A New Report from the Council on Contemporary Families:

The Recession Is Officially Over, But How Are American Families Faring this Holiday Season?

Retailers report that this year's post-Thanksgiving shopping weekend broke all previous records, raising predictions of "the best holiday shopping season ever." Yet the number of people living in poverty has also broken all previous records.

Poverty, Hardship and Families:
How Many People Are Poor, and What Does Being Poor in America Really Mean?

A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families

By Philip N. Cohen, Professor of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

December 5, 2011

This briefing paper describes three common misperceptions about poverty and families, and clarifies new information about recent poverty trends.

Keeping Your Family (and Yourself) Healthy During the Holidays

A Council on Contemporary Families Information Sheet prepared by Deborah Carr, Rutgers University

If you are a typical American, you consumed 3,000 calories at the Thanksgiving dinner table, and another 1,500 nibbling and snacking throughout the day. Exercise physiologists say that the average 160-pound person would need to run for four hours, walk 30 miles, or swim for five hours to burn those calories!

The rest of the weekend probably wasn’t a lot better, what with all the leftovers. And the Thanksgiving Day feeding frenzy is just the kick-off event for the five-week season of holiday eating and drinking that follows.

From Steve Jobs to Kids in Foster Care: Lessons During National Adoption Month

By: Adam Pertman

October 28, 2011

With seemingly ceaseless regularity nowadays, most recently in the coverage of Steve Jobs' passing, we are inundated by conflicting messages relating to adoption.

For the next few weeks, the wonder of adoption will be on display. November is National Adoption Awareness Month, so media outlets nationwide will be -- and should be -- writing stories about children whose lives are improved as a result of moving from foster care into permanent, loving families. President Obama will even issue a proclamation, as he and his predecessors have done routinely in past years, saying something to the effect that our country is blessed by this extraordinary institution.

At other times, of course, a very different picture is transmitted. Sometimes the focus is on adoptive parents who seem to regard adoption as child rental (remember the mother who "returned" her son to Russia?) or ones who purportedly use the child welfare system as a means of getting monthly support payments; the most sensational case took place several years ago in New Jersey, where a couple allegedly starved their four adopted sons in order to retain more of their state subsidies.

Press accounts cast an appropriately suspicious eye on parents who commit such horrid acts but, all too often, they also raise broader concerns about the competence and motives of adoptive parents per se; in particular, they implicitly or explicitly suggest that people may adopt children for dubious reasons or even that adoption itself is somehow a less-legitimate or less-desirable means of building a family than is childbirth. In the coverage of Jobs, for instance, we're regularly seeing and reading reports that question his being "given away" by his "real parents" -- language that hardly affirms adoption as a positive option.

So which is it? Lucky kids or kids relegated to second-class families? Good people trying to do the right thing for their children, either by placing their children for adoption or adopting them, or desperate people with suspect motives? What are we to think when we receive such disparate impressions, not just today, but time after time when there's a high-profile story involving adoption? Or even when adoption is depicted in either very positive ways ("Modern Family") or chillingly negative ways ("Orphan") in the movies and on television?

Based on available research and extensive experience, two unambiguous images emerge: that most adoptive parents are doing the same things as most biological parents -- that is, providing their children with all the affection and care they humanly can; and that, with rare exceptions, boys and girls are far better off in permanent families than in foster care, orphanages or any other temporary or institutional setting.

But adoption's history of secrecy has afforded us with too few opportunities to learn about its realities. So we tend to assume we're learning far more from singular, usually aberrational experiences -- man bites dog is a story, after all, while dog bites man is not -- than we usually are.

Yes, financial payments intended to increase the number of adoptions from foster care can cause complications, but that's the clear exception. And, yes, families sometimes struggle as a result of the challenges their children face as a consequence of having been mistreated and/or institutionalized before they were adopted. But there is no indication that horrors such as the ones that typically make the news are being repeated with any regularity elsewhere, even though many thousands of parents throughout the country receive state subsidies -- and even though the number of children being adopted from foster care is at historic highs.

Moreover, even in the most troubled systems, good things are happening daily. Most children are being reunited with newly healthy mothers, fathers and other biological relatives, while a fast-growing number of kids -- over 52,000 last year alone and over 57,000 the year before that -- are being adopted by loving parents who treat them well. The same is true for the hundreds of thousands of girls and boys who have been adopted from orphanages abroad over the last couple of decades.

It's hard to learn much from secrets, so we as a culture don't yet know enough about adoptions from foster care and institutions to put the aberrational stories in perspective. That's changing, to be sure; organizations such as the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, which I'm proud to lead, are providing more and better research and knowledge - please take a look at www.adoptioninstitute.org to read our most recent work - and, partly as a result, the media are doing a better and better job of informing the public, policy-makers and others who profoundly affect the tens of millions of children and families for whom adoption and foster care are daily realities.

Even as we make progress, however, the still-widespread lack of knowledge has tangible, negative consequences that play out in the attitudes all these people encounter and the policies that impact their lives.

I am not defending any system that does less than everything possible to protect the children within it. But we live in a society in which nearly every program that helps vulnerable children receives insufficient resources; in which well-intentioned quick fixes replace (rather than augment) thoughtful, long-term solutions such as post-adoption services; and in which cases like the ones I've cited above fuel our worst stereotypes about adoptive parents, birth parents, their children, and adoption itself.

A positive and fair question for the media to ask (but I haven't yet heard it asked) would be something like this: Would the world have had Steve Jobs without adoption?

During National Adoption Awareness Month, states across the country will celebrate by holding public ceremonies at which hundreds upon hundreds of children will receive the opportunity to move into permanent, loving and successful families.

I'd like to suggest it's also a good time for all of us to start learning more about adoption, foster care and institutionalization (orphanages), because the problems will be fixed more rapidly if faulty stereotypes are replaced by genuine understandings. And the ultimate beneficiaries will be the hundreds of thousands of boys and girls, in our own country and others, who will still need homes long after we turn another page on our calendars.

About CCF: The Council on Contemporary Families is a non-profit, non-partisan organization of family researchers, mental health and social practitioners, and clinicians dedicated to providing the press and public with the latest research and best practice findings about American families. It was founded in 1996 and is based at the University of Miami.

For more information, or to receive future fact sheets and briefing papers from the Council, contact Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education of CCF and Professor of History and Family Studies at The Evergreen State College. coontzs@msn.com; 360-352-8117.

New Way to Tally Poor Recasts View of Poverty

By Sabrina Tavernise and Robert Gebeloff

The Census Bureau on Monday released what it says is a more accurate measure of poverty in America. The new measure shows more poverty among the elderly, but less among children and African-Americans.

It also shows a slightly higher poverty rate for the nation last year — 16 percent compared with 15.2 percent under the official measure — but lower rates among groups who benefit from noncash government programs the official count leaves out, including food stamps and the earned-income tax credit.

The Rising Age Gap in Economic Well-Being

The Old Prosper Relative to the Young

The wealth gap between young and old Americans is at a record high - Pew Social Trends.

Color Us Invisible

By: Mignon Moore

In the shadow of communities, black lesbians form lives, love, and families.

Color Us Invisible

By: Mignon Moore

In the shadow of communities, black lesbians form lives, love, and families.

Let's make a rule on sexual harassment

By Barbara Risman

Heavily male-dominated occupations, including politics, are so heavily masculine in their cultures, full of sexual innuendo and -- perhaps -- the kind of sexual harassment of which Cain is accused. I don't have an easy answer, but I do know we'll never solve the problem by trying to figure out what he said or she said. Instead, we have to decide what, as a society, we want to be acceptable or not in our workplaces and schools and then enforce the norms with legal penalties. Here's a first volley: It should be illegal for men (or women) to make sexual overtures to their subordinates.

Let's make a rule on sexual harassment

By Barbara Risman

Heavily male-dominated occupations, including politics, are so heavily masculine in their cultures, full of sexual innuendo and -- perhaps -- the kind of sexual harassment of which Cain is accused. I don't have an easy answer, but I do know we'll never solve the problem by trying to figure out what he said or she said. Instead, we have to decide what, as a society, we want to be acceptable or not in our workplaces and schools and then enforce the norms with legal penalties. Here's a first volley: It should be illegal for men (or women) to make sexual overtures to their subordinates.

Single and Unmarried Americans As Family and Community Members

A Fact Sheet Prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families in Honor of Unmarried and Singles Week, September 18-24.
by Dr. Naomi Gerstel, University of Massachusetts,  September 15, 2011

Unmarried and singles' week celebrates the lives of many Americans. In 2010, this group included 99.6 million people -- close to half (43.6 percent) of U.S. residents 18 and older. Over their life course, many more people will move in and out of this group.

The single and unmarried are a diverse group: Some have not yet married but will eventually do so. Some are divorced or widowed. And some have chosen to live their entire lives single. Some live alone. Some cohabit with a romantic partner. 16.4 million are aged 65 and older, 11.7 million are parents. Though gays and lesbians can now get married in six states, most of the couples living in the 591,300 same-sex households reported to the census are unmarried.

Homesick Kids and Helicopter Parents: Are Today's Young Adults Too Emotionally Dependent on Parents?

A Back to School Discussion Paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families

By Susan Matt, Presidential Distinguished Professor of History and Chair of the History Department, Weber State University

September 12, 2011

As colleges across the country begin the new school year, we hear a chorus of warnings about a generation of young adults unable or unwilling to "leave the nest." Phrases are bandied about: "Failure to launch"; "the Peter Pan syndrome"; "boomerang kids" who can't seem to leave home and establish an independent life. Undergirding these warnings is a fear that the younger generation is growing soft, losing the pioneer independence and rugged individualism that once built this nation.

But a glance at the past suggests it may not be the behavior of youths that has changed so much as the response by adults. Only over the past 90 years did American culture come to define young adults' continued reliance on parental guidance and their longing to return home as a sign of psychological maladjustment.

These days, in an effort to help students develop more individual self-reliance, some colleges have developed "Parting Ceremonies," designed to establish a decisive separation from their parents. At Morehouse College, the ceremony ends with the incoming freshmen marching through the campus gates, which then swing closed, shutting all parents outside. Other educational institutions have created formal "hit the road" departure rituals designed to hustle parents off campus and encourage students to start organizing their own lives. College counseling centers advise students to limit the time they spend thinking of home or talking with family and to combat unproductive feelings of homesickness by getting involved in new activities and making new friends.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Stephanie Coontz

coontzs@msn.com
360 556-9223

Is That a Fact? Council on Contemporary Family Researchers Offer Guidance on Making Sense of Competing Factoids and Claims about What Causes What

CHICAGO, IL. Americans are bombarded by a constant stream of competing factoids and causal claims about families. Politicians, advocacy groups, pundits, and instant internet "experts" claim that social science "proves" this or that is the impact of divorce, "surveys show" what people think about marriage, or "the facts are clear" about the benefits of one family form or another.

Are some facts more trustworthy than others, and if so, how can we tell the trustworthy from the untrustworthy? What is the difference between a cause, a correlation and a coincidence?

Three new papers released from researchers at the Council on Contemporary Families help journalists, students, and general audiences interpret claims of fact and causation about such controversial topics as divorce, marriage, and domestic violence. Written by award-winning researchers at the top of their respective fields, the papers advise when to take research claims with a grain of salt and how to be confident that a study is particularly well done, clear, and reliable. The summary below provides links to each paper in its entirety.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Stephanie Coontz
coontzs@msn.com
360-352-8117

Debate from the Council on Contemporary Families: Scholars respond to a marriage proposal regarding interracial marriage and African-American women

Chicago, IL, August 30, 2011-In a discussion paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families, based on his forthcoming book, Is Marriage for White People? How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone, Stanford Law Professor Ralph Richard Banks challenges conventional responses to the black marriage decline and offers a provocative, demography-based recommendation for how Black women's intermarriage can counteract the trend. His discussion paper is available here.

Because Banks' work is already stirring controversy, CCF has invited leading authorities on marriage, sexuality, and family life to offer commentary on his proposals, available here.

Council on Contemporary Families Releases New Research on Moms' Depression.
Study Includes a Win-Win Finding for Working Moms AND Stay-at-Home Moms
But Findings Pose a Challenge to Employers and Politicians

CONTACT: Virginia Rutter Framingham State University Sociology

vrutter@gmail.com; 508-626-4863

Neither side is right, according to a new briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families. The impact of working for pay or staying home on a woman's risk of depression depends on her preferences and on the quality of her job, the researchers find.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE -- March 22, 2011
CONTACT: Pamela Anne Quiroz, pamelaquiroz@comcast.net, 708 386-2625     

Journalists Covering Family Diversity Honored by Council on Contemporary Families:
9^th Annual Media Awards to be Presented at April 8^th Conference in Chicago

CHICAGO, IL--The Council on Contemporary Families (CCF) is pleased to present its Ninth Annual Media Awards on Friday, April 8, at the CCF Annual Conference in Chicago, IL. The awards honor outstanding journalism that contributes to the public understanding of contemporary family issues. Awards will be presented at the CCF luncheon on Friday, April 8, at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Award recipients will speak briefly about their work and the ways in which scholars and practitioners can help them advance the conversation about the needs of American families today.

For Immediate Release
Contact: Stephanie Coontz
360 556-9223; coontzs@msn.com

LOOKING FOR LOVE BEFORE THE INTERNET

19th Century Personals Have Much In Common With Today's High-Tech Versions - And Some Interesting Differences

A Valentine's Day Information Sheet Prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families
by Pam Epstein, Rutgers University

On Valentine's Day, it is only natural that our thoughts turn to love. Those who think they have found it use the occasion to celebrate their relationship, making Valentine's Day the busiest day of the year for candy sales and romantic restaurant dinners. Those still looking for love often feel lonelier than ever, so that web dating sites see their numbers spike in February.

Much attention has been paid to the explosion of on-line dating and the posting of personal profiles, but Americans have been advertising for partners for more than 150 years. I have collected thousands of personal ads from the 19^th-century, and it's worth reading what men and women said they were looking for then, and how they went about it, to see what has and has not changed.

CONTACT: Stephanie Coontz, coontzs@msn.com

360 352-8117; 360 556-9223

MASS INCARCERATION AND AMERICA'S FAMILIES

A Best-Practice Briefing Prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Carol Shapiro, Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, Columbia University, October 12, 2010

October 16 is the 37^th anniversary of congressional approval of the Drug Enforcement Administration, whose purpose, in the words of then-President Richard Nixon, was to coordinate an "all-out war" on drugs. Before the 1970's, drug abuse had been seen by policy makers primarily as a disease that could be addressed by treatment. During the 1970s, however, drug abuse - even in the absence of any violent or other criminal behavior - came to be seen as a law enforcement problem to be solved through aggressive arrest and incarceration policies.

Since then, the United States has increased its rates of imprisonment by nearly 500 percent. We now incarcerate a far higher proportion of our citizens than any other nation -- 2.3 million adults and an additional eight hundred thousand youths.  This is a higher proportion than in either China or Russia, and higher than the top 35 European countries combined, per recent reports. As an absolute number it represents more than the combined populations of Boston, San Francisco, and Washington, DC.

On any given day, at least one in 100 adults is in our nation's jails and prisons, while more than one in 30 adults is under some form of correctional custody, including probation and parole supervision in the community. More than half of all inmates are parents of minor children. Almost 3 million minor children have a parent behind bars-that is one in 28--and about one million juveniles are themselves under some form of correctional supervision, creating complex relationships between parents, schools, probation officers, and other agencies.

Low-income communities are disproportionately affected by America's mass incarceration practices. Residents are more likely to be arrested, prosecuted, and sent to jail for the same offenses that lead to warnings, probation, or treatment programs in more affluent neighborhoods.  Most convictions in low-income communities, contrary to popular impression, are for nonviolent acts, with drug users and the mentally ill heavily overrepresented in the prison population.  Two-thirds of incarcerated parents of minor children are in jail for non-violent acts. Many non-violent offenders cycle in and out of jail simply because of technical violations of probation or parole rules, not because they have committed new crimes.

WHY SHOULD WE CARE?

The 100th Anniversary of Father's Day: A Council on Contemporary Families Media Advisory

CHICAGO, June 16 (AScribe Newswire) -- One hundred years ago, on June 19, 1910, the first Father's Day was celebrated in Spokane, Washington, after Sonora Dodd convinced the mayor that fathers such as hers, a widowed farmer who raised his six children, deserved their own day of recognition.


Unlike Mother's Day, politicians didn't immediately jump on the bandwagon. In fact, the holiday was met with mockery in its early years. Not until 1972 did President Richard M. Nixon sign the holiday into law. It has since become a day when Americans celebrate their fathers and father-like figures, including uncles, grandfathers, and even older brothers.  Father's Day is also observed world-wide, with at least 52 countries setting aside a day to honor "dear old dad."


Fatherhood has changed dramatically since 1910, and even since 1972. While a father's job was once primarily to "bring home the bacon," dads are increasingly involved in all aspects of family life - reading to their kids, shuttling car pools, and offering a shoulder for the kids to cry on. Between 1965 and 2003, men tripled the amount of time they spent in child care.


But involved fatherhood remains a challenge, both because of the large numbers of children whose fathers are not in the home and because employers, government, and many members of the public still think that a dad's only real job is to provide economic support to his children and leave the nurturing to others.


In honor of Father's Day, here are some surprising and thought-provoking facts and figures about fatherhood today.

Back in 1963, when 17 million Americans aged 65 and older represented just 9 percent of the population, President John F. Kennedy designated May as Senior Citizens Month. Today there are almost 40 million Americans aged 65 and older, a number that is projected to increase to 88.5 million by 2050. By then they will make up 20 percent of the total population, and nearly 1 in 4 will be over 85. (By comparison, in 1900 only 4 percent of women and 3 percent of men lived to be 90.)

We now know that they hate being called "senior citizens." (President Carter changed the name to Older Americans Month in 1980.) Their numbers are swelling. What else do we know about older Americans? Follow this link to read some surprising facts from researchers at the Council on Contemporary Families.