Mind the gap: The health advantages that accompany parental marriage vary by maternal nativity

Abstract

Using data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), we examine whether and how the health benefits of having two biological parents in a continuous marital relationship vary by maternal nativity and ethnicity, comparing UK-born White mothers with: (1) White mothers born in wealthy countries; (2) ethnic minority mothers from South Asia; and (3) ethnic minority mothers born in Africa. Making novel use of classification and regression tree (CART) methods, we examine whether marital status is a uniform marker of economic advantage or better health-related behaviours across the four maternal nativity and ethnic groups. The findings, which indicate that the health-related advantages associated with parental marriage are not uniform across the four nativity and ethnic groups, have implications for future research on family gaps in well-being and the socio-economic determinants of health.

Keywords:

• parental marriage
• child well-being
• health production
• assimilation
• family structure
• CART
• recursive partitioning

ORCID

Wendy Sigle http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8450-960X

Notes

1 Please direct all correspondence to Wendy Sigle, Department of Gender Studies, LSE, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK; or by E-mail: [email protected]

2 We thank the Millennium Cohort Study families for their time and cooperation, as well as the Centre for Longitudinal Studies at the Institute of Education, University College London. The MCS data are deposited in the UK Data Archive and funded by the UK Economics and Social Research Council. We thank two anonymous reviewers and the managing editor of the journal for their extremely insightful comments and suggestions. Thanks also go to Julie Banton for her excellent copyediting and to Fernando Riosmena, Rebecca Sear, Øystein Kravdal, Ben Wilson, Ross MacMillan, Shireen Kanji, Pia Schober, and Emily Smith-Greenaway for their thoughtful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of the manuscript. Any remaining errors are our own.

3 Funding for this paper was from the Economic and Social Research Council, grant no. RES-177–25–0016, and the Research Council of Norway through its Centers of Excellence funding scheme, project number 262700.