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The Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS, formerly known as the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study) follows a cohort of nearly 5,000 children born in large, U.S. cities between 1998 and 2000. The study oversampled births to unmarried couples; and, when weighted, the data are representative of births in large U.S. cities at the turn of the century. The FFCWS was originally designed to address four questions of great interest to researchers and policy makers:

1. What are the conditions and capabilities of unmarried parents, especially fathers?
2. What is the nature of the relationships between unmarried parents?
3. How do children born into these families fare?
4. How do policies and environmental conditions affect families and children?

The FFCWS consists of interviews with mothers, fathers, and/or primary caregivers at birth and again when children are ages 1, 3, 5, 9, 15, and 22. The parent interviews collected information on attitudes, relationships, parenting behavior, demographic characteristics, health (mental and physical), economic and employment status, neighborhood characteristics, and program participation. Beginning at age 9, children were interviewed directly (either during the home visit or on the telephone). The direct child interviews collected data on family relationships, home routines, schools, peers, and physical and mental health, as well as health behaviors.

A collaborative study of the FFCWS, the In-Home Longitudinal Study of Pre-School Aged Children (In-Home Study) collected data from a subset of the FFCWS Core respondents at the Year 3 and 5 follow-ups to ask how parental resources in the form of parental presence or absence, time, and money influence children under the age of 5. The In-Home Study collected information on a variety of domains of the child's environment, including: the physical environment (quality of housing, nutrition and food security, health care, adequacy of clothing and supervision) and parenting (parental discipline, parental attachment, and cognitive stimulation). In addition, the In-Home Study also collected information on several important child outcomes, including anthropometrics, child behaviors, and cognitive ability. This information was collected through interviews with the child's primary caregiver, and direct observation of the child's home environment and the child's interactions with his or her caregiver.

Similar activities were conducted during the Year 9 follow-up. At the Year 15 follow-up, a condensed set of home visit activities were conducted with a subsample of approximately 1,000 teens. Teens who participated in the In-Home Study were also invited to participate in a Sleep Study and were asked to wear an accelerometer on their non-dominant wrist for seven consecutive days to track their sleep (Sleep Actigraphy Data) and that day's behaviors and mood (Daily Sleep Actigraphy and Diary Survey Data).

An additional collaborative study collected data from the child care provider (Year 3) and teacher (Years 9 and 15) through mail-based surveys. Saliva samples were collected at Year 9 and 15 (Biomarker file and Polygenic Scores). The Study of Adolescent Neural Development (SAND) COVID Study began data collection in May 2020 following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. It included online surveys with the young adult and their primary caregiver.

The FFCWS began its seventh wave of data collection in October 2020, around the focal child's 22nd birthday. Data collection and interviews continued through January 2024. The Year 22 wave included a young adult (YA) survey with the original focal child and a primary caregiver (PCG) survey. Data were also collected on the children of the original focal child (referred to as Generation 3, or G3).

In 2017, the FFCWS team announced the Fragile Families (FF) Challenge, a collaborative effort in which participants were tasked with using machine learning methods and FFCWS data (Baseline to Year 9) to build a model that would predict six key outcomes at Year 15. Materials used in the FF Challenge have been archived in this collection.

Documentation for these files is available on the FFCWS website under Data and Documentation. For details of updates made to the FFCWS data files, please see the project's Data Alerts page.

Data collection for the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) of the National Institutes of Health under award numbers R01HD36916, R01HD39135, and R01HD40421, as well as a consortium of private foundations.

Below is the citation for use of the FFCWS data accessed through ICPSR. For information on additional citation requirements when using FFCWS in publications, please refer to this FAQ on the FFCWS project site.

The Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP) was a multisite, randomized, controlled trial of an educational intervention until three years of age for low birth weight preterm infants born in 1984-1985. There were three components to the intervention: (1) an educational program delivered through home visits (weekly during the first year and every other week during the second and third years of life), (2) a daily center-based program beginning at 12 months corrected for duration of gestation, and (3) parent support groups coinciding with the start of the center-based program. Previously, the subjects were assessed at baseline up to age 3 (Phase I), age 5 (Phase II), and age 8 (Phase III). Phase IV assessed them at age 18.

This data collection contains selected variables from all four phases that were used in analyses reported in two articles by the principal investigators and others:

• McCormick, Marie C., Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Stephen L. Buka, Julie Goldman, Jennifer Yu, Mikhail Salganik, David T. Scott, Forrest C. Bennett, Libby L. Kay, Judy C. Bernbaum, Charles R. Bauer, Camilia Martin, Elizabeth R. Woods, Anne Martin, and Patrick H. Casey. "Early Intervention in Low Birth Weight Premature Infants: Results at 18 Years of Age for the Infant Health and Development Program." Pediatrics 117.3 (2006): 771-780.
• Martin, Anne, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Pamela Klebanov, Stephen L. Buka, and Marie C. McCormick. "Long-term maternal effects of early childhood intervention: Findings from the Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP)." Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 29 (2008): 101-117.

As such, the collection comprises only some of the variables that were collected for Phase IV and the other phases.

The collection contains information about the children and their mothers/caregivers. Data on the children include treatment group, sex, birth weight group, and an index of neonatal health, plus indices of receptive vocabulary, intelligence, and adult-child activities at age 5, indices of intelligence, receptive vocabulary, reading ability, math ability, and behavioural problems and competencies at ages 8 and 18, and indices of risk behaviors, physical health, future expectations, and engagement towards school at age 18. Information about the mothers/caregivers includes maternal age and mother's race, as well as educational achievement at baseline and ages 5, 8, and 18; smoking at ages 5 and 18; measures of employment, physical health, and mental health at ages 5, 8, and 18; indices of parenting style, educational aspirations for the child, and yelling frequency at the child at ages 8 and 18; and indices of connectedness to the community and involvement with the child's school at age 18. Other variables include measures of home literacy and the presence of televisions in the household at age 5, and indices of family cohesion and conflict at ages 8 and 18.