Family Structure and Partner Choice

I-Fen Lin, Bowling Green State University

Parental divorce has become a common event in the lives of American children today. Every year, more than one million children experience parents' divorce and nearly one half of the children born in recent cohorts will spend part of their childhood living in a single-parent family. The consequences of parental divorce on children's development and their transition to adulthood have been well documented. Yet our understanding of the long-term consequences remains limited. In this paper, I will examine whether respondents' family of origin predicts the parenting behavior of their partners, and whether partner's parenting style buffers the association between family structure and respondents' own parenting behaviors. The analysis consists of 1,720 respondents who are biological, adoptive, or step parents of the children in the special supplement to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID-CDS). Three aspects of respondents' early family experiences and seven domains of parenting practices will be examined.