Better for Baby? The Retreat From Mid-Pregnancy Marriage and Implications for Parenting and Child Well-being Jessica Houston Su 1 & Rachel Dunifon 2 & Sharon Sassler 2 Published online: 1 July 2015 # Population Association of America 2015 Abstract Recent decades have seen a significant decline in mid-pregnancy (“shot- gun”) marriage, particularly among disadvantaged groups, which has contributed to increasing nonmarital birth rates. Despite public and political concern about this shift, the implications for parenting and child well-being are not known. Drawing on a sample of U.S. black and white mothers with nonmarital conceptions from the NLSY79, our study fills this gap. Using propensity score techniques to address concerns about selection bias, we found that mid-pregnancy marriages were associated with slightly better parenting quality relative to remaining single, although effect sizes were small and limited to marriages that remained intact at the time of child assessment. Mid-pregnancy marriages were not associated with improved children’ s behavior or cognitive ability. These findings suggest that the retreat from mid-pregnancy marriage may contribute to increasing inequality in parenting resources for children. Keywords Nonmarital fertility . Marital status . Child well-being . Selection bias Introduction In previous decades, nonmarital pregnancies in the United States were relatively common, yet nonmarital births were rare because of the normative expectation that unmarried pregnant couples would marry before the birth (Ellwood and Jencks 2004). Following Gibson-Davis et al. (2015), we adopt the terminology “mid-pregnancy Demography (2015) 52:1167–1194 DOI 10.1007/s13524-015-0410-5 * Jessica Houston Su jhsu2@buffalo.edu 1 Department of Sociology, University at Buffalo, SUNY, 455 Park Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260, USA 2 Department of Policy Analysis and Management, Cornell University, 2301 Martha Van Rensselaer Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article-pdf/52/4/1167/877657/1167su.pdf by guest on 22 October 2022