F F Furstenberg
Biographic Data
| ID | 8361 |
|---|---|
| NAME | F F Furstenberg |
| GIVEN NAMES | F F |
| FAMILY NAME | Furstenberg |
| SIGNATURE | FURSTENBERG F F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pennsylvania |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8815-4578 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 131 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2436 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 131 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1953 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 28 |
Union formation, within‐couple dynamics, and child well‐being
Studies on global changes in families have greatly increased over the past decade, adopting both a country-specific and, more recently, a cross-national comparative perspective. While most studies are focused on the drivers of global changes in families, little comparative research has explored the implications of family processes for the health and well-being of children. This study aims to fill this gap and launch a new research agenda explorin…
Communication with Kin in the Wake of the Covid-19 Pandemic
This study investigates patterns of communication among non-coresident kin in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic using data from the New York City Robin Hood Poverty Tracker. Over half of New Yorkers spoke to their non-coresident family members several times a week during the pandemic, and nearly half increased their communication with non-coresident kin since March 2020. Siblings and extended kin proved to be especially important ties activa…
Family Change and Family Diversity
Future historians of the family will undoubtedly look upon the final decades of the twentieth century as a time of upheaval, when a major shift occurred in the form and function of the Western family. During the last third of the century, the nuclear family built around durable conjugal ties and a distinct division of labor based on gender has given way to a multiplicity of kinship types. This new (or some would argue renewed) diversity of family…
Family change and variation through the lens of family configurations in low‐ and middle‐income countries
Using 254 Demographic and Health Surveys from 75 low- and middle-income countries, this study shows how the joint examination of family characteristics across rural and urban areas provides new insights for understanding global family change. We operationalise this approach by building family configurations : a set of interrelated features that describe different patterns of family formation and structure. These features include partnership (marr…
A Sequence-Analysis Approach to the Study of the Transition to Adulthood in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
This study investigates whether young people in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) have experienced processes of destandardization of the life course similar to those observed in high-income societies. We provide two contributions to the relevant literature. First, we use data from 263 Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) across 69 LMICs, offering the richest comparative account to date of women's transition to adulthood (TTA) patterns in t…
Changing Gender Gaps in the Timing of First Union Formation and Sexual Initiation in Sub-Saharan Africa
Gender differences in union formation and sexual initiation in sub-Saharan Africa remain poorly documented, in large part due to a scarcity of research on the transition to adulthood among men. We adopt a novel perspective on this topic by examining gender gaps in the ages at first union and sex in 24 countries, focusing on measures of central tendency and dispersion. Gender differences in age at first union decreased, driven by postponement amon…
How Families Give and Receive
Support of family members has been a long-standing interest of social scientists. Contemporary American families must provide support to members in a historical context wherein family inequality continues to rise. Based on the life course perspective, and utilizing qualitative, in-depth interviews with 50 multi-generational participants from the Family Exchanges Study, this article explores the mechanisms through which families across the socioec…
Reaching Adulthood
Since 2000, transition to adulthood behaviors changed across gender and social class. Yet it is unclear whether these changes reflect a corresponding shift in beliefs. In particular, widening inequality and changes to higher education may differentially alter the opportunities available to young adults across gender and socioeconomic status, potentially changing attitudes about entering adulthood. Using the General Social Survey's 2002 and 2012 w…
Delayed Adulthood, Delayed Desistance? A Brief Report on Changing Age Schedules of Risky Behaviors
Desistance from the risky behaviors associated with adolescence is linked to entry into adult roles like marriage and employment. Increases in the age of these transitions may delay desistance from risky behaviors. Using population data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the National Center for Health Statistics, and tabulated data from Monitoring the Future, we chart trends in six problem behaviors—arrests, marijuana use, binge drinking, …
Kinship Reconsidered
This article reviews the recent history of kinship research, noting the relative neglect of the topic in recent decades. The lack of scholarly and empirical work on kinship has been hampered by both the absence of survey and qualitative research on contemporary kinship practices. The author focuses on what is known and not known about how individual put into practice kinship in the standard, nuclear form of the family. There is surprising in atte…
Kinship Practices Among Alternative Family Forms in Western Industrialized Societies
ObjectiveThis article discusses how kinship is construed and enacted in diverse forms of the family that are now part of the culturally pluralistic family system of Western societies.BackgroundThis study is the second in a pair documenting changes over the past century in the meaning and practice of kinship in the family system of Western societies with industrialized economies. While the first paper reviewed the history of kinship studies, this …
Who Initiates the Help Older Parents Give to Midlife Children
This study reveals variation in the initiation of older parents' help and refines our understanding of family help in late life. Findings may suggest a parental expectation for children to be competent in adulthood regardless of their resources and willingness to help
After the Burden Is Lifted
More support for caregivers with high caregiving burdens may alleviate some of the strain associated with spousal caregiving, as-even if the partner dies-a decrease in spousal caregiving hours results in an uplift in life satisfaction
Gender Differences in Spousal Caregivers’ Care and Housework
Even in a context of children's decreasing availability to care for parents, male spouses assume the required caregiving role in systems relying on a mixture of public and private care
Journeys in Sociology
Financing Children's Futures
This paper, based on three waves of qualitative data with middle‐income families outside of Philadelphia, explores how families deal with the challenge of financing postsecondary education over time. Because of economic setbacks, these families adopt a variety of financial maneuvers to support their young adult children's postsecondary educational plans. In particular, families are driven to sacrifice familial savings accounts and retirement fund…
Patterns of Multisystem Service Use and School Dropout Among Seventh-, Eighth-, and Ninth-Grade Students
Youth who receive services from public mental health, child welfare and delinquency, and homeless systems are often exposed to a number of overlapping child, family, school, and community risk factors. Minimal research, however, has focused on the extent to which single- or multiple-system involvement influences school dropout. Relying on an integrated data set, the associations between single- and multiple-system utilization and risk for droppin…
Social Class and Development in Early Adulthood
This response to Jeffrey Arnett’s article on social class and the development of emerging adults points out a number of limitation in the data, analysis, and conclusions. For reasons outlined in my commentary, I take issue with his conclusion that social class differences in the development of young adults are modest. I try to show why that interpretation of the data presented is premature and unwarranted
Reconsidering Teenage Pregnancy and Parenthood
This paper looks back at the findings reported in Destinies of the Disadvantaged: The Politics of Teenage Parenthood, a decade after its publication in light of recent research. Increasingly, the most methodologically sophisticated research has minimized the “causal impact” of early childbearing on later life events consistent with the findings of the Baltimore Study. I argue in the paper that we must see early childbearing primarily as a marker …
The Future of Intergenerational Relations in Aging Societies
As the pressure mounts to reduce the public costs of supporting rapidly aging societies, responsibility for supporting elderly people will increasingly fall on their family members. This essay explores the family's capacity to respond to these growing challenges. In particular, we examine how family change and growing inequality pose special problems in developed nations, especially the United States. This essay mentions a series of studies suppo…
Becoming adults
This article summarizes the reasons for the slower passage to adult status (at least measured by demographic markers) and discusses some of the important implications of what today's pattern of becoming an adult means for young people, their families, and the larger society. By no means should this article be considered a review of the growing body of evidence on the changing pattern of adult transition. Indeed, there are many reviews of the lite…
I'll Give You the World
Research has shown that parents with higher socioeconomic status provide more resources to their children during childhood and adolescence. The authors asked whether similar effects associated with parental socioeconomic position are extended to adult children. Middle-aged parents (N = 633) from the Family Exchanges Study reported support they provided to their grown children and coresidence with grown children (N = 1,384). Parents with higher in…
Fifty Years of Family Change
The first section of the article discusses how and why we went from a relatively undifferentiated family system in the middle of the last century to the current system of diverse family forms. Even conceding that the family system was always less simple than it now appears in hindsight, there is little doubt that we began to depart from the dominant model of the nuclear-family household in the late 1960s. I explain how change is a result of adapt…
Educational Aspirations, Expectations, and Realities for Middle-Income Families
Although most Americans agree that postsecondary education is the clearest path to later financial security, many families have trouble saving money to help their children in this process. This article focuses on the struggles of middle-income families as they attempt to negotiate their daily financial realities with their aspirations for their children's postsecondary education. In particular, the article examines the discord between the high ed…
Investing in Children
Parental spending on children is often presumed to be one of the main ways that parents invest in children and a main reason why children from wealthier households are advantaged. Yet, although research has tracked changes in the other main form of parental investment—namely, time—there is little research on spending. We use data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey to examine how spending changed from the early 1970s to the late 2000s, focusing …
The Life Course of Children of Divorce
In a preliminary analysis of data from a nationally representative sample of U.S. children aged 11 to 16 in 1981, the authors examine (1) the incidence of marital disruption in children's lives; (2) the type of living arrangements children experience following a disruption; and (3) the amount of contact children maintain with the outside parent. The analysis reveals large racial differences in both the incidence and aftermath of disruption. Black…
Investing in Children
Parental spending on children is often presumed to be one of the main ways that parents invest in children and a main reason why children from wealthier households are advantaged. Yet, although research has tracked changes in the other main form of parental investment—namely, time—there is little research on spending. We use data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey to examine how spending changed from the early 1970s to the late 2000s, focusing …
Social Capital and Successful Development among At-Risk Youth
Social scientists have been slow to appreciate the great diversity among the poor. Until quite recently, researchers have devoted more attention to examining patterns of persistent poverty than to understanding how individuals and families maneuver their way out of economic disadvantage (for exceptions, see Clark, 1983; Kellam, Ensminger, & Turner, 1977; Williams Kornblum, 1985). Evidence about mobility patterns among the poor provides a perfect …
Paternal Participation and Children's Well-being after Marital Dissolution
Using a nationally representative sample from the National Survey of Children of 227 children in the US aged 11-16 who had experienced their parents marital dissolution this paper examines whether children generally fare better when their noncustodial father maintains an active presence in their lives. For measures of academic difficulty problem behavior and psychological distress there is little evidence that paternal involvement had either harm…
Race Differences in the Timing of Adolescent Intercourse
Researchers have long been aware of sizeable racial differences in the prevalence and timing of premarital sexual behavior. In a national US sample of youth aged 15-16 blacks are shown about 4 times more likely than whites to report ever having intercourse. Various explanations are hypothesized: a demographic composotion explanation that stresses differential socioeconomic position; an explanation that focuses on the consequences of low socioecon…
Are Parents Investing Less Time in Children? Trends in Selected Industrialized Countries
Trends in parental time invested in children since the 1960s are examined in 16 industrialized countries using time-use survey data. Despite the time pressures that confront today's families, parents appear to be devoting more time to children than they did 40 years ago. Results also suggest that mothers continue to devote more time to childcare than fathers, but the gender gap has been reduced. The consistency of these results across countries s…
The Prevalence and Correlates of Multipartnered Fertility Among Urban U.S. Parents
Recent trends in marriage and fertility have increased the number of adults having children by more than 1 partner, a phenomenon that we refer to as multipartnered fertility. This article uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine the prevalence and correlates of multipartnered fertility among urban parents of a recent birth cohort ( N = 4,300). We find that unmarried parents are much more likely to have had a child …
Shifting Childrearing to Single Mothers
We investigate how recent changes in the Western family have affected childhood living arrangements. For 17 developed countries, we use multistate life table techniques to estimate childhood trajectories of coresi-dence with biological fathers versus other maternal partners. In all countries childhood exposure to single parenting is more often caused by parental separation than out-of-partnership childbearing. Both exposure to single parenting an…
Parenting Apart
Divorce and remarriage have become prominent features of American life. Today many parents divide their attention and resources among 2 or more families and children frequently grow up with multiple parents. Using a nationally representative household sample or children this study describes relations among parents steoparents and children after separation and divorce. Results suggest that most children have little contact with their nonresident p…
Social Change and Transitions to Adulthood in Historical Perspective
Multipartnered fertility among American men
Using the 2002 (Cycle 6) National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), which was the first NSFG to interview men, we document the prevalence and correlates of sequential parenthood with different partners (multipartnered fertility) among a representative sample of American men. Nearly 8% of American men aged 15–44 report having had children with more than one partner, with sharp differences by age, race/ethnicity, and income—over one-third of poor bla…
Educational differences in parents’ time with children
We analyze time diary data from 24,546 married mothers and married fathers in Canada, Germany, Italy, and Norway to determine whether the effect of education on child‐care time varies cross‐nationally. Our results indicate that more educated mothers spend more time with children than less educated mothers in each country, despite substantial cross‐national variation in levels of economic support and services for families. This suggests that bette…
Paternal involvement with adolescents in intact families
We measure the quality and quantity of fathers’ involvement with adolescent children in intact families over time using longitudinal data from The National Survey of Children. We examine differentials in fathers’ involvement by children’s and family characteristics and model the long-term effects of fathers’ involvement on children’s outcomes in the transition to adulthood. Fathers are more involved with sons than with daughters and they disengag…
Helicopter Parents and Landing Pad Kids
Popular media describe adverse effects of helicopter parents who provide intense support to grown children, but few studies have examined implications of such intense support. Grown children (N = 592, M age = 23.82 years, 53% female, 35% members of racial/ethnic minority groups) and their parents (N = 399, M age = 50.67 years, 52% female; 34% members of racial/ethnic minority groups) reported on the support they exchanged with one another. Intens…
Banking on Families
Before we can determine the relevance of social capital to the sociology of family and kinship, we must fill the gaps in our theoretical knowledge. For example, we still do not know how couples, parents, children, and groups generate, accumulate, manage, and deploy social capital. Neither do we know the consequences of social capital for the welfare of families and their individual members. To investigate these areas, we must replace the makeshif…
Who Drops Out of and Who Continues Beyond High School? A 20-Year Follow-Up of Black Urban Youth
The antecedents of dropping out of high school and continuing beyond high school are explored in a 20-year follow-up of the first-born children of about 250 Black teenage mothers who gave birth in the late 1960s in Baltimore. In 1988, the first-born children of the teenage mothers were making the transition to young adulthood (M age = 19 years). Thirty-seven percent had dropped out of school, 46% had completed high school, and 17% had gone on for…
How marital dissolution affects children
Etude examinant les effets du divorce des parents sur plusieurs mesures du bien-etre de 1197 enfants (problemes comportementaux et psychologiques, performances scolaires)
I'll Give You the World
Research has shown that parents with higher socioeconomic status provide more resources to their children during childhood and adolescence. The authors asked whether similar effects associated with parental socioeconomic position are extended to adult children. Middle-aged parents (N = 633) from the Family Exchanges Study reported support they provided to their grown children and coresidence with grown children (N = 1,384). Parents with higher in…
Calling the Police
In the rapidly expanding literature on the police, one question has been treated with increasing frequency in the past few years: How can the police be encouraged to become more responsive to the publics they serve? Many writers contend that in order for change to take place, it will be necessary to alter those conditions which affect the type of individual who becomes a policeman, either by modifying recruitment procedures, the training process,…
The Sociology of Adolescence and Youth in the 1990s
The 1990s saw considerable advances in the state of research on adolescence and youth. This article provides a critical commentary on a subset of this research, focusing on the causes and consequences of the lengthened period in which the transition to adulthood occurs. It provides a brief history of adolescence research, identifying a select set of topics, themes, and research problems that will guide research on adolescence and youth over the n…
Fifty Years of Family Change
The first section of the article discusses how and why we went from a relatively undifferentiated family system in the middle of the last century to the current system of diverse family forms. Even conceding that the family system was always less simple than it now appears in hindsight, there is little doubt that we began to depart from the dominant model of the nuclear-family household in the late 1960s. I explain how change is a result of adapt…
Trends in the Economic Independence of Young Adults in the United States
One of the major milestones of adulthood is achieving economic independence. Without sufficient income, young people have difficulty leaving their childhood home, establishing a union, or having children-or they do so at great peril. Using the National Longitudinal Survey, this article compares the employment and economic circumstances of young adults aged 22-30 in 1973, 1987, and 2007, and their possible determinants. The results show that achie…
The Effect of Divorce on Intergenerational Transfers
This paper draws on new data on intergenerational transfers of time and money that were collected in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We use these data to examine the effects of divorce on these transfers. We find that the timing of divorce is critical. Fathers and mothers involved in late divorces have similar levels of transfers with their adult children, while divorce during a child’s childhood years increases transfers with mothers and sha…
Reconsidering the Effects of Marital Disruption
This article identifies predivorce individual and family characteristics that explain a portion of the effect of parental separation on the long-term well-being of children. Using longitudinal data from the National Survey of Children (NSC), the authors discuss how much of the relationship between a separation and measures of adult well-being (including educational and economic attainment, patterns of family formation, delinquency, and psychologi…
Kinship Reconsidered
This article reviews the recent history of kinship research, noting the relative neglect of the topic in recent decades. The lack of scholarly and empirical work on kinship has been hampered by both the absence of survey and qualitative research on contemporary kinship practices. The author focuses on what is known and not known about how individual put into practice kinship in the standard, nuclear form of the family. There is surprising in atte…
Prescribing, an Index to Quality of Medical Care
Prescribing, an Index to Quality of Medical Care: A Study of the Baltimore City Medical Care Program Frank F. Furstenberg, Matthew Taback, Harry Goldberg, and J. Wilfrid Davis CopyRight*Presented before the Medical Care Section of the American Public Health Association at the Eightieth Annual Meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, October 24, 1952. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.43.10.1299 Published Online: August 29, 2011
Industrialization and the American Family
It is frequently assumed that the American family has undergone considerable change since industrialization. By referring to the accounts of European travelers visiting the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century, it is possible to bring together a large number of detailed observations on the American family prior to industrialization. Great similarities are apparent between the modern family and the family of a century ago.…
Birth Control Knowledge and Attitudes among Unmarried Pregnant Adolescents
Frank Furstenberg, Jr., Leon Gordis, Milton Markowitz, Birth Control Knowledge and Attitudes among Unmarried Pregnant Adolescents: A Preliminary Report, Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Feb., 1969), pp. 34-42
Premarital pregnancy among black teen-agers
Moral Development
Although the work of Piaget dealt with the intellectual development of children, and that of Goldman with a child’s religious thought, there had hitherto been no comparable book on child morality to complete the developmental picture of the time. Originally published in 1968 William Kay’s book was designed to fill this gap, for he offers a complete description of the moral growth of children from infancy to adolescence. Dr Kay was writing specifi…
Birth Control Experience among Pregnant Adolescents
This paper questions the common assumption that premarital pregnancy is specially motivated. Instead, it contends that pregnancy is usually the unanticipated outcome of sexual activity. If this is so, it becomes important to investigate why birth control is not used more often to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Results of research on a sample of 337 unmarried black teen-agers indicates that experience with birth control was strongly related to the …
The Transmission of Mobility Orientation in the Family
There is a need to test the widely accepted assumption that the child's attitudes are acquired directly from his parents. Previous research may have exaggerated the extent to which attitudes are transmitted in the family. Using a sample of 466 parent-child pairs, it was discovered that there was a low association between family members' mobility orientations. Various conditions within the family had a noticeable affect on the level of parent-chil…
Preventing Unwanted Pregnancies Among Adolescents
From 1966 to 1968 337 unwed teenagers under 18 years of age and 84 married adolescents were interviewed when they entered Baltimores Sinai Hospital for prenatal services. Information collected included family background feelings about pregnancy and knowledge of and experience with contraceptives prior to pregnancy. The girls most of whom were Negro and lower class entered the hospitals Adolescent Family Clinic and were offered medical and social …
Calling the Police
In the rapidly expanding literature on the police, one question has been treated with increasing frequency in the past few years: How can the police be encouraged to become more responsive to the publics they serve? Many writers contend that in order for change to take place, it will be necessary to alter those conditions which affect the type of individual who becomes a policeman, either by modifying recruitment procedures, the training process,…
Willard W. Waller on the Family, Education, and War
Counting the Jobless
This paper contends that the official definition of unemployment is poorly designed to reflect the size of the population available for work. Certain cultural and normative assumptions which develop as a consequence of the limited supply of jobs influence many individuals who are interested in working to behave in ways which exclude their being classified as unemployed. One of the most important norma tive considerations affecting labor market be…
The Origins of the Female-Headed Black Family
Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr., Theodore Hershberg, John Modell, The Origins of the Female-Headed Black Family: The Impact of the Urban Experience, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 6, No. 2, The History of the Family, III (Autumn, 1975), pp. 211-233
Children of the Great Depression
The Social Consequences of Teenage Parenthood
Premarital Pregnancy and Marital Instability
This paper examines the existing evidence on the association between premarital pregnancy and marital dissolution, deriving possible explanations to account for the link between the timing of conception and the marital outcome, and testing certain of these explanations using selected data from a five year longitudinal study on the social consequences of unplanned parenthood. Information was collected on the marital careers of 203 young women who …
Social Change and Transitions to Adulthood in Historical Perspective
The Timing of Marriage in the Transition to Adulthood
Recycling the Family
No abstract available for this article
The Statistical History of the United States
Burdens and Benefits
This paper explores the impact of teenage pregnancy and childbearing on the families of the adolescent and examines the amount and type of support extended by the family of origin to the pregnant teenager. The analysis draws on data from a longitudinal study of teenage childbearing in Baltimore and a series of intensive case studies of adolescents and their families carried out at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic. The findings reveal that m…
Reflections on Remarriage
Children's Names and Paternal Claims
Remarriage after Divorce
Data from a longitudinal study of divorce and remarriage are examined to ascertain whether remarriage appears to be helpful in enhancing one's well-being following marital separation. Eight measures that collectively assess well-being were used to examine changes between the immediate postseparation period and a period approximately two and one-half years later. One hundred eighty men and women divorced in central Pennsylvania were studied with r…
Sex and Pregnancy in Adolescence
The Life Course of Children of Divorce
In a preliminary analysis of data from a nationally representative sample of U.S. children aged 11 to 16 in 1981, the authors examine (1) the incidence of marital disruption in children's lives; (2) the type of living arrangements children experience following a disruption; and (3) the amount of contact children maintain with the outside parent. The analysis reveals large racial differences in both the incidence and aftermath of disruption. Black…
Psychology (94 works) · Sociology (83 works) · Developmental psychology (63 works) · Family Dynamics and Relationships (59 works) · Political science (55 works) · Demography (49 works) · Intergenerational Family Dynamics and Caregiving (43 works) · Population (42 works) · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics (38 works) · Economics (37 works)