LBJ School News Brief

Uncle Sam wedding graphic

Marriage promotion policy and children’s wellbeing
Professor Cynthia Osborne raises critical questions about the direction
of federal marriage initiatives

As part of President George W. Bush’s Healthy Marriage Initiative, the U.S. Administration for Children and Families proposes to distribute $1.5 billion to states over five years for projects designed to promote healthy marriages among low-income families. The Bush administration called the Healthy Marriage Initiative “the centerpiece” of the welfare reauthorization bills it launched in 2002. The initiative represents a growing trend on the part of the government to attempt to improve the wellbeing of children and reduce welfare dependence through marriage promotion policies.

LBJ School Professor Cynthia Osborne, who has conducted groundbreaking research on the effects of family structure on children’s wellbeing, cautions that a one-size-fits-all type of policy promoting marriage may be ineffective in meeting the diverse needs of unmarried parents.

According to Osborne, the primary approach of the programs currently underway is to address couples’ relationship quality, with a heavy emphasis on relationship counseling. Economic and health factors are considered secondary. Differences in needs across race and ethnicity are only beginning to be taken into account.

Cynthia Osborne photo

Cynthia Osborne

“The current administration’s answer is to encourage ‘healthy marriages’ in the hope that it will bring greater stability and more resources to family members, especially children,” said Osborne. “Marriage is perceived as a poverty reduction strategy and a way to further reduce welfare rolls. Yet it is not clear that marriage really increases household resources, because most unmarried parents either already live together or live with kin.”

Osborne, who recently joined LBJ School faculty and also became an affiliate of the UT Austin Population Research Center, was previously a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Research on Child Wellbeing. Her work on the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Survey of New Parents has contributed to a growing recognition that marriage outcomes differ across racial and ethnic lines, and that additional selective factors such as education, age, earnings and health behaviors play a critical role in shaping family stability.

“Most researchers conclude that the causal benefits of marriage are minimal, but many policymakers have not moved away from the idea that ‘if we get them married, it’s going to solve low-income families’ problems,’” she said.

Osborne points to statistics that show large differences in family structure across race and ethnic groups. Today, 24 percent of white children are born to unmarried mothers, compared to 45 percent of Hispanic children, and almost 70 percent of African-American children. The findings, she said, suggest that the meaning and benefits of marriage may differ across these groups, and that family structure may also affect parenting differently across race and ethnic groups.

“Overall I am finding that the benefits associated with marriage apply more to white families than to African-American or Hispanic families,” said Osborne. “Again, however, within race and ethnic groups, I find little evidence that marriage causes these benefits; rather benefits are largely associated with the characteristics of mothers and fathers who choose marriage for childbearing.”

At the LBJ School, Osborne will continue to look at the selective role that race and ethnicity play in shaping marriage outcomes and family stability. She is working with a multidisciplinary group of UT researchers on an unprecedented study that will assess the state of Texas families. Funded by the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, the project aims to inform policymakers on the nature of marriage in Texas with a sharp focus on Hispanics. The results of the survey are expected in spring 2006.

This fall, Osborne is teaching a course that takes an in-depth look at the origins and current form of U.S. family policy, and considers how varying policy goals and designs affect poverty, children, marriage, and women's labor force participation.

“My goal as a professor is to encourage students to develop the tools necessary to critically analyze and interpret social science research, and to use this research to both advance our knowledge and inform decision makers about the best solutions to poverty and inequality,” she said.

Osborne was drawn to the field of public policy by her overarching interests in the wellbeing of children in disadvantaged environments and the role of social policies in ameliorating this disadvantage. She first pursued these interests by teaching sixth-grade in a low-income Latino neighborhood in California. As a teacher, she quickly learned that the disparities in her students’ academic and social development were influenced more by events outside the classroom than by the experience she provided inside the classroom.

“The confluence of poverty and unstable home environments seriously affected their abilities to engage in their learning or muster hope for their futures,” she said.

Osborne went on to pursue a master's degree in public policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a Ph.D. in demography and public affairs from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

“One of the reasons why I chose policy rather than a discipline like sociology was because I wanted to look at these issues through multiple lenses and borrow from lots of different disciplines,” she said. “And that’s something that policy allows you to do and demands that you do in order to come up with solutions to problems.”

Related research from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study

"Instability in Fragile Families: The Role of Race-Ethnicity, Economics, and Relationship Quality"
By Cynthia Osborne, Wendy Manning, Pamela Smock

"The Effects of Partnership Instability on Parenting and Young Children’s Health and Behavior"
By Cynthia Osborne, Sara McLanahan

"Parental Substance Abuse and Child Health and Behavior"
By Cynthia Osborne, Lawrence Berger

"Young Children's Behavioral Problems in Married and Cohabiting Families"
By Cynthia Osborne, Sara McLanahan, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn

"The Relationship Between Family Structure and Mothering Behavior within Racial and Ethnic Groups"
By Cynthia Osborne

"Maternal Stress and Mothering Behaviors in Stable and Unstable Families"
By Cynthia Osborne

"Marriage following the birth of a child among cohabiting and visiting parents."
Journal of Marriage and Family, 67, 14-26 (2005)
By Cynthia Osborne

These papers are available at http://crcw.princeton.edu/papers.html.

UT Austin Population Research Center

U.S. Administration for Children and Families Healthy Marriage Initiative

23 August 2005

Comments to: lbjweb@uts.cc.utexas.edu

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