Multipartnered Fertility Among American Men 583 T Demography, Volume 44-Number 3, August 2007: 583–601 583 MULTIPARTNERED FERTILITY AMONG AMERICAN MEN* KAREN BENJAMIN GUZZO AND FRANK F. FURSTENBERG, JR. Using the 2002 (Cycle 6) National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), which was the rst 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 differ- ences by age, race/ethnicity, and income—over one-third of poor black men aged 35–44 report having had children with two or more mothers, and 16% report children with three or more mothers. Fathers of two or more children by multiple partners appear to be more disadvantaged than fathers with two or more children by the same partner. Multipartnered fertility is strongly related to prior birth char- acteristics; men not in a coresidential union at the preceding birth are more likely to have their next birth with a new partner, and controlling for prior-birth characteristics accounts for the elevated risk of Hispanics and blacks in baseline models. Results also suggest that multipartnered fertility is becom- ing more prevalent as younger cohorts transition to a new-partner birth more quickly and at a higher rate than older cohorts. he past few decades have witnessed tremendous changes in family structure; a major change has been the dissolution of the traditional links between marriage, childbearing, and childrearing. As the centrality of marriage has eroded, people have increasingly had children outside of marriage while continuing to experience high rates of divorce in unions that resulted in children. One consequence of these changes is the increased risk of having children with different partners, an emerging phenomenon known as multipartnered fertility. Little is known about this issue, though, especially among men. Yet the implications of multipartnered fertility for men, their children, and their future relationships may be signi- cant and are of interest to social demographers, family sociologists, and policy makers. BACKGROUND The shift away from marriage, both as a lifelong partnership and as a locus of childbearing and childrearing, is well-documented, though much of the discussion of the “decline” of marriage has focused on women. Like women, men have been delaying marriage. Since 1950, the median age at rst marriage among men has risen about ve years to 27.4 (U.S. Census Bureau 2005b). The proportion of divorced men has also risen dramatically: in 1950, less than 2% of men were divorced, but by 2004, over 8% of men were divorced (U.S. Census Bureau 2005a). Thus, men are spending more time outside of marriage, and although direct information on men’s fertility behavior has been difcult to obtain, it is clear that more fertility is taking place outside of marriage, as evidenced by the rise in the nonmarital fertility ratio from 4% in 1940 to nearly 36% today (Hamilton et al. 2005; Ventura and Bachrach 2000). Part of the rise in nonmarital fertility is due, of course, to the rise of cohabiting unions and births within them (Raley 2001), but cohabiting unions are *Karen Benjamin Guzzo, Population Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania, 3718 Locust Walk, Phila- delphia, PA 19104-6298; E-mail: kguzzo@sas.upenn.edu. Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr., Sociology Department, Uni- versity of Pennsylvania. This work was partially supported by a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Individual Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Sociology Department at the University of Pennsylvania (NIH F32 HD046332-01A1) to Karen Guzzo. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2006 annual meeting of the Population Association of America, Los Angeles, CA, and at the Conference on Multiple-Partner Fertility, Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin–Madison, September 2006. We thank the editors and reviewers of Demography for insightful comments. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article-pdf/44/3/583/909215/583guzzo.pdf by guest on 24 July 2023