Abstract
Young adults face an increasingly complex and often difficult landscape as they transition to adulthood, especially because the market provides fewer opportunities for them to find stable work that provides a straightforward path into the middle class. The transition to adulthood is particularly daunting for less-privileged young adults, who have fewer resources to navigate the new landscape. This chapter investigates the association between adolescent family structure and the transition to adulthood among young adults, especially less-privileged young adults. Considerable evidence demonstrates that young men and women from biological married families are more likely to graduate from college and avoid a nonmarital birth than their peers from non-intact families , but less evidence shows that family structure matters for young adult employment and income. The link between family structure and young adult outcomes seems to be particularly strong for young adults from moderately educated homes (where their mother has a high school degree but not a bachelor’s degree).
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Acknowledgments
This research uses data from Add Health, a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded by Grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health Web site (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth). No direct support was received from Grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis.
This research was supported in part by the Institute for Family Studies. We also gratefully acknowledge the research assistance of Samuel Richardson.
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Wilcox, W.B., Stokes, C.E. (2015). The Family Foundation: What Do Class and Family Structure Have to Do with the Transition to Adulthood?. In: Amato, P., Booth, A., McHale, S., Van Hook, J. (eds) Families in an Era of Increasing Inequality. National Symposium on Family Issues, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08308-7_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08308-7_11
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