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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2024 Feb 6.
Published in final edited form as: Fam Relat. 2017 Nov 10;66(4):601–613. doi: 10.1111/fare.12272

Family Instability and Children’s Health

CHELSEA SMITH 1, ROBERT CROSNOE 1, SHANNON E CAVANAGH 1
PMCID: PMC10846885  NIHMSID: NIHMS1913421  PMID: 38323140

Abstract

Research on family instability is fertile ground for translation into policy and practice. This article describes how basic science in this area can more effectively support work in later stages of the translational research process. To begin, the scope of family instability is outlined with trends, causes, and effects. Next, a conceptual model of the effects of family instability on children’s health identifies focal aspects that could be leveraged for translational research: developmental domain, developmental time, mechanisms, and points of variation. The guidelines presented are meant to be general and applicable to a variety of topics and fields in which family scholars aim to improve basic research that can contribute to and move forward a translational family science.

Keywords: Child development, family processes, family/social policy and law, family structure, health and health-related issues

Family scholars from a variety of disciplines have increasingly recognized over the past several decades that the extensive focus on parental divorce, single parenthood, and other elements of family structure thought to undermine children’s development was too narrow. The increasingly dynamic nature of union formation and dissolution in the overall U.S. population, the growing theoretical emphasis on life course patterns of family roles and relationships, and the rising number of longitudinal studies that trace parents and children through time have, together, helped to shift attention from children’s family structures at any one point of development to their family structure histories across developmental time (Fomby & Cherlin, 2007; McLanahan, 2004). In the not so distant past, after all, the majority of children lived with both parents through adolescence, and, although not unheard of, voluntary family structure transitions were limited in number (Ellwood & Jencks, 2004). Today, the majority of youth experience a family structure change by the end of adolescence, and a substantial minority experience multiple family structure changes, usually because their parents split and a parent remarries or cohabits with new partners. Research has consistently shown that the accumulation of family structure transitions—often referred to as family instability in parents’ romantic unions—poses substantial developmental risks to children above and beyond any one family structure that they experience (Crosnoe & Cavanagh, 2010).

The purpose of this article is to discuss how basic research on family instability and child development at the T1 level can be used to inform the next steps of translational family science that more effectively speaks to the needs of policy makers and practitioners. Our goal is not to propose applied research itself but to show how basic research can ask better questions and establish associations that applied researchers and those that they seek to inform can use. In this spirit, we begin with an overview of demographic trends and the causes and effects of family instability. We then lay out a model for research on this topic that emphasizes four focal aspects of family instability: (a) developmental domains such as children’s health, which is already part of a broad system of services and programs; (b) how these links change as children age in ways that might pinpoint critical windows of intervention; (c) variation in these links across diverse segments of the population that can identify where action is needed and where it might have the biggest effects; and (d) the mechanisms underlying these links that could be targeted by policies and programs.

Repositioning research on the effects of family instability on child development within the translational process is important because this issue is so crucial to the intergenerational transmission of inequality. In the biomedical field, a standard definition of translational research is that it “fosters the multidirectional integration of basic research, patient-oriented research, and population-based research, with the long-term aim of improving the health of the public” (Rubio et al., 2010, p. 471). Our discussion here is grounded in this definition, as we are population scientists who study health disparities that are relevant to policy intervention on the large and small scale. Yet what we propose here is not specific to this particular field but instead is meant to speak to a broader array of family scientists conducting work of great importance to promoting the well-being of individual people and society at large.

The Scope of Family Instability

The interdisciplinary literature on family instability and child development is both deep and broad. A good starting point, therefore, is to lay out the basic demographic trends in family instability as well as its causes and effects.

What Is Family Instability?

Family life in the United States today looks different from how it did just one generation ago. Young adults marry at later ages, with more than half cohabiting at least once before marriage (Cherlin, 2010; Kennedy & Bumpass, 2008; Raley, 2000), and childbearing is frequently decoupled from marriage (Edin & Kefalas, 2005; Schoen, Landale, & Daniels, 2007). Instead, nonmarital fertility is on the rise and increasingly occurs within cohabiting unions (Lichter, Sassler, & Turner, 2014) and with more than one partner (Guzzo, 2014). Those trends have resulted in major changes to the typical households of U.S. children, with more than 40% of all children living without both parents due to parental separation, divorce, or nonmarriage (Payne, 2013). The term family structure refers to the composition of a household, with family scholars usually focusing on mothers’ romantic unions and the relationship of coresidential male partners to the children. In this sense, family structure includes whether a parent is single or partnered, whether that partnership is marriage or cohabitation, and whether the partner is the child’s other biological parent. Family structure based on a parent’s union status therefore encompasses whether she or he is married to the child’s other biological parent, cohabiting with the child’s other biological parent, married to a new partner in a stepfamily, cohabiting with a new partner in a stepfamily, or single without a coresidential partner.

Whereas family structure captures the composition of a household at a certain point in time, family instability refers to changes in household composition over time. More important than the diversity that now defines family structure in the United States is the higher incidence of changes in family structure. Half of U.S. children spend time in two or more different family structure types (Brown, Stykes, & Manning, 2016), and those born to unmarried parents are more likely to experience multiple transitions (Cavanagh & Huston, 2006). In other words, the makeup of children’s home and family lives not only varies across diverse segments of the population (e.g., socioeconomic status, race; McLanahan, 2004), but is also more fluid over time at the individual level throughout childhood. Accordingly, family scholars in the social sciences have shifted their focus from family structure to family instability, or changes in family structure. From this perspective, instability represents children’s experiences of transitions in a parent’s union status (including marriage and cohabitation) regardless of the initial and subsequent family structure. Married biological parents who divorce are one example of family instability, but so is a single parent who gets married. Instability also encompasses the movement of step, half, and full siblings and other kin (e.g., grandparents, aunts, uncles) in and out of children’s homes (Ellis & Simmons, 2014; Fomby, Goode, & Mollburn, 2016; Gerstel, 2011; Pilkuaskas, 2012; Kreider, 2007). Thus, a change in partner status alters the household composition and, potentially, family functioning.

Why Should We Care About Family Instability?

The rising level of family instability in the United States has generated considerable public debate because of concerns that this instability represents a potential harm to society. For family scholars interested in child development, this harm could be manifested in more problematic developmental trajectories of children being raised in the context of unstable family structures.

Life course theory is a useful orienting perspective for understanding why family instability might have a substantial developmental impact. Specifically, the principle of linked lives suggests that the life pathway of one person in a relationship has implications for the life pathway of the other person in a relationship, in part through their ongoing interactions (see Elder, 1998; Elder, Johnson, & Crosnoe, 2003). In the case of family instability, a parent’s trajectory of union formation and dissolution would have implications for a child’s developmental trajectories by shaping how the parent parents the child. The entry or exit of a parent or parent’s romantic partner (and other kin) is likely to change a parent in ways that alter how she or he parents (e.g., stress in one’s romantic life tends to affect parenting behaviors, as described subsequently). A life course perspective also suggests that the developmental importance of family instability through linked lives is likely to be highly variable—both across developmental time in children’s lives (following the principle of timing) and across diverse social and economic contexts in which children live (following the principle of time and place). Thus, the theory suggests that children will experience transitions in their family lives in developmentally problematic ways, but that these problems will be depend on where they are along individual life course trajectories as well as along social lines of advantage and disadvantage.

As for the specific evidence for these theoretically suggested ways that family instability could undermine child development, a vast and growing social science literature shows that family instability is associated with a host of negative academic, socioemotional, and behavioral dimensions of child well-being. Younger children who experience family instability are rated by adults as having more emotional and behavioral problems (Cavanagh & Huston, 2006; Lee & McLanahan, 2015; Osborne & McLanahan, 2007), and they are more likely to experience potentially harmful disruptions in their child care arrangements and contact with other kin (Crosnoe, Prickett, Smith, & Cavanagh, 2014; Mollborn, Fomby, & Dennis, 2011). The movement of parents and their romantic partners in and out of the household can thus adversely affect children’s social and emotional skills well before they complete elementary school. Furthermore, the implications of family instability extend beyond early and middle childhood. Adolescents with histories of family instability, for example, tend to have lower academic performance and experience more difficulty with socioemotional adjustment and peer relations. They are also more likely to use drugs (Cavanagh, 2008). Experiences of family instability in childhood are also associated with young people’s involvement in romantic relationships in adolescence, especially for boys (Cavanagh, Crissey, & Raley, 2008), and with sexual debut, especially for White girls (Wu & Thomson, 2001).

The family change and stress perspective (Wu & Martinson, 1993; Wu, 1996) is often used to explain why family instability matters to children’s well-being. This theoretical perspective posits that changes in family structure are accompanied by changes in parents’ economic circumstances and mental health that influence their parenting and the resources that they can then marshal for their children, which, in turn, has an impact on a host of child outcomes (see McLanahan & Percheski, 2008). From this perspective, adverse child outcomes do not directly result from family structure or instability but instead indirectly flow from the associated changes in resources mothers and fathers have at their disposal to effectively parent their children. Indeed, family instability can alter both economic resources and health resources crucial for parenting. It can be an economic detriment because of costs associated with entry or exit of a parent’s partner and the shift in household resources added or taken away. The stress introduced or compounded by transitions in parents’ romantic partnerships can have a psychological impact that disrupts consistent engagement in positive parenting (Beck, Cooper, & McLanahan 2010).

What Causes Family Instability?

If family instability can undermine the positive development of children and adolescents, then understanding the causes of the rising level of family instability is important. Informed by our backgrounds as family demographers, we highlight several macro-level trends related to family instability. Elucidating these causes can point to strategies for reducing family instability, but, more important for the purposes of our focus on the developmental importance of family instability, they also help us to understand key confounds in observed associations between family instability and child well-being (Fomby & Cherlin, 2007; Lee & McLanahan, 2015).

One macro-level trend associated with family instability is the increasing economic stratification of U.S. society, which has created larger gaps between the haves and have-nots. This increase is important because socioeconomic disadvantage increases the likelihood that children will experience family instability in the first place, and it also has detrimental implications for child well-being that are similar to, yet independent of, the effects of instability itself (Wu, 1996). In other words, the structural challenges and individual circumstances imposed by economic inequality can make instability more likely and more frequent among poor families while also affecting children’s well-being across a variety of outcomes. One of the most common structural explanations of the greater instability among socioeconomically disadvantaged families is the decoupling of marriage and childbearing that is especially pronounced among this segment of the population. The deinstitutionalization of marriage has actually increased its importance and status to the point that marriage is often regarded as a capstone and marker of prestige in one’s life (Cherlin, 2004). Financial barriers—both perceived and tangible—have contributed to the delay of marriage in favor of other coresidential unions such as cohabitation (Smock, Manning, & Porter, 2005), whereas childbearing is not viewed in the same way (Edin & Kefalas, 2005; Edin & Reed, 2005). As a result, poor children are more likely to be born into the family structures that lead to greater instability over time (Kennedy & Bumpass, 2008).

Another related macro-level trend is the “diverging destinies” of U.S. children, or stronger links among mothers’ socioeconomic lives and their family formation behaviors that matter to child development (McLanahan, 2004). The key is that socioeconomic attainment and family formation are more closely connected today than in the past (e.g., being disadvantaged increases the odds of mothers being unmarried more than it did several decades ago). Consequently, there are larger numbers of mothers who are socioeconomically advantaged on one hand and have stable trajectories of marriage and fertility on the other, as well as larger numbers of women who are both socioeconomically disadvantaged and experience turbulence in marriage and fertility. Increasingly, the children of these two sets of mothers have divergent paths through life. As a result, diverging destinies in childhood forecast instability in the future, in an intergenerational feedback loop. Indeed, family instability in childhood predicts greater risk of nonmarital fertility, cohabitation, truncated rates of educational attainment, and earlier workforce entry in young adulthood, all of which lay the foundation for future family instability (Fomby & Bosick, 2013; Teachman, 2003; Wu & Martinson, 1993).

Other macro-level trends of potential importance to understanding rising levels of family instability are more specific to particular segments of the population. For example, the past several decades have witnessed a massive increase in the incarceration of men. This trend has had important repercussions for family instability. It has removed many fathers from their families and separated them from their partners and children, thereby directly increasing family instability. It has also impaired the socioeconomic prospects of fathers even when released, thereby indirectly increasing family instability (Turney & Schneider, 2016). Notably, this trend has been most pronounced among African American men, the racial/ethnic group that already had high levels of family instability (Braman, 2002; Wildeman & Western, 2010). As another example, the increased enforcement of immigration laws and fears of immigration crackdowns have had repercussions for children, as seen in growing numbers of children separated from mothers and fathers who are undocumented. Although on a smaller scale, this trend could have similar repercussions as mass imprisonment because it is splitting up families and may also have destabilizing economic effects (Menjívar, Abrego, & Schmalzbauer, 2016). This trend is most pronounced among Latin American immigrants.

How Can We Improve the Lives of Children in the Context of Family Instability?

If rising levels of family instability are undermining children’s positive development, then one method of improving children’s futures is to reduce family instability. Addressing the root causes of family instability discussed thus far (e.g., prison reform) or more directly intervening to stabilize parents’ relationships (e.g., marriage promotion) would be avenues of action in line with this method (Amato, 2014; Amato & Furstenberg, 2007; Johnson, 2012; Moore, Wood, Clarkwest, Killewald, & Monahan, 2012). Another way to promote children’s futures is by breaking the link between family instability and children’s negative outcomes. We do not have the space to do justice to both of these methods in this article. Reflecting our focus as family scholars who study children, we focus on the second method; in other words, given that family instability is occurring, we consider ways to prevent family instability from leading to developmental risks for children.

Focal Aspects of Family Instability to Be Leveraged for Translational Research

Having laid out the basic theoretical and empirical parameters of the link between family instability and child development, we now turn to the translation of this research into action. We argue that there are many ways to think about how basic research in this area of family science can support policy and practice. Figure 1 depicts a general model for basic research with this intent. We go through the various focal aspects of this model before discussing it as a whole.

Figure 1.

Figure 1.

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Conceptual model for translational research on family instability and children’s health.

Focal Developmental Domain: Health

The effects of family instability on children and youth’s economic resources, academics, socioemotional development, and behavior are well established by family scholars. The potential risks posed by family instability for health, however, are only infrequently studied in this literature (Crosnoe & Cavanagh, 2010). Compared with the children of stably married parents, children with histories of family instability are more likely to be to be diagnosed with acute conditions such as asthma, and they also have worse overall health statuses (Bzostek & Beck, 2011). Child weight has been one dimension of health that family scholars have begun to unpack. That research has revealed that children who do not live in two-parent households and who experience family instability are heavier and more likely to be obese than their counterparts in stable, two-parent households (Augustine & Kimbro, 2015; Schmeer, 2012). Thus, family instability research as it relates to child health is an important avenue for future research, especially translational research, because family instability is a strong indicator of child well-being but also a potential entry for policy efforts and targeted programs.

Focal Times: Developmental Gradient

Childhood and adolescence are dynamic periods with specific developmental stages, suggesting there may be a developmental gradient in the association between family instability and children’s health. As boys and girls grow, sensitive periods such as infancy and puberty are marked by rapid development. When those normative changes occur in the presence of family instability, their effects may be particularly pronounced if the timing of family instability matters. Some evidence suggests that transitions during early childhood seem to have the strongest implications for children’s outcomes (Cavanagh & Huston, 2008; Fomby & Bosick, 2013; Osborne & McLanahan, 2007; Ryan & Claessens, 2013), but other evidence suggests that proximal transitions matter most, regardless of the period in which they occur (Cavanagh, 2008). Connecting family instability and health across childhood and adolescence, the life course principle of timing in lives (Elder et al., 2003) orients why a developmental gradient may be suspected. Whereas parents must manage all aspects of young children’s health and well-being, older children have more autonomy over their everyday tasks and routines because they are better able to care for themselves (Pettit, Keiley, Laird, Bates, & Dodge, 2007). Similarly, how children cope with the stress may change as they age (Compass, Connor-Smith, Saltzman, Thomsen, & Wadsworth, 2001), especially stress brought on by transitions in their household structure and their relationship with their parents. If young people’s health is more sensitive to family instability at certain developmental periods, then translational research focused on those periods would be the most useful for narrowing the frame of children that policies and programs target. Thus, documenting a developmental gradient in links between family instability and children’s health can support the translational process.

Focal Groups: Variation in Prevalence and Reactivity

Overall, family instability is relatively common in children’s lives, with about half of children experiencing multiple family structure transitions before turning age 18 (Crosnoe & Cavanagh, 2010). Children born to unmarried parents—about 40% of all children today—tend to experience more family structure transitions, especially children born to single mothers (Cavanagh & Huston, 2006). Not all U.S. children are at the same risk of experiencing family instability. Instead, it is more prevalent among children who are socially and economically disadvantaged. College-educated individuals are the most likely to marry (Cherlin, 2010), whereas divorce rates are increasing only for those who did not complete high school (Martin, 2006), and the increases in nonmarital fertility have been driven by women in their 20s and 30s without college degrees (Cherlin, 2010). Family instability is also more common among African Americans, in part because of economic inequality but also because of more recent increases in mass imprisonment (Cherlin, 2010; Sweeney & Raley, 2014; Wildeman & Western, 2010).

Although non–two-parent family structures and family instability are more common among children from poor families and those who are racial or ethnic minorities, prevalence is only one point of heterogeneity in family instability. Another important component of family instability is variation in children’s reactivity to family structure transitions. Despite their lower likelihood of experiencing instability, the effects of instability actually appear to be greater for White children relative to African American children, net of all other factors (Fomby & Cherlin, 2007). Similarly, levels of nonmarital fertility are higher among Mexican American women compared with White women (Wildsmith & Raley, 2006), but Mexican American mothers’ romantic relationships with men acting as supportive social fathers to their children can improve those mothers’ depressive symptomatology (Gonzalez & Barnett, 2014). These patterns are likely to become even more important in the context of stricter enforcement of immigration laws.

Taken together, a trend emerges that family instability is more common but perhaps less meaningful in disadvantaged segments of the population. This variability in who is at risk versus who might be the most reactive should not be viewed as a paradox, but instead as a reflection of the multiple ways to approach and frame translational research on family instability. Policies and programs aimed at improving child well-being relative to family instability should focus on each type of variation to include particularly at-risk groups as well as particularly affected groups.

Focal Mechanisms

The conceptual model thus far has suggested a link between family instability and children’s health, with variation likely based on developmental timing and sociodemographic location. Equally important to establish and lay out are the mechanisms connecting family instability to health, which could be the focus of policy efforts because they can be targeted and changed to improve children’s health even in the face of family instability. Those mechanisms include family-based practical and socioemotional resources, behaviors, and institutional access. A guiding assumption here is that most parents value good health for their children and seek to promote it. They do so by providing safe and secure housing, setting sleep schedules, purchasing food and setting up routines around food and meals, managing children’s leisure activities (e.g., media viewing, play), and connecting with health services. Parents also provide the emotional, social, and economic resources that children can draw on when health problems arise (Bianchi, 2000; Hammons & Fiese, 2011; Lareau, 2002; Lindsay, Sussner, Kim, & Gortmaker, 2006). Yet these values do not always translate into good health for children when families are experiencing family instability.

Beginning with family-based mechanisms, family instability tends to affect the practical resources that parents can allocate to health maintenance of themselves and their children. The amount of time and money at parents’ disposal likely change when a romantic partner enters or exits the household. We know, for example, that children in single-parent families tend to eat fewer meals with parents than other children, eat more packaged and prepared foods, and eat fewer fruits and vegetables (Bradley, Corwyn, McAdoo, & Coll, 2001; Schmeer, 2012; Zick, McCullough, & Smith, 1996; Ziol-Guest, DeLeire, & Kalil, 2006). Even if the exit or entrance of a new partner is associated with improvement in family practical resources, any change can create upheaval and inconsistency, at least temporarily (Burton & Tucker, 2009).

This inconsistency can introduce stress into the household, operating through the resident parent, typically the mother (Cooper, McLanahan, Meadows, & Brooks-Gunn, 2009). Stress and associated mental health issues, in turn, can be linked with children’s health outcomes (Turney, 2011) and parents’ regulation of children’s health behaviors (e.g., diet, sleep, exercise) that can undermine health (Augustine & Kimbro, 2015). This stress may also lead parents to engage in maladaptive coping strategies such as overeating, sedentary behaviors, drinking, and smoking. These behaviors, in turn, can undermine children’s health by shaping the kinds of food available for children to eat, the kinds of physical activities they engage in, and the degree to which parents are able to actively engage in their kids’ health. Parents of infants and toddlers manage all of their feeding, play, and sleep schedules (Adair, 2007; Klesges, Klesges, Eck, & Shelton, 1995; Kuhn & Weidinger, 2000; Landhuis, Poulton, Welch, & Hancox, 2008), whereas older children and adolescents take a more active role in their diet, physical activity, and sleep patterns. Thus, child age may determine how family instability and behavioral mechanisms are linked.

In addition to the behaviors that parents and children enact at home, their engagement with institutions outside of the home shapes children’s health and is affected by family instability and the associated changes in resources. One institution clearly linked to children’s health is the health care system. When family-based practical resources change in response to family instability, there can be implications for health care. For example, housing instability and food insecurity, which can accompany family instability, are associated with less health care access and utilization (Kushel, Gupta, Gee, & Haas 2006). After a divorce, women with children are more likely to lose their health insurance coverage or switch to public insurance (Lavelle & Smock, 2012), which could have implications for their children’s health and insurance coverage. Beyond health insurance, regular doctor’s appointments and checkups require time and money for co-pays, transportation, and time off from work; access to these resources could change with transitions in parents’ union statuses (Ram & Hou, 2003). The stress of family instability on a parent’s socioemotional well-being and own health behaviors may also affect his or her ability to proactively schedule and follow through with children’s appointments (Minkovitz, O’Campo, Chen, & Grason, 2002) and to communicate effectively and be assertive with health care professionals during visits (Lareau, 2002).

Schools are another important institution where children spend most of their time outside of the home. Family instability is associated with lower academic performance in adolescence at the individual level (Cavanagh, 2008) and at the school level such that family transitions are especially detrimental in schools with high academic pressure (Cavanagh & Fomby, 2012). It also operates indirectly to shape children’s health. Parental involvement in children’s education both at school and at home require time, energy, and emotion work, resources that are negatively affected by family instability (Erickson & Cottingham, 2014; Thomson, Mosley, Hanson, & McLanahan, 2001). Regardless of the effects of parental involvement on children’s academic performance and success, involvement in children’s education is an important point of contact between parents and teachers, the adults with whom children generally spend most of their time (Ressler, Smith, Cavanagh, & Crosnoe, 2017). Communication about children’s well-being—academically but also healthrelated—between parents and teachers can be especially important for managing child health during stressful times of family transitions, but it may be more difficult if family instability is coupled with maternal depression (Augustine & Crosnoe, 2010). As another component of practical resources, family instability may limit parents’ abilities to take advantage of school resources that promote health yet often require time or monetary investments, such as after-school physical activities or healthy school lunches.

The mechanisms laid out here thus represent easier points of intervention that are more quantifiable and responsive to policies and programs yet could still accomplish the overall aim of protecting children’s health against the adverse effects of family instability. Public assistance and programming, for example, to improve families’ economic standing, bolster maternal mental health, promote healthy behaviors, and increase access to high-quality health care have the potential to improve children’s health through targeted interventions that are achievable.

Integrating Focal Parts of the Model

Now that we have described each part of the conceptual model shown in Figure 1 (developmental domain, times, sociodemographic groups, and mechanisms), we can connect them to create an overall framework for translational research on family instability and children’s health. The first step is research that links family instability to children’s health, an association that we hypothesize operates through family-based practical and socioemotional resources. Such investigations answer the “so what?” question and establish baseline associations on which future research can build. Linking family instability to children’s health with the best methods of causal modeling at our disposal will be necessary before we can explore what explains that association and how it may differ across various groups and developmental stages. Another component of this first step will be to test whether health is reactive to family instability in ways similar to other aspects of child well-being (i.e., adverse outcomes resulting from stress and compromised resources; McLanahan & Percheski, 2008; Wu & Martinson, 1993).

The next step in creating a translational research agenda on family instability and child well-being is to answer the “how?” question by identifying and empirically testing a variety of explanations and mechanisms at play. Informed by social science research by family scholars, family-based mechanisms are one piece of the puzzle, but other mechanisms are likely to be important for connecting family instability to children’s health specifically. Whereas behavior problems, for example, are much more social aspects of child well-being, children’s health is driven by behaviors such as diet, activity, and sleep, in addition to genetics, prenatal conditions, and their interactions with behaviors. Zooming back out from the micro individual level to the macro societal level, how children and families interact with institutions based on the resources at their disposal impacts children’s health. In addition to the family, schools are one of the main institutions in which children and youth are embedded, and health care is another critical institution for maintaining and promoting children’s health. The value added of this step of the conceptual model is that it is more amenable to policy interventions than seeking to alter family instability itself. Public health campaigns tend to target individual health behaviors, and there already exist numerous health policies operating through the health care system and schools.

The final step in this framework for translational research is to explore variability in the connections among family instability, mechanisms, and children’s health. At the individual level, any one child’s health may respond differently to family structure transitions based on the developmental timing of when the instability occurs. If the timing of family instability matters for other components of child well-being (Cavanagh & Huston, 2008), then it may also have differential impacts on children’s bodies and minds as they grow and develop from infancy through adolescence. Again, moving back out to a more macro level of research, translational research in this final step should also consider variability across segments of the U.S. population. We know that family instability is more common among children from socially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds, a trend that has been increasing over time (McLanahan, 2004), but its effects on the health of those children may also be less severe in the context of all of the health risks that they face overall. Although these two branches of research on variation in the link between family instability and children’s health take different approaches (individual vs. societal), they both hold implications for translation into policy and programming. By identifying sensitive periods of development and at-risk populations, translational family instability research can help policy makers narrow their focus to target children and families who are most in need and most receptive to policy interventions.

Conclusion

The problematic link between family instability and children’s health is an important issue that deserves attention, especially as rates of family instability rise and the overall health of the population declines. Policy intervention is most likely to be effective when it is grounded in science, and family scholars working somewhere along the translational process are well positioned to produce that research. Like many readers of this journal from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, the three of us work within the initial parts of the translation of research into policy and practice, which are fundamental to making the whole process work.

In this article, we have shared guidelines for other family scholars doing basic research on family instability meant to support translation. Specifically, we have picked outcomes of family instability connected to extant policy frameworks, identified critical points and targets of intervention, and elucidated mechanisms of family instability risks that might be more amenable to intervention than family instability itself. These guidelines, however, are not limited to research on family instability. Instead, they are applicable to a broad range of topics with great public importance that are studied by family scholars. These guidelines are only a start, as they address changes to research but do not necessarily facilitate its broader dissemination. Working directly with applied researchers, getting the message out, and finding and keeping a seat at the policy-making table are also necessary steps to take. Those steps are not part of the way that most social and behavioral science programs, and their associated professional organizations, have trained new family scholars to date, but adopting this translational approach to family science will bolster the relevance and impact of family scholarship on real-world lives and problems moving forward.

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