Cohabitation: The Forgotten Family Structure The Impacts of Parental Relationship Dissolutions on Children's Cognitive Abilities

Abstract

In the United States, 35% of children are born to cohabiting parents (Pew Research, 2018). However, while studies have examined divorce (the breakup of married parents) - and shown that it significantly impacts children - existing literature has neglected to investigate how a breakup affects children whose parents cohabit. This thesis addressed this gap by examining the association between cohabitation breakup and children's cognitive test scores. The analysis included children with divorced, broken up, stably cohabiting parents and compared their cognitive scores to those with stable-married parents. The hypothesis was that all else being equal, children raised in stable two-parent households from birth to age three would perform better than children who experience any form of dissolution. However, children with divorced parents would perform worse than those with broken-up parents on the cognitive ability assessment because previous research suggests divorce to be a more stressful experience than a cohabiting breakup, thus causing harsher impacts for the custodial parent and child (Fagan, 2013; Conger et al., 2002; Lansford, 2009). While children’s cognitive test scores are my primary outcome, I conducted an additional analysis to investigate the impact of parental relationship dissolutions on children’s externalizing and internalizing behaviors.