In this article, Melanie Wasserman reviews the latest evidence about the causal link between family structure and children's economic and social outcomes. Going beyond the question of whether family structure affects child outcomes--a topic that's already been covered at length, including in previous Future of Children volumes--she examines how…

Compared to unpaid leave, paid family leave may better help working parents balance the competing needs of job and family early in a child's life, among other advantages. Yet the United States remains one of only two countries in the world without a statutory national paid maternity leave policy, and one of the only high-income countries that…

In this article, developmental psychologists Ariel Kalil and Rebecca Ryan examine the relation between parenting practices and socioeconomic gaps in child outcomes. They document substantial differences between richer and poorer families, including growing gaps in parental engagement and time use. These gaps matter: the fact that children born to…

Children from low-income backgrounds are less likely to have economically successful role models and mentors in their own families and neighborhoods, and are more likely to spend time with media. In this article, Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine review the theoretical and empirical evidence on how these external forces can influence children's…

A half century ago, relatively few US children experienced the incarceration of a parent. In the decades since, incarceration rates rose rapidly (before leveling off more recently), and today a historically unprecedented number of children are exposed to parental incarceration. In this article, Kristin Turney and Rebecca Goodsell review the…

Is income during children's earliest years a key determinant of long-term child and adult success in the longer run? The research to date, Christopher Wimer and Sharon Wolf write, suggests that it is. Wimer and Wolf review substantial descriptive evidence that income can enhance child development and later adult outcomes, and that it does so most…

In this article, Ajay Chaudry and Heather Sandstrom review research on child care and early education for children under age three. They describe the array of early care and education arrangements families use for infants and toddlers; how these patterns have changed in recent decades; and differences by family socioeconomic status, race, and…

Since 1950, marriage behavior in the United States has changed dramatically. Though most men and women still marry at some point in their lives, they now do so later and are more likely to divorce. Cohabitation has become commonplace as either a precursor or an alternative to marriage, and a growing fraction of births take place outside marriage.…

Marriage between two parents, compared with other family living arrangements, appears, on average, to enhance children's wellbeing and development. Some of the positive association between marriage and children's wellbeing comes from positive associations between marriage and other things that also contribute to children's wellbeing. David Ribar…

For poor families, the possession of assets--savings accounts, homes, and the like--has the potential not only to relieve some of the stress of living in poverty but also to make a better future seem like a real possibility. If children in families that own certain assets fare better than children in families without them, then helping poor…

Children's mental health covers a wide range of disorders. Some, such as ADHD and autism, tend to manifest themselves when children are young, while others, such as depression and addiction, are more likely to appear during the teenage years. Some respond readily to treatment or tend to improve as children grow older, while others, such as autism,…

Families who live in poverty face disadvantages that can hinder their children's development in many ways, write Greg Duncan, Katherine Magnuson, and Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal. As they struggle to get by economically, and as they cope with substandard housing, unsafe neighborhoods, and inadequate schools, poor families experience more stress in…

Better-educated parents generally have children who are themselves better educated, healthier, wealthier, and better off in almost every way than the children of the less educated. But this simple correlation does not prove that the relationship is causal. Neeraj Kaushal sifts through the evidence from economics and public policy and reviews large…

In this article, the authors found that the economic circumstances of military families are good, certainly much improved compared with even a decade ago. The military context is nonetheless challenging, with long hours, dangerous work, frequent transfers, and stressful absences during deployment. Service members receive relatively high pay and…

In 2012, nearly 16 million U.S. children, or over one in five, lived in households that were food-insecure, which the U.S. Department of Agriculture defines as "a household-level economic and social condition of limited access to food." Even when we control for the effects of other factors correlated with poverty, these children are more…