The Impact of Complex Family Structure on Child Well‐being: Evidence From Siblings

• Published date: 01 August 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12456
• Author: Tarek Mostafa,Heather Joshi,Ludovica Gambaro
• Date: 01 August 2018

T M University College London Institute of Education

L G Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (German Institute for

Economic Research) Berlin∗

H J University College London Institute of Education∗∗

The Impact of Complex Family Structure on Child

Well-being: Evidence From Siblings

Evidence from the United Kingdom Millennium

Cohort on children at ages 3 and 5 with older

siblings addresses the questions of whether

those living with both biological parents and

only full siblings have better emotional and

behavior outcomes than other children, and

whether nonfull siblings affect children’s out-

comes independently of parents’ partnership

status. Adjusting for measured family cir-

cumstances and resources in cross-sectional

regressions accounted for much of the adverse

Centre for Longitudinal Studies, Department of Social

Sciences, University College London Institute of

Education, 20 Bedford Way,London WC1H 0AL, UK

(t.mostafa@ucl.ac.uk).

∗Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (German

Institute for Economic Research) Berlin, Mohrenstraße 58,

10117 Berlin, Germany.

∗∗Centre for Longitudinal Studies, Department of Social

Sciences, University College London Institute of

Education, 20 Bedford Way,London WC1H 0AL, UK.

© 2018 The Authors. Journal of Marriage and Familypub-

lished by WileyPeriodicals, Inc. on behalf of National Coun-

cil on Family Relations.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative

Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribu-

tion and reproduction in any medium, provided the original

work is properly cited.

Key Words: child well-being, family structure, longitudinal

research, siblings, stepfamilies.

association of family complexity with child out-

comes. Controlling for unobserved family and

child xed effects did not, however, attenuate all

estimates further. Fixed unobservable factors

appeared to be masking underlying associa-

tions. Allowing for them intensied some, albeit

modest, estimates. These revealed excess exter-

nalizing behavior problems for boys with single

or stepparents but only full siblings. For girls

with single mothers, the chances of internalizing

problems were raised. Whether siblings were

full or not made little difference to outcomes in

general.

In recent decades, patterns of partnership and

parenthood have changed profoundly in many

industrialized countries, with implications for

the living arrangements in which children are

brought up (Lesthaeghe, 1995; McLanahan,

2004). Children living with both biological par-

ents tend to have better developmental outcomes

than children who do not. This empirical regu-

larity is found in the United States (Carlson &

Corcoran, 2001; Cooksey, 1997; McLanahan &

Sandefur, 1994) as well as other industrialized

countries (Björklund, Ginther, & Sundström,

2007; Ermisch & Francesconi, 2001). As family

forms have diversied,the literature has not only

contrasted the experiences of children in one-

and two-adult families but also distinguished

between married and cohabiting couples and the

902 Journal of Marriage and Family 80 (August 2018): 902–918

DOI:10.1111/jomf.12456

Complex Families: Evidence From Sibling Data 903

formation of stepfamilies (Artis, 2007; Biblarz

& Raftery, 1999; Brown, 2004; Case, Lin, &

McLanahan, 2001; Hofferth, 2006; Hofferth &

Anderson, 2003; Sweeney, 2010). Increasing

partnership instability and multipartner fertility

mean that children are less likely to live with

both biological parents and are also more likely

to be brought up sharing a home with half- or

stepsiblings (Brown, Stykes, & Manning, 2016;

Carlson & Furstenberg, 2006; Guzzo, 2014). Yet

family structure research has focused more on

parent–child relationships, paying less attention

to the conguration of sibling relationships in

the family.

Siblings form another dimension to a child’s

experience of family life, which is likely to

have implications for child development (Brody,

1998; Dunn, 2005). Siblings can support each

other during stressful events or be an additional

source of maladjustment. Although psycho-

logical literature on the quality of siblings’

relationships downplays the importance of

biological relatedness (Gass, Jenkins, & Dunn,

2007), there is emerging evidence from family

structure research showing that children who

live with nonfull siblings fare worse than those

who do not (Halpern-Meekin & Tach, 2008;

Tillman, 2008).

In this article, we suggest that the relationship

between family structure and child development

is best understood when families are studied

holistically and sibling constellations are taken

into account alongside parent–child relation-

ships. Drawing on research on stepfamilies

and on the few studies distinguishing nontra-

ditional siblings (Fomby, Goode, & Mollborn,

2016; Gennetian, 2005; Halpern-Meekin &

Tach, 2008; Tillman, 2008), we distinguish

between biological two-parent, stepparent,

and single-parent families as well as families

with full and nonfull siblings. This provides a

more complete picture of the family structure

than usually made in the literature. We use the

term family complexity to indicate this way of

conceptualizing children’s living arrangement,

which integrates the traditional approach based

on child–parent relationships with information

on children’s relationships to their coresiding

siblings (Brown, Manning, & Stykes, 2015). Our

contribution is based on previously unanalyzed

evidence about children’s behavioraladjustment

in families with more than one sibling in the

United Kingdom, where data of the appropriate

structure are relatively rare.

W F C M M

There are only a few studies, all from the

United States, that expand the traditional family

structure classication to investigate the impact

of living with half- or stepsiblings, but this

emerging line of research points to adverse

effects for children and youth. Adolescents

living with half- or stepsiblings were found to

have poorer academic achievement and higher

levels of depression, school-related behavioral

difculties, and delinquency than children liv-

ing with full siblings only (Halpern-Meekin

& Tach, 2008; Tillman, 2008). These associ-

ations cut across different parental structures

and remained after controlling for family back-

ground characteristics, family instability, quality

of interpersonal relationships within the family,

and parental investment in children. Moreover,

the negative association of family complexity

with youth academic achievement was much

stronger for males than females (Tillman, 2008),

in line with the nding that girls forge more pos-

itive relationships with their siblings of any sort

than do boys (Anderson & Rice, 1992). Ginther

and Pollak (2004) found little difference in

the educational outcomes of joint children and

stepchildren from the same complex families,

but both groups of children had worse academic

outcomes than children who were residing with

full siblings only. Similarly, Gennetian (2005)

reported the possibility of a small negative

effect of living with half- and stepsiblings on the

cognitive scores of children aged 5 to 10. The

results on children’s emotional and behavioral

adjustment are similar. Fomby et al. (2016)

showed that among kindergarten children, those

living with half- or stepsiblings displayed worse

behavioral scores when compared with their

peers with full siblings only and whose parents

had the same union status, even after extensive

controls on parental nancial, material, and

emotional resources. Hofferth (2006) also found

more emotional and behavioral difculties

among children aged 3 to 12 years with complex

sibships.

There are a number of explanations of why

these negative associations might be effects

of family complexities on child development,

which broadly draw on theories about stress

and parental investment (Tillman, 2008). Stress

theory asserts that major or highly disruptive

events create strain and psychological distress

(Amato, 2000; Fomby & Cherlin, 2007; Thoits,

1995). Changes in parental partnership may put