The University of Notre Dame has launched an interdisciplinary research initiative aimed at understanding how family structure affects children’s outcomes and what policies might help strengthen families across the United States.
The Strengthening Families Research Initiative is led by economist Melissa Kearney, who joined Notre Dame this fall. She said recent decades have brought dramatic changes to children’s living arrangements.
“One of the things that's happened in the U.S. over the past half-century is there's been a very large decline in the share of children living in two-parent households,” Kearney said.
Researchers have spent years focusing on the roles of schools, neighborhoods and social programs, she said, but the academic evidence points to something broader.
“What the academic evidence is telling us from economics, from sociology, from psychology is that families are really important,” she said.
Kearney said the trend is closely connected to socioeconomic divides. Family structure, she said, is increasingly split along educational and economic lines.
“Having a two-parent family is now something that is really disproportionately enjoyed by the most privileged class in society,” she said.
About 30 percent of U.S. children live outside a two-parent home, and the numbers are even higher for children whose parents do not have a college degree.
“About 30% of U.S. children live outside a two-parent home. And the rates are much higher for children who are born to parents without a college degree,” Kearney said.
The new initiative will bring together economists, psychologists, anthropologists and other scholars from across Notre Dame’s College of Arts & Letters, with support from the university’s Poverty Initiative. Kearney said Notre Dame’s structure and mission make it a strong fit for the work.
“What's so exciting about what's happening at Notre Dame is there is a real commitment to providing these kinds of interdisciplinary structures… to really make progress on answering these very complex and vexing questions,” she said.
The research will explore how economic conditions, tax and benefit policies, relationship supports and legal frameworks may influence family stability and children’s outcomes.
