Household Instability and Girls’ Teen Childbearing

Abstract

Abstract More than one third of U.S. children spend part of their childhood living with extended family members. By age 18, nearly 40% of U.S. children experience a household change involving a nonparent. Research has found that having extended family or nonrelatives join or leave children's households negatively affects children's educational attainment. I argue that we need new ways of theorizing, conceptualizing, and measuring household changes and their effects on children. I use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and marginal structural models with inverse probability of treatment weighting to estimate the association between household changes involving parents and nonparents and teen childbearing among girls. I find that experiencing household changes involving nonparents and parents during childhood is associated with a significantly higher probability of having a child as a teenager than experiencing no changes. In addition, the association between changes involving parents and teen childbearing is statistically indistinguishable from the association between changes involving nonparents and teen childbearing, suggesting that household composition shifts involving nonparents can be as disruptive to girls as those involving parents.