Low Income Living Arrangements and Child Development
Alzier Johnson-Gomez
Housatonic Community College
May 12, 2014

Abstract
This study was conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the University of Chicago by E. Michael Foster and Ariel Kalil; it was published in the November/December 2007 issue of the journal Child Development.
It used longitudinal data from approximately 2,000 low-income families, in order to compare the development of children living only with their mothers with children in other arrangements (those living with their biological fathers, in blended families, and in multigenerational households) to determine the effect of living arrangements on the children’s cognitive achievement and emotional adjustment.
Instead of comparing children in different family arrangements at one point in time, the researchers addressed how children and their families change over time. Allowing them to consider whether and how a child’s emotional and intellectual development changes after there has been a change in family structure.
The study found that in general, children’s performance on developmental assessments changed very little after their mothers married. The absence of a relationship between family structure and children’s outcomes suggests that there is as much diversity within families of a given type as there is across families of different types. This distinction implies that policies like income support that seek to improve the lives of children regardless of whether their mothers are married may be more effective in improving the well-being of low-income children and youths.

Background
Considerable research has been done on children’s development in different living arrangements and how this may or may not affect their outcomes at one time or another; they also took into consideration the ethnic groups