Pearlstein, Mitchell B. From Family collapse to America’s Decline:The Educational, Economic, and social costs of Family Fragmentation. Rowman and Littlefield ,2011. Mitchell Pearlstein, who worked in the Department of Education under Reagan and Bush I, and then founded the Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis sees family fragmentations as a growing problem. In his book, From Family Fragmentation to America's Decline, he says that due to rising divorce and non-marital birth rates, an alarming number of young Americans grow up without the benefit of two caring parents. He describes the effects of single parenthood on children's social wellbeing and mental development. He's persuaded that such weakness in the structure of American families hampers our nation's economic competitiveness.
Waldfogel, Jane, Terry-Ann Craigie, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn. “Fragile families and child wellbeing.” The Future of children/Centre for the Future of Children, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation 20.2 (2010): 87. The authors use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS) to examine why children who grow up in single-mother and cohabiting families fare worse than children born into married-couple households. The authors find that the links between fragile families and child outcomes are not uniform. Family instability, for example, seems to matter more than family structure for cognitive and health outcomes, whereas growing up with a single mother (whether that family structure is stable or unstable over time) seems to matter more than instability for behavior problems. The authors conclude by pointing to three types of policy reforms that could improve outcomes for children. The first is to reduce the share of children growing up in fragile families (for example, through reducing the rate of unwed births or promoting family stability among unwed parents).
