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Ralph, age 22, awakens each morning at 5:30 to get his 13-month-old daughter a bottle and change her Pamper. Once she’s “situated,” he returns to bed until it’s time to wake and dress his son. The two eat a leisurely breakfast while watching cartoons. When 8 a.m. comes it’s time to take the boy to the daycare center around the corner. When Ralph returns home, Stefanie is up and in the shower. While she dons her uniform and prepares for the day, Ralph does “a little bit of housework…you know, cleaning up stuff. That’s the kind of stuff that makes my girl happy.” The couple then enjoys a couple of hours together before Ralph puts the baby in her stroller and walks Stefanie to the bus stop. Ralph returns home for lunch and then decides to visit his friend Derek, another unemployed “house husband” with a child the same age. Derek leaves to run errands and Ralph watches the kids for a couple of hours. Then, Derek takes his turn. Ralph plays a pickup game of basketball at the park and “chills” with a couple of friends.

At 6 p.m., it’s time to collect his daughter and pick his son up from daycare. The three return home and Ralph prepares dinner and puts his daughter to bed. Ralph and his son pass the rest of the time before Stefanie returns home – at 10 p.m. – enjoying each other’s company. “We always play a game like Monopoly, whatever. At 8:00 p.m. he likes to watch a whole bunch of cartoons and stuff…. When my girl gets home, we just have time together. I just spend a whole lot of time with my family.”

Ralph has just gotten fired from his job at Bertucci’s, where he had been clearing between $200 and $300 a week, over some “stupid shit.” (The stupid shit was 2 days of missed work while Ralph was locked up.) Before that unfortunate turn of events, Ralph’s typical day was as follows: “It was finding a babysitter [for my daughter], go to work, come home and do everything… After 7:00 p.m., I cook for the kids. Then spend time with my girl.” Both now and then, though, Ralph says, “weekends is the best time for me. My girl stays home all day on the weekends, so we have a whole bunch of family time.”

Half of a credit is all that stands between Ralph and a high school diploma – the credential he needs to get into a program in “computers.” He’s dedicated to pursuing that goal, though has no concrete plans for how to do so. Meanwhile, he watches his daughter and does a little construction work on the side for his uncle, a contractor. He hates the construction work – the heavy lifting exacerbates a sports injury, plus it is under the table and only part-time. He’s desperate to find a “real” job and claims he is willing to work anywhere, even McDonalds, to help make the money his family needs to get by. When the bills loom especially large, he admits he sometimes sells “reefer.” “I try to stay away from it [but], I mean, I got to get money somehow.”

Recently, Ralph spent 2 days locked up “on state road” for getting into a fight with a guy who pulled a knife – this is what cost him the job at Bertucci’s. Ralph says he struggled with the man, confiscating the knife by the time the police came. But his possession of the weapon meant he, rather than his attacker, was charged. The missed days of work resulted from the fact that it took several days for his mother to scrape the bail money together. Ralph is still awaiting trial on that charge but is cautiously optimistic that he’ll beat it, as he doubts that the “other guy” will show up to testify against him. The 2 days in jail – where he saw two fellow inmates stabbed – were the worst in his life.

Despite the recent hard times, Ralph revels in his relationship with Stefanie. “When I come home I have my girl to come to and I just love coming home to her. I can’t believe it. And we’re so young, I can’t believe we’re staying together so long!” he exclaims, as if their 3-year relationship sets some sort of record. Ralph sums up the relationship as follows: “It’s more good than bad. We don’t have that many problems as far as arguing and stuff goes. When she gets to arguing, I roll out. So when I come back, she’s calmed down and we’re cool again…. We have fun almost every day, ‘cause I spend time with them as much as I can.”

Ralph met Stephanie and her 1-year-old son, whom he treats as his own, when he was 18 and a junior in high school – she was a year younger. This African American couple conceived their daughter, Shanea, 13 months later. Giving birth to a girl gave Stefanie the “rich man’s family” she desired – the local colloquialism for a family with just one boy and one girl. Ralph had been playing daddy to Stefanie’s son with enthusiasm, but becoming a “real” father was something else entirely. Ralph says he was happy when he heard the news of the not quite planned, but hardly accidental, pregnancy. Stefanie had both an abortion and a miscarriage in the 13 months before she and Ralph conceived Shenea. Ralph had tried to talk her out of the abortion, though he eventually agreed that the pregnancy, occurring just 3 months after the two got together, simply came “too soon.” At that time, both Ralph and Stefanie were couch-surfing among relatives and friends – Ralph didn’t get along with his step-father and Stefanie’s mother, a drug addict, moved away to New York – and both were struggling to finish high school. Once the two finally secured a stable place to live together, in the basement apartment of Ralph’s mother’s new home (a purchase she had just made after years of scrimping and saving while living in the projects), the two felt the minimum criteria had been met. Ralph tells us he “actually…felt confident about having a child. So we just went on and did it.”

The pregnancy put added financial pressure on Ralph, who was trying to complete the requirements for his GED. He was already working part-time construction on weekends, plus going to school, but given all the things the baby would need the money just wasn’t enough. Lacking the half credit he needed to graduate, Ralph enrolled in summer school to try and make up his missing coursework. But August came before he could finish, and Stefanie was due with Shenea. “My daughter was on the way. I had to start making some money somehow, so I had to find a job,” he explains. “I got a job [at Bertuccis] and starting stacking some money. Just tried to make the best of it.” After Shanea was born, Ralph decided to stay at his job so that Stefanie could finish school.

What does Ralph feel he gave up by having a child so young? “I know I would have had my diploma faster…, because I didn’t have the time to actually go to the classes ‘cause my girl had to go to school and she was already missing a couple years because of having [her son] and whatever.…So I let her get her stuff back on track. If I didn’t have [my daughter], I know I’d have my diploma by now and I know I’d be in [college] right now doing something.” Yet in Ralph’s view, having Shanea has been more good than bad. For one, it has made Ralph and Stefanie love each other even more. “I don’t even know how to put this in words. But to see your child, knowing it’s your child, come out like that man, it just made me love her even more, man…. Once it came out and it was over, she gave me all the hugs and kisses in the world.”

When we interview Ralph for the first time, Stephanie’s son is about to turn four and Shanea has just celebrated her first birthday. Ralph has exhausted his remaining savings from the time he spent working two jobs at one time – Bertucci’s and construction – on a rented clown, pony rides, and a trip to Chuck E. Cheese. At 21, Stefanie has finally graduated from an alternative high school and has a job cleaning office buildings in the afternoons and evenings. She plans to take one year off of school before enrolling in a local technical college to work toward her chosen degree, in medical office training. Ralph is determined to use this time to make up his needed half credit; this is all that separates him from his dream – to enroll in a 2-year program in computer technology.

Meanwhile, Ralph and Stefanie struggle to keep things together. She has a childcare voucher for the 3-year-old, which saves the couple a lot of money. Just after Shanea’s birth, Stefanie qualified for a subsidized apartment so she pays only a third of her income for rent (Ralph isn’t on the lease, though he lives there). The blended family situation is a struggle as well. Due to the animosity between Stefanie and her son’s biological father, who “put her out” of his house while she was pregnant because he decided that he didn’t want the child, Ralph now plays an intermediary role with the boy’s father. The father has been absent from his son’s life until recently, which gives Ralph, whose earnings have helped to support the boy, the perceived right to control access to him. Ralph can’t imagine finding himself in the same situation – seeking another man’s authorization to see his own child. “He asks my permission to see his own son! Which I can understand ‘cause he hasn’t been there. I was there and he wasn’t.”

Introduction

Like Ralph, about half of all young Americans become parents before 25. In the 1950s early parenthood was the norm for all Americans, rich and poor and White and non-White alike. But in recent decades, a dramatic divide has emerged by race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status.

Thus, our story is of a much narrower slice of young adults than are described in the other chapters in this volume. In this chapter, we use quantitative data from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) and the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to describe the characteristics of young adults who transition to parenthood before 25 and the family contexts into which their children are born. We supplement this with qualitative data from an in-depth study of low-income fathers in Philadelphia to illustrate what parenthood means to young adults. Their narratives reveal how early parenthood affects the texture of their daily lives, the quality of their relationships, and their expectations for the future.

Characteristics of Young Parents

Ralph’s transition to fatherhood is typical of that of many young men who have children as young adults. Nationally representative data from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) in Table 12.1 reveal that about one half of women and almost one in three men have their first child before 25.Footnote 1 But, as indicated earlier, non-Hispanic Whites are quite a bit less likely to become parents during young adulthood than either Hispanics or Non-Hispanic Blacks.Footnote 2 Forty-five percent of White women had their first birth by age 25, compared to 69% of Hispanic women and 68% of Non-Hispanic Black women. There is also a strong education gradient in who becomes a parent during young adulthood, with a particularly large gap between those with a college degree and those without one. For those with less than a high school, parenthood before age 25 is normative for men (52.6%) and nearly ubiquitous for women (81.5%). For college graduates, by contrast, the experience is fairly rare for women (25.1%) and nearly nonexistent for men (6.1%). There is also an income gradient, although this is weaker than the association with education. Among women in family households with earnings under $20,000, 73% had their first birth as a young adult, compared to just 39% of women in family households where earnings exceeded $50,000. We observe a similar pattern for men, as the experience of parenthood during young adulthood is twice as common for men in low-income family households ($20,000) as for men in high-income family households (>$50,000).

Table 12.1 Percent of men and women who become parents by age 24
Full size table

Furthermore, among men and women who had their first child during young adulthood, nonmarital childbearing is normative: a majority of mothers and fathers were unmarried at the time of the birth. Almost 60% of first births to young adult men, and almost 65% of first births to young adult women occurred outside of a marital union. These proportions are even higher among parents younger than 20. In 2007, 82% of births to women ages 18–19 were nonmarital (Hamilton et al., 2009). These patterns are partly the result of a class-based divergence in age at first birth that has occurred since the 1960s. While age at first marriage has increased for women across the education spectrum, less-educated women have not delayed childbearing nearly as much as more-educated women have. As a result, fewer highly educated women have children as young adults, and the proportion of highly educated single mothers has remained very low. By contrast, most poorly educated women do transition to parenthood in young adulthood, and the proportion of their births occurring outside of marriage increased dramatically (Ellwood & Jencks, 2004; McLanahan, 2004).

Ralph’s story, drawn from an in-depth qualitative study of low-income fathers in Philadelphia, highlights the challenges associated with fathering with little education. He had to quit school to find a job. While he hopes to get a 2-year technical degree, which would provide much-needed additional earnings, he put his career aspirations on hold after the baby was born. He bounced around among construction, restaurant work, and some drug-dealing on the side to make ends meet. Stefanie also put her high school degree on the back burner while she had two babies, and at 21 she has only recently finished her degree and found steady employment. While Ralph enjoys the experience of parenting and embraces his role as “house husband,” taking a certain amount of pride in spending time with his family, he still recognizes the price he paid for becoming a young parent in terms of his education and career.

The Nonmarital Relationship Contexts of Parenthood

Much of the survey evidence we now have about the content and quality of young parents’ marital, and especially nonmarital, relationships comes from a new longitudinal survey, the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, which follows a cohort of nearly 4,000 children born to unmarried parents in the late 1990s, with a companion sample of about 1,000 children born to married parents. The study was designed to be representative of children born in large US cities with populations over 200,000. The study interviews mothers and fathers at the time of the child’s birth and again after 1 year, 3 years, and 5 years. The survey continues to interview both the mother and father at each follow-up, regardless of their relationship status. Because the majority of births to young adults occur outside of marriage, and because we know less about the quality and texture of such nonmarital relationships, the Fragile Families Study is a valuable new source of information about the relationships between unmarried young parents.

Pregnancy Intentions

The relationships in which young adults first conceive children are typically short in duration and casual in nature. Using data from the Fragile Families Study, we found that couples knew each other less than a year, on average, before getting pregnant (Table 12.2).Footnote 3 Young married parents knew each other 7 months longer, on average, than unmarried parents. The relationships of young parents were considerably shorter than the relationships of their older counterparts, both married and unmarried, who knew each other at least several years before having a child.

Table 12.2 Personal and relationship characteristics of young adult mothers at time of child’s birth
Full size table

The short duration and informal nature of romantic relationships during young adulthood is consistent with previous qualitative research that documents young men’s and women’s descriptions of their own relationships. One study, based on in-depth longitudinal qualitative interviews with a subsample of 48 unmarried couples drawn from the Fragile Families Survey (almost all of whom became parents before age 25), found that fully half of unmarried fathers rated their relationships with the mothers of their children as “casual” prior to conception, and they were more likely to describe their preconception relationships as casual than their female partners were (Edin, England, Shafer & Reed 2007; see also Furstenberg, 1976; Roy, 2008).

Not surprisingly, then, the children who result from these relationships are seldom explicitly planned. Previous research has found that unmarried women are more likely to report that a pregnancy was unintended than are married women (74% vs. 27%, respectively) (Finer & Henshaw, 2006; Henshaw, 1998; Musick, 2002). Similar patterns hold for men, with 70% of men who were married at the time of the birth characterizing the pregnancy as wanted, compared to just 36% of men who were not living with the mother at the time of the birth (Martinez et al., 2006). Furthermore, in the Fragile Families Study, we found that 11% of young unmarried mothers reported that the father suggested she have an abortion after he found out that she was pregnant, compared to less than 1% of married mothers (Table 12.2).

Pregnancy intentions are difficult to measure, however, and previous qualitative research suggests that most pregnancies to unmarried parents are neither fully planned nor avoided (Augustine, Nelson, & Edin, 2009; Edin & Kefalas, 2005; Edin et al., 2007; see also Waller, 2002). In their study of the fertility histories of 183 poor fathers, Augustine et al. (2009) found that while few men actively planned or consistently took actions to avoid pregnancy, a large minority reported an ambivalent desire to have children and used little if any contraception, even though they knew what might result from such actions. The rest – about one half of the total – were not using regular contraception either, and said they were just “not thinking” about the consequences of their actions at the time. These results are consistent with those drawn from the fertility histories of the 48 unmarried couples in the qualitative subsample of the Fragile Families Study (Edin et al., 2007), where women were somewhat more likely to describe an ambivalent desire for pregnancy while men’s responses were more likely to fall in the “not thinking” category.Footnote 4

Disadvantaged Circumstances

Young parents have low human capital and are economically disadvantaged at the time of their children’s birth. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, we found that 20% of young married mothers and 40% of young unmarried mothers had received welfare benefits in the past year, and annual earnings for both groups of women were well under $10,000 during the year prior to the birth (Table 12.2). Around one half of mothers had not earned a high school diploma, and virtually none had completed college. Young fathers’ education and earnings were also quite low compared to those of older fathers. Children born to young adults enter economically vulnerable families regardless of their parents’ marital status, but unmarried parents face a particularly acute set of economic disadvantages.

Young parents are also more likely to have used drugs or spent time in jail, although these experiences are much more common for unmarried parents than they are for married parents. We found that 6% and 7% of unmarried mothers and fathers, respectively, reported having problems related to drugs in the year before the child was born, and fully 42% of unmarried fathers had spent time in jail or prison. By contrast, less than 1% of young married parents reported drug problems and a ­comparatively low 18% of young married fathers had spent time in jail or prison. These disparities between married and unmarried parents are just as large for parents who are older than 25 when their child is born.

Fragile Families, Not Single Parents

The fact that the majority of births to young adults occur outside of marriage does not mean that young unmarried mothers are parenting alone. Previous research has found that young men often readily acknowledge paternity rather than contest it (Edin, Tach & Mincy, 2009; Furstenberg, 1995; Sullivan, 1993; Waller, 2002) and many eagerly embrace the role of father (Hamer, 2001; Waller, 2002; Young, 2004). In contrast to popular images, most unmarried men are not eager to flee their parental responsibilities as soon as the child is conceived (Achatz & MacAllum, 1994; Augustine, Nelson & Edin, 2009; Hamer, 2001; Nelson, Torres, & Edin, 2002; Nurse, 2002; Waller, 2002), though this certainly does sometimes happen.Footnote 5

In Table 12.2, we describe the relationship characteristics of unmarried parents 24 or younger in the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. Fully 46% of children born to unmarried young adults occurred to a couple who was cohabiting, living together all or most of the time. Another 33% of nonmarital births occurred to young adults who were romantically involved but not living together. Just 20% of nonmarital births occurred to young adults who were no longer romantically involved with one another. An overwhelming majority of unmarried fathers (74%) offered financial support to the mother during her pregnancy, and roughly seven in ten visited her and the child in the hospital (Table 12.2). While marriage is not a normative context in which young adults experience parenthood, being in a romantic relationship clearly is and parents are optimistic about their future together. Eighty percent of unmarried mothers claimed that there was at least a 50–50 chance that they would marry the baby’s father (Table 12.2), and rates for fathers are just as high as they are for mothers (see also Center for Research on Child Wellbeing, 2003).

We know little about couple relationship dynamics during pregnancy, as most existing work is based on retrospective data collected after the child was born. A few scholars offer retrospective accounts of this pregnancy period, drawing mainly on qualitative data from women (Edin & Kefalas, 2005; but see Reed, 2008, who interviewed couples), which suggest that this period may be fraught with turmoil and plagued with serious relationship problems such as domestic abuse and infidelity. Most couples reconcile by the time of the birth, though, because a shared child offers a strong motive to stay together for the betterment of the child (Edin, Kefalas, & Reed, 2004).

Using qualitative data drawn from an in-depth qualitative study of low-income men in Philadelphia, we describe how one man, Jones, experienced the path to young parenthood. Like many young unmarried parents, Jones’ story reflects ­common features of many of these men’s stories, an ambivalent desire for children and relationship tensions that result from an unplanned pregnancy.

Jones, a white 19-year old, is in his first semester of community college. He grew up with both his father – a postal worker – and mother, a nurse for the family physician. Jones was engaged to his girlfriend, Jessie, when they conceived their first child. Jones didn’t exactly intend for Jessie to get pregnant, but he wasn’t against it either; and for Jessie, it was definitely part of her plan. Even while Jessie was still in high school, she “wanted a baby and she always talked about it,” he recalls. Around the time of conception, Jones’ older, unmarried sister had just had a child, which spurred that desire even further.

One evening while Jones and Jessie walked together down the aisle at Walmart, they browsed through some racks of baby clothes and accessories, and Jessie almost casually informed Jones that she hadn’t taken her birth control pill for nearly 2 months. Although Jones was surprised, he took the news in stride, recalling later that he didn’t think it was “really any big thing. Like I wasn’t saying, ‘Uh-oh, better get back on the pill.’ And we totally knew the consequences, I mean, there’s no doubt about that. I don’t need sex education, I know how it works.” In sum, this couple was “fully aware, but I guess you could say we weren’t really worried about it.” After all, Jones and Jessie had been an on-again–off-again couple ever since middle school and had been serious since their junior year in high school, living together at her dad’s house. It was shortly after graduation that Jones got Jessie “that ring on her finger.”

About 2 months after the Walmart conversation, Jessie was checking a home pregnancy test when Jones walked into the bathroom. “This test is negative,” she told him, “but I’ve got to take another one tomorrow morning.” Jones looked over her shoulder at the indicator and exclaimed, “This says you are pregnant!” “No it doesn’t”, Jessie argued, but looked at it again to make sure. “No, it says you are,” he persisted, and when she realized he was right, she burst into tears – of happiness, he thought at the time, but later he isn’t so sure. When we ask about how he felt at that moment, Jones replies, “I was like, ‘Oh, wow, this is a little early in my life,’ but I was excited – I was really happy…. I thought, ‘Wow, I’m going to be a dad!’ I was real excited about it.’” When we ask him if he was worried at all, he says, “No, ‘cause I figured that we’d find a way. If there was any problems, we’d find a way.”

Despite Jones’ bravado, problems did arise. After the baby came, Jones and Jessie got their own place, but she left him after only 3 weeks, telling him she’d decided to seek sole custody of the child. Jessie explained she just wasn’t ready for a serious relationship and didn’t want to share access to the baby. “I was pretty bitter about that. Yeah, because, like…, I didn’t do anything [wrong] at all! I was working…. I didn’t leave the girl because she was pregnant. I didn’t want anything more than to be there, make money, have a family. And here I am, I get screwed because I get left, I get like, my feelings torn away from me,” Jones explains. “I took a wrong turn and I became a dad. And I went through all this fucked up shit with my [girlfriend].” “So being a dad was a wrong turn,” we ask? “I think …the wrong turn was getting involved with Jessie,” he concludes, “cause I’m sure I’m going to have more kids.”

Jones’ story revealed how ambivalent young unmarried couples can be about unplanned pregnancy. Even though he thought it was a bit early, Jones was prepared to take responsibility for his child, and was “really happy” at the thought of ­becoming a dad. Despite the fact that Jones and Jessie had known each other for a while, their relationship was on again, off again, and their attempts to make the relationship work, including moving in together, fell apart when Jessie realized, shortly after the child’s birth, that she did not want a “serious relationship.” Only in retrospect did Jones realize that their transition to parenthood had been based on a tenuous relationship foundation.

Young Parents’ Romantic Relationships

Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, we traced the relationship trajectories of young parents and show them in Table 12.3. By the time their child was 5 years old, 56% of mothers who were married at the time of the birth were still married to their baby’s father, which is consistent with other work showing that marriages that begin at younger ages are less stable than marriages among older couples. Similarly, over one half of the young mothers (53%) who were cohabiting with the father at the time of the birth were still in a romantic relationship with him 5 years later. Relationships were much less stable among the couples who were romantically involved but not living together at the time of the birth: just 27% of these relationships remained intact 5 years later. Many married and cohabiting couples, and even some romantic nonresident couples, went on to have more children together.

Table 12.3 Young adult mothers’ relationship and fertility 5 years after the birth
Full size table

Reasons for Breaking Up

Previous research has identified large socioeconomic and racial differences in the experience of family instability. Cohabiting and marital unions are especially unstable among Blacks (Manning, Smock, & Majumdar, 2004), whereas marriages are more stable among Hispanics, especially Hispanic immigrants (Bean, Berg, & Van Hook, 1996) than they are for the population as a whole. Marriages among young adults of low socioeconomic status are also more prone to instability (Graefe & Lichter, 1999; Martin, unpublished calculations). Analyses that examine the dynamics of couple behavior within disadvantaged populations identify men’s behaviors as a key source of relationship instability, particularly drug use and physical abuse (Waller & Swisher, 2006). Wilson and Brooks-Gunn (2001) found that, relative to married fathers, unmarried fathers were more likely to have used drugs, drank alcohol, smoked, or physically abused the mothers of their children. These behaviors were common reasons women cited for ending relationships or failing to enter into new relationships (Amato & Previti, 2003; Amato & Rogers, 1997; Cherlin, Burton, Hurt & Purvine, 2004; Reed, 2007).

Incarceration is also deeply implicated in the romantic relationships of young unmarried parents, particularly for African Americans (Western & Wildeman, 2009). These relationships are undermined by men’s absence from the family and the community, the logistical problems of visitation, and the shame fathers feel as a result of their incarceration (Arditti, Lambert-Shute, & Joest, 2003; Arditti, Smock, & Parkman, 2005; Edin, Nelson, & Paranal, 2004; Roy & Dyson, 2007; Waller, 2002). Men’s absence during incarceration, for example, imposes both economic pressures and opportunities for women to move on to new partners. Even when this does not occur, the physical separation and lack of ability to monitor one another’s behavior fuels suspicion and mistrust (Edin & Kefalas, 2005). One ­in-depth study of 40 incarcerated men in a work release program found that partner relationships were marked by confusion and conflict during the period of incarceration, and deteriorating commitments between partners continued to worsen after the men were released (Roy, 2005). Other ethnographic work suggests that disadvantaged minority men experience persistent supervision and threat of imprisonment in their communities, which undermines their already tenuous family and romantic relationships (Goffman, 2009).

Women often learn the mother role by participating actively in the care of their younger siblings and cousins, but they learn far less from their family of origin about how to enact successful partner roles (Edin & Kefalas, 2005). Men sometimes participate in such care, but must usually learn how to parent from their partners; few can point to strong role models in the parenthood realm (Nelson & Edin, forthcoming). These tentative conclusions come from qualitative studies; more systematic research is needed to understand how young adults learn to parent.

Reasons for Marrying

Not all nonmarital unions end in dissolution. About one quarter of young adults who were cohabiting at the time of the birth had married by the child’s fifth birthday, and another fifth of cohabiters remained stably living together 5 years later. Marriage rates for young adult cohabiters are similar to the rates for older cohabiting couples (Center for Research on Child Wellbeing, 2007).

In-depth qualitative research reveals that the standards that low-income unmarried parents of both genders have for marriage closely resemble the standards that their middle-class counterparts hold, even though their chances for meeting them are far lower. For the typical low-income unmarried father or mother, a prerequisite for marriage is a set of financial assets that demonstrate that the couple has “arrived” economically. Most say that before they can marry, they will need a mortgage on a modest home, a car note, furniture, some money in the bank, and enough left over for a wedding. Without these marks of personal and collective couple achievement – often called the “marriage bar” by researchers – it would not be right to get married (Edin & Kefalas, 2005; Gibson-Davis, 2007). Both the in-depth interviews with 48 unmarried fathers and mothers drawn from the Fragile Families Survey (Gibson-Davis, Edin, & McLanahan, 2005) and qualitative work in Toledo with 115 working- and lower-class cohabiters without children (Smock, Manning, & Porter, 2005) found that these views were expressed by both women and men.

Clashing with the reality of poor economic prospects, these standards lead to an indeterminate delay in marriage for many couples (Gibson-Davis et al., 2005). Marriage is more likely if a couple is able to improve their economic prospects, while becoming poorer decreases the likelihood of marriage (Osborne, 2005; Smock & Manning, 1997). However, neither earnings nor income is associated with additional fertility (Gibson-Davis, 2009). Men’s economic standing is particularly important; those with less education, low earnings, and weaker attachment to the labor force are less likely to marry (Goldstein & Kenney, 2001; Lichter, LeClere, & McLaughlin, 1991; Lloyd & South, 1996; Manning & Smock, 1995; Oppenheimer, 2000; Sweeney, 2002).

Many studies have documented a positive relationship between male employment rates and marriage in low-income communities (Lichter, McLaughlin, Kephart, & Landry, 1992; Manning & Smock, 1995; Sullivan, 1989; Testa, Astone, Krogh, & Neckerman, 1989). Wilson and Neckerman (1986) linked low marriage rates among poor African Americans to the shortage of “marriageable men” in these communities. In this thesis, low male employment rates and high rates of imprisonment depleted the supply of suitable marriage partners for Black women in poor urban neighborhoods. Combining Fragile Families data with data on local marriage market conditions, Harknett and McLanahan (2004) also found that an undersupply of employed African American men could explain some of the racial and ethnic differences in marriage rates following a nonmarital birth. In a similar analysis, McLanahan and Watson (2009) found that, conditional on their own incomes, unmarried parents were more likely to marry if their incomes were the same or higher than the median income in the city in which they lived. These studies provide further evidence that local contexts in the availability of suitable marriage partners may influence marriage rates among disadvantaged couples, even after they have become parents.

Repartnering and Multiple-Partner Fertility

Experiences of relationship instability and family complexity are common among young parents, particularly when they are unmarried. Among the couples who ended their relationships, we found that transitions to new romantic relationships occurred quickly. Table 12.3 shows that almost two thirds of young mothers who ended their marriages, and over three-fourths of young mothers who ended their cohabiting relationships, had engaged in a new romantic relationship by the time the child was 5 years old. Many had even had two or more different partnerships during that time period, although this pattern of “churning” through partners was more common among unmarried mothers than among divorced mothers. Rates of partner churning were particularly high for mothers who were not involved with the focal father when the child was born.

Furthermore, many of these new relationships produced children. Twenty-one percent of divorced young mothers and 26% of formerly cohabiting mothers had a new child by a new partner within 5 years of the focal child’s birth. Over 35% of mothers who were in romantic nonresident relationships with the father prior to splitting up had new children by new partners, and fully 40% of mothers who were not involved with the baby’s father at the birth had new children by new partners. This, combined with the high rates of multiple-partner fertility that mothers and fathers brought with them to many of their relationships (shown in Table 12.2), even at young ages, resulted in exceedingly complex family structures, with children experiencing two, three, or even more different father figures and a host of different resident and nonresident half-siblings. Table 12.3 considers just mothers’ relationships and fertility transitions, because the quality of the data for mothers is better than the quality of data for men, but the data on families would be even more complex if fathers’ subsequent relationship and fertility transitions were included. Other work shows that fathers’ rates of these transitions are at least as high as mothers’ (Tach, Mincy, & Edin, 2010).

For a subset of young parents, there is extraordinary churning through a number of very weak partnerships, leading to high rates of multiple-partner fertility and highly complex family forms. Prior research has shown that parents are more likely to experience multiple-partner fertility when they have a first sexual experience or a first child at a young age or have children outside of marriage, whereas having more than one child with any given partner is associated with reduced odds. There are also racial and economic disparities in the likelihood of multiple-partner fertility. Blacks and Hispanics have greater odds of experiencing multiple-partner fertility than Whites, and less-educated parents are more likely to experience multiple-partner fertility than highly educated parents (Carlson & Furstenberg, 2006; Guzzo & Furstenberg, 2007a, 2007b; Manlove, Logan, Ikramullah, & Holcombe, 2008; Mincy, 2002). Estimates from the NSFG indicate that almost 33% of fathers under age 25, and 47% of Black young fathers, have children with multiple partners (Smeeding, Garfinkel, & Mincy, 2011).

Unmarried mothers who repartner typically do so with men who have considerably more human capital and fewer behavioral problems than their prior partners (Bzostek, 2008; Graefe & Lichter, 2007), but we know next to nothing about the quality of the subsequent partnerships in which fathers are involved. Nor do we know much about how stable these subsequent unions are. Drawing on other research showing that complexity is strongly associated with dissolution (Cherlin, 1992; Kreider & Fields, 2005; National Center for Health Statistics, 2002) and that the unions of serial cohabitors – who engage in multiple sequential cohabitations – are quite unstable (Lichter & Qian, 2008), we can infer that these new pairings among young parents are likely quite fragile.

Implications for Family Relationships

Multiple-partner fertility has many repercussions for the dynamics of family life. Having children from a previous union reduces the prospects that parents will marry (Carlson, McLanahan, & England, 2004; Mincy, 2002; Stewart, Manning, & Smock, 2003; Upchurch, Lillard, & Panis, 2001). Harknett and Knab (2007) also found that parents’ kin networks provide less social support to them when they have children by other partners. Prior partners, who often continue to engage with the mother via child visitation, are a significant source of tension in new couple relationships, as the prior partner’s visits to see the child fuel jealousy from the current partner (Classens, 2007; Hill, 2007).

Multiple-partner fertility means that fathers’ scarce resources must be spread across several households; this presents a challenge to maintaining meaningful involvement with all of the households to which they may be obligated. Fathers’ relationships with the mothers of their children become increasingly complicated when they and their former partners take on new partners and have subsequent children. This may lead to a “crowding out” effect, reducing fathers’ investments and involvement with any one family. Furstenberg and his colleagues suggested that fathers’ priorities may shift as they move from one family to the next, taking on commitments and obligations with a new romantic partner (Furstenberg, 1995; Furstenberg & Cherlin, 1991; Furstenberg & Harris, 1992). Indeed, fathers visit their nonresident children less frequently (Carlson & Furstenberg, 2007; Manning & Smock, 1999; Tach et al., 2010) and provide less economic support to them via formal and informal arrangements (Manning & Smock, 2000) when they have children with new partners. Fathers with children in different households are also less intensively involved with their current residential children (Carlson, McLanahan, & Brooks-Gunn, 2008), causing strain for current couple relationships (Carlson & Furstenberg, 2007; Classens, 2007; Hill, 2007). Upon starting new romantic relationships, men also become more involved in the lives of the other children who live in the household, to whom they are not biologically related, taking on the role of “social fathers.” Biological fathers often see these new partners as competition, asserting the primacy of the biological father–child role (Edin, Tach, & Mincy, 2009).

Maintaining high-quality relationships between parents is crucial for the intensity and quality of fathers’ involvement with their children, both in the context of romantic relationships and after those relationships have ended (Carlson, McLanahan, & England, 2004; Coley & Chase-Lansdale, 1999; Furstenberg & Cherlin, 1991; Marsiglio & Cohan, 2000). In other words, “good partners make good parents” (Carlson, McLanahan, & Brooks-Gunn, 2006). Cooperative coparenting – the ability of mothers and fathers to actively engage with one another to share childrearing responsibilities (Ahrons, 1981; Furstenberg & Cherlin, 1991) – is relatively uncommon, but it predicts more frequent and higher-quality father–child contact (Sobolewski & King, 2005). Custodial mothers play an important role as “gatekeepers,” either facilitating or hindering a nonresident father’s involvement (Arditti, 1995; Buchanan, Maccoby, & Dornbusch, 1996), and mothers are more likely to restrict access when the two have a troubled relationship, regardless of whether they are currently romantically involved with another partner (Waller & Swisher, 2006).

The story of another young man from the qualitative study of low-income men in Philadelphia reveals the difficulties young unmarried parents face in negotiating parenting rights and roles once their romantic relationships have ended. Like many young unmarried parents, Misel’s story reflects the tensions that emerge between biological and social parents, the tenuous relationships with present and past romantic partners, and the challenges this poses for maintaining parent–child relationships.

Misel, a 28-year-old father of two biological children and two more he loves like his own, is now 28, but had his first child at 24. Each weekday, he must punch in at work by 7 a.m. at the maternity clothing factory where he works as a cutter. He works 40 h each week and makes $8.50 an hour – about $18,000 per year, $2.50 more than he made when he started 2 years ago. He knows this job is a good one, given his education (a GED). He has insurance and a dental plan, and is insured against disability, but he dreams of becoming a long-haul trucker, an occupation that pays far more.

Before landing this job, Misel was in prison for “doing things I shouldn’t be doing.” This meant he missed out on three precious years of his daughter’s life. Misel was 20 when he met Alejandra – she was only 15. External events compelled the two to begin living together almost immediately – Alejandra’s mother kicked her out of the house, and she moved in with Misel and his mother. The two fell in love and had high hopes of a future together, but waited 4 years to start a family so that Alejandra could finish high school. After a difficult pregnancy, Alejandra gave birth to twin girls, but only one of them survived.

Right after the birth, the two married. Misel remembers this as an exceptionally happy time. This Puerto Rican father says he treated his daughter like a “princess.” But he was “more in the streets than at home,” selling drugs and holding up convenience stores for money because the slow money from his conventional jobs, working as a laborer for a construction company and as a landscaper, just wasn’t enough for Misel, who now laments his “ignorance” at the time. Predictably, only 3 months after his daughter’s birth, Misel “got in trouble with the law” and went to prison. “It was like after 3 months that I got incarcerated for 3 years.” This was the beginning of the end of the marriage. “When [Alejandra] came to visit me [in prison] I told her that I wasn’t going to be able to do anything for her since I was in jail so I told her to take care of our daughter and to go on with her life.” Alejandra waited 2 years, visiting him regularly, before moving on.

Now that he is out of prison and has a stable job, Misel takes his daughter most weekends, but her mother is possessive and doesn’t want to give her up for too long. It would be much harder to be involved if he didn’t own a home (purchased for $32,000 the year before, through a special program offered by a neighborhood nonprofit); this gives him a place to spend time with his daughter on his own and have overnight visits. Most fathers his age don’t have their own apartments, much less homes, and have to intrude on their ex-girlfriends’ households – and their ex-girlfriends new partners – to visit their children.

Misel has moved on too, with Elena, who has just given birth to Misel’s son. Elena, the baby, and Elena’s two older children have lived with Misel since Elena’s middle child, by another partner, was in infancy. Misel currently provides nearly all of the support for the five-person family with his wages – Elena receives no child support, though her food stamps help somewhat. Misel is proud of his provider role. “Well here I run the show,” he says, chuckling. “That means that I take care of all the expenses. I pay the rent, electricity, water, gas, cable, telephone. I’m the one who makes the money for now so it’s my responsibility.”

Taking responsibility for four children has made fathering extra difficult. “I have two that are mine and two that are not mine and for me it’s very difficult, understand, to be able to buy everything they need…. I take care of [her children] and love them as if they were my own children understand but like I said, it’s difficult…. You have to make a lot of sacrifices in order to put them first.” The pair has cut expenses to the bone. When we ask him if he ever treats the kids to fast food, he replies, “McDonalds, that’s on hold for a couple of years.”

Misel’s fathering challenges go far beyond finances, however. “It is hard for me to be a real father for [Elena’s older two children] since they are not mine. I don’t know how I should act towards them and how to deal with them…because they are not my children, and I can’t control them like if they were mine. I can control my [own] children by [disciplining] them if I have to, if they deserve it. With the others it’s different, because there will always be problems with their father. And coming up against him wouldn’t be good, for him or me.”

In the year and a half Misel and Elena have lived together, they have only had phone calls from Elena’s prior partner, but the man wants more contact, and Misel fears he’ll “come here demanding things from me. I won’t let him come to my house looking for trouble.” The trouble Misel fears can come in several forms – sexual jealousy between Misel and Elena, rekindled attraction between Elena and her ex, or competition between Misel and the ex over the children, who look to Misel as their father because he’s the only one they have really known Misel feels he deserves that designation since he’s been the one supporting them financially and emotionally. Yet Misel struggles to be understanding, because “I was in his shoes at one time, just like he is now. I was on the other side of the fence before with my daughter.”

Misel’s story highlights the many challenges faced by young parents who have children by multiple partners and live in blended family households. Despite their initial optimism for their future together, and the fact that they waited for several years to have a baby, Misel’s incarceration led to the demise of his relationship with Alejandra. After he was released, Misel worked hard to see his daughter and is fortunate that Alejandra has been largely supportive of that goal. His new romantic relationship with Elena, which came with new social father roles for Elena’s two boys, spread his modest salary thin. Misel was threatened by the possibility of the boys’ biological father trying to come back into their lives, but at the same time he could relate to the man because he was in a similar position with his first daughter with Alejandra. Misel also struggled with how he should parent his new partner’s children and how he should interact with his nonresident daughter, unsure what his rights and responsibilities should be.

The Consequences of Parenthood for Young Adults

Most young adults who become parents do so in the context of a nonmarital relationship, with few economic resources at their disposal. Even though the transition to parenthood typically occurs within a tenuous romantic relationship, most mothers and fathers try to make their relationships work, and fathers generally accept responsibility for their children. Because the children born to young adults are seldom explicitly planned, and economic hardships and parenthood strain even the most committed relationships, young parents break up at higher rates than couples who delay childbearing. These breakups are followed by new romantic relationships, many of which produce additional children, as was the case with Elena and Misel. The churning of romantic partners and the multiple-partner fertility that results create a complex web of economic obligations and negotiations that lead to uncertainty about the rights and responsibilities of each parent to their biological and social children. Elena, Misel, and Misel’s ex-partner Alejandra manage the complexity better than most, but with Elena’s ex about to reenter the scene difficult times may well lie ahead.

While some young adults wait until they have completed their educations to become parents, many do not and postpone their educations and careers, sometimes indefinitely. Young couples were often excited when they found out they would become parents and thought that they would be able to make it work, but in retrospect many recognized that they’d had to put their own aspirations on hold to provide for their family. These families were quite fragile and many saw their relationships end in the years following the birth. While it is unclear whether the transition to parenthood outside of marriage has a causal effect on the future economic or relationship trajectories of young adults, the instability of employment and relationships that follows is likely to detract from both parental and child wellbeing.

Thus, young adults who transition to parenthood typically do so in challenging circumstances, and their children often end up in family constellations that are highly unstable and enormously complex. While this is less true for those who marry than those who do not, young parents are still far more likely to divorce than those who wait until they are at least 25. As the pioneering research of Heatherington (2003) first revealed, most children show surprising resilience in the face of parental breakup, often bouncing back after about a year. But the repeated transitions many children of young adults face is historically unprecedented in the US, as is the complexity that results from high rates of multiple partner fertility for both parents. It also seems to be unique among rich nations (Andersson, 2002).

What policy response ought to flow from these findings? First, as most pregnancies to young adults are unplanned (though not unwanted), continued attention should be paid to preventing unplanned pregnancy, and should recognize that a considerable number of unplanned pregnancies are to young adults, not just teens. Extant evidence suggests that while access to birth control can occasionally be a problem (Kearney & Levine, 2009), many young adults facing limited economic prospects lack sufficient motivation to take the steps necessary to avoid pregnancy, though they may worry somewhat about whether the timing or circumstances are right (Augustine et al., 2009; Edin et al., 2007; Edin & Kefalas, 2005).

Second, more should be done to support young adults who have children, recognizing that most are together with their partner at the time of the birth and desire to stay together. Currently, interventions with such couples focus heavily on teaching relationship skills, and given the behavioral problems so often associated with breakup – particularly infidelity, criminal behavior, substance use, and domestic abuse – such approaches are not unwarranted. Experimental evaluations of such interventions offer mixed results, though African Americans do seem to benefit (Wood et al., 2010). In addition, one state program shows considerable promise – Oklahoma’s Family Expectations, a voluntary program that provides relationship skills education and supportive services to both married and unmarried pregnant women on Medicaid and their romantic partners. An experimental evaluation conducted 15 months after random assignment shows gains in relationship quality, fathers’ economic support, coresidence, and mothers’ mental health among experimental couples relative to controls (Devaney & Dion, 2010). However, no intervention we know of helps young parents meet the considerable economic challenges they face, challenges that, when met, often allow young parents to forge lasting family relationships. In the coming decade, this is a key challenge that must be addressed.