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The results indicate that the effect of child care use is negative, significant, and rather sizeable. In particular, an additional year of child care use is associated with a reduction of 2.8 percent (.15 standard deviations) in child test scores. But this general finding masks important differences across types of child care, children's ages, and maternal education. Indeed, only informal care used after the first year leads to significant reductions in child achievement. Formal care (i.e., center-based care and preschool) does not have any adverse effect on cognitive outcomes. In fact, these estimates imply that formal care has large positive effects on cognitive outcomes for children of poorly educated single mothers. Finally, the authors also provide evidence of a strong link between children's test scores at ages 4, 5, and 6 and their completed education.

Mounting evidence suggests that health risk behaviors such as illicit drug use change in response to marriage, childbirth and other demographic events (Bachman, Wadsworth, OMalley, Johnston, and Schulenberg, 1997; Umberson, 1987; 1992). However, much of this evidence is either cross-sectional or fails to track longitudinal changes surrounding the actual occurrence of a life event. Our study uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to relate changes in smoking, binge drinking, marijuana use and cocaine use to the first occurrence of cohabitation, marriage, nonmarital and marital births. Preliminary results indicate that all four life events are linked to substantial decreases in at least some of the risk behaviors. Illicit behaviors appear more responsive to events than do licit behaviors, changes are much more pronounced for marital than nonmarital births and somewhat more pronounced for marriage than for cohabitation. Women's responses are stronger than mens for several of the behaviors.

Our answers to these questions are based on an analysis of data from a national sample of over 2,000 children followed from birth until adolescence. Family poverty, structure and home environments are measured throughout this time, enabling us to both describe the stability of contexts between early and middle childhood and assess the extent to which middle childhood contexts add to the explanation of adolescent achievement and behavior over and above early environments.