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Racial Differences in Transitions to Marriage for Unmarried Mothers

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Abstract

Unlike prior studies that have explained racial differences in the transitions to marriage among unmarried women, our study used the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine racial differences in the transitions to marriage among unmarried women following a non-marital birth. We found that Black mothers were 60–65% more likely to delay marriage after a non-marital birth compared to White mothers and these racial gaps were only partially explained by economic, demographic and attitudinal factors. Our paper further contributes to this literature by examining changes in cohabitation patterns, educational attainment, poverty status and attitudes of gender distrust that are able to partially explain and reduce these racial gaps in transitions to marriage. With the general decline in marriage and rise in cohabitation, our paper tried to assess whether cohabitation is a leading factor for marriage or a substitute for marriage for unmarried mothers. Racial disparities have important implications for child wellbeing and intergenerational transmission of inequalities.

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Notes

  1. Over 40% nonmarital births occurred to cohabiting mothers in 2002 and this increased to 58% between 2006 and 2010.

  2. Here, cohabitation refers to couples living together. It should be noted that not all cohabiting unions are the same and the extent to which couples live together may vary across households, which is extremely difficult to discern from surveys

  3. They also show that using policy experiments that changing the cost of divorce have little effect on relationship choices.

  4. Studies have also explored whether racial differences in adolescent experiences have lasting effects into adulthood (Crissey 2005).

  5. These decisions also have a wide variation by race and ethnicity (Weden and Kimbro 2007).

  6. For more details about the FFCWS sample and design see Reichman et al. (2001).

  7. The "other" race category refers to everyone who is not White, non-Hispanic; Black, non-Hispanic; Hispanic. This group is constitutes <5% of the sample and the racial make-up of this group is not known in FFCWS.

  8. According to Harknett and McLanahan (2004), cohabitation might be an important indicator of strong marriage markets.

  9. For example, if we allow for interaction terms between race and education, then we can account for partial effects of race on time to marriage, conditional on the level of education.

  10. We explored another model in which we interacted father’s race and father’s education and found that father’s education effects were significant only in Model 2 reported in Table 2.

  11. In a separate model, where we added interaction terms for father’s poverty status and father’s race (results not reported but available upon request), the effect of mother’s race remained statistically significant.

  12. We also checked whether marriage to a new partner lowered the likelihood of marriage and found it to be statistically nonsignificant (results not shown).

  13. This behavior could potentially be associated with perceptions of single mothers raising their children just as well as married mothers.

  14. There is also evidence that Black women have very low rates of exogamy (i.e., marrying outside the group)

  15. Waller and McLanahan (2005) have documented cohabitation with the baby’s father at birth being positively related to marriage one year post a nonmarital birth. While this might be true in the short run and many marriages are likely to occur in the short term, our results test this finding for cohabitation patterns over the long term. We also checked if cohabitation with baby’s father at the baseline (a time-constant variable) is related to transitions to marriage. The variable was found to be nonsignificant but positively related to the likelihood of marriage.

  16. Patterson (1998) has associated gender distrust amongst Black women to slavery. In his opinion, the economic resources of White-middle class men (in contrast to the lack thereof of the same among Black men) was responsible for exerting some authority over women.

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Acknowledgements

We thank participants of the First Formal Demography workshop 2015 at UC Berkeley Campus which was funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) R25HD083136 and co-sponsored by the Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging (CEDA) and the Berkeley Population Center. We are grateful to Shelly Lundberg and Robert Chung for their invaluable comments. We also thank the participants of the 2016 Annual meeting of the Population Association of America. Fellowship support from Howard University is greatly acknowledged. The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study is generously supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver NICHD through Grants R01HD36916, R01HD39135, and R01HD40421, as well as a consortium of private foundations and government agencies.

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  1. Department of Economics, Howard University, 2400 4th St., N.W. Academic Support Building B, Washington, DC, 20059, USA

    Gerald Eric Daniels Jr

  2. Department of Economics, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave. HSS 142, San Francisco, CA, 94132, USA

    Venoo Kakar & Anoshua Chaudhuri

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Daniels, G.E., Kakar, V. & Chaudhuri, A. Racial Differences in Transitions to Marriage for Unmarried Mothers. J Fam Econ Iss 38, 370–389 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-017-9538-3

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