The long-term impact of family trajectories during childhood on health and socioeconomic status at midlife

Context
In industrialized countries children are increasingly experiencing family complexity through their early life course, for
example going from living in a single-parent household to experiencing the arrival of step- or half-siblings as a
result of their parents' repartnering (Cavanagh and Fomby, 2019). Rates of partnership dissolution, repartnering
and family complexity are particularly high in the US and UK (Smock and Schwartz, 2020; ONS, 2022).
Investigating the life course consequences of family structure types and family transitions during childhood is of
high relevance not only due to the increasing prevalence of nonstandard family structures as such but also due to
the potential implications that this development has for the intergenerational transmission of advantage. Starting
from the observation that single motherhood is more common among lower educated mothers the "diverging
destinies thesis" argues that the increasing prevalence of nonstandard family structures is likely to increase the
persistence of inequalities across generations (McLanahan, 2004).
Existing research on the consequences of family disruption during childhood has focused on the more immediate
impacts on cognitive skills or socioemotional problems during childhood (e.g., Kim, 2011; Lee and McLanahan,
2015), on obesity during childhood (e.g., Goisis, Özcan and Van Kerm, 2019) or on the impact on educational
outcomes (e.g., Martin, 2012; Bernardi and Radl, 2014). There has only been limited research on the long-term
consequences of parental separation for outcomes at midlife (Stannard, Berrington and Alwan, 2022). I intend to
fill this gap and investigate how childhood family trajectories impact health and socioeconomic status in midlife.