Family Structure and the Economic Wellbeing of Children

Our results suggest the economic wellbeing of children who experience a maternal dissolution differs depending on the whether the mother remarries. More specifically, the children whose mothers remarry appear to have, as a child, family incomes that are quite similar to the children who live with continuously married mothers. Children of mothers who never remarry appear to suffer economically. In fact, our results suggest that the children of continuously married mothers and mothers who remarry have an improved economic situation throughout their youth. In contrast, the children of mothers who do not remarry not only have worse economic conditions at birth compared to the children of continuously married parents, their economic wellbeing actually declines over time. In other words, they are become worse off as they age. P. 26.

The data is from the US and the authors of the article (Lopoo & DeLeire, August 2012) explain:

We selected a sample of children born between 1967 and 1978 to the original sample members, and collected information on them between their birth and age nine and again from 2000 to 2008, when they were adults. P. 8. 

HT: Viviana Di Giovinazzo.