This dissertation examines low-income fathers’ involvement with their young children using the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing (FFCW) data. Chapter 3 entitled, “He Said, She Said: Comparing Father and Mother Reports of Father Involvement,” compares mother and father reports of fathers’ frequency of involvement in various activities and in measures of emotional involvement. This chapter finds that fathers report spending 17.6 percent more time engaged in 11 activities with their young children than mothers report the father spending. How parental disagreement is measured yields starkly different results given the underlying distribution of these data. Chapter 4 entitled, “Estimating the Impact of Child Support and Welfare Policies on Fathers’ Involvement,” is a longitudinal analysis combining three waves of the FFCW data with annual, state-level policy data on child support enforcement and welfare policies. This chapter examines the impact of policies on fathers’ involvement over time. Fathers’ involvement is operationalized as accessibility, responsibility, and engagement. Using parents that are unmarried at the time of the focal child’s birth, this chapter finds that public policies do influence fathers’ involvement after controlling for individual social and demographic characteristics. Policies may be operating in conflicting ways to both increase and decrease fathers’ involvement. For example, fathers’ daily engagement is positively affected by stronger paternity establishment policies but is negatively affected by stronger child support enforcement collection rates and the welfare family cap policy. Chapter 5 entitled, “Two Dads Are Better Than One: Biological and Social Father Involvement,” examines whether biological and social fathers are substitutes or complements in a child’s life and how biological fathers and social fathers impact the mother’s frequency of involvement. This chapter finds that resident social fathers contribute as much time to the focal child as resident biological fathers. Factors that increase the overall parental frequency of involvement include having: a resident biological or social father, native-born parents, a biological father who had a very involved father, and a positive relationship between the biological parents. Factors that decrease overall parental frequency of involvement include: the father’s new partner, the father’s incarceration, a mother’s other children, and the child’s increasing age. / text

Thesis advisor: Summer S. Hawkins / Preventing poor health in childhood is a national social work and public health priority in the United States. Importantly, child health and wellbeing is explicitly linked with maternal health. Thus, maternal depression, a common mental illness, is a concern not only for the mother, but for the health of her offspring. The purpose of this three-paper dissertation was to extend the understanding of child health and wellbeing at age 9 years old in the context of maternal depression. Analyses utilized data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study and were guided by a resilience perspective, life course perspective, family systems theory, and ecological systems theory. Paper 1 examined the unique impact of maternal depression on child physical health outcomes utilizing a series of logistic regression analyses. Findings indicated that multiple individual-, maternal-, and family-level risk and protective factors influenced the association between maternal depression and child physical health. Paper 2 utilized latent profile analysis and multinomial logistic regression analyses to examine child physical health and psychosocial wellbeing in the context of maternal depression. Five distinct profiles of child health and wellbeing were identified, suggesting the traditional dichotomy of healthy versus unhealthy may fail to capture the complex nature of child health and wellbeing for those experiencing maternal depression. Results showed that maternal depression was associated with increased risk of poor health and wellbeing, yet also emphasized the ability for children to achieve resilient functioning. Paper 3 explored the impact of maternal depression on the maternal-child relationship and the protective nature of interpersonal supports and community resources. Findings indicated that interpersonal and community resources directly and indirectly supported a positive maternal-child relationship for mothers with depression. Altogether, results extend the literature base by providing a more nuanced and complete examination of child health and wellbeing in the context of maternal depression, with a focus on the potential for resilient functioning among this at-risk population. Findings provide evidence that even in the context of risk, protective factors exist that support resilient functioning. Results have important policy and practical implications, including continued screenings for maternal depression in a primary care setting. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Social Work. / Discipline: Social Work.

While reducing food insecurity is a major health initiative, most studies and programs focus only on health-related outcomes and not on other types of hardships. This secondary data analysis of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study examined the relationship between food insecurity and housing instability with social support, parental depression, and material hardship in vulnerable fathers. Using structural equation modeling on Wave 3 data, the final resulting model was X2 (4, N= 4898) = 3.72 at p = .444. For fathers, material hardship, depression, social support impact the relationship between food insecurity and housing instability. This research has implications for programs and services that may serve low income, single, or minority fathers and families to provide supports to improve food and house instabilities. Agencies and organizations should examine material hardship, not just health-related outcomes. They should provide services for mental health concerns as well as facilitate greater social support.

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This study examines the transition to marriage among low-income urban mothers and fathers who are unmarried and have a newborn baby together. The study contributes to an emerging body of research that explores the concept of obstacles to marriage by testing whether obstacles to marriage operate in the way that the descriptive literature has proposed: by standing in the way of loving and committed couples who might otherwise make a smooth transition to marriage. Using survival analysis techniques and data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, and introducing a new measure, the Headed to Marriage Index, the study tests the influence that three categories of determinants of marriage — relationship quality, investment in the relationship, and guiding values and beliefs — have on how long couples with a newborn remain unmarried to each other. It also determines whether and how the association between these determinants of marriage and time to marriage is affected by the presence of three obstacles to marriage: low education, poverty, and multiple partner fertility. Results show that the Headed to Marriage Index can be used to estimate hazard of marriage among these couples, and that as a predictor of marriage behavior, this simple index performs nearly as well as the individual components that it comprises. Results also show that low education, being in poverty, and having multiple partner fertility are formidable obstacles that might help to explain why some new parents never marry each other, even though they report wanting to. Finally, interaction terms using the Headed to Marriage Index and each of the three obstacles to marriage test the hypothesis that the extent to which these obstacles to marriage matter might differ depending a couple’s score on the Headed to Marriage Index. The results provided evidence that poverty is an obstacle to marriage for couples at all levels of the Headed to Marriage Index, but that its effect grows stronger as HMI score increases. Poverty is a significant barrier to marriage for those who are otherwise most prepared and oriented toward marriage. / text

Parental incarceration is connected to many negative outcomes for children including negative externalizing behaviors. Most studies are not conclusive in determining whether maternal incarceration or paternal incarceration has a more detrimental impact on children. This study looks at a sample of 2,458 youth from the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study (FFCWS) and their parents and compares the gender of the incarcerated parent and that of the child to determine if there are differences in the risk of delinquent behavior among adolescent children. Results found that parental incarceration overall increased the risk of juvenile delinquency and that female children are at greater risk of delinquency if their mothers were incarcerated. Overall, the empirical results suggest that the gender of the parent and child matter in influencing delinquent behavior. Because maternal incarceration appears to be more consequential for female daughters' participation in delinquent acts, there may be a need to have more gendered research when studying juvenile delinquency and parental incarceration.

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It has long been acknowledged that housing is essential for access to employment, social services, healthcare, and other forms of assistance that help move people out of poverty. Through identifying dimensions of housing insecurity, policymakers, as well as researchers, will have a better understanding of the protective factors that make families more secure and the risk factors that raise their level of insecurity. These analyses use resident and non-resident, low-income, urban fathers’ responses to the five publicly available waves of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing (n = 4378) dataset to examine the relationship between protective and risk factors and housing insecurity. As access to protective factors increases, fathers’ risk of housing semi-insecurity and insecurity decreases, and as fathers are more exposed to risk factors, both their housing semi-insecurity and insecurity risks increase.

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