The past half-century of changes in marriage, divorce, remarriage, childbearing, cohabitation, and household structure have retooled the American family. Over time, the decline or retreat from marriage has made way for other arrangements of family life. For example, the increase in cohabitation and later age at marriage has resulted in more births to cohabiting couples, leading to what some authors have called the Fragile Family (Carlson, McLanahan & England, 2004 ) . As a consequence, we ? n d more children being raised by their unmarried parents. We also ? n d children and parents experiencing an increasing number of household changes in their lifetime and greater inequality of life chances associated with family type experienced.