Marital Match Quality and Inputs to Children's Health: The Case of Infants' Exposure to In-home Smoking

A growing body of literature is establishing the link between childhood health and later life outcomes in terms of education, labor market success, and health as adults.  These studies often observe significant disparities in child health across family structure.  Children of married parents tend to enjoy better health than children of other family types.  Transition and instability of family structure are also shown to have negative implications for child health.  However, the underlying mechanisms remain unclear.  

This study draws on the match quality argument of parental investment, which implies that parents' perceptions about the relationships with their partners influence the level of parental investment in children.   This study takes the example of infants' exposure to secondhand smoke inside the house to examine the relationship between marital match quality and parents' behaviors relevant to child health production.

The analysis relies on Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort (ECLS-B), which consists of a cohort of about 10,700 children born in the U.S. in the year 2001.  Information about these children was collected at multiple time points (9 months old, 2 years old, 4 years old, and fall of 2006).  The data set provides rich information on various aspects of the children and their families, including parents' marital dissatisfaction and marital conflict, and in-home smoking status.  The analytic sample is limited to respondents who were continuously married at birth through the 9-month interview. 

In the empirical analyses, the study first compares families with parents married at baseline who experience marital instability in the future and families with parents who do not.  Infants in families that experience marital instability in the future are at higher risk of being exposed to in-home tobacco smoke.  The study then relates three measures of marital match quality (marital dissatisfaction, marital conflict, and predicted marital instability) to children's in-home smoke exposure status using logit regressions.  Each of the three measures of marital match quality are associated with infants' exposure to in-home smoking, with lower match quality being associated with higher risk of exposure.  Results are similar when lagged measures of match quality are used.

This study contributes to the literature in two ways.  Firstly, it extends the match quality argument of parental investment to the health dimension.  Secondly, it adds the match quality component to the discussion of determinants of children's smoke exposure.