Hope seen for 'fragile families'

PROVO — Initiatives to strengthen relationships between unmarried parents could work if the programs are targeted to intervene at the time a couple's child is born, a Princeton researcher said Thursday night at Brigham Young University.

Sara McLanahan spoke at BYU's second annual Marjorie Pay Hinckley Endowed Chair Lecture in Social Work and the Social Sciences. The chair is named for the late wife of President Gordon B. Hinckley, leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

"A lot of my colleagues think this is really silly, that programs will help unmarried parents overcome all their problems and achieve stable relationships," McLanahan said. "But one of the most important things I've learned is that birth is really a magic moment for these fragile families."

McLanahan is one of four principal investigators in a groundbreaking $25 million national study of "fragile families," a term for a family formed when a child is born out of wedlock to young disadvantaged parents. In 1960, 6 percent of children were born out of wedlock. Now 35 percent of all children are born outside marriage.

The scientific Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study began in the late 1990s, when researchers interviewed 3,600 unmarried mothers within 24 hours of childbirth at hospitals serving low-income areas in 20 major American cities. The researchers revisited the mothers and their children three and five years later. They recently landed a $15 million grant to follow up with the families again after nine years.

The findings debunk many standard perceptions of unwed parents, McLanahan said.

For example, the study revealed as myth the idea that unmarried parents are just like married parents. Single moms are not successful, educated parents like the former TV character Murphy Brown, either, McLanahan said.

Instead, unmarried parents are younger, less healthy, far less educated and have far less money and other resources than married parents. Fewer than 1 percent of births outside marriage are to college-educated women over 34 having their first child, like Murphy Brown, McLanahan said. Because they are so young and poorly educated, the study also shows that unmarried parents would still be impoverished if they married.

"Not surprisingly," she added, "the children of unmarried parents do worse than those with married parents."