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Family Systems and Parents’ Financial Support for Education in Early Adulthood

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Demography

Abstract

Young adults raised outside of two-parent families receive less financial support from their families for education compared with peers who always lived with both parents. We consider how parents’ union status over time shapes contributions for young adult children’s education. Our approach emphasizes the dynamic relationship between family structure and family economic resources. Marginal structural models with inverse probability weights estimate the association of parents’ union status history with eventual financial transfers while not overcontrolling for the effects of union status operating indirectly through time-varying characteristics, such as coresident family composition and economic circumstances. The analytic sample includes parents of a recent cohort of young adults (Panel Study of Income Dynamics, 1983–2013, N = 2,754). Compared with parents who lived continuously with a child’s other parent, unpartnered parents’ transfers to children were 44 % to 90 % smaller, and repartnered parents’ transfers were one- to two-thirds smaller, depending on how long the parent was unpartnered or repartnered. Through its influence on subsequent coresident family composition and family economic resources, parents’ union status has indirect as well as direct associations with financial transfers to adult children for education.

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Notes

  1. Because some children were first observed at age 2, the prevalence statistics for baseline family structure reported in Table 2 are not identical to those reported for family structure at age 1 in Table A1 (online appendix).

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Acknowledgments

Research reported herein was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under award number R01HD088506. We thank Shannon Cavanagh and the anonymous reviewers and editors at Demography for constructive feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript. All errors and omissions are the responsibility of the authors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, 426 Thompson Street, Ann Arbor, MI, 48104, USA

    Paula Fomby

  2. Violence Prevention Research Program, Department of Emergency Medicine, University of California Davis Medical Center, 2315 Stockton Boulevard, Sacramento, CA, 95817, USA

    Nicole Kravitz-Wirtz

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  1. Paula Fomby
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  2. Nicole Kravitz-Wirtz
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Correspondence to Paula Fomby.

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Fomby, P., Kravitz-Wirtz, N. Family Systems and Parents’ Financial Support for Education in Early Adulthood. Demography 56, 1875–1897 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-019-00807-0

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