Journal Issue: Fragile Families Volume 20 Number 2 Fall 2010 For
much of the nation's history, the vast majority of American
children were born into and spent their childhood in intact
married-couple families. Almost the only exceptions were
children whose families suffered a parental death. Over the
course of the twentieth century, however, as divorce became more
common, an increasing share of children experienced a breakup in
their families of origin and went on to spend at least some
portion of their childhood or adolescence living with just one
parent or with a parent and stepparent. A large research
literature developed examining the effects of such living
situations on child outcomes. More recently, as unwed births
have risen as a share of all births, family structure in the
United States has increasingly featured "fragile families" in
which the mother is unmarried at the time of the birth. Children
born into fragile families spend at least the first portion of
their lives living with a single mother or