African American Family Structure

Currently, in society, as a whole, the biggest issue we put our focus on during a divorce situation is the financial issue. Appropriate measures have been taken to try and curb that issue as temporary fix, such as, mandated child support, and various programs to get subsidies for single parents. This research study found that even though low-income families are more likely to experience divorce and other trauma to the family structure and tend to be African Americans, it is more white children than African American children in terms of behavioral and cognitive outcomes, that family instability has a larger negative impact on (Ryan, Claessens, & Markowitz, 2015) This study is questioning if family structure relate to changes in children’s behavioral …show more content…
The method utilized was data was pulled from the children the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which is a nationally representative survey of youth who were aged 14–21 when interviewed in 1979 and were re-interviewed annually until 1994 and biennially thereafter (Ryan, Claessens, & Markowitz, 2015). They also did an analyzed a sample of children that were being observed from birth to twelve years old, from 1986 to 2008. What the information they were able to gain, they estimated the effects of changes in family structure on changes in children’s behavior separately in early childhood, preschool, middle childhood, and preadolescence (Ryan, Claessens, & Markowitz, 2015). These methods are reliable and ethical because to get an appropriate result for this study you would need to follow-up on a number of different children throughout the different stages of their life. The key finding of this study is that the results suggest that for children of higher income parents, moving into a stepfamily may improve, not undermine, behavior (Ryan, Claessens, & Markowitz, …show more content…
Policies that are being currently utilized are targeted more towards low-income and disadvantaged families. They noted that this approach is flawed because it makes the assumption that average associations between family instability and child behavior apply to low-income families (Ryan, Claessens, & Markowitz, 2015). This study cited other studies saying that financial burden can trigger emotional distress, depression and anxiety in parents. They found that single parent structures that became a dual parent structure fair better for the children, presumably because the financial burden on the parents has been lessened. Economic hardships effect everyone and so appropriate attention needs to be focused on all families and children, regardless of the economic