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Title: Early Childhood Paternal Absence and Later Childhood Behavior Problems: Evidence from the 1979 NLSY Mother and Child Data
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Lynch, Jamie L.
Mott, Frank L.
Early Childhood Paternal Absence and Later Childhood Behavior Problems: Evidence from the 1979 NLSY Mother and Child Data
Presented: Dallas, TX, Population Association of America Meetings, April 2010
Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79
Publisher: Population Association of America
Keyword(s): Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Behavioral Problems; Children, Behavioral Development; Children, Home Environment; Children, Well-Being; Cognitive Development; Fathers and Children; Fathers, Absence; Gender Differences; Home Environment

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

Using data from the Mother and Child cohorts of the National Longitudinal Survey, this research examines the role of father absence on behavioral outcomes in late childhood. Results indicate that family disruption has a large negative effect on the emotional, but not cognitive, quality of the home environment. Important to child well-being on its own, the emotional quality of the home links father absence with an increase in externalizing and internalizing behavior problems for children at age ten. Uncontrolled estimates show a linearly increasing relationship between behavior problems and duration of father absence; however, this relationship is mediated by the emotional and cognitive home environment. Children in disrupted homes are found to maintain, and in some instances increase, high levels of behavior problems with the addition of a new father figure. Girls, but not boys, exhibit less behavior problems when a father is continuously present throughout childhood.
Bibliography Citation
Lynch, Jamie L. and Frank L. Mott. "Early Childhood Paternal Absence and Later Childhood Behavior Problems: Evidence from the 1979 NLSY Mother and Child Data." Presented: Dallas, TX, Population Association of America Meetings, April 2010.