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Updated: Jun 21, 2026

Assessing the Coherence of Parents' Short Narratives Regarding their Child Using the Five-Minute Speech Sample Procedure
Published on: September 19, 2019
Effects of child health on parents' relationship status
Nancy E Reichman1, Hope Corman, Kelly Noonan
1Department of Pediatrics, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, New Brunswick 08903, USA. reichmne@umdnj.edu
Abstract:
We used data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to estimate the effect of a child's poor health on the presence of thefather. We investigated whether parents lived in the same household 12-18 months after the child's birth and whether their relationships changed along a continuum (married, cohabiting, romantically involved, friends, or not involved) during the same period. We found that within this short period, having a child with poor health decreased the probability that the parents lived together by 10 percentage points. It also increased the probability that their relationship status moved in the direction of less involvement by 6 percentage points. These results indicate that children's health and family structure jointly shape children's long-term health and economic trajectories.
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