The Evolving Marriage Gap in Children’s Outcomes: Family Structure and Young Adult Outcomes Revisited

Much of the existing research on the relationship between family structure and children’s outcomes has focused on average effects. Kearney and Levine (2017) instead proposed a heterogeneous framework in which the gap in outcomes between children of married and unmarried parents varies according to the resource context, namely a mother’s own resources, the net resources that a partner would contribute, and the outcome-specific returns to those resources. Using data from the 2013 Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), they found evidence consistent with the model’s predictions. We revisit this question using the 2023 PSID to examine how these relationships have changed over the past decade. We find that the association between childhood family structure and young adult poverty has greatly diminished, whereas the association with college completion persists and is concentrated among children of mothers with higher levels of education. These findings suggest that although the economic circumstances of single mothers and their children have generally improved in recent decades, disparities in household resources and higher-order educational outcomes by family structure remain.