In this video, I'm going to talk about the fragile families and child well-being study. It's the best data for the study of single mothers and their children and most especially for studying the fathers that are associated with the single mothers and their children. We started this study in 1996 to study unwed mothers and fathers in four cities. We were very interested in making sure that we could get a representative sample of the fathers who did not live with their children which is a very difficult thing to do because when you sample, you sample particular residences and you sample the people in the household and the fathers were not there. So, the study grew to be approximately 5,000 births of over the period 1998 to 2000. We sampled from 20 cities, 20 large cities, 200,000 or more, 75 hospitals in those cities, and because we are interested in fragile families which we defined as unwed parents we oversampled non-marital births. Of the 5,000 total births about 3,700 were non-marital births. The mothers and fathers were both interviewed at the hospital shortly after birth. We then conducted followup interviews when the children were one, three, five, and nine years old. So, the questions addressed in the fragile family study were first, what are the capabilities and circumstances of the unmarried parents? Most especially of the fathers. We knew a great deal about single mothers. Much less about the fathers because they weren't living in households with the single mothers. A second very important question was what's the nature of the parental relationships at birth and how those relationships changed over time. Third question was what is the role of the welfare state in the lives of these families and finally, we are interested in what happens to the parents and children in the fragile families over time, what happens to their well-being. So, I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the key findings from the studies. First, our finding is that the mothers and fathers, both, have low capabilities. With respect to education for example, three-quarters of the mothers and fathers have a high school or less education. About half of them have high school degrees and about half of those three-quarters are dropouts. So, very low education capabilities. Probably the biggest surprise for us was how many of the fathers had been incarcerated. So, if the fathers in fragile families by the time the children were five years old, almost half of the fathers were incarcerated. Of the fragile families, about half of them are Black, about a quarter are Hispanic, and about another quarter, White. The fact that we have such a large proportion of the fragile families are Black and Hispanic is a consequence of sampling in very large cities. If we sampled in the suburbs and rural areas, there would be a larger proportion of the fragile families would be White. In living circumstances at birth were actually interesting as well. A big surprise was that half of the unwed parents were living together at birth cohabiting. Another 30 percent were still involved romantically. So, these are not fly-by-night one night stands and still another percent were friends but not romantically involved. So, and at birth, we asked the parents did they expect to get married, a huge proportion of both the mothers and the fathers who were unwed did expect to get married, shall we say they were over-optimistic. What happens over time, first of all the 30 percent that were romantically involved but not living together, virtually all of them by five years, were broken up. Of the cohabitors, by year five, half the cohabitors were broken up. To give you a comparison, compared to the married couples, 20 percent were divorced by year five. So, what accompanies fragile families both the cohabitors and even more so those who are living apart is a lot of instability and complexity and this instability and complexity is very hard on both the mothers and the children. One way to think about this is the mothers are still looking around for a partner and that takes a lot of time, a lot of energy, it can be very exciting but there's also a lot of energy involved in that and that energy is not going to be devoted to the child plus the insecurity of having different father figures, the mother dating different people, that creates a very unstable home situation for the children.