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Cohabiting Couples Raising Teens
Why Teens Benefit When Couples Say, "I Do."
By Laura Paul
As teenagers, most of us rolled our eyes when Mom told us to turn off the soap opera because the actors were "living in sin."
They called it "shacking up" in the 1970s. Today, more couples are choosing to live together instead of getting married. But researchers say teenagers are more likely to have behavioral problems if they live with cohabiting couples as opposed to a single parent or the married biological parents.
The 2000 U. S. Census reveals 19 million children living with one parent, up from 15.9 million in 1990. It's not unusual for many of those single parents to cohabitate with a girlfriend or boyfriend. Greg Acs, a senior researcher with the Urban Institute in Washington, D. C., says the rise in cohabitation has been well documented, but little was known about how children fare in cohabiting families as opposed to traditional families.
He researched the living arrangements of teenagers and published his findings with co-authors Rebecca Clark and Sandi Nelson in the report, "Beyond the Two-Parent Family: How Teenagers Fare in Cohabiting Couples and Blended Families."
"The why is the hardest part," says Acs, who found white and Hispanic teenagers living in cohabiting families fare worse, on average, than those living with single mothers. "There may be important differences based on the amount of time children spend in a given living arrangement, how old they are when they are in that arrangement, the number of times their living arrangements change, their sex and their race/ethnic affiliation."
He speculates there may be no ill effects of living with unmarried parents when a child is an infant, but problems may emerge when he or she reaches school age. "A teenage girl might have a harder time with a stepfather than a teenage boy," he says. "As to why there are race differences in outcomes for teens by living arrangement, I can only speculate. For example, having Mom's boyfriend present may be a bigger disruption for whites than for blacks."
