The Terrible Cost of Porn
Rod Dreher, The American Conservative

Effects of Early Parenting Interventions on Parents and Infants
Joanne Commerford, Child Family Community Australia

The 2017 Index of Culture and Opportunity: The Social and Economic Trends that Shape America
The Heritage Foundation, July 20, 2017

Establishing the Facts About Family Breakdown and Transforming the Debate About Marriage
Harry Benson, Marriage Foundation

Who Gets More Out of Marriage, Men or Women?
Ben Steverman, Bloomberg

A friend recently alerted me to a disturbing Teen Vogue article that is best described as an explicit “how-to guide” on anal sex for adolescents. In the piece, sex educator Gigi Engle uses dehumanizing language at times (like “vagina owner” for adolescent girls) to paint a positive picture of a sexual activity the CDC says is the highest risk sexual behavior for HIV for men and women. To be fair, the article was “recently updated” to emphasize the necessity of condoms because “STIs are widespread and abundant.” Engle concludes the piece by telling adolescents that anal sex is “awesome” and “if you want to give it a go, you do that. More power to you.”

Teen Vogue is obviously targeting the general content of its magazine toward sexually active teens—many, who, let’s face it, have been exposed to online pornography from a young age. In the magazine's view, if teens are doing it, considering doing it, or being pressured by a partner to do it, then the responsible thing is to give them all the tools they need to do so as safely as possible. It’s a common argument we often hear in sex education disputes.

But this vision of young people ignores the majority who are not sexually active. These young women and men are swimming against the cultural tide that says everyone they know is “hooking up” and that even the highest-risk behaviors are acceptable, as long as they are done “right” and the person is willing. It also ignores the overwhelming majority of teens who express support for postponing sex, along with a desire for more encouragement for that decision.

Instead of giving them that support, content like this Teen Vogue article leaves teens with the mistaken impression that most of their peers are sexually active, which, as a recent Harvard study found, can put a lot of pressure on young people. Richard Weissbourd, the study’s lead author, told ABC News, “these overestimations of the size of the hook-up culture can cause young people to have sex or to hook up when they're not really interested, and they're not really ready."

Last month, the CDC’s National Centers for Health Statistics (NCHS) released its latest report on teen sexual activity and contraceptive use, which is based on data from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG). Not surprisingly, the news that more sexually active teens today are using contraception generated a good bit of media attention. One headline from CNN read, “Teens Are Still Having Sex, Most Use Contraception.”

But the NCHS report also tells us that teens who have not yet had sexual intercourse make up well over 50% of the teen population (57.6% of teen girls and 55.8% of teen boys), similar to the “levels seen in 2002 and 2006-2010.”

In terms of overall trends, as the figure below indicates, the percentage of teen girls “who had ever had sexual intercourse” fell from 51.1% in 1988 to 42.4% in the most recent survey, and for boys it declined from 60.4% to 44.2% (there was a slight increase for boys between 2006-2010 and 2011-2015, but the NCHS says the change was “not significant”). The report also notes, “This pattern across recent decades sheds light on the contribution of sexual activity to the pattern of decline in the teen birth rate in similar time periods.”

Perhaps we should focus more of our collective attention on the majority of teens who are delaying sex and the reasons motivating them, as well as the factors most likely to influence teen sexual decision-making. Importantly, the NSFG survey asked teen girls and boys who said that they were not sexually active, “What would you say is the most important reason why you have not had sexual intercourse up to now?” The most common reason cited by girls was “against religion and morals” (35.4%), followed by “haven’t found the right person yet” (21.9%), while for boys, the two most common reasons were “haven’t found the right person yet” (28.5%) and “against religion and morals” (27.9%).

What does this information tell us about teen sexual decision-making? First, it tells us that values matter more to teens than avoiding STDs or even pregnancy (which was third on the list for both boys and girls). And the people who most strongly shape young people’s values about sex, including what type of relationship signifies the “right person,” are parents, who are consistently shown to have the biggest influence on teens when it comes sex. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy explains:

Teens who are close to their parents and feel supported by them are more likely to abstain from sex, wait until they are older to begin having sex, have fewer sexual partners, and use contraception more consistently.

But parents matter to teen sexual decision-making in another big way. The structure of a teens’ family life is also linked to their sexual debut. For both male and female teenagers in the survey, a significantly lower percentage were sexually experienced if they lived with both biological or adoptive parents when they were 14, as the figure below shows.

The bottom line is that parents still wield the most influence over teen sexual decision-making, and ideally, parents should be the primary resource for schooling young people on the ins and outs of sexual behavior, the best time to have sex, and how to form lasting relationships.

Moreover, we know from recent surveys that teens not only support delaying sex but want more support for that decision, as well as more guidance from their parents and other trusted adults in their lives. For example, a 2014 survey of young adults by The National Campaign found that: 86% said it is important for teens to know “it’s okay to be a virgin when you graduate from high school,” and 66% said they think it would help teens delay sex longer if they knew less than half their peers were sexually active. And according to the previously mentioned Harvard study, “70% of young adults wish they had received more information and guidance about finding lasting love from their parents,” and 65% wanted more guidance from a health or sex education class “on some emotional aspect of romantic relationships.” 

In light of the support and guidance teens say they want, our messages about sex should go beyond the benefits of avoiding disease or pregnancy to emphasize how postponing sex protects young people against a host of negative outcomes, including emotional heartache, and helps keep them on a path to success. Research shows that teens who delay sex not only have fewer lifetime sexual partners but are also more likely to graduate high school and go on to college. This is an opportunity to make the “Success Sequence” part of our discussions and messaging about sex, which should include connecting marriage to parenthood for teens, who are growing up in a culture where cohabiting parenthood is increasingly accepted as equal to having and raising children within marriage.

The door is wide open for parents, religious communities, educators, and other trusted adults to do more to combat our sex-obsessed culture and support young people in making healthier choices about sex and relationships. This should include the message that most of their peers are not having sex and that delaying sexual activity—ideally until marriage—is best for their overall health and future success.

It was a dizzying experience reading the recent IFS blog post by Dr. Steven E. Rhoads, asserting that universities and other workplaces should discontinue gender-neutral policies because most women, especially those with young children, don’t really want to work full time. I had recently written a piece arguing the opposite, The Case Against Maternity Leave, because the evidence shows policies aimed to “help” one gender typically end up disadvantaging that very gender.

I wanted to better understand Rhoads’ point of view, and the closing argument in his blog post that "proponents of ’leaning in’ have no reason to believe they speak for most women or that they have a better understanding than women themselves of what’s good for them. Why not try to accommodate the life preferences women in fact have?"

I have my own issues with the “Lean In” school because it asks women to lean into a work culture and social policies that are still geared to a middle class 1950s world that no one lives in anymore. I say it’s time to value care work because it is our connection with others that gives life meaning. And it’s time to update those work cultures and policies to give people of all genders more choices in how to work and live, which, in the end, will make work better, families happier and more stable, and the economy more innovative and productive.

But I wondered how Rhoads could claim to speak for the life preferences of women—or men for that matter. So, I read his 2004 book, Taking Sex Differences Seriously, which argues for a biologically-determined vision of the traditional breadwinner-homemaker ideal.

Reading both the blog and the book was disorienting, not only because he claimed to know best what women really want, based on a foundation that irresponsibly disregards the full range of scientific research on gender differences, but also because I happened to be in the middle of a boisterous extended family reunion in Wyoming.

You’d assume, perhaps, given Wyoming’s macho cowboy tradition and history of culturally conservative politics, and my family’s heritage in the ranching business, that Rhoads’ vision on the page and life on Casper Mountain would synch up: Men are men—aggressive, competitive, interested in casual sex, and suited to work. Women are women—nurturing, drawn to caregiving and homemaking with an “inexplicable need to bond with their young,” as Dr. Rhoads put it in his book. Each gender chemically and hormonally wired for the roles they are to play in life. Nothing to be done. And, more ominously, nothing to “wish or legislate” away.

And yet, I watched my cousin, Sean, a respected dentist, board member of the local Rocky Mountain Gun Club, hunter, fisherman, leader of the ski patrol (whose wife manages their business), in the kitchen, doing the dishes, sweeping the floor, and refusing help.

Another cousin, Seano, a sheriff’s deputy, undercover cop, and member of the local SWAT team, lovingly carted his baby son around all weekend through feedings, naps, fussing and diaper changes, clearly putting a lie to Rhoads’ assertion in his book that fathers “usually don’t enjoy taking care of them [children] for extended periods.”

And it’s not like that behavior was unusual—a brief burst of guilty bonding to make up for long hours at work. True, Seano’s work often does require long hours. But talk to him and his wife, Kerstin, and the shared care is a conscious decision they’ve both made about how they want to combine their work and family lives. Seano said he’s grateful for Kerstin’s support in his difficult work. But in the same breath, he talked proudly of supporting her, too, and the new marketing business she’s starting.

Another cousin, Steve, brought his darling eight-year-old twin daughters, so his wife, Brandi, could take their son to a Little League championship. Both Steve and Brandi have high-power jobs at the same company. I was reading Rhoads’ view in his book that women are in a culture war between a “majority who are traditionally feminine and others who are more like men than their sisters are.” The latter, he insists, without supporting evidence, have been “exposed to higher levels of testosterone.” These two twin girls, ostensibly exposed to the same amounts of testosterone in utero, couldn’t have been more different. One loves nail polish and dancing. The other is the only girl on her baseball team. Yet they were both out riding four-wheel ATVs on back roads, building campfires in the woods, and baking a spice cake and decorating it with M&M’s.

One day, for breakfast, my cousin’s wife—a state senator—cooked breakfast, while my cousin looked after their three kids and washed up. That day, two four-year-olds, a boy and a girl, took turns hurling a fire truck off the back deck—he in a Spiderman cape and she in a Wonder Woman T-shirt. All the kids lined up to learn how to shoot a bow and arrow and clambered to go to the museum to see mastodon bones. That night, we told stories around the fire of our immigrant past, and how our educated grandmother helped our uneducated grandfather break from his family and homestead his own ranch.

I’m aware that these are merely anecdotes against the backdrop of the larger human story. But that’s just the point. Unlike Rhoads, who handpicks anecdotes and uses them, however tortuously, to support a single, limiting worldview, my aim is to show the confounding, complex, unpredictable, mysterious, and often wild variation in the human behavior, outlook, and desires of all genders.

What kind of world, through policy, practice, and culture, do we want to create for ourselves as humans? For men and women? For our families?

And I can certainly argue the science. Unlike Rhoads’ cherry-picked data, some of it outdated, some misinterpreted, the best work shows that there is often more biological variation within gender than there is across gender. For instance, just as women’s bodies very obviously change when they are in the process of becoming mothers, so, too, do men change hormonally and neurologically when they become fathers. Their testosterone levels drop, their bodies produce prolactin, the same hormone responsible for producing breast milk, and oxytocin, the bonding or “love” hormone. Their brains’ nurturing and communication pathways light up, just like women’s do when they look at an infant. Mice studies show that, with more exposure and experience, father brains become more like mother brains, wired for nurture.

What I find interesting is that scientists discovered many of these hormonal changes by accident, in thyroid studies, according to Kyle Pruett, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine’s Child Study Center who has long studied fathers. So entrenched is Rhoads’ vaunted breadwinner-homemaker ideal, even in the minds’ of inquiring scientists, that nobody bothered to look.

The point is this: of course, men and women are different biologically. But we are members of the same species. Humans have survived through millennia because we are cooperative breeders, say experts like anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. We have always helped each other care for and raise our young. And in the centuries of agricultural life, of family-run businesses, we all helped each other work for our daily bread, even mothers, even children. The Industrial Revolution separated the work of men and women.

The productivity gains and political commitment to a “family wage” in the two decades after World War II enabled more Americans to live the breadwinner-homemaker life so nostalgically celebrated by Rhoads and others like him. But the Industrial Age is over. Wages have stagnated since the 1970s, and basic costs like healthcare, housing and education have skyrocketed, even though worker productivity has continued to rise—the fruits of that labor funneling increasingly to the 1 percent. And now, with changing mores and shifting economics, nearly three-fourths of all children are being raised in families where all parents work. And many of those families are time-starved and stressed financially, mentally, and physically.

American workers put in among the longest hours of any advanced economy. The stress of those long hours and demanding work cultures is now the 5th leading cause of death, according to studies by Stanford professor of organizational behavior Jeffrey Pfeffer and his colleagues. Rhoads insists that women would prefer to work part time in order to be more present for their families. But let’s face it, no one wants to overwork the punishing American way. It’s no surprise that Gallup routinely finds 70% of U.S. workers are not engaged at work, and the majority of Americans would prefer to run their own business, to set their own schedules, if they could.

Both women and men report feeling high-stress levels trying to make it work in unforgiving work cultures, with outdated cultural expectations like Rhoads’, and with policies that are, frankly, hostile to modern families. The real question, then, is what kind of world, through policy, practice, and culture, do we want to create for ourselves as humans? For men and women? For our families?

With changing mores and shifting economics, nearly three-fourths of all children are being raised in families where all parents work. And many of those families are time-starved and stressed financially, mentally, and physically.

Rhoads warns against what he calls a feminist agenda to create an androgynous world. As if allowing the personhood of women, which is what feminism is at heart, meant that we were all going to march around in Mao pajamas and be sexless, indistinguishable automatons. How boring. Not to mention oppressive—as oppressive as Rhoads’ view about the limits of my own destiny because of my gender.

But what if men and women could make real choices— for themselves and their families—about how they choose to work and live? What if the goal were an egalitarian—not androgynous—world? A world where humans could craft their life courses based, not on gender, but on what moves the soul? Where people could create loving families of blood and choice. And where those families, not just women, had time to care for and bond with infants and set their own family dynamics, to care for themselves and others—freely, without constraint. That means paid family leave of adequate duration and wage replacement.

A world where career paths could be fluid and flexible, not one steep ladder to the top, where work cultures enable, instead of punish, men and women who take time for the important work of care. That means fair wages, and high quality, affordable early care and learning. That means workplaces that no longer require and blindly reward long hours and total devotion to the point of sacrificing life, family, time and health, just because that’s the way it was done in the 1950s. Instead, it means workplaces that recognize that in a knowledge economy, healthy, well-rested, and happy workers who are better able to control and predict their schedule and workflow, with time for life, are not only more productive but are setting themselves up, neuroscience shows, for having the best ideas and insights.

Are we there yet? Of course not. The tenure study Rhoads’ cites in his IFS post, where male economists used family leave to get ahead at work, is far more indicative of how these traditional gender norms and outdated workplace expectations imprison both men and women than the result of any biological drive. The research out of Iceland, Quebec and other places is clear—gender-neutral policies that are both designed and implemented well are a good place to start toward a world that allows us all to become more authentically human.

As I finished Rhoads’ book and thought about his blog post in the mountains of Wyoming, I couldn’t help but wonder if this academic effort was merely an elaborate ruse to get out of doing the dishes. When boys grow up, he writes, “they may be good family men, but they do not usually do much domestic work. Males, like high-testosterone females, tend to be more stubborn and intractable about this and other matters.” I looked up at the startling array of stars in the clear night sky. Life is big and mysterious. Human beings are wondrously, maddeningly complicated. I wanted to say, “Steven, be a man. It’s your turn to load the dishwasher.”

Brigid Schulte is an award-winning writer and journalist, author of the New York Times bestselling book, Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, and director of the Better Life Lab at New America, a nonpartisan think tank.

Do you live to work, or work to live?

Regardless of where their hearts are, many Americans spend more time with their colleagues each week than they do with their own families. Work sets the rhythm of our week. The type of work parents perform dictates how much flexibility is feasible, with regard to both the timing and location of that work. For those with young children, flexibility is vital, because work must complement significant family responsibilities.

As a mother with three young children, I appreciate being able to work near my daughters and to write around their schedules. My preference is not unique, either. As Pew reported in 2013:

Working part time has consistently been the top choice for women with at least one child under the age of 18 in the three years that the question was asked. Nearly half of mothers (47%) in 2012 said that their ideal situation would be to work part time. The share was 50% in 2007 and 44% in 1997.

So, how does reality compare to parents’ reported preferences? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), about 26% of “mothers with young children (under 3 years old)” worked part time last year. As for other parents, the BLS recently released the American Time Use Survey for 2016, and the results shed more light on contemporary family life. The report notes that on work days, "83% of employed persons did some or all of their work at their workplace and 22% did some or all of their work at home.” But this figure includes both parents and those without children, so it’s crucial to ask, who are these at-home workers? The BLS also notes:

Among workers age 25 and over, those with an advanced degree were more likely to work at home than were persons with lower levels of educational attainment—43% of those with an advanced degree performed some work at home on days worked, compared with 12% of those with a high school diploma.

In other words, at-home workers significantly overlap with the pool of American college graduates—the one subset of American adults who are significantly more likely to marry before having children. Parents in these families can split the burden of breadwinning, in addition to any child care responsibilities.

As for child care, the BLS reports that “adults living in households with children under age 6 spent an average of 2.1 hours per day providing primary childcare to household children.” Meanwhile,

adults living in households with at least one child under age 6 spent an average of 5.3 hours per day providing secondary childcare—that is, they had at least one child in their care while doing activities other than primary childcare. Secondary childcare provided by adults living in households with children under age 6 was most commonly provided while doing leisure activities (2.1 hours) or household activities (1.3 hours).

That at least some (mostly highly educated) parents have the option to work closer to their families—and operationalize that option—is a consequential detail. It helps explain how two-parent households manage to devote more time and attention to their youngest members.

When families can afford to have at least one parent work part-time or keep reasonably flexible hours, it makes a difference for the whole family. That’s particularly the case when parents use that extra time to read bedtime stories to young children, help with homework, eat dinner together, and generally engage children, who benefit both socially and academically.

The challenge here is that not all jobs lend themselves to flexibility. Waitresses, factory workers, and ER doctors can’t telecommute; they must work in a specific place during set hours. Single parents are also unlikely to have much room to maneuver on scheduling at least when compared to their two-parent family counterparts.

For those who are parents of young children, the most important takeaway here may simply be the importance of creativity. If at all possible, consider how you might adapt your job description so that you can be more available to your children on a regular basis. For others whose work defies flexibility or who are parenting solo, make the most of whatever time you do have at home with your kids. They’ll thank you for it later.

Melissa Langsam Braunstein, a former U.S. Department of State speechwriter, is now an independent writer in Washington, D.C. She frequently writes about culture, religion, and issues affecting families. She shares all of her writing on her website.

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Appalachia is a byword for poverty, backwardness, rurality, whiteness, coal, and any number of other less-than-cosmopolitan things. This characterization is old, going back to at least the 1870s. But even earlier than this popularization of Appalachian stereotypes is Appalachian poverty itself: as early as 1850, Appalachia was substantially behind neighboring areas economically, and by most measures, Appalachia is more similar economically to other parts of the US than it was in 1850, 1900, or even 1970.

But there’s one piece of Appalachian life that goes back a long time: family. If you read JD Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy, stories of family—and family instability—come thick and fast. But interestingly, one thing we see quite clearly is a nostalgia for a time when Appalachian families weren’t so unstable. Vance and others seem to present a story of cultural decay; once upon a time, Appalachia was functional, but now, the cultural engine has broken down.

We have some data that should allow us to explore this theory. For this post, I’ll talk about some key family demographic indicators for Central Appalachia, which I define as the Appalachian Regional Commission areas of Central, South Central, and North Central Appalachia. Loosely, that’s the mountainous counties of Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky, and West Virginia. This is the heartland of the old Scotch-Irish settlement, the core of what people think of when they talk about Appalachia.

The very earliest data we have that can tell us much about Appalachia comes from the 1850 Census, where we find that crude birth rates were higher and crude death rates lower than the rest of the country, suggesting a younger, and probably more fertile, population. By the turn of the 20^th century, we begin to get much more interesting data.

For example, we have data on lifetime births for women in Appalachia in 1900, 1910, 1940, and 1950. Averaging together 1900-1910 and 1940-1950 helps us smooth a little bit (each pair of decades is very similar). Essentially, we get a broad estimate of turn-of-the-century completed fertility by age, and mid-century completed fertility by age, as shown in the figure below.

As you can see, completed fertility has fallen sharply for both Appalachia and the nation as a whole, but in both the turn-of-the-century and mid-century years, Appalachia’s fertility was higher for all ages. Since fertility is higher for all ages, this isn’t just about demographics. This is something cultural or social. Appalachian women started having babies younger, and, ultimately, ended up having about one more child on average than women elsewhere in the nation. That was as true in 1900 as it was in 1950.

Unfortunately, we don’t have geographically specific completed fertility data for more recent years. We can get age-specific births in the last year from the American Community Survey, however, which we see in the figure below.

As you can see, Appalachia today has higher fertility early in life, but lower fertility later in life. When we calculate out a Total Fertility Rate, Appalachia comes out behind the nation on the whole, at 1.82 vs. 1.93, with non-Appalachian women catching up around their late thirties. While Appalachian women today have kids younger, much like their forebears in the 1900s or 1940s, they have not kept up with higher late-in-life fertility. This could reflect poorer health, worse economic conditions, different desired fertility, timing differences, or simply less access to the reproductive technologies that make later fertility possible.

Given Appalachia’s high poverty levels, one might expect the rate of unplanned pregnancy to be high. But then again, maybe not. While I don’t have data about unplanned pregnancy for Appalachia, we can look at unmarried women, who are probably more likely to reflect unplanned births. Unmarried childbearing accounts for 37.5% of births in Appalachia, versus 35.2% in the rest of the US. The difference is almost entirely accounted for by a higher share of Appalachian women experiencing births with an unmarried partner in the household (12.5% vs. 10.4% nationally); births to women with no partner present are essentially identical within and outside of Appalachia (25.1% vs. 24.8%). In other words, though Appalachian women start having kids earlier, the unpartnered births that are probably the best proxy for unplanned births aren’t actually any more common in poverty-stricken Appalachia than elsewhere, which would suggest that unplanned pregnancies might not be all that much more common either. One reason Appalachia may seem to outsiders like a place with a great deal of unplanned pregnancy could be racially-coded expectations. While its overall rates of unmarried pregnancy are not exceptional, Appalachia does have anomalously high white rates of unmarried pregnancy (35.8% vs. 29.2% nationally).

But, on some level, it’s possible that what we’re really seeing is just a different life cycle for women in Appalachia. For example, marriage happens earlier, too. We have age at first marriage data for Appalachia in 1930 and 1940, shown below.

As you can see, women in Appalachia got married about a year earlier than women outside of Appalachia. Unfortunately, I don’t have age at first marriage data for Appalachia today, but we can see the proportion ever married by age in the figure below.

As one might expect, Appalachian women experience their first marriage earlier, but women in the rest of the US ultimately catch up to them. It’s worth noting that the ever-married share is falling for all age groups in Appalachia and the rest of the nation. The ever-married share is falling especially quickly for women under 34, and is falling faster in Appalachia than in the rest of the US; that is, Appalachian marriage-age habits are converging with the rest of the nation.

However, these Appalachian marriages are often troubled. And, in fact, they’ve been that way for a long time. In the figure below, I show the share of women who have been married multiple times, by age, for Appalachia and the US on the whole in 1910, the 1940-1950 average, and 2008-2011 average (note: dates selected due to data availability).

In 1910, Appalachian women were substantially more likely to have had multiple marriages in their life than women throughout the rest of the US. Whether this was due to divorce or higher mortality, I can’t say, but it’s clear that a greater degree of Appalachian marital flux was present as far back as 1910. But by the mid-century period, Appalachia had achieved a slightly greater degree of marital stability than the nation as a whole, a remarkable accomplishment given it was much poorer than the rest of the country. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t last: by 2008-2011, Appalachian women were again more likely to have had multiple marriages.

The point here is simple: Appalachian marital instability only looks truly new for people not aware of pre-WWII Appalachian social history. Appalachia in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries already exhibited the early marriage, high marital separation, early-fertility social model we observe today. It briefly escaped that model in the middle of the century thanks to explosive growth in coal and military employment: low-skill jobs that gave comparatively good wages and, crucially, where the employer tightly regulated the lifestyle and living conditions of Appalachian workers. Now, coal companies were not beneficent overlords—far from it—and their long-run impact is a story of violence and corruption in the region. But they did run company towns that forced a degree of social uniformity and created a kind of engineered society for Appalachians. Certainly, since the middle of the century, Appalachia has been harder-hit than the rest of the country with a wave of divorce and family instability, reflecting its shift from slightly better-than-average marital stability to substantially worse-than-average: a shift that may reflect the different impact of liberalized divorce laws by income level.

When Appalachians look back, they see what they’ve lost since the middle of the century as a story of outside forces wreaking havoc on a region. There’s some truth to that account. But Appalachia has been riven by instability, guerrilla warfare, assassination, family instability, substance abuse, and cultural chaos since at least the tumults of the American Civil War, and it shows in the data we have on family demographics. And now today, the share of Appalachians who have divorced in the last year is higher for most age groups, especially the young (see figure below).

Even with these higher divorce rates, the share of Appalachian women currently married is nonetheless higher than women in the rest of the US. But if we calculate a “total lifetime divorce risk” the same way we would calculate a total fertility rate, then it turns out the average Appalachian women who is 17 today can expect to be divorced more than once in her life (1.16), vs. just under once for women elsewhere in the US (0.96).

This is a hard reality Appalachians must deal with. But it’s not, properly speaking, a totally new phenomenon. For those of us who care for the region, and our friends and families who live there, considering a solution is challenging. If this were new, we might just be able to undo a few bad influences. But we’re wrestling with a larger cultural logic, a deeper untethering of the Appalachian family than just the present troubles with opioids, disability payments, environmental degradation, and lost coal jobs. At the very peak of its coal-boom, Appalachia only just managed to edge out the rest of the US in terms of family stability. Whatever makes Appalachia hard on families, whether it’s an old Scotch-Irish set of cultural norms, geographic isolation, or bad governance, it goes back a long time, and it seems like fixing it might take more than a few tweaks to this or that program.

Lyman Stone is an economist who blogs at In a State of Migration, and a proud Kentuckian. Lyman also works as an agricultural economist at USDA. His views are not endorsed by, supported by, or in any way reflective of the US government.

Married People Have More Sex
Nathan Yau, FlowingData

Premarital Counseling Can Decrease Divorce Rates, Psychologist Says
Lauren Hanson, The Daily Universe

7th Annual NARME Summit: Denver Colorado
National Association for Relationship & Marriage Education

The Fracking Boom, a Baby Boom, and the Retreat from Marriage
Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics

What America's 'Baby Bust' Means for Public Policy
Mike Maciag, Governing

Editor’s Note: This essay was first published in Principles, a publication of Christendom College. It is reprinted here with permission.

Over the next decade, count on the press, academics, and pop culture icons to take a more negative view of religion in American life. This opposition has been driven by a variety of factors, such as the rise of the “new atheism” and conservative Christian alliances with the Republican Party and with President Donald Trump. In particular, orthodox religious opposition to today’s new morality—on matters ranging from abortion to LGBTQ rights—has made religion a target of scorn, skepticism, or outright hostility on the part of many of the nation’s cultural elites. This negative view of religion extends to religion’s influence on family life.

Take, for instance, the media’s coverage of a recent University of Chicago study purporting to show that children raised by religious parents were less altruistic than children raised by secular parents. The study’s author, psychologist Jean Decety, claimed that his research showed “how religion negatively influences children’s altruism” and that it challenged “the view that religiosity facilitates prosocial behavior,” calling into question “whether religion is vital for moral development—suggesting the secularization of moral discourse does not reduce human kindness. In fact, it does just the opposite.”

The study had numerous methodological problems and limitations—it was based upon a non-random and non-representative sample of children watching cartoons and sharing stickers in a few cities around the globe—but received glowing, credulous coverage from numerous media outlets. As I noted in the Washington Post, a Daily Beast headline proclaimed “Religious Kids are Jerks,” and the Guardian reported “Religious Children Are Meaner than Their Secular Counterparts,” while Slate weighed in to say that “religious children are more selfish.” This was clearly a story that some in the media were more than happy to run with.

There is only one problem with this new, negative view of religion and family life: it misses the mark. In the United States, at least, religion is generally a positive force in the family. My own research, which has focused extensively on the connection between faith and family life, indicates that religion generally fosters more happiness, greater stability, and a deeper sense of meaning in American family life, provided that family members—especially spouses—share a common faith. In simple terms, the old slogan—“the family that prays together, stays together”—still holds in 2017.

Wedded Bliss

Consider Roberto, 37, and Marcia Flores, 35, who immigrated to the United States from Mexico when they were children. This Catholic couple are representative of some of the unique challenges and opportunities facing Latino couples. These San Diego residents met in their early twenties, lived together for a number of years and had their daughter prior to getting married. In 1997, they wed and had a son shortly thereafter. For most of the early years of their relationship, Roberto struggled with drugs and alcohol, and spent many a weekend focused on soccer and friends rather than his family. “Before, I used to be in the world (‘del mundo’); I used a lot of drugs, I drank a lot, I didn’t care for my family, not my wife, my brothers, mother and father, I didn’t care about them,” he said, also noting, “when the weekend came, I left my wife and I would go play soccer with friends . . . and then go drinking, and that was my whole weekend.”

He also says he took a “macho” approach to family life, leaving domestic responsibilities to Marcia. “You come home and you boss people around,” he said, describing his macho ethic. “You force your wife and your kids to do things for you. And the woman had to take care of all the house one way or another, the man did nothing.” If he had kept up this approach to family life, an approach characterized by intoxication and machismo, Roberto thinks his family would have fallen apart: “I’m sure my wife would have left me. I wouldn’t have my wife or kids anymore if I had stayed in that path.”

In 2000, Roberto took a detour. Some friends suggested that he and Marcia attend a retreat for couples at a local Catholic church, and, after some prodding from her, he decided to go. Much to his surprise, Roberto was overcome at the retreat, filled with remorse over his failings as a husband and father. What happened next was powerful: “That’s when I met God,” he said, adding, “I cried before God, which was something I never did. I never cry. But a lot of things I never did before I did on that day.” Besides crying at the retreat, Roberto felt “all the presence of God” and decided to give up drugs and alcohol and to stop treating his family so poorly.

In the wake of the retreat, Roberto and Marcia have seen a marked improvement in the quality of their marriage. “I started going to church and they taught me that the family is important and you have to care for it,” he said. “I never knew that before; I really didn’t think I had to put family first before.” At church, he has learned that God “has a plan for marriage,” that he must live “unity in all aspects” of his marriage. In practice, this meant temperance, and coming to embrace the notion that “you need a lot of love to raise a good family.”

This has translated into big changes in their marriage and family life. Roberto stopped abusing drugs and alcohol, curtailed his involvement with friends and soccer on the weekends, and took a more engaged approach to “helping in the house.” A religious perspective and religious rituals became more common for Marcia and Roberto. Now, Roberto says, “time with my family is something spiritual to me,” and he and Marcia pray with their kids on the weekends. The changes he has experienced in his marriage and family, in turn, have further deepened Roberto’s faith: “That’s why I know there’s a God.”

Religious communities can provide important resources for a healthy marriage.

The Flores’ experience is suggestive of how a shared faith can help a couple dealing with male misbehavior or other challenges. Their Catholic faith enabled Roberto to experience powerful, life-changing religious rituals, and to become integrated into a religious community that embraces a positive, family-oriented ethos. Their faith—especially Roberto’s—has given the couple a sense of hope. It has helped them make the changes needed to strengthen their marriage and family life. As suggested in Elizabeth Brisco’s The Reformation of Machismo, men’s religious faith can counter some of the misogynistic attitudes associated with machismo in the Latino community; in this case, Roberto has jettisoned his expectation that he could devote all his free time to friends, soccer, and drinking, and leave Marcia with full responsibility for the caretaking and housework that are part and parcel of family life.

Although the Flores’ particular story of faith and family life is emblematic of many of the challenges and opportunities facing Latino couples, my research suggests that the benefits of shared church attendance extend to American couples across racial and ethnic lines. Specifically, my work with Nicholas Wolfinger in Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage Among African Americans and Latinos indicates that couples are substantially more likely to report being happy in their relationship when both partners attend church regularly than when neither partner does. This result holds equally for whites, blacks, and Latinos, as the figure below indicates.

Clearly, white, black, and Latino spouses who attend church together are about 9 percentage points more likely to say they are “very happy” or “extremely happy” than husbands and wives who do not. This may not seem like a huge boost to marital happiness, but in practical terms, it means that almost everyone in a jointly religious marriage is at least “very happy,” which is striking given the ups and downs of contemporary married life. In other words, religious couples are significantly more likely to enjoy wedded bliss than are their secular peers.

The Power of Prayer & Peers

Why does shared religious attendance lead to happiness? Part of the reason faith matters is that it fosters norms—such as a commitment to marital permanence and fidelity—that strengthen marriages. My research indicates that two other mechanisms, one social and one devotional, also help explain the power of joint church attendance. First, almost half of jointly attending couples form the majority of their friendships with fellow parishioners. Attending religious services with friends accounts for more than half of the association between church attendance and relationship quality, which means that couples who have many shared friends at their church are happier than other couples. Attending church with one’s friends appears to provide many role models of happy, healthy relationships. These friends can also offer support when an intimate relationship hits the inevitable speed bump, and such friends may encourage each other, by example or the threat of stigma, to resist the temptation of an affair. The figure below illustrates the link between shared religious friendships and relationship happiness.

Second, couples in which both members attend church are more likely to say that they often pray together, and shared prayer also helps to account for the link between church attendance and a happy relationship. Previous studies show that prayer helps couples deal with stress, enables them to focus on shared beliefs and hopes for the future, and allows them to deal constructively with challenges and problems in their relationship, and in their lives. In fact, we find that shared prayer is the most powerful religious predictor of relationship quality among black, Latino, and white couples, more powerful than denomination, religious attendance, or shared religious friendships. In simple terms, as the figure above also indicates, the couple that prays together, flourishes together.

Couples who attend religious services together are happier in their relationships than are their peers who don’t regularly attend church. This finding holds for whites, African Americans, and Latinos alike. It is true that most people are happy in their relationships irrespective of church attendance, but black, Latino, and white couples who attend together enjoy an added boost here. Part of the story here too may be due to selection (couples who are happier together may also be inclined to do many things together, including attending church). But selection probably isn’t the whole story. Our evidence for this contention is our identification of two of the mechanisms through which religious participation improves relationship quality: religious friends and shared prayer. Couples who attend church together enjoy significantly happier relationships, in large part because they socialize with friends who share their faith and especially because they pray with one another. In other words, those couples who pray together are happiest together.

Together Forever

But do higher-quality marriages founded on faith necessarily mean more stable marriages? Certainly, in the broader culture, many people think that Christians divorce just as much as their unaffiliated fellow Americans. Some would even argue that Christianity is actually bad for marital stability. Writing in The Nation, for instance, Michelle Goldberg asked: “Is Conservative Christianity Bad for Marriage?” Her affirmative answer was based on a study of red-state Protestant cultures where disapproval of premarital sex has led to earlier, less financially stable marriages. It is true that marital happiness is not perfectly correlated with freedom from divorce. Enjoying a happy marriage doesn’t eliminate your odds of divorce later on; it just reduces them. So, does faith serve as a stabilizing force in American marriages?

New research from Harvard professor Tyler VanderWeele indicates the answer to that question is "yes." In tracking a sample of thousands of middle-aged women across the United States, he found that women who regularly attended church were 47 percent less likely to divorce than women who did not regularly attend church. He also noted that other research has come to a similar conclusion, generally finding that regular church attendance is associated with a reduction in divorce of more than 30 percent.

So, what accounts for the stabilizing power of religion when it comes to American marriages? VanderWeele offered four theories to explain how faith is linked to less divorce:

1. Religious teachings often indicate that marriage is something sacred—that an important bond is created in the exchange of marriage vows. Attending religious services reinforces that message.
2. Religious teachings also discourage or censure divorce to varying degrees across religious traditions, which may lead to lower rates of divorce; moreover, religious traditions also often have strong teachings against adultery, which is one of the strongest predictors of divorce.
3. Religious teachings often place a strong emphasis on love and on putting the needs of others above one’s own. This may also improve the quality of married life and lower the likelihood of divorce.
4. Religious institutions often provide various types of family support, including a place for families to get to know one another and build relationships, programs for children, marital and pre-marital counseling, and retreats and workshops focused on building a good marriage. Religious communities can provide important resources for a healthy marriage.

Regardless of how precisely religion fosters more stable marriages, however, this new research from Harvard suggests that the couple that attends together, stays together.

So, the next time you come across an academic study or media story contending that faith plays a pernicious role in family life, be skeptical. So long as family life, and marriage in particular, are based on a common commitment to religious faith, it looks like religious faith lifts the fortunes of American families. And that’s good news in a nation where the fortunes of the family too often seem to be flagging.

W. Bradford Wilcox is the Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and a Senior Fellow of the Institute for Family Studies. This essay is adapted, in part, from Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage Among African Americans and Latinos, co-authored with Nicholas Wolfinger.

Enshrined in the Ten Commandments, the adultery taboo has persisted throughout human history. According to the past 30 years of the General Social Survey (GSS), three out of every four American adults aver that extramarital sex is always wrong. At the other end of the spectrum, under three percent of the population thinks extramarital sex isn’t wrong at all. The number of Americans who report actually having sex outside the bonds of matrimony has held relatively steady, at around 16 percent. Annual fluctuations have been minor, rarely exceeding more than a percentage point in either direction. At first glace, it seems like America has made up its mind about extramarital sex.

But the broader trend has obscured startling changes: since 2000, older Americans are cheating more, while younger Americans are cheating less. These numbers are derived from GSS responses to this survey item: “Have you ever had sex with someone other than your husband or wife while you were married?” Survey respondents have been asked this question in each survey wave since 1991.

The growing age gap in extramarital sex is depicted in Figure 1, below. For the first few years of the millennium, there were scant age differences. Starting after 2004, Americans over 55 began reporting rates of extramarital sex that were about five or six percentage points higher than were being offered by younger adults. By 2016, 20% of older respondents indicated that their marriages were nominally adulterous, compared to 14% for people under 55. Most married Americans remain committed to monogamy, but the mounting age difference is noteworthy and statistically significant. Additional analysis suggests that the age difference cannot be explained by fundamental sociodemographic differences between respondents, including sex, age, race/ethnicity, or education.

Figure 2, below, suggests that the trend toward extramarital sex is being driven by people in their fifties and sixties. Additional analysis of the GSS data reveals that most of these people have been married for between 20 and 30 years. Once survey respondents enter their seventies, rates of extramarital sex decline considerably.

Another way to look at the Figure 2 data is by birth cohort. We know that the lion’s share of people in the 18-29 age range were born in the 1980s, most people between 30-39 were born in the 1970s, and so on. Perhaps the propensity for extramarital sex is a product of what people experienced while growing up, not a question of how old they are. As we might expect, Figure 3 is a mirror image of Figure 2. People born between 1940 and 1959 report the highest rates of extramarital sex. These are the first generations to come of age during the sexual revolution, so it’s understandable they are more likely to have sex with someone without their spouses. They may have firsthand experience with 1970s-era experiments with nonmonogamy. A few people born in the late 1950s may have had swingers for parents, leading offspring to question taboos surrounding infidelity.

Two other insights about extramarital sex can be gleaned from Figures 2 and 3. The first concerns the chances that a marriage dissolves once a spouse has had sex with another person. The gap in extramarital sex rates between people who remain married to their first spouses and people who’ve ever been married (i.e., including people who’ve stayed married and their contemporaries who married and divorced) is largest for GSS respondents in their fifties and sixties at the time they’re interviewed (no such gap appears in Figure 3). The obvious implication is that this is the age range at which extramarital sex is most likely to precede the dissolution of a marriage (adultery seems to be both cause and consequence of a failing marriage). In contrast, survey respondents who are younger (30s and below) or older (70s and up) are less likely to dissolve their marriages in the wake of extramarital sex.

The second insight is more complex. Do people in their fifties and sixties have the most extramarital sex because they’re in midlife and have been married for 20-30 years, or because they came of age at a time that fostered greater sexual exploration? The answer is probably “both.”

The question reflects a broader dilemma of how to interpret trends referred to by social scientists as the age-period-cohort problem. Age is self-explanatory. Period reflects the social influences people experience at the time they’re interviewed for the General Social Survey. Cohort, more properly known as birth cohort, refers to what people experience while growing up. Each dimension of time—age, period, cohort—may potentially have a distinct effect on people’s propensities for extramarital sex. Yet it is often impossible to distinguish the three.

People in their fifties and sixties, coming of age in the wake of the sexual revolution, have had more sex partners in their lifetimes than their older or younger compatriots. And after peaking around 1990, teen sex has dipped significantly. Collectively, this sexual biography makes it understandable that products of the sexual revolution would be most predisposed to extramarital sex. If people just aged into outside love affairs, presumably as they grew bored of their marital beds, we could expect that the oldest GSS respondents would be the most likely to report extramarital sex. But Figure 2 suggests this isn’t the case.

Why do I say “suggests”? Perhaps some people do become more likely to have outside sex partners as they age, but only if they grew up during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Age and cohort effects may work hand in hand to explain the diverging trends in extramarital sex. These developments may be abetted by changing attitudes (in other words, period effects). Analysis based on sociologist Yang Yang’s intrinsic estimator, a complex statistical model for age-period-cohort data, favors the role of age in explaining higher rates of extramarital sex. Still, Figures 1 and 2 suggest that age by itself isn’t enough: older Americans only became more sexually active outside marriage in recent years.

One inducement to do so may have been the proliferation of Viagra and other medications for erectile dysfunction, which only came on the market 20 years ago. Period effects can also be assessed by looking at how sentiments about extramarital sex have changed. Figure 4 tracks these attitudes between 2000 and 2016 for different age groups of survey respondents. Collectively, we still disapprove of sex outside of wedlock, but we disapprove less strongly than we used to. Interestingly, this shift has been greatest for older Americans—people in their sixties, seventies, and eighties. Conversely, the only adults who’ve grown more disapproving are those in their fifties, and to a lesser extent, their forties.

Recall that the fifty-somethings had some of the highest rates of extramarital sex. Either people’s attitudes don’t match their behavior—a classic story in the social sciences—or we’re witnessing sexual inequality: while some Americans have more sex out of wedlock, others have grown more disapproving. Indeed, perhaps some of this disapproval reflects the comparably high rates of extramarital sex 50-somethings and 60-somethings have been observing in their peers.

This isn’t hard to believe given how balkanized American society has become. Indeed, it may figure into how people answer when the GSS queries people about nonmarital sex. Although this probably means adultery most of the time, the wording doesn’t rule out polyamory or other forms of consensual nonmonogamy. Even as most people continue to disapprove of anything but monogamous marriage, others have found unprecedented venues for sexual exploration.

No authoritative estimate of nonmonogamous relationships in the United States exists. On the basis of extrapolation, one researcher estimated a consensually nonmonogamous population of 9.8 million. I suspect this number is on the high side. Still, millions of married Americans could be in open relationships. This trend is likely abetted by the burgeoning public interest in ethical nonmonogamy (that is, extramarital relationships conducted with the explicit consent of one’s spouse). As an institution with self-help books, Internet forums, and support groups, polyamory came into being less than 30 years ago. Based on Google Books data, interest has soared.

Can polyamory help explain growing rates of extramarital sex among middle-aged Americans? It’s impossible to know with these data. It’s also unclear whether the option of an open relationship keeps some marriages together. One recent study based on national data did show that extramarital sex doesn’t raise divorce rates when both spouses are participating. On the other hand, Figure 2 suggests that sex outside of marriage is most likely to lead to divorce among the very same age groups that have the highest levels of extramarital sex. No matter how many polyamorists there are nowadays, old-fashioned adultery probably has risen among older Americans.

The consequences are plain, even if the causes are uncertain. Even as overall divorce rates have fallen in recent decades, there has been a startling surge in “gray divorce” among the middle-aged. Part of that story seems to be a corresponding increase in midlife extramarital sex. The seeds sown by the sexual revolution continue to bear unanticipated fruit. But given the declines observed for younger Americans, barring any unforeseen developments, we should anticipate a future of more monogamous marriage.

Nicholas H. Wolfinger is Professor of Family and Consumer Studies and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University of Utah. His most recent book is Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage among African Americans and Latinos, coauthored with W. Bradford Wilcox (Oxford University Press, 2016). Follow him on Twitter at @NickWolfinger.

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One curious aspect of American political geography is that variables that predict partisanship at the individual level often do a poor job of predicting the partisan balance at the state level. African Americans are among the most reliable Democratic voters, but the region with the largest African American population (the Deep South) is reliably Republican; wealthy Americans are, on average, more likely to vote Republican, yet the Northeast, where so much of the nation’s wealth is concentrated, consistently gives its Electoral College votes to Democrats. This pattern makes it difficult to find variables that accurately predict whether a state falls in the Red or Blue camp. One of the few such variables is the median age at first marriage.

As I showed in an article for Party Politics, median age at first marriage for women had a strong, linear relationship with support for Bush at the state level in the 2000 presidential election. I found a similar relationship when looking at county-level and individual-level data. And this relationship remained statistically significant and substantively important despite controlling for a myriad of additional variables.

Although comparatively new (it did not garner much scholarly interest until the 1980s), the marriage gap is now one of the more consistent elements of American politics. I have conducted a similar analysis for all subsequent presidential elections. Although the 2016 presidential campaign upended many expectations, in this regard, it was business as usual, as we see in the figure below.

Although there was a slight decline in the correlation between these two variables in the 2016 election compared to 2012, this was almost entirely due to Trump’s poor performance in Utah compared to Mitt Romney—a significant percentage of Utah voters supported conservative third-party candidate Evan McMullen.

The follow-up question, of course, is what predicts earlier marriages? This is an important question, given that, if the relationship between marriage and Republican voting is not spurious, then the decline of marriage in the United States represents yet another long-term demographic problem for the GOP.

When considering this question, it is easiest to say that “culture”—however defined— explains different family formation trends, and that culture is the reason we see a partisan marriage gap. That is, in some states, people are more religious and traditionalist, which explains both the early marriages and the greater support for Republican voting. There is definitely some truth to this argument. For example, the large Mormon population in Utah explains both the state’s political conservatism and its high marriage and fertility rates.

These cultural explanations, however, neglect the scholarly literature demonstrating that many economic variables predict trends in marriage and the family. One such variable, which government policy can influence, is home affordability. To my knowledge, the blogger Steve Sailer was the first person to make the connection between home values, marriage rates, and vote choice. However, the existing scholarly literature supported this hypothesis.

Social scientists have noted the relationship between the availability of spacious housing and family size since at least the 1930s, and it makes intuitive sense. We typically associate marriage, and especially children, with single-family homes rather than apartments and condominiums. One does not need to be a scholar to make this connection; anyone who has spent time with multiple toddlers in a confined space knows why large families prefer large houses, ideally with yards.

This theory also partially explains other elements of American political geography, such as why coastal cities tend to be more Democratic than large cities farther inland. Metropolitan areas with natural barriers to growth will experience a faster increase in property values; cities like Seattle that are constrained by both water and mountains quickly become family unfriendly because of the paucity of affordable single-family homes. In contrast, inland metropolitan areas like Dallas, which can easily expand in all directions, can keep their housing costs down. By being family friendly, these inland cities tend to be more Republican than their coastal counterparts.

The plausible hypothesis that affordable housing leads to more marriages which lead to more Republicans voting must be viewed with some skepticism, however. Although these correlations are definitely real, it is much harder to prove the causal relationships. For example, it may not be that marriage causes people to become Republicans. Instead, there may be personal attributes associated with both early marriage and vote choice. Again, greater religiosity could be driving both.

Similarly, it may not be the case that cheap housing causes people to form families at an earlier age. Instead, divergent migration patterns may explain this geographic divide: recently or soon-to-be married people may exit those cities and regions with a high cost of living and settle where spacious housing is more affordable. Varying prices may determine how married and unmarried Americans are geographically distributed, but may not have much influence on the total number of marriages.

Thanks to the growing stack of research on these topics, it is becoming increasingly clear that these relationships are not spurious. It appears that marriage does change political attitudes, for example. Moreover, while the different family formation patterns we see in different housing types can be partially attributed to selective moves, this is not the entire story. Affordable housing itself promotes earlier family formation and larger families.

Given these findings, it seems that a pro-marriage agenda is the politically smart move for the GOP, and a key element of such an agenda would be home affordability. I would urge caution for those with such ideas, however. Pushing people into homes does not promote family formation and fertility if doing so leads to massive financial burdens. Furthermore, the government does not have a stellar record of accomplishment when it comes to tinkering with lending standards and other policies surrounding home ownership.

Regardless of what policymakers ultimately decide to do with these findings, prognosticators looking to forecast the future of American politics should keep a close eye on trends in the American family.

George Hawley is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama. His books include Demography, Culture, and the Decline of America’s Christian Denominations and Making Sense of the Alt-Right.

When I first met Dan and Heidi in the summer of 2010, they had been living together for several years and knew they wanted to get married. “I think we’ll just be more deeply committed to each other,” Heidi said. “I think that people who are married would tend to try to work things out better than people who aren’t.”

So Dan and Heidi made a list of 120 guests and booked a venue, but then discovered why that venue was so much cheaper than others: alcohol was not allowed and maximum capacity was 80.

As Dan explained, “It came down to where we couldn’t find a place to do it, so we just said ‘All right, we’ll wait.’” Heidi added, “When you rent those places out, it’s expensive. Sometimes a $500 deposit plus like $600 to rent it out for a couple of hours.” With rent, car payments, and other bills, Heidi said they “just didn’t have money for that right now” for a wedding.

Scanning headlines or The New York Times Best Sellers—Senator Ben Sasse’s The Vanishing American Adult, for example—it is evident that we as a nation are worried about young adults making the transition to adulthood. And rightfully so. But as a culture we also attach steep financial barriers for entry into one of the traditional markers of adulthood: marriage.

“I mean it’s all about money issues, really, that’s all that it is,” Dan said about why he and Heidi weren’t married. Heidi made $9.10/hour as a cake decorator in a grocery store deli and though Dan made up to $50/hour as a stagehand, in the off-season, he resorted to low-wage work at Dairy Queen.

“Financial stability is nice, but not all of us…are fortunate to have that,” Heidi added, noting:

There’s a lot of rich yuppies who just don’t understand. And I’m not saying this in a mean way. I have nothing against people who have money, because I want to be like that someday. But, a lot of people who are handed money just assume that life is easy and that that’s what you do after high school. You just go to college, and you meet somebody there, you get married. And in a realistic world, where your feet are on the ground and you work 40-hour jobs every week, you know…that’s just not always how it works.

Still in their early twenties, both Dan and Heidi hoped to attend college, and they figured that if they were married, they would have a better chance at receiving financial aid when they filled out the FAFSA. So they decided to forgo their original wedding plans and have a backyard wedding with close family and friends instead. Heidi found a white summer dress on sale in the prom section and Dan planned to wear a white polo shirt with dress pants.

According to Dan, they planned to eventually “renew our vows with a big ceremony and everything,” after they were able to save up more money. We heard this a few times from the white, working-class young adults my husband David and I interviewed. Sometimes, people would get married without much fuss, with plans to save for a large reception down the road. Whether or not that celebration ever happened, it’s a way to save face in a culture that expects a nice wedding to feel like a big party.

But two days before their wedding, Dan’s dad found out that he was scheduled to work and could not get off. (Yet another example of why fair scheduling matters.) The couple planned to proceed—they had hired a tattoo artist who was licensed to officiate and Heidi’s grandmother was in town to help with preparations. But, understandably, Dan’s father “freaked out.”

So they called off the wedding a second time. Frustrated, Heidi said she would not plan another wedding and honeymoon until they could save up $5,000 to “make sure it’s right the third time.”

“I’m not that girl who’s going to go way into debt for my wedding,” Heidi added. “That’s dumb. But, I understand spending a decent amount…saving a decent amount first and then spending a decent amount on it, because it’s a big step in your life.”

This was, it seemed to her, what Dan’s family preferred anyway.

Heidi explained that originally she and Dan preferred a courthouse marriage. “My family didn’t care. They were like, do whatever you want, go for it," she said. "But his family made it a huge deal, because he’s the first person of their kids getting married, and it’s just a huge deal to them.”

Others we interviewed mentioned the stigma of “going to the courthouse.” As one engaged and unemployed woman told us, “I don’t wanna go to the courthouse…I just want it to be a little bit better than that.” Another woman who married at the courthouse and later divorced said, “We actually just went through the courthouse, and really, it did not mean much.”

This may be because having friends and family present does seem to matter, perhaps indicating the level of social support surrounding a couple. The more guests a couple has at their wedding, the lower their likelihood of divorce. (It’s worth noting that the inverse is true when it comes to the cost of the wedding. The more expensive the wedding, the higher the likelihood that the couple will divorce.)

In other words, perhaps there is a sweet spot to be found in a large but affordable wedding. That’s what Heidi was aiming for, but with low-wage jobs, even saving several thousand dollars for a modest wedding can take years. Getting married legally is, as one young man put it, as easy as “going to buy a video game” or getting a burger from McDonald’s. But couples—often out of respect for what a “big deal” marriage is—understandably want to mark their marriages with a ceremony and a celebration. It’s just too bad that the bar is set so high.

A wedding cooperative wouldn’t come close to solving the problems facing working-class young adults as they transition to adulthood, but it could do some good by at least removing one barrier to marriage for some young couples.

To be clear, most of our interviewees swore up and down that they didn’t care about having an expensive wedding. Most saw “grandiose” weddings as “boastful” and “ridiculous.” In fact, couples like Dan and Heidi, who cited the cost of a wedding as the main reason they weren’t getting married, were the minority in our sample. Other couples pointed to troubles within the relationship itself—like trust issues, abuse, addiction, mental illness—as reasons they were not ready for marriage. And there was sometimes the belief that marriage is not an urgent priority because they were already living together and marriage wouldn’t change much (or could make the relationship worse).

But even if Dan and Heidi’s experience is not typical, neither is it uncommon. Working-class couples who are striving to enter into middle-class stability are sensitive to the norms around them. As such, we ought to think about how we might help couples who desire to get married but cannot afford what they perceive as a respectable wedding in our culture.

One possible response is to try to change those cultural norms. Next time you are at a wedding resist the urge to compare it to other weddings or to speculate about the budget. Rather than raise eyebrows at low-budget affairs, might we instead start to see it as distasteful when a couple spends more in a single day than what low-wage workers earn in an entire year?

Another approach is to try to help couples afford modest weddings. What if places of worship, businesses, and nonprofits partnered together to form wedding cooperatives? I don’t have a worked-out model for what this would look like, but I could imagine, for example, a well-intentioned photographer donating some volunteer hours once a year, or places of worship offering their spaces on a rotating schedule. Volunteers from organizations like the St. Vincent de Paul Society and Knights of Columbus could prepare a light luncheon reception following the wedding. Couples could be identified with the help of local nonprofits and could participate in a formal wedding preparation process in order to qualify. Part of the process could include the newly married couple volunteering to serve food or clean up at someone else’s wedding, which would make it more like a true cooperative and less of a social service. It would be important to do this in a way that avoids the stigma that courthouse weddings can have.

A wedding cooperative wouldn’t come close to solving the problems facing working-class young adults as they transition to adulthood, but it could do some good by at least removing one barrier to marriage for some young couples.

For those of us who like happy endings, I should add that Dan and Heidi did save up and have that wedding! They’ve now been married four years, are homeowners, and are working on their college degrees. Together, they’ve overcome a lot of obstacles, but the high cost of a wedding seems to me like an unnecessary roadblock to marriage—a challenge worth using our collective creativity to change.

Amber Lapp is a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, an Affiliate Scholar at the Institute for American Values, and co-investigator of the Love and Marriage in Middle America Project.

A recent international conference made one thing clear: the evidence is overwhelming that shared parenting, in general, and for most children, is superior to sole physical custody arrangements after parents separate. That was the consensus of 111 social science researchers and practitioners, who reached this conclusion in 2014, and the most recent research supports their conclusion.

What does this mean for family law? A very large international group of highly accomplished and prominent experts who reviewed the literature believe that science supports custody policy favoring shared parenting for children whose parents separate. This does not mean that the arrangement is for everyone, or that every professional supports the consensus viewpoint.

Professional recommendations and public policy necessarily deal with generalities. The fact that some smokers avoid health risks associated with smoking does not keep doctors from warning patients to stay away from cigarettes. The consensus on shared parenting explicitly acknowledges that the recommendation applies in normal circumstances and does not include, for example, parents who abuse or neglect their children. But the existence of children who need protection against abuse should not dictate policy for the majority of children being raised by parents who live apart from each other. Some commentators miss this point. Instead, they oppose shared parenting because they can think of situations in which children might be better off spending most of their time with only one parent.

A new argument resurrects a very old way of viewing child custody, where shared parenting can be denied to any parent who voluntarily walks away from a marriage, especially if this person was unfaithful. This proposal treats child custody as a parental entitlement, and the loss of custody as a punishment for bad behavior, much like common law in earlier centuries. But ever since the best-interest-of-the-child standard mandated a focus on children’s welfare instead of parents’ prerogatives, courts are not supposed to use decisions about parents’ time with their children as tools to reward or punish parents.

It might be argued that children’s interests are best served by spending less time with a parent whose moral and spiritual flaws contributed to the failure of the marriage—that children need protection from exposure to a toxic environment. We may forgive a betrayed spouse for temporarily feeling this way in the immediate aftermath of discovering a partner’s infidelity. But the argument that limiting children’s time with an adulterous parent is in their best interests has zero scientific support.

In fact, if the betrayed spouse is unable to keep his or her pain from polluting the child’s view of the other parent, the child might very well need protection from “divorce poison,” rather than protection from the adulterous spouse.

The proposal that adultery should be prima facie evidence of unfitness to share custody has several problems in addition to the lack of any research support. First, does the child lose a parent completely, or is some contact with a morally flawed parent acceptable? On what basis could we conclude that a child will be okay spending 25% of their daytime hours with a parent, but any more time than that, or overnights, will compromise the child’s development? Second, reducing infidelity to the adulterer’s moral flaws overlooks the fact that when a spouse is unfaithful in a marriage, often (but not always) the marriage itself was in trouble and the affair was the symptom of the underlying problems. That is, both spouses contributed to the marital problems. Third, and most important, do we want courts to use an award of sole custody to one parent as a punishment to the other parent for being a bad spouse? In other words, do we want courts to punish children for the sins of their parents?

Other opponents of public policy favoring shared parenting rely on unusual interpretations of research. For instance, a study by UVA professor Robert Emery and his student Samantha Tornello was widely reported as evidence that overnights with their fathers harm young children. What the press coverage did not report is that the majority of the children classified as spending frequent overnights with their fathers were actually living primarily with their fathers. And these children actually had superior behavior when assessed at age five—another fact left out of the media accounts. In fact, UVA’s press release incorrectly claimed that infants who spent at least one night per week away from their mothers had more insecure attachments than babies who saw their fathers only during the day. Fake news. (Also, the attachment measure used in that study is non-standard and invalid; the behavior measure is a standardized, valid instrument.) The press release overlooked the key finding of interest for those interested in whether shared parenting should become public policy: the children who did the best were those who spent the most time with their father.

In contrast to “nutpicking” worst case scenarios to show that shared parenting is bad for kids, denying custody as a punishment for infidelity, and bending the evidence to support a bias against fathers having overnights with their children, new trustworthy research continues to add to our knowledge about the long-term outcome for infants whose fathers care for them at night and in the mornings.

The clear-cut conclusion is that children of all ages—including babies—whose parents separate do best when they have the same opportunities to spend time with their fathers as do children whose parents live together. We have no good reason to postpone fathers’ overnight care until children enter kindergarten. This was the view of the 111 experts in 2014, and the widespread acceptance of their conclusions and recommendations for overnights and shared parenting remains supported by science.

Richard A. Warshak is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. He is the author of “Social Science and Parenting Plans for Young Children: A Consensus Report,” published in Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, and the books, Divorce Poison: How To Protect Your Family From Bad-mouthing and Brainwashing, and Welcome Back, Pluto: Understanding, Preventing, and Overcoming Parental Alienation. Find him on Facebook: @RichardAWarshak.

To what extent is social mobility a function of place, as opposed to people? In other words, can you improve a poor child’s life by moving his family to a better place? Or will that family just bring its disadvantages along for the ride?

Superstar economist Raj Chetty, working with assorted coauthors through his Equality of Opportunity Project, has gone all-in on the “place” theory. In a series of studies over the past few years, he’s produced empirical evidence that social environments matter. But a new paper by a trio of Chicago-based economists (Ryan Gallagher, Robert Kaestner, and Joseph Persky) challenges that view, advancing a “people”-based explanation for Chetty’s own data.

First, let’s briefly review Chetty’s work. In 2014, using highly sensitive tax-return data the IRS made specially available to him, he looked at kids whose parents were at the 25th percentile of income nationwide, producing estimates for each commuting zone and county as to how socially mobile those kids were. This study said relatively little about what these differences might mean, though it did note that levels of single parenthood, segregation, inequality, etc., correlated with decreased upward mobility.

A 2016 paper went a step further. It focused on families that moved, and showed that the longer kids lived in their new neighborhoods before adulthood, the more their outcomes matched those of their new peers. Chetty estimated that “at least 50% of the variation in intergenerational mobility across the U.S. reflects the causal effects of childhood exposure.”

The most compelling aspect of this second analysis was that it held up even among siblings, who share the exact same families and thus should “bring along” the exact same disadvantages from their old neighborhoods. Younger siblings, who spend more of their childhood years in the neighborhoods they move to, saw a bigger impact on their future mobility.

Okay, one might say. Parents who move are usually taking advantage of new job opportunities and the like, and the benefits trickle down to their kids. This doesn’t mean that we’ll see the same benefits if we start a government program to grab poor families at random and plop them down in richer areas.

But wait, there’s more! The study also deployed another “quasi-experimental” method, looking at “displacement shocks” in which people were abruptly forced to move (such as Hurricane Katrina), finding the same thing.

Furthermore, the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) project was set up as a true experiment, indeed, randomly offering poor families a voucher to help them move to a nicer area. Early studies showed it to be more or less a flop, with little to no effect on kids’ school performance or their parents’ economic success. But when Chetty got hold of it and looked up the kids (now adults) in his tax data, he found that the kids who’d relocated made almost $3,500 a year more and were more likely to attend college—so long as they’d moved before the age of 13. After that point, moving was, if anything, harmful.

I won’t lie about my biases: My own instincts favor “people” explanations over “place” ones, and I’m skeptical of any study based on data that hardly anyone but the authors is allowed to see. So I was primed to relish this new paper. But I ended up skeptical of it, too.

As I mentioned above, Chetty’s 2014 paper did report that areas’ mobility rates correlated with the characteristics of the families that lived in those areas, such as rates of single parenthood. The new study is basically a deeper dive into the concept of measuring how high- and low-mobility areas differ. Where Chetty looked at families at the 25th percentile of the nationwide income distribution, the new study uses the whole third decile (from the 20th percentile to the 30th), because they have to rely on a smaller data set from the Census.

The authors’ results on race are especially striking. The areas that Chetty says are best for mobility in the 2014 study are only 4% black, while the worst areas for mobility are 36% black (again, looking only at families in the third decile of income nationally). Gallagher et al. remark:

Alone, this striking nine-fold difference in racial composition suggests that spatial differences in AIIM [a measure of mobility] may be as much, if not more, about the characteristics of the low-income families themselves and their individual burdens, as it is about the actual places within which they reside.

Families in less upwardly-mobile areas also are less likely to include married parents and more likely to have adults with lower educational credentials, etc.

Source:  Ryan Gallagher, Robert Kaestner, and Joseph Persky, "The Geography of Family Differences and Intergenerational Mobility," 2017.¹

Then, the authors calculate the relationship between traits like these and economic mobility. (Again resorting to a data set much smaller than that available to Chetty, they use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth for this purpose, and this time, they look at parents from the entire lower half of the national income distribution.) They use the results to simulate mobility rates for the geographic areas they study. In other words, they look at the demographic mix of each area and ask: Based just on the demographics, how much mobility would we expect this population to have?

These simulated rates, based purely on readily measurable family characteristics — “people differences,” as opposed to “place differences” — seem to explain most of the area-to-area variation in social mobility that Chetty documented. “It seems reasonable to conclude that differences between places in intergenerational mobility would be even further reduced, perhaps to zero, with the addition of more family characteristics,” the authors add.

These results are interesting, but they raise some questions.

For one thing, how are we sure that these “people differences” aren’t really “place differences” at root? For example, kids in single-parent families have lower upward mobility, and that lower mobility factors into the authors’ simulations. But there’s no way to tell how much of the lower mobility results from the fact that these kids tend to live around other disadvantaged kids, as opposed to being a direct result of growing up with a single parent. This point holds especially for race, as even middle-income blacks live in much poorer neighborhoods than middle-income whites do.

In setting up their analysis, the authors themselves write that families’ characteristics might determine mobility “either directly or through their influence on an area’s institutional characteristics” (emphasis added). I would argue that this gives the entire game away—that areas’ “institutional characteristics” are a “place difference,” a reason that a given family, with given traits, might be better off in one place than another. The flipside, of course, is that if strong institutions depend on certain demographics, which is to say the presence of certain people, there’s a limit to how many disadvantaged families we can move into an area before we undermine the institutions themselves. So a lot hinges on the semantics here.

And what about Chetty’s one-two-three causal punch—his findings on siblings, displacement shocks, and the Moving to Opportunity experiment? They show compellingly that the same kids will fare differently in different places, a conclusion that Gallagher et al. don’t reject but cast some doubt on.

Regarding the study of movers based on IRS data, the authors point out that people who move are different from people who stay in place, and thus the results may not be applicable to non-movers. (This is the “external validity” critique.) They make the same point regarding MTO in a footnote: “external validity of the findings may again be an issue, as the experiment was conducted in only a few cities, only 40-48% of the children in ‘winning’ families actually took up the offered vouchers for moving to better neighborhoods, and movers were different from non-movers.”

And yet . . . if place seems to have an effect among (A) siblings within families that move of their own volition, (B) kids in families forced to move by “displacement shocks,” and (C) kids of poor parents who are randomly selected to receive a voucher and choose to take it, the argument that other kids might not see the same benefits starts to wear thin, no? Indeed, one study suggests that the MTO study might understate the potential value of relocation because the kids who’d benefit most from moving are the least likely to have parents who seek out the opportunity to participate in such programs.

Basically, at this point, Chetty has fully developed his argument that place matters, sanded down the rough edges, wrapped it up, and topped it with a pretty bow made of fabric woven from the entire country’s tax returns. So it’s nice to see someone take a swing at it, even if the blow doesn’t land squarely.

But what I would really like to see is for someone who’s naturally skeptical of Chetty’s results, with top-of-the-line statistical chops and an impeccable reputation for academic integrity, to get a crack at his data sets, especially the IRS records. Only then will we know if Chetty’s findings are simply the story the data tell or just one of many ways to spin the numbers.

— Robert VerBruggen is a deputy managing editor of National Review.

1. "All values are based on family-level observations (N = 118,857) provided by the U.S. Census’ 1990 PUMS file (5% sample). This sample is restricted to families with own children between the ages of 0-12 who have incomes within the 3rd decile of the national income distribution. The characteristics assigned to each family are based on those of the mother, if present, or those of the father if the mother is not present. Families with no mother or father present are omitted from the sample as are families with multiple mothers or fathers present. All values are calculated using sample weights. A family’s absolute upward mobility quintile is determined by assigning it to one of 897 counties or 'super' counties."

Meet the Out-of-Work
Marth Ross and Natalie Holmes, Brookings Institution

Sexual Activity and Contraceptive Use Among Teenagers in the United States: 2011-2015
Joyce C. Abma and Gladys M. Martinez, CDC: National Center for Health Statistics  

Registration Now Open for 25th Annual National Symposium on Family Issues
Brooke McCord, Penn State University

GOP Resolution Says Welfare Programs "Discourage Marriage"
 Pete Kasperowicz, Washington Examiner

State-Wide Fatherhood Program, The R3 Academy, Launches In July In The Inland Empire
Healthy Relationships California

I spot Beth, 30, and her husband Jim, 27, sitting in the back corner of Wendy’s, sipping soda. Jim greets us, and I can tell immediately that he has an eccentric flare—he is both a video game fanatic and a Southern gentleman. His longish dark brown hair, parted down the middle, flows outwards from the center part in a wave that matches his dark mustache, reminding me of Cogsworth in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. Beth, dressed in black dress pants, and a white and black sequined tunic, looks like she came straight from her job as a receptionist at a doctor’s office.

At the age of 18, Jim got a job pushing carts at a grocery store. Nine years later, he is still there but has worked his way up as a senior member of their systems team, where he takes care of all computer-related problems for the store. Though neither he nor Beth has a four-year college degree, they make enough to pay the bills and recently purchased a two-bedroom ranch in a small town in southwestern Ohio.

Jim says that in their first few years of marriage, though, they felt buried by debt, including wedding debt. “It’s like we started off—we had a fair amount of digging to do, but…we managed to dig our way out, at least as far as we’ve gotten.”

To accommodate a large extended family for their wedding, they rented a conference center big enough for their 210 guests. Beth’s parents, a technician for a cell phone company and a school cafeteria worker, helped out a lot but couldn’t cover everything, so Jim took out a loan somewhere between $2-4K to pay for the DJ and flowers and “just for breathing room until we started getting regular paychecks going again.” Beth opened a credit card to pay for her dress, and she put other wedding odds and ends on her other credit card.

“We probably should’ve looked at the numbers for the wedding—that whole mess—more than we did,” Jim says. “That was a mess—mercifully, all that’s behind us.”

As USA Today recently reported, in the last 10 years, the average cost of weddings has increased significantly, from $16,000 for an 110-guest wedding in 2006 to $28,000 in 2016, according to a comparison from online wedding planning site WeddingWire, which collected data from 15,000 couples. Average engagement length also jumped from eight months to 13 months, perhaps to give time for the more demanding planning required by increasingly personalized weddings. "Today, couples want to differentiate their weddings from others with themes and more customized events," USA Today notes. "While only 17% of couples had a theme for their wedding 10 years ago, today nearly 50% have a theme, while 1 in 4 has a personalized cocktail."

My younger sister got engaged a few weekends ago, with her thoughtful boyfriend planning a surprise proposal on the top of Cincinnati’s Carew Tower, followed by a gathering of friends and family who traveled from six different states to celebrate with the couple. But after the fun of the engagement weekend, the pressure of wedding planning hit with a shattering thud. My sister has never been one to dream of wedding details and wishes that she could instead have more time to focus on just learning to be a couple and preparing for marriage, as well as a related move to a new city and a transition to a new job. We expect young couples to have skills and expertise in large-scale event planning, when practicing more basic skills like household budgeting and relationship conflict resolution would be time better spent.

It’s a shame that cultural norms surrounding weddings have shifted so much in a generation. My parents, who married in the early 1980s recall that virtually everyone they knew got married in their church, followed by a small reception in the church basement with sandwiches and cake following the ceremony. Church ladies helped with the food and costs were minimal. There was even less ado about weddings in my grandparent’s generation, with some couples marrying in the church at the end of the usual Sunday morning service.

For working-class couples like Beth and Jim, the norm of extravagant weddings can be a stumbling block to marriage. For some couples that my husband David and I interviewed for the Love and Marriage in Middle America Project, it was a factor in the decision to postpone marriage, something which I’ll explore in detail in my next post.

Others proceeded with a wedding but got into debt in the process. Not everyone fared as well afterwards as Beth and Jim, who thankfully had other supports to both prepare them for marriage and help them get out of debt.Beth’s dad had insisted, much to the couple’s chagrin, that they do premarital counseling and recommended Les and Leslie Parrot’s Saving Your Marriage Before it Starts. Although they did it only to satisfy her father, Jim says he learned some helpful concepts through the process—including the idea that “People have to choose to be happy where you’re at.” The couple also enrolled in a Dave Ramsey course and credits that with helping them to keep a budget and pay down their debt.

About a month after they were married, Jim worried that he was “falling out of love” with Beth, and for a week battled internally about that. However, he came to the conclusion that “love comes in a variety of flavors”—different seasons call for different feelings, in other words—and says it hasn’t been an issue for him since. He says that he and Beth “are a great team,” and that he trusts her, and that they’re sensitive to each other’s feelings. They also try to have the same goals: for instance, buying a home and getting out of debt. In the end, he took the advice that he got from the Parrots and chose to be happy where he was at.

While wedding planning brought stress and debt, it seems that Beth and Jim’s marriage preparation was part of securing their commitment to one another. That is why premarital counseling is so important. If wedding planning is beginning to crowd out time and resources that could be better used helping couples actually prepare for marriage, it’s time for a new version of engagement—one that is driven less by commercial concerns and is more about establishing the kinds of supports most helpful to the couple in their new life together.

On June 20, IFS senior fellow W. Bradford Wilcox testified before the “Committee on Building an Agenda to Reduce the Number of Children in Poverty by Half in 10 Years,” an ad-hoc committee of experts convened by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to study child poverty in the United States. Below is an edited version of his testimony.

Many factors influence the persistence of comparatively high levels of child poverty in the United States—from relatively low spending on government transfers¹ to declines in real wages for men without college degrees.² But we cannot lose sight of the role that changes in family structure, especially among Americans without college degrees,³ have also played—first, in fueling increases in child poverty and, second, in keeping rates of child poverty higher than they should be.

Research by Robert Lerman of the Urban Institute⁴ and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution,⁵ among others, suggests the growth of child poverty from the 1970s to the 1990s was driven, in part, by the rise of single-parent families and family instability over this time period. For instance, in 1970, 12% of children lived with a single parent; by 1990, 25% of children lived with a single parent. Their work indicates that more than half of the increase in child poverty over this period can be attributed to the decline of stable marriage as an anchor to family life in America. Since then, the retreat from marriage has slowed, which means that family structure has been less salient in the ebb and flow of child poverty. Nevertheless, this research suggests that child poverty would be markedly lower in the United States if more American parents were stably married.

In fact, the continuing relevance of marriage to economic well-being can be seen in two recent studies, both of which suggest that marriage per se is strongly related to poverty. My own recent research with the Institute for Family Study’s Wendy Wang indicates that Millennials who have formed a family by marrying first are significantly less likely to be poor than Millennials who have formed a family by having a child before or outside of marriage. After controlling for education, race, ethnicity, family-of-origin income, and a measure of intelligence/knowledge (AFQT scores), we find that Millennials who married before having any children are about 60% less likely to be poor than their peers who had a child out of wedlock. In fact, as shown in the figure below, 95% of Millennials who married first are not poor by the time they are in their late twenties or early thirties. So, even for the latest generation of young adults, it looks like marriage continues to matter.

Given the trends for adults noted above, it is no surprise that children from single-parent families are more likely to be poor than children from married-parent families. For instance, as the figure below indicates, since the 1970s, children in single-mother-headed families (who make up the clear majority of single-parent families) are over four times more likely to be poor, compared to children in married-parent families.⁶ And because more than one-quarter of American children are in single-parent families, this elevates the child poverty rate above what it would otherwise be if more children were living in married-parent families. Sawhill’s research suggests that if the share of children in female-headed families had remained steady at the 1970 level of 12.0%, then the 2013 child poverty rate would be at 16.4%, rather than a rate of 21.3%.⁷ In other words, the current child poverty rate would be cut by almost one-quarter if the nation enjoyed 1970-levels of married parenthood.

In addressing marriage, family structure, and child poverty now, one additional point needs to be made. Today, a rising share of children are being raised by cohabiting parents. In 2014, 7% of children were living in homes headed by cohabiting parents.⁸ Might these children benefit financially as much as children from married-parent families by living with two adults?

The answer is no. Not only are cohabiting parents less likely to pool their income and put aside money for family savings, they are also much more likely to split up than are married parents.⁹ One recent study finds, for instance, that children born to cohabiting parents are almost twice as likely to see their parents break up, compared to children born to married parents, even after controlling for a number of socioeconomic factors.¹⁰ This means that children in cohabiting families are more likely to end up in single-parent families or complex families without both their biological parents, which increases their risk of being in poverty.¹¹ All this suggests that cohabitation does not protect children from poverty as much as marriage does.

Why Marriage Matters for Economic Well-Being

Why does marriage matter for the economic well-being of children? First, children raised by their married parents are much more likely to enjoy access to the economic support of their father over the course of their childhood, compared to children raised by single or cohabiting parents.¹² Second, married parents are more likely to enjoy economies of scale, compared to single parents, and to pool their income, compared to other types of families.¹³ Third, stably married parents who do not have children with other partners do not incur child support obligations or legal expenses related to family dissolution that reduce their household income.

Overall, the economic value of marriage for children should not be underestimated. One recent study suggests that having stably married parents is worth about an extra $40,000 in annual family income to children while growing up, compared to children being raised by a single parent.¹⁴

Unfortunately, despite the economic value of marriage for children—not to mention its social, educational, and psychological value¹⁵ —marriage has been in retreat since the 1970s, especially among poor and working-class families. In fact, there is a growing marriage divide, such that children from college-educated families continue to enjoy high levels of family stability, whereas children from less-educated families face higher levels of family instability and single parenthood.¹⁶ For instance, as the figure below indicates, the share of children with less-educated mothers living in single-parent homes has grown steadily since the 1960s, whereas it has actually fallen for children of college-educated mothers since the 1990s.¹⁷ This leaves many children in less-educated homes doubly disadvantaged—they have markedly less income, along with less time and attention from their parents than children in more affluent and college-educated homes.¹⁸

What’s Driving the Marriage Divide?

The growing marriage divide is driven in large part by four developments. First, men without college degrees have seen their real wages decline and spells of unemployment increase, both of which make them less attractive as marriage partners.¹⁹ Second, changes in public policy and law have made marriage less financially advantageous, especially for lower-income Americans who often face marriage penalties associated with a range of means-tested policies offered by the federal government.²⁰ Third, the erosion of marriage-related norms governing sex, childbearing, and marital permanence, along with the rise of a soulmate model of marriage that increases men and women’s expectations for high-quality marriages, has left lower-income Americans more vulnerable to premarital childbearing, family instability, and divorce—partly because they face fewer opportunity costs for having children out of wedlock, and partly because they face more economic stresses that can undercut the quality of their marriages.²¹ Finally, civic participation has fallen most among Americans without college degrees; this matters because civic groups—especially religious organizations—have long lent moral and social support to marriage and family life.²²

Policy Recommendations

To bridge the marriage divide between less-educated and college-educated Americans, and thereby reduce child poverty, policymakers, business executives, philanthropists, civic leaders, educators, and culture shapers should consider the following four recommendations:

1. On the educational front, strengthen vocational education and apprenticeship programs, so as to increase the vocational opportunities of the majority of young adults who will not get a four-year college degree.²³
2. On the policy front, work to minimize marriage penalties facing lower-income families, perhaps by offering newly married Americans a “honeymoon” period of three years where their eligibility for means-tested programs would not end if they marry—so long as their household income is below a threshold of $55,000.
3. On the cultural front, launch local, state, and federal campaigns on behalf of what Haskins and Sawhill have called the “success sequence,”²⁴ where young adults are encouraged to get at least a high school degree, work full-time, and marry before having any children—in that order.
4. On the civic front, encourage secular and religious organizations to be more deliberate about targeting Americans without college degrees.

The alternative to taking measures like these is to accept a world where college-educated Americans enjoy stable and strong families, and the economic benefits that flow from such families, and everyone else faces increasingly unstable families and high rates of economic insecurity and poverty.

W. Bradford Wilcox is a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.  

1. Rainwater, Lee and Timothy M. Smeeding. 2005. Poor Kids in a Rich Country: America’s Children in Comparative Perspective. New York: Russell Sage.

2. Autor, David, and Melanie Wasserman. 2013. Wayward Sons: The Emerging Gender Gap in Education and Labor Markets. Washington, DC: Third Way.

3. Cherlin, Andrew J. 2009. The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today. New York: Vintage. Wilcox, W. Bradford. 2010. State of Our Unions 2010: When Marriage Disappears: The New Middle America. National Marriage Project and Institute for American Values.

4. Lerman, Robert. 1996. Helping Disconnected Youth by Improving Linkages Between High Schools and Careers. Washington, DC: Urban Institute.

5. Sawhill, Isabel and Adam Thomas. 2005. “For Love and Money? The Impact of Family Structure on Family Income.” The Future of Children 15(2): 57-74.

6. Haskins, Ron. 2015. "The Family is Here to Stay—or Not." The Future of Children 25(2): 129-153.

7. Sawhill, Isabel. 2014. How Marriage and Divorce Impact Economic Opportunity. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

8. Pew Research Center. 2015. Parenting in America: Outlook, Worries, Aspirations are Strongly Linked to Financial Situation. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.

9. Wilcox, W. Bradford. Et al. 2011. Why Marriage Matters: 30 Conclusions from the Social Sciences. New York: Institute for American Values and National Marriage Project.

10. DeRose, Laurie, Mark Lyons-Amos, W. Bradford Wilcox, and Gloria Huarcaya. 2017. The Cohabitation Go Round. New York: Social Trends Institute and Institute for Family Studies.

11. McLanahan, Sara. 2009. "Fragile Families and the Reproduction of Poverty." The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 621(1): 111-131.

12. Sawhill, Isabel and Adam Thomas. 2005. “For Love and Money? The Impact of Family Structure on Family Income.” The Future of Children 15(2): 57-74.

13. Wilcox, W. Bradford. Et al. 2011. Why Marriage Matters: 30 Conclusions from the Social Sciences. New York: Institute for American Values and National Marriage Project.

14. Lerman, Robert, Joseph Price, and W. Bradford Wilcox. 2017. "Family Structure and Economic Success Across the Life Course." Marriage & Family Review: 1-15.

15. McLanahan, Sara, and Isabel Sawhill. 2015. "Marriage and Child Wellbeing Revisited: Introducing the Issue." The Future of Children 25(2): 3-9.

16. Wilcox, W. Bradford. 2010. State of Our Unions 2010: When Marriage Disappears: The New Middle America. National Marriage Project and Institute for American Values.

17. Putnam, Robert D. 2015. Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. New York: Simon and Schuster.

18. McLanahan, Sara. 2004. “Diverging Destinies: How Children are Faring Under the Second Demographic Transition.” Demography 41: 607-627. Putnam, Robert D. 2015. Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. New York: Simon and Schuster

19. Autor, David, and Melanie Wasserman. 2013. Wayward Sons: The Emerging Gender Gap in Education and Labor Markets. Washington, DC: Third Way. Wilcox, W. Bradford. 2010. State of Our Unions 2010: When Marriage Disappears: The New Middle America. National Marriage Project and Institute for American Values.

20. Besharov, Douglas and Neil Gilbert. 2015. Marriage Penalties in the Modern Welfare State. Washington, DC: R Street Institute. Wilcox, W. Bradford, Joseph P. Price, and Angela Rachidi. 2016. Marriage, Penalized: Does Social-Welfare Policy Affect Family Formation? Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute and Institute for Family Studies.

21. Cherlin, Andrew J. 2009. The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today. New York: Vintage. Edin, Kathryn, and Maria Kefalas. 2011. Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wilcox, W. Bradford. 2010. State of Our Unions 2010: When Marriage Disappears: The New Middle America. National Marriage Project and Institute for American Values.

22. Wilcox, W. Bradford. 2010. State of Our Unions 2010: When Marriage Disappears: The New Middle America. National Marriage Project and Institute for American Values.

23. Lerman, Robert I. 2014. Proposal 7: Expanding Apprenticeship Opportunities in The United States. Washington, DC: Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution.

24. Haskins, Ron and Isabel Sawhill. 2009. Creating an Opportunity Society. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

What is the most beneficial parenting plan for children after their parents separate or divorce? Are children better off living primarily or exclusively with one parent in sole physical custody (SPC) and spending varying amounts of time with their other parent? Or are their outcomes better when they live with each parent at least 35% of the time in a joint physical custody/shared parenting (JPC) family? Furthermore, is JPC beneficial when parents have high, ongoing conflict? In fact, isn’t shared parenting only chosen by, and suitable for, a very select group of parents—those with higher incomes, lower conflict, and more cooperative relationships who mutually and voluntarily agree to share from the outset?

To answer these questions, I reviewed 54 studies that compared children’s outcomes in shared and sole physical custody families independent of family income and parental conflict. In another recent study, I examined all the studies that compared levels of conflict and quality of co-parenting relationships between the two groups of parents. Ten findings emerged from my research, many of which refute commonly held beliefs that can lead to custody decisions that are often not in children’s best interests.

1. In the 54 studies—absent situations in which children needed protection from an abusive or negligent parent even before their parents separated—children in shared-parenting families had better outcomes than children in sole physical custody families. The measures of well-being included: academic achievement, emotional health (anxiety, depression, self-esteem, life satisfaction), behavioral problems (delinquency, school misbehavior, bullying, drugs, alcohol, smoking), physical health and stress-related illnesses, and relationships with parents, stepparents, and grandparents.

2. Infants and toddlers in JPC families have no worse outcomes than those in SPC families. Sharing overnight parenting time does not weaken young children’s bonds with either parent.

3. When the level of parental conflict was factored in, JPC children still had better outcomes across multiple measures of well-being. High conflict did not override the benefits linked to shared parenting, so JPC children’s better outcomes cannot be attributed to lower parental conflict.

4. Even when family income was factored in, JPC children still had better outcomes. Moreover, JPC parents were not significantly richer than SPC parents.

5. JPC parents generally did not have better co-parenting relationships or significantly less conflict than SPC parents. The benefits linked to JPC cannot be attributed to better co-parenting or to lower conflict.

6. Most JPC parents do not mutually or voluntarily agree to the plan at the outset. In the majority of cases, one parent initially opposed the plan and compromised as a result of legal negotiations, mediation, or court orders. Yet in these studies, JPC children still had better outcomes than SPC children.

7. When children are exposed to high, ongoing conflict between their parents, including physical conflict, they do not have any worse outcomes in JPC than in SPC families. Being involved in high, ongoing conflict is no more damaging to children in JPC than in SPC families.

8. Maintaining strong relationships with both parents by living in JPC families appears to offset the damage of high parental conflict and poor co-parenting. Although JPC does not eliminate the negative impact of frequently being caught in the middle of high, ongoing conflict between divorced parents, it does appear to reduce children’s stress, anxiety, and depression.

9. JPC parents are more likely to have detached, distant,  and “parallel” parenting relationships than to have “co-parenting” relationships where they work closely together, communicate often, interact regularly, coordinate household rules and routines, or try to parent with the same parenting style.

10. No study has shown that children whose parents are in high legal conflict or who take their custody dispute to court have worse outcomes than children whose parents have less legal conflict and no custody hearing.

These findings refute a number of popular myths about shared parenting. One among many examples is a 2013 study from the University of Virginia that was reported in dozens of media outlets around the world under frightening headlines such as: “Spending overnights away from mom weakens infants’ bonds.” In the official press release, the researchers stated that their study should guide judges’ decisions about custody for children under the age of four. In fact, however, the study is not in any way applicable to the general population. The participants were impoverished, poorly-educated, non-white parents who had never been married or lived together, had high rates of incarceration, drug abuse, and violence, and had children with multiple partners. Moreover, there were no clear relationships between overnighting and children’s attachments to their mothers.

My review of 54 studies on shared parenting finds that, independent of parental conflict and family income, children in shared physical custody families—with the exception of situations where children need protection from an abusive or negligent parent—have better outcomes across a variety of measures of well-being than do children in sole physical custody. Knowledge and understanding of these findings allow us to dismantle some of the myths surrounding shared parenting so we can better serve the interests of the millions of children whose parents are no longer living together.

Dr. Linda Nielsen is a professor of Adolescent and Educational Psychology at Wake Forest University. She has written numerous articles on shared parenting research and is frequently called upon to share the research with legislative committees and family court professionals. For copies of her research articles contact nielsen@wfu.edu.

Sex—who does it, how often, and with whom—occupies a central place in the public imagination. And rightly so: Sex plays an important role in the quality and stability of men and women’s lives and relationships. Politics are also on our mind a lot, especially given an era of mega-partisanship and a uniquely divisive president in office. Our two parties offer divergent views about the role of sex in American society. Does this translate into different sexual behavior for Democrats and Republicans?

Previously in this blog, W. Bradford Wilcox and I described political differences in family life: Republicans tend to have happier marriages than do Democrats. We showed this finding could be explained by two factors, race and church attendance. On average, whites have happier marriages than African Americans, and the former are much more likely to be Republicans. Republicans are also more likely to be churchgoers, which in turn leads to happier relationships.

This finding left me curious about how specific components of relational bliss might be affected by political leanings. The answer is surprising: Republicans have more sex than Democrats and cheat less on their spouses. Political independents have sex even more often than Republicans but cheat at the same rate Democrats do. Republican sexual frequency is entirely explained by the fact that they’re more likely to be married than are Democrats. On the other hand, there’s no obvious explanation for the partisan difference in adultery.

I explore the effects of party ID on sexual behavior using 25 years of data from the General Social Survey, an omnibus survey that’s been conducted annually or biennially since 1972. I rely on a somewhat vague question about sex: “About how often did you have sex during the last 12 months?” This may or may not refer to vaginal intercourse, but that probably doesn’t matter much for the non-procreative benefits of sexual activity. Slightly over half (53%) of my sample reports having sex at least once a week.

As Figure 1 shows, this is especially likely to be true for independents and Republicans. My baseline statistical model controls for basic demographic differences between respondents: age, race/ethnicity, sex, and the calendar year the survey was completed. The results show that independents and Republicans are, respectively, 22% and 11% more likely to have weekly sex compared to Democrats (in other words, independents have the most sex and Democrats have the least). The absolute differences in sexual frequency aren’t large—only a few percentage points—but they are large enough to be statistically significant.

Note: * indicates the gap in sexual frequency between Republicans or independents and Democrats is statistically significant.

The more active sex lives of Republicans are entirely the product of political differences in marriage: married Americans are more likely to be Republicans, and anyone with a live-in relationship has more sex than does an otherwise comparable single person.

It’s harder to understand why independents have more sex than do their peers without stronger partisan leanings. Socioeconomic status (SES)—measured by education, employment, and family income—accounts for about a third of the independent-Democrat sex gap. Further analysis indicates that education is the component of SES most responsible for the gap. Why might that be? Weirdly, Americans with four-year college degrees are far less likely to have weekly sex—about a quarter less likely, according to the GSS—and independents are less likely to have college degrees than are either Democrats or Republicans. There is certainly a lot to think about here, but in short, education is part of the story behind sexually-active independents.

Even after adjusting for differences in relationship status—single, married, cohabiting—and SES, independents are still more likely to have weekly sex than are Democrats or, for that matter, Republicans. What gives? Political science suggests that a relatively small number of independents are probably responsible. Published 25 years ago, The Myth of the Independent Voter showed that most independents are really just crypto-partisans in their beliefs. As such, we would expect them to behave more like either Democrats or Republicans. True independents, small in numbers, are generally detached from political beliefs, let alone political participation. Why these independents may be especially sexually active awaits future inquiry.

It’s not that much easier to understand the strong effects of party identification on marital infidelity. Democrats and independents cheat on their spouses at equal rates, but Republicans have starkly lower rates of infidelity. Controlling only for survey year and basic demographic differences between respondents (age, sex, race/ethnicity), Republicans have 23% lower odds of cheating than do Democrats. The adultery gap between independents and Republicans is nearly as large.

Note: * indicates that the gap in extramarital sex between Republicans and Democrats is statistically significant.

Measured respondent attributes can explain approximately half of the partisan gap in infidelity. Socioeconomic status doesn’t make any appreciable difference, but marital status and church attendance do matter. Marital status measures whether respondents remain in potentially adulterous marriages at the time of the survey (obviously, adulterous marriages are far more likely to dissolve). Given the strong association between marital status and party identification, it’s not surprising that current marital status can help explain the association between political beliefs and being in or having been in an adulterous union. Church attendance also has predictable effects on the relationship between adultery and party ID. Republicans go to church more, and churchgoers cheat less.

Last year, Bradley Wright looked at adultery by political orientation on this blog. He didn’t conduct multivariate analysis in an attempt to understand why Democrats cheat more, but nevertheless shed some light on the topic: the political gap in adultery is driven by the 31% of party affiliates who consider themselves “strong” Democrats. It’s not impossible that some of these Democrats might have different ideas about sex than other Americans. This speculation is abetted by the broad General Social Survey measure of extramarital sex: “Have you ever had sex with someone other than your husband or wife while you were married?” Although this probably means adultery the vast majority of the time, the wording doesn’t rule out polyamory or other forms of consensual nonmonogamy.

No authoritative estimate of nonmonogamous relationships in the United States exists. On the basis of extrapolation, one researcher estimated a consensually nonmonogamous population of 9.8 million. Based on my decades as an American family scholar, I’m inclined to view that figure as a ceiling. Even if it’s several times too high, it still implies that a small but noteworthy percentage of Americans would be producing what amounts to falsely positive results if the GSS is presumed to be measuring adultery per se.

Could this be contributing to the propensity for higher rates of extramarital sex among strongly partisan Democrats? I have no way of knowing with these data, but it’s certainly possible. But it’s not the whole story. In the unlikely event there really are almost 10 million polyamorous Americans, it’s still not enough to explain the partisan gap in extramarital sex (indeed, presumably some polyamorists are Republicans). Finally, I shouldn’t overlook the most basic explanation: Republicans might be simply more inclined to lie about adultery than Democrats. More insight here could be gained from a survey that asked both spouses about their politics and their sexual behavior.

Very few of us would deny that sex is important in myriad ways. It’s a noteworthy component of satisfaction in romantic relationships. To this end, this blog post is an incremental contribution to the scientific literature on relationship satisfaction. It also speaks to our understanding of partisan differences in our politically riven country. To this end, the actual findings here—particularly more independent sex and less Republican cheating—say less about sex in and of itself than about considerably more amorphous differences between Red and Blue America.

Nicholas H. Wolfinger is Professor of Family and Consumer Studies and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University of Utah. His most recent book is Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage among African Americans and Latinos, coauthored with W. Bradford Wilcox (Oxford University Press, 2016). Follow him on Twitter at @NickWolfinger.

Notes: Results expressed as odds ratios. Data are weighted to make sample nationally representative.
Standard errors adjust for clustering and other design effects. Source: General Social Survey, 1989-2016; N = 28,768

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Notes: Results expressed as odds ratios. Data are weighted to make sample nationally representative.
Standard errors adjust for clustering and other design effects. Source: General Social Survey, 1991-2016. N = 19,605.

What the Research Says About Dad and How One BYU Researcher Dad Tries to Live Up to It
Lois Collins, Deseret News

Are Commuter Marriages Healthy?
Anna Medaris Miller, U.S. News & World Report

Progress in Women's Well-Being Stalled in Recent Generations
Population Reference Bureau

Elder Care is a Looming Crisis: Hawaii is Facing it Headon
Christina Cauterucci, Slate

6 Facts About American Fathers
Kim Parker & Gretchen Livingston, Pew Research Center

For Regina R. Robertson, the journey to publishing her new book, He Never Came Home: Interviews, Stories, and Essays from Daughters on Life Without Their Fathers (out this week from Agate Publishing), began 15 years ago, early in her journalism career, when the features editor of Honey magazine advised her to “write what you know.” Regina, who is now the West Coast editor of Essence magazine, had grown up without her father, so she decided to write about that. Instead of focusing on her own story, though, she interviewed three fatherless women, which resulted in her first national story, “Where’s Daddy?” being published. But after the article ran, she began hearing from several female friends and colleagues who wanted to know why she had not interviewed them about their experiences with father loss.

“That was the first time I realized that there were many more women out there who had stories to tell,” Regina says. That realization eventually led to He Never Came Home, a collection of 22 essays and interviews from women of different ages, races, religions, and social classes who share one thing in common: they lost their fathers to abandonment, divorce, or death.¹

Recently, I had the opportunity to talk with Regina about the book, her hopes for it, and what she learned about fathers and daughters from the women who were brave enough to share their stories of father loss, longing, and healing. 

Alysse ElHage: What’s striking about your book is how women from a variety of backgrounds experienced the absence or loss of their fathers in similar ways. What were some of the similar themes you heard from the women who contributed to the book?

Regina Robertson: One of my primary goals with creating this anthology was to include women from all walks of life. Writing and editing the stories showed me how similar so many of us are, no matter where we grew up, the name of our God, or our financial standing.

For a few women, the question of their worth came into play when trying to understand why their father wasn’t present or didn’t show up when he promised. For the daughters of divorced parents, there seemed to be such a longing for life to return to what it once was, especially after being told by one, or both, parents that things wouldn’t change so much. And for the daughters whose fathers have died, there was a sense of sadness, of course, as well as questions about what might have been.

Our experiences shape who we are, and although each contributor’s circumstance is different, every woman featured in the book is dealing with issues of loss. That was the main thread.

Alysse ElHage: When the book arrived in my mailbox a few weeks ago, the story I was most looking forward to reading was yours. You previously shared with me the details about never knowing your father and then learning about his death, and how that made you feel. Share with us a little bit of your story—how difficult was it for you to write about your own loss in the book?

Regina Robertson: At times, it seems so odd to say that I never met my father, but that’s the truth. That is a fact of my life. As an adult, I know that’s not normal, though. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be.

I wrote the first draft about seven years ago and spent quite a bit of time editing, tweaking, and over-thinking it. Along with including that first draft in my book proposal (which was rejected several times, of course!), I tried submitting it to a few women’s magazines in the hopes of gaining some interest. Some magazine editors didn’t respond at all. Others wanted me to rework the piece, yet again. But there was one editor who replied, “This is an interesting, moving essay—and, I know, a difficult one to write.” While my essay never ran in a magazine, getting that feedback let me know that I was on to something.

Once I signed the book deal, I figured I’d just “punch up” my story when I was done with the rest. During the process, I learned that my father died, and while I know it might be hard to believe, I didn’t have much of a reaction. Because I didn’t know him, it was like hearing that a stranger had died. It still feels that way.

So, my essay went from needing to be “punched up,” to needing to be reworked to include his death. Also, because I asked my contributors to be honest—whether they wrote their own stories or if I did the interviewing, writing, and editing—I knew that I had to be honest, too. So, I just spoke my truth.

At times, it seems so odd to say that I never met my father, but...that is a fact of my life. As an adult, I know that’s not normal, though. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be. 

Alysse ElHage: You’ve described He Never Came Home as a book that's about more than just the sadness of father loss but also about healing. Give us some examples of how the women featured in the book overcame father loss and started on the path to healing?

Regina Robertson: There is some sadness on the pages of the book, but there’s also a lot of hope and triumph. For many of the contributors, there seems to have been a moment of awakening—a moment when each woman made a conscious choice to accept the past and move forward with life. For some of the women, prayer has been the balm. For others, therapy has been helpful. Overall, I’d say that time has served (or is still serving) everyone well. Time is essential to the healing process.

Alysse ElHage: As you worked on this book, what did you learn about the importance of fathers in the lives of girls that perhaps you were not aware of before?

Regina Robertson: Speaking with the women whose fathers are deceased was quite eye-opening. From them, I learned what it meant for the first man in a girl’s life to not only love and cherish her but also have dreams for her. Because that was not my experience, I was especially moved by many of those stories.

Many of those women had such vivid memories of their fathers—from the smell of his cologne, the jewelry he wore, or even the fact that he was the world’s best tickler. And although they’re still grappling with grief, they also carry so much of the hope and love bestowed upon them by their fathers. It was amazing to hear about how much they loved their dads and all of the beautiful reasons why.

Alysse ElHage: Who do you hope will read He Never Came Home—who is your target audience?

Initially, I wanted to write the book that I wished I’d had as a teenager. My plan was to focus on women who were abandoned by their fathers, but over time, that idea expanded to include women who’d lost their fathers via divorce and death. Overall, I wanted the book to follow the journey of the fatherless woman, no matter the reason for his absence.

Having the conversation about a parent who is not present isn’t the easiest conversation to have. Perhaps these stories can also offer single mothers a peek into the thoughts and feelings that their daughters might be experiencing. I’d be honored if the book served at the first step toward getting that conversation started.

Alysse ElHage: I think it’s also a great book for fathers—especially divorced or unmarried dads who often have to navigate a number of obstacles to stay involved in their kids' lives, and who may wonder, at times, whether all the extra effort is worth it. 

Regina Robertson: Honestly, I’ve been very surprised by the reactions I’ve heard from men—some of whom are fathers, others are not. I spoke with one man who said that reading the stories made him want to be a better man. I’ve also been told that the book will make men aware of the ways in which their absences and actions affect their daughters in the long run.

I think the book is important for dads because the stories shed light on how necessary their presence is. As actress Regina King stated so eloquently in her essay, “Redefining Family”: "A lot of people think that girls need their mothers and boys need their fathers, but kids need both of their parents. Girls need their dads in their lives for so many reasons. There are certain things about life and relationships that only a father can teach his daughter."

1. I had the honor of contributing an essay to He Never Came Home.

Millennials are taking longer than previous generations to reach two traditional milestones of adulthood: marriage and parenthood. Not only are young adults delaying marriage longer, but they are more likely to cohabit and have children outside of marriage, often in cohabiting unions. And as Pew reported a few years ago, Millennials are less likely than older generations to connect marriage to parenthood, particularly when it comes to child well-being.

But how does the order of marriage and parenthood in Millennials’ lives—or whether young adults marry before having children or have children before marriage—affect their future financial success? A new report released today by the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) tackles that question and finds that Millennials who pursue a sequence of steps that include putting marriage before parenthood are more likely to be on track to achieving the American Dream.

The report, The Millennial Success Sequence: Marriage, Kids, and the “Success Sequence” among Young Adults, was authored by IFS research director Wendy Wang and IFS senior fellow W. Bradford Wilcox. They analyzed Bureau of Labor Statistics panel data on young adults born between 1980 and 1984. They found that Millennials who follow the “Success Sequence” (earn at least a high school degree, get a job, and marry before having children—in that order) are significantly more likely to avoid poverty and be on a path to financial success than those who do not. In fact, the overwhelming majority (97%) of Millennials who follow the “success sequence” are not poor by the time they reach ages 28-34.

As the figure below indicates, 86% of Millennials who either followed all three steps, or are “on track” to do so, are in the middle or top income groups in their prime adult years (ages 28-34). However, only 29% of young adults who missed all three steps are in the middle or higher-income groups. (In the study, “on track” is defined as “those who have no children and are unmarried by ages 28-34, but have followed the education and work steps.”)

That education and hard work are linked to better financial outcomes in adulthood is perhaps a no-brainer for most of us, but in a society with increasing cohabitation and unmarried parenthood, the link between marriage and financial well-being is not quite as clear. It’s a particularly hard sell for young adults, who, as noted earlier, are more likely to cohabit and have children before or outside of marriage.

Indeed, the report finds that 55% of Millennial parents had their first child outside of marriage—more than double the share of Baby Boomers when they were young adults. Although 25% of these Millennial parents married after the baby was born, 30% did not.

But getting married before having children is as essential to young adults’ future financial success as following the education and work steps, according to Wilcox and Wang, who note: “Millennials’ economic fortunes differ depending on which comes first in their lives: marriage or parenthood.”

They found that Millennials who marry before having children are twice as likely to be in the middle or upper-income groups as those who have children outside of marriage, even after controlling for factors like race/ethnicity, education, and family income growing up.

The figure below shows that 36% of "marriage-first" Millennials are in the middle-income bracket when they reach adulthood, and 50% are in the top third. But almost half of young adults who had a baby before or outside of marriage are in the bottom third of the income distribution.

The strong link between economic success and married parenthood holds for Millennials from all racial/ethnic and family income backgrounds—especially non-white adults. As the report explains:

Among black young adults, those who married before having children are almost twice as likely as those who had a baby first to be in the middle or upper-income groups (76% vs. 39%). In contrast, white Millennials who followed the ‘marriage first’ sequence are about 1.5 times more likely to achieve financial success as their counterparts who had a baby first (87% vs. 60%).

Having a baby within marriage is also a key to avoiding poverty (see figure below). In fact, the report notes that getting married before having a first child reduces the odds that young adults will be in poverty by a striking 60% (compared to having a baby first).

So, what is it about marriage that helps boost the odds of financial success for young adults? According to Wilcox and Wang, “Stable marriage seems to foster economies of scale, income pooling, and greater work effort from men, and to protect adults from the costs of multiple partner fertility and family instability.”

They conclude the report with several policy recommendations aimed at making the “three pillars of the American Dream” (education, work, and marriage) more “attractive” and accessible to young people, especially those from lower-income families. Importantly, this includes the development of public and private social marketing campaigns promoting marriage and the "success sequence" to youth.

Such a campaign seems to be particularly timely, considering Millennials' desire for more direction on how to form healthy relationships. As we reported last week, a recent Harvard survey found that 70% of young adults wish they had received more information and guidance about finding lasting love from their parents (presumably this would include marriage). A strong and consistent message on how following the “success sequence,” including delaying parenthood until marriage, is linked to their economic well-being just might be a message that young adults are ready to hear. And given the myriad of benefits of married parenthood for adults, children, and society that extend beyond financial success—including success in school and greater family stability—it is certainly a message Millennials and younger generations need to hear.

In a recent study, economists Leonardo Bursztyn, Thomas Fujiwara, and Amanda Pallais posed an interesting question: “Do single women avoid career-enhancing actions because the actions signal undesirable traits, like ambition, to the marriage market?”

The researchers were interested in examining how ambitious young women deal with the “trade-off” of career and marriage: the trade-off being that certain actions and traits could be an asset to a woman’s career and help her towards professional success, while at the same time could potentially hurt her chances in the marriage market.

There is some evidence to support this position. A 2006 study involving speed dating found that most men preferred women who were less professionally ambitious than they were. Additionally, other studies suggest that men are more likely to avoid relationships with women who have achieved higher education levels than themselves or women with a higher position in the workplace. Conversely, another recent study found that higher-educated women still prefer to marry men who make more money than they do.

Bursztyn, Fujiwara, and Pallais conducted their investigation at an unnamed “elite U.S. MBA program.” This setting was ideal because, as the authors point out, many young people in graduate school are not only working towards professional success but are also at the point in life where they’re seeking a future spouse.

The first part of the experiment looked at how single women expressed their ambition when they were in full view of their classmates, including single men. Questionnaires were passed out to the students, asking questions regarding desired compensation, the number of hours they were willing to work, and about their willingness to travel. Students were also asked to rate their leadership abilities and professional ambition. In one group, the students were told that these answers would be seen only by the career services department, while the other group was told that they would be discussing their answers in class. Students were told that this information would be used in placing them in important summer internships.

The results were compelling. When the single female students believed that their answers would only be viewed by a career counselor, they responded similarly to the married women in the program. However, when they thought their answers would be discussed in class, single women’s answers were markedly different. According to the authors:

They lowered their desired yearly compensation from $131,000 to $113,000, on average, and reduced their willingness to travel from 14 days per month to 7 days. They also reported wanting to work four fewer hours per week. Finally, they reported significantly lower levels of professional ambition and tendency to lead.

The second part of the experiment asked students to make choices about hypothetical jobs and choose which job they would prefer. Students were told that they would discuss their answers in groups of their peers—some groups were entirely female and some included men and women.

When placed in all female groups, 68% of the single female students reported that they would prefer a job that paid a higher salary and required 55–60 hours of work per week to a position that required a lower salary and fewer hours. However, when placed in a mixed group, only 42% of the single women chose the higher-earning option.

From these findings, the researchers drew the expected conclusions. “Single women are changing their answers because they think it’s going to hurt them in the marriage market,” said study co-author Amanda Pallais, Professor of Political Economy and Social Studies at Harvard. “They’re worried that their actions are sending a signal about their marriageability… Because they’re interested potentially in dating these men, they would not want to send that signal of ambition or assertiveness.”

The authors describe this behavior as “acting wife”—acting less ambitious to appear better suited for a marriage relationship. They imply that the choices these single female students made need to be corrected in some way.

While there are several interesting aspects to this study worth delving into, the media coverage seems to have extrapolated only one talking point. Essentially, as one Slate article put it, “men still aren’t comfortable with ambitious women” (and women know that), and (as another article argued) this is an issue of inequality between the sexes.

However, I’ve heard little discussion about another point that is, perhaps, equally worthy of consideration. There is almost no recognition of the possibility that these young women—and many other professional women throughout society—may prioritize marriage and family life over their careers.

This is perhaps incomprehensible in a society that glorifies career success, while frequently dismissing women who choose to stay at home with their children. For example, a recent New York Times article on the gender pay gap expressed incredulity that marriage and children are parts of life that might impact some women’s career choices.

But this seems to ignore the fact that for most women—whether they are “elite” MBA grads or not—a career is a part of life but not all of it. Consider a 2013 Pew Research report that found that the majority (76%) of married mothers would prefer to work either part-time or not at all. Additionally, 42% of employed mothers said they would prefer to be home but need the income, and 10% of highly-educated mothers (those with Masters degrees or higher) chose to stay home with their children.

As Professor Steven E. Rhoads recently explained on this blog: "To help women thrive and achieve happiness as they see it, we must first acknowledge that most mothers—inside or outside academia—want to avoid full-time work, at least while their children are young… "

Marriage and family are components of human life generally treasured above material success, and pursuing these things with ambition and drive does not seem to merit condescension, scorn, or the flippant claim of “acting wife.” The single young women in this recent study were intelligent and ambitious, and probably more likely to take advantage of a singular opportunity to attain an important life goal. If that goal is marriage, then it should be respected as entirely valid.

Nora Sullivan is a freelance writer and an associate scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute.

In 1910, the first Father’s Day was celebrated. Today, more than 40% of Americans have at least one step-relative in their family. This new normal in modern families means that many children will send more than one card this Sunday to celebrate the father and stepfather in their lives.

Fatherhood is challenging enough, but a stepfather faces unique challenges. He may not have a life-long history of shared experiences and shared values with his stepchildren, so he needs to make extra effort to create a positive relationship. Although parents generally feel more responsible for their own children than for their stepchildren, and stepchildren feel less responsible for their stepparents than their own parents, many stepfathers and stepchildren have figured out how to reinforce their responsibilities to one another.

In our research on blended families, elder care, and loss, we observed critical ways that stepparents step in, step up, and step alongside their stepchildren that led to working together gracefully as a blended family for many years. The key element to this choreography was that the stepparent took the lead.

Stepping In

Stepfathers who step in to connect to their stepchildren, whatever their age, develop a lifelong relationship, even if the marriage eventually dissolves. Sociologists, such as Vern Bengtson, stress that the key to establishing strong, life-long bonds between generations is “warmth.”

When a father acts in warm and nurturing ways toward his children, the likelihood of on-going, life long relationship is high. This finding may seem like a no-brainer, but putting it into practice can be challenging, especially for a stepfather who may not receive a warm reception from his stepchildren.

Destiny, a manager at a Baton Rouge fast food restaurant, came to our interviews to talk about her ex-stepfather, Albert. When she was a child, he would walk her and her brothers to and from school because they did not live in a safe neighborhood. When she played softball, he rearranged his work schedule to watch her play and escort her home safely. The care he showed her in childhood was returned years later when he became terminally ill. She adjusted her work schedule to spend time with him in the hospital during his final days, even though he and her mother had been divorced for many years. Albert had stepped in for her as a child, so she stepped in for him at the end of his life.

Stepping Up

In times of family crisis, a stepparent can be a critical source of support. Jeremy’s mother had issues with substance abuse, which led to her divorce from Paul, his stepfather. His mother’s addiction ultimately led to an overdose and her death. As he sat in shock, waiting for the coroner to arrive at her apartment, Jeremy called his stepfather, Paul, who came right away. Paul helped Jeremy plan his mother’s funeral, sitting next to him during the service, and even helped Jeremy settle her estate. Paul had no legal obligation to step up and help his ex-stepson, but when Jeremy cried out for help, Paul answered.

Stepping Alongside

Dancing gracefully as a blended family requires stepparents who invite a stepchild to walk alongside them, especially when a crisis happens. For those stepfamilies in our research that cared together gracefully, the stepparent took the lead in including the stepchild in caregiving and burial decisions.

Phillip’s parents divorced when he was in elementary school, and his father quickly remarried Cheryl. Decades later, when Phillip’s father was diagnosed with congestive heart failure and his cognitive abilities began to fail, Phillip worried that Cheryl might exclude him from making decisions about his father’s treatment. Cheryl assured him that she would keep him in the loop through text, email, and phone calls. They stood side-by-side in the ER after his father’s death. Cheryl deferred to Phillip in choosing a casket. She invited him to sit next to her during the funeral. The two remained family a year following his father’s death because of their shared experience.

Stepfathers may have to work hard to dance gracefully as a blended family, but when they do, their stepchildren express gratitude. It’s these types of stepfathers who truly deserve those cards.

Rev. Amy Ziettlow is a minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and is the former COO of The Hospice of Baton Rouge and Naomi Cahn is a Law Professor at George Washington University. They are the authors of Homeward Bound: Modern Families, Elder Care & Loss (Oxford, 2017).

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As of 2016, less than 65% of the 50 million school-aged children in the United States were living in households with two married parents.¹ As shown in Figure 1, more than 12 million—24%—were living with their mothers only as a result of birth outside of marriage (10%), parental divorce (9%), or separation (5%). Moreover, 2.2 million (4.5%) were living with their fathers only for similar reasons. Another 2 million (4%) were living with neither birth parent, but with other relatives or in a foster family. And 1.3 million (2.6%) were living with two parents who had not (yet) married. How does the fact that so many students today come from non-intact or unmarried families affect their progression through school?

Students from unconventional family forms pose a challenge to teachers and school administrators who are striving to give all students the same opportunities to succeed. Single parents are often less able to devote as much time, attention, financial support, and consistent discipline to their children as married couples.² Marital disruption is often accompanied by conflict, turmoil, and parental anger or depression. Parent education and family income levels are typically lower in single-parent and step-families than in married two-parent families, and poverty rates are higher.³ Furthermore, the racial and ethnic identities of students from non-traditional families are more likely to be African-American or Hispanic-American, whereas those of students from married two-parent families are more likely to be European-American or Asian-American.⁴ So, long-standing ethnic gaps in achievement, concerns about unequal opportunity, and racial sensitivities come into play as well.

Children’s conduct and performance in school are profoundly affected by the emotional support, intellectual stimulation, guidance, and discipline they receive at home. And they are more likely to get the attention, affection, and direction they need to thrive in school when they come from an intact, married family. A long line of studies, beginning with the 1966 Coleman Report, have shown this to be the case.⁵ More recently, our own analysis of trends in Arizona and Florida indicates that school districts tend to be more successful and safer when more of their families are headed by married parents.⁶ In this research brief, we examine data from a recent federal survey to explore the influence of family structure and family functioning on student achievement.

Data and Methods

The survey in question was the 2011-2012 National Survey of Children’s Health, a nationwide telephone survey of parents of some 96,000 children—61,000 of whom were of elementary and secondary school ages (6-17 years old).⁷ Three indicators of academic progress and classroom conduct were measured in the study:

• whether the parent had been contacted by the child’s school due to learning or behavior problems the child was experiencing at school;
• whether the child had repeated one or more grades; and,
• whether the child seemed positively engaged in his or her schoolwork by “caring about doing well in school” and “doing all required homework” “always” (as opposed to “usually,” “sometimes,” “rarely,” or “never”).⁸

We analyzed the extent to which each of these school performance indicators was associated with the type of family in which the child lived, dividing families into six types depending on whether the child lived with:

• two married parents;
• two parents who were cohabiting;
• a biological parent and a stepparent;
• single mothers who were separated or divorced;
• single mothers who had never married; or,
• single biological fathers, other relatives, or foster families.⁹

We also examined how the school performance indicators were associated with the:

• education level of the child’s parents;
• family income and poverty status;
• child’s race and ethnicity;
• child’s age in years; and,
• child’s sex.

We carried out multiple logistic regression analyses to adjust the relationship between each of the independent variables and the dependent variable for its association with the other predictors. We repeated these analyses with the national sample for each of the school performance indicators.¹⁰

Children Who Live with Married Parents Do Better in School

Our analyses showed that schoolchildren who live with both married parents do better on each of the three educational progress indicators. Family income and parent education were significantly associated with student performance as well, but children from married-couple families do better even after controlling for socioeconomic and demographic correlates of family structure. Here are our findings for each of the indicators in turn:

Parents contacted by school

Nearly a third of U.S. parents of students ages 6-17 reported that they had been contacted by the child’s school at least once due to conduct or learning problems that their child was exhibiting in class. School contact is an indicator of student maladjustment and often foreshadows more serious disciplinary issues or learning failures to come. It may also be an indication that the student’s behavior is interfering with an orderly classroom environment, thus reducing other students’ opportunities to learn.

Forty-five percent of students living with never-married mothers had their parents contacted by their schools, compared with one-quarter of children living in married, two-parent families.¹¹ Rates of school contact were also significantly higher among students living with separated or divorced mothers (40%), among those living in stepfamilies (37%), and among those living with unmarried fathers or other relatives or in foster families (42%). Even students living with cohabiting parents (i.e., unmarried biological parents) had higher rates of school contact (38%). The differences among single-parent and stepparent family types were not statistically significant, except that students in stepfamilies had significantly lower rates of school contact than did students living with never-married mothers.

After taking demographic and socioeconomic disparities into account, differences in school contact rates between students in intact families and those in unmarried, disrupted, or reconstituted families were reduced in magnitude but remained substantial (see Figure 2). The odds of school contact were between 1½ and 1¾ times higher in unmarried, disrupted, and reconstituted families than in married birth-parent families. The differences in school contact rates among the various forms of non-traditional families were not statistically significant, after adjusting for child age, sex, and race, and parent education, income, and poverty status.

Grade repetition

Being held back a grade in school is not only an indicator of current learning difficulties, it is also an early warning sign for later non-achievement and for dropping out of school. Among all U.S. elementary and secondary school pupils, 9% had to repeat one or more grades in school. The proportion of students who had repeated a grade was nearly four times higher among students from never-married families as among those growing up in intact, married two-parent families: 19% versus 5%. It was twice as high among students from formerly-married families, such as those living with separated or divorced mothers (12%), or in stepfamilies (13%). Children living with single fathers, other relatives, or in foster care were three times more likely to have repeated a grade (15%). Even children living with cohabiting biological parents had an elevated rate of grade repetition (10%). All of these differences were statistically significant.

Grade repetition differences were reduced somewhat when the figures were adjusted for demographic and socioeconomic disparities across family types, as shown in Figure 3. However, compared to students in intact married families, the adjusted odds of having to repeat a grade were still more than twice as high among students living with never- married mothers, in stepfamilies, and with fathers or other relatives. The adjusted odds were 1½ times higher among students living with separated or divorced mothers, and nearly as high among those with cohabiting parents. All these elevated odds ratios were statistically significant, except for cohabiting families, where it was only marginally significant.

Consistent engagement in schoolwork

One of the key indications that a student is on a path to success in school is showing interest and engagement in schoolwork. Based on their analysis of several longitudinal studies, economist Greg Duncan and his colleagues found that a positive approach to learning activities in the early grades was one of the best predictors of future academic achievement as well as of later occupational advancement and earnings.¹² School engagement was measured in the National Survey of Children’s Health by asking parents how often in the past month the student “cares about doing well in school” and how often he or she “does all required homework.” Only about half of all American schoolchildren (52%) “always” both cared about doing well in school and completed all required homework.

Among students living with both married parents, a 55% majority displayed consistent engagement in schoolwork. A majority of students living with cohabiting parents were also reported to be consistently engaged in schoolwork. Less than half of those living with separated or divorced mothers, in stepfamilies, or with other relatives showed similar engagement with their studies. These differences were statistically significant. Students living with never-married mothers were not statistically different from students in intact families in this regard.

After adjusting for demographic and socioeconomic differences across family types, students from married two-parent families showed more engagement than students from other family types, as shown in Figure 4. The odds of consistent engagement were from 65% to 71% lower among students living with never-married or formerly married mothers, in stepfamilies, or with other relatives. Students with cohabiting parents were not significantly different from those with married biological parents. Differences in schoolwork engagement among the various forms of non-traditional families were not statistically significant.

Student performance cannot be understood apart from the family.

Student success is predicated on staying out of trouble in school and on remaining meaningfully engaged in class and with homework. Our analysis of the National Survey of Children’s Health indicates that children from intact married families are more likely to avoid detours that can derail their educational performance and to be successful students, compared to children from unmarried or non-intact families. Specifically, children from unmarried or disrupted families are more than 1½ times more likely to have their parents contacted by their school for problem behavior, about twice as likely to be held back in school, and only two-thirds as likely to be engaged in class and with their homework, compared to children from intact married families—even after controlling for a range of sociodemographic factors. We also find that poverty and low parent educational attainment are associated with higher rates of schools contacting families and with a student being held back in school. Taken together, our results indicate that student outcomes across the U.S. are strongly associated with three important family factors: family poverty, parent educational attainment, and family structure.

In general, then, our results suggest that student performance cannot be understood apart from what’s happening in American families. Families struggling with material want, conflict, or instability appear to be less able to give children the resources, consistent attention and affection, and stability they need to avoid trouble and to thrive in school. Thus, policymakers, educators, business executives, and philanthropic leaders seeking to improve the educational fortunes of children must not lose sight of the ways in which strong families are seedbeds of educational success. To improve education, we also need to enhance the material and marital fortunes of American families. Policymakers, educators, and civic leaders should consider measures—such as a refundable child tax credit, a social marketing campaign on behalf of marriage, and a family life curriculum that explains the importance of marriage to schoolchildren—to strengthen and stabilize American families.

Nicholas Zill is a research psychologist and a senior fellow of the Institute for Family Studies. He directed the National Survey of Children, a longitudinal study that produced widely cited findings on children’s life experiences and adjustment following parental divorce. W. Bradford Wilcox is a senior fellow of The Institute for Family Studies and the Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. 

1. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Survey. (2016). Table C3: Living arrangements of children under 18 years. (Authors’ analysis of data in table.) Figure cited includes children living with married adoptive and stepparents.

2. Paul Amato, “The Impact of Family Formation Change on the Cognitive, Social, and Emotional Well-Being of the Next Generation,” Future of Children 15, no. 2 (2005): 75-96; Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, Growing Up With a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1994); Nicholas Zill, “Family Change and Student Achievement: What We Have Learned, What It Means for Schools,” in Family-School Links: How Do They Affect Educational Outcomes?, ed. Alan Booth and Judith F. Dunn (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1996).

3. For example, in 2016, the proportions of U.S. children with college-graduate parents were 53% in married-couple families, 31% in divorced-mother families, 17% in separated-mother families, and 10% in never-married mother families. The proportions of children living below the poverty line were 10% in married-couple families, 28% in divorced-mother families, 46% in separated-mother families, and 47% in never-married mother families. These figures are from the Current Population Survey Annual Supplement, Table C3, cited in Note 1, and are based on all children under 18 years of age.

4. For example, in 2016, children in married-couple families were 59% non-Hispanic white, 23% Hispanic, 8 percent black, and 7% Asian. By contrast, children living with never-married single mothers were 22% non-Hispanic white, 28% Hispanic, 46% black, and less than one percent Asian. These figures are from the Current Population Survey Annual Supplement, Table C3, cited in Note 1, and are based on all children under 18 years of age.

5. James Coleman, et al., Equality of Educational Opportunity (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966); Anna J. Egalite, “How Family Background Influences Student Achievement, EducationNext 16, no. 2 (2016): 71-78; Ariel Kalil, Rebecca Ryan, and Michael Corey, “Diverging Destinies: Maternal Education and the Developmental Gradient in Time With Children,”Demography 49, no. 4 (2012): 1361-1383; Barbara Schneider and James Coleman (eds.), Parents, Their Children, and Schools (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996).

6. W. Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas Zill, Stronger Families, Better Schools: Families and High School Graduation Across Arizona (Charlottesville, VA: Institute for Family Studies, 2016), and Wilcox and Zill, Strong Families, Successful Schools: High School Graduation and School Discipline in the Sunshine State (Charlottesville, VA: Institute for Family Studies, 2016). 

7. 2011/12 National Survey of Children’s Health, Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative (CAHMI), “Child Health Indicator and Subgroups SAS Codebook, Version 1.0,” 2013, Data Resource Center for Child and Adolescent Health, sponsored by the Maternal and Child Health Bureau, www.childhealthdata.org; National Center for Health Statistics, “Design and operation of the National Survey of Children’s Health, 2011-2012.” 

8. National Survey of Children’s Health, 2011-2012: Questionnaire (CDC/National Center for Health Statistics, 2014), http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/slaits/nsch.htm.

9. Adopted children who lived with two married adoptive parents were included in the “two married parents” group in this analysis. An earlier study examined the school adjustment of students adopted from foster care and compared it with that of students who remained in foster care, using the same data set. See: Zill, N. & Bramlett, M.D. (2014). Health and well-being of children adopted from foster care. Children and Youth Services Review, 40: 29-40.

10. For more details, see: Nicholas Zill & W. Bradford Wilcox, Strong Families, Successful Students (Charlottesville, VA: Institute for Family Studies, 2016).

11. Percentages cited in the text are observed relative frequencies for students in different types of families. Percentages shown in graphs are adjusted for demographic and socioeconomic disparities among family types

12. Greg Duncan, et al.,“School Readiness and Later Achievement,” Developmental Psychology, 43 (2007): 1428–1446.