Family Structure and Children’s Achievements

Abstract

In this paper we estimate the associations between several outcomes in early adulthood (educational attainment, unemployment, leaving home, early childbearing, distress and smoking) and a number of parental (or mother's) behaviours during childhood, including the mother's employment patterns, her age at the child's birth and the child's experience of life in a non-intact family. The analysis has been performed using a special sample of 1,400 young adults (and their mothers) selected from the first five waves of the BHPS, 1991-95. We estimate these associations with a linear probability model on the full sample and a restricted sample, which we analyse because of sample selection issues. We also estimate the same associations with a mother-specific fixed-effects estimator which imposes less restrictive assumptions than conventional linear probability estimators on the interpretation of the relationships of interest. We find that (i) experience of life in a non-intact family is usually associated with disadvantageous outcomes for young adults; (ii) mother's employment during childhood is usually associated with favourable outcomes for her offspring during young adulthood; (iii) there is a strong persistence across generations in early childbearing.