Family Instability and Children's Health

• Author: Robert Crosnoe,Chelsea Smith,Shannon E. Cavanagh
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12272
• Published date: 01 October 2017
• Date: 01 October 2017

C S, R C,  S E. C University of Texas at Austin

Family Instability and Children’s Health

Research on family instability is fertile ground

for translation into policy and practice. This

article describes how basic science in this area

can more effectively support work in later stages

of the translational research process. To begin,

the scope of family instability is outlined with

trends, causes, and effects. Next, a conceptual

model of the effects of family instability on

children’s health identies focal aspects that

could be leveraged for translational research:

developmental domain, developmental time,

mechanisms, and points of variation. The guide-

lines presented are meant to be general and

applicable to a variety of topics and elds in

which family scholars aim to improve basic

research that can contribute to and move

forward a translational family science.

Family scholars from a variety of disciplines

have increasingly recognized over the past sev-

eral decades that the extensive focus on parental

divorce, single parenthood, and other elements

of family structure thought to undermine chil-

dren’sdevelopment was too narrow. The increas-

ingly dynamic nature of union formation and

dissolution in the overall U.S. population, the

growing theoretical emphasis on life course pat-

terns of family roles and relationships, and the

rising number of longitudinal studies that trace

parents and children through time have, together,

helped to shift attention from children’s family

structures at any one point of development to

Population Research Center, University of Texas at Austin,

305 East 23rd Street, Stop G1800, Austin, TX 78712-1699

(chelsea.c.smith@utexas.edu).

Key Words: Child development, family processes, fam-

ily/social policy and law, family structure, health and

health-related issues.

their family structure histories across develop-

mental time (Fomby & Cherlin, 2007; McLana-

han, 2004). In the not so distant past, after all,

the majority of children lived with both parents

through adolescence, and, although not unheard

of, voluntary family structure transitions were

limited in number (Ellwood & Jencks, 2004).

Today, the majority of youth experience a fam-

ily structure change by the end of adolescence,

and a substantial minority experience multiple

family structure changes, usually because their

parents split and a parent remarries or cohab-

its with new partners. Research has consistently

shown that the accumulation of family structure

transitions—often referred to as family instabil-

ity in parents’ romantic unions—poses substan-

tial developmental risks to children above and

beyond any one family structure that they expe-

rience (Crosnoe & Cavanagh, 2010).

The purpose of this article is to discuss how

basic research on family instability and child

development at the T1 level can be used to

inform the next steps of translational family sci-

ence that more effectively speaks to the needs

of policy makers and practitioners. Our goal is

not to propose applied research itself but to show

how basic research can ask better questions and

establish associations that applied researchers

and those that they seek to inform can use. In

this spirit, we begin with an overview of demo-

graphic trends and the causes and effects of

family instability. We then lay out a model for

research on this topic that emphasizes four focal

aspects of family instability: (a) developmen-

tal domains such as children’s health, which is

already part of a broad system of services and

programs; (b) how these links change as chil-

dren age in ways that might pinpoint critical win-

dows of intervention; (c) variation in these links

across diverse segments of the population that

Family Relations 66 (October 2017): 601–613 601

DOI:10.1111/fare.12272