Marital quality over the life course and child well-being from childhood to early adolescence

Abstract

Research on marital quality and child well-being is currently limited by its common use of geographically constrained, homogenous, and often cross-sectional (or at least temporally limited) samples. We build upon previous work showing multiple trajectories of marital quality and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1979 (NLSY79) regarding mothers and their children (inclusive of ages 5–14). We examine how indicators of child well-being are linked to parental trajectories of marital quality (happiness, communication, and conflict). Results showed children whose parents had consistently poor marital quality over the life course exhibited more internalizing and externalizing problems, poorer health, lower quality home environments, and lower math and vocabulary scores than children of parents in consistently higher-quality marriages. Group differences remained stable over time for child health, home environment, and vocabulary scores. Group differences for internalizing problems declined over time, whereas group differences increased for externalizing problems and math scores. Initial advantages for females across nearly all indicators of child well-being tended to shrink over time, with boys often moving slightly ahead by mid adolescence. We discuss the implications of these findings in regard to children's development and well-being and suggest treating marriage as a monolithic construct betrays important variation within marriage itself.

Satisfaction or connectivity?: Implications from the strong relationality model of flourishing couple relationships

“…These were crossed by each partner's responses, such that there were 16 possible rows of data each representing the possible combinations of partners in each of the four classes; combined weights across all rows summed to 1; rows with zero probability of class membership were removed. Thus, rather than weighting the data just by the most likely class, data were weighted and included for those that had a likelihood of being in any of the classes (Galovan et al, 2019; James et al, in press), and we used this data in cross‐tabulation analysis. Finally, we evaluated how the correlation between relationship satisfaction and relational‐connectivity differed by class.…”

Parental separation risk before and after the diagnosis of a child physical health condition

“…Regarding reverse causality, there is some evidence that poor physical health in children may result from family conflict, which could explain the increased parental separation risk even before the first diagnosis. Studies have shown that poor parental relationship quality has a detrimental effect on children's overall physical health, as rated by mothers (James et al 2022) and children themselves (Hair et al 2009). While Repetti et al (2002) also showed in a systematic literature review that family conflict often leads to poor physical health in children, they only used studies in which children's health was reported by the parents.…”

Happily ever after for coupled and single adults: A comparative study using latent profile analysis

“…We first conducted BCH analyses on the coupled and single profile solutions separately to examine profile differences on the outcome and indicators. For analyses where we wanted to compare coupled versus single profiles directly, we combined the class probabilities for both profile solutions, wherein the class probabilities from a given solution were kept while the class probabilities for the other solution were given a weight of zero (Galovan et al, 2022; James et al, 2022). In other words, individuals in coupled profiles would have a zero probability of being in any of the single profiles and vice versa.…”