The Two-Parent Advantage

“Isn’t divorce less of a big deal for kids these days?” A colleague’s wife asked me this question as we hiked down Parkman Mountain last summer, while taking a break from an academic conference. She asked the question after she learned that I studied American families. “After all,” she added, “we’re more accepting now of all sorts of families.”

My hiking partner’s theory was this: because kids in nontraditional families are less likely to feel ostracized or stigmatized nowadays, they are also less likely to be harmed by family breakdown than they would have been a half-century ago. 

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