February 1, 2007

By Jody Heymann, Professor in the Faculties of Medicine and Arts, McGill University, Founder and Director of the Project on Global Working Families; jody.heymann@mcgill.edu; 514.398.2027 or 514.398.2436; and Alison Earle, Project Manager for the Work, Family and Democracy Initiative, Harvard University; and Jeffrey Hayes, Institute for Health & Social Policy, McGill University

When it comes to protecting the family lives of workers, U.S. public policies lag dramatically behind other high-income countries, and even behind many middle- and low-income countries.

January 29, 2009

By Evelyn Lehrer, Professor of Economics, University of Illinois at Chicago; elehrer@uic.edu; 312.413.2363

Age at marriage is higher than ever before in the US, and according to a new study, this trend bodes well for union stability, as marriages that take place at later ages tend to be stable.  In this fact sheet prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families, economist Evelyn Lehrer from the University of Illinois at Chicago explains why and previews her forthcoming article in the Journal of Population Economics.

July 5, 2008

By Lynn Prince Cooke, Professor of Sociology, University of Kent, Canterbury, England; L.P.Cooke@kent.ac.uk

Let's face it: The road to happily-ever-after is pitted with potholes. Children, finances, and in-laws can all put stress on a marriage. But what about who cleans the floor?  This matters, too. A survey released this week by the Pew Research Center shows that most Americans now regard sharing household chores as more vital to a good marriage than such traditional measures of marital success as having children.

May 11, 2008

By Valerie Adrian, Research Intern, Council on Contemporary Families; valadrian@gmail.com; and Stephanie Coontz, Professor of History and Family Studies, The Evergreen State College; coontzs@msn.com; 360.556.9223

Here's a thought for a Mother's Day gift that would go beyond the complimentary flowers passed out by restaurants and the complementary speeches churned out by politicians every May: Affordable child care that is operated in accord with high-quality national standards.

May 10, 2009

By Judy Osborne, Psychotherapist and Director of Stepfamily Associates, Brookline, Massachusettes; judyosborne16@gmail.com; 617.731.5767

PREPARED FOR THE COUNCIL ON CONTEMPORARY FAMILIES' 12TH ANNIVERSARY CONFERENCE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO

April 17-19, 2009

Edited by Joshua Coleman, Senior Fellow, Council on Contemporary Families, and Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education, Council on Contemporary Families

See also: Unconventional Wisdom, Issue 1 and Unconventional Wisdom, Issue 3

The Council on Contemporary Families was formed to increase communication among family researchers and practitioners from many different fields, and to help the press and public get access to accurate information and best-practice findings about how today's families work. Our 12th anniversary conference detailed the latest research and clinical findings about the ways that boys, girls, men, and women have become more similar in recent years--and why they continue to be different. We examined sexuality, work and family, our conceptions of masculinity and femininity, and how recent changes in these domains are represented in the media. To get the conversation going, we asked conference participants to send in their most important--and sometimes surprising--research findings, practical experience, and clinical observations.

We encourage members and the press to explore these topics at greater length.

CHICAGO, IL, April 24 - In a discussion paper prepared for a panel to be held at the 11th annual conference of the Council On Contemporary Families, on April 25 and 26, 2008, University of Illinois, Chicago, Allen Li presents a new approach to researching the impact of divorce on children. Li argues that it is methodologically unsound to compare the outcomes of children of divorced parents with those of continuously-married parents. Instead, the proper comparison is between the behavior of children years before a divorce occurs and their behavior after the divorce. Only this can tell us whether children's problems after a divorce were a result of the divorce or were a continuation of prior problems attributable to pre-existing conditions of the child's environment. Arguing that previous studies have over-stated the impact of divorce by failing to control for both "observable" and "unobservable" differences in families prior to divorce, Li used longitudinal research and novel statistical methods to revisit the question. He found that the average effect of divorce was neither to increase nor decrease children's behavior problems. "It is possible that the dissolution of some marriages decreases some children's behavior problems and the dissolution of others increases children's behavior problems," Li writes, "so that they cancel each other out, creating the zero effect that I found when I totaled the average effect of divorce. However, for this to be true, one must admit that while certain divorces harm children, others benefit them. My findings contradict the widely-accepted claim that MOST divorces increase children's behavior problems and that only a tiny minority of divorces do NOT."

This discussion paper summarizes the findings of a more technical, unpublished paper that won the 2007 Graduate Student Paper Award in Social Demography from the Section on Population of the American Sociological Association. Li describes his methods and findings below. Following the appendix, several other scholars offer differing perspectives on his work and on the debate over the impact of divorce.

Read The Impact of Divorce on Children's Behavior Problems here.

June 19, 2008

By Valerie Adrian, Research Intern, Council on Contemporary Families; valadrian@gmail.com; and Stephanie Coontz, Professor of History and Family Studies, The Evergreen State College; coontzs@msn.com; 360.556.9223

In the following paper, we summarize the extent of the unfolding economic crisis in America and then discuss its many effects on families, from the direct impact of economic stress to less obvious effects such as deteriorating schools, changes in eating habits, and even families' ability to take care of their pets.

May 13, 2008

By Shelley MacDermid, Director, Military Family Research Institute at Purdue University; shelley@purdue.edu; 765.496.3402

When politicians make speeches celebrating Armed Forces Day, they seldom discuss the military child care system. But this is an area in which the military has a lot to teach the civilian world. Indeed, the transformation of child care in the military is one of the government success stories of the past 20 years.

April 25-26, 2008
Prepared for the 11th Annual Conference of the Council on Contemporary Families

By Oriel Sullivan, Professor of Sociology, Ben Gurion University; sullivan@bgu.ac.il; 972.8647.2056; and Scott Coltrane, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Riverside; scott.coltrane@ucr.edu; 951.827.2443

For thirty years, researchers studying the changes in family dynamics since the rise of the  women's movement have concluded that, despite gains in the world of education, work, and politics, women face a "stalled revolution" at home. According to many studies, men's family work has barely budged in response to women's increased employment. The typical punch line of many news stories has been that even though women are working longer hours on the job and cutting back their own housework, men are not picking up the slack.

Our research suggests that these studies were based on unrealistic hopes for instant transformation. They underestimated the amount of change going on behind the scenes and the growing willingness of men to adapt to their wives' new behaviors and values. In fact, more couples are sharing family tasks than ever before, and the movement toward sharing has been especially significant full-time dual-earner couples.

April 15, 2008
For experts' contact information, see end of release.

Americans tend to think we are better off than families in most other industrial countries because we pay lower income taxes. But when we factor in the higher amount Americans pay for health care, child care, and education, the comparison is not always in our favor. Where do American families' tax dollars go and what family "value" do they get in return?

April 15, 2008

By Betsey Stevenson, Professor of Business and Public Policy, The Warton School of the University of Pennsylvania; betseys@wharton.upenn.edu; and Justin Wolfers, Professor of Business and Public Policy, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania; jwolfers@wharton.upenn.edu

A new report,"The Taxpayer Costs of Divorce and Unwed Childbearing: First-Ever Estimates for the Nation and all 50 States", raises the question of how much divorce costs taxpayers. This is an intriguing question, but unfortunately this report falls short on providing the answer.

February 11, 2008

By Steven Martin, Professor of Sociology, University of Maryland; smartin@socy.umd.edu; 301.405.3464

Just in time for Valentine's Day, demographer Steven Martin analyzes the latest data on childbearing trends among American women.

January 23, 2008

By Frank F. Furstenberg, Zellerback Family Professor of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania; fff@sas.upenn.edu; 415.291.4486

A new longitudinal study reveals that teen childbearing is NOT the reason that many Americans have been trapped in poverty over the past three decades.

Media Contact:
Stephanie Coontz, coontzs@msn.com; 360 352-8117; cell: 360 556-9223

Chicago, September 24, 2007

Council on Contemporary Families Study:
New findings on low-income couples and unmarried women with children

Why do so many low-income couples postpone marriage but fail to postpone childbearing? Which couples eventually do marry? Why do the rest of the couples break up? How would knowing the answers to these questions affect public policy?

A new briefing report by the Council on Contemporary Families offers an advance look at the answers to these questions, based on research to be published in a forthcoming book (October, 2007) by Stanford sociologist Paula England and Harvard sociologist Kathryn Edin.

The report, "Unmarried Couples with Children," follows below. Among the questions to which it provides surprising answers:

* Why low-income unmarried couples with children believe they will have a longer-lasting relationship if they postpone marriage, even after they have a child, and even though most say they expect to marry each other;

* Which couples are most likely to use contraception; and why some couples do not;

* How the issues that eventually break most of these couples up differ from the issues that initially cause them to postpone marriage;

* Why liberal and conservative policy proposals for these couples each fail to address half the problem.

Other topics covered in the study:

Couples who do not use birth control consistently are NOT the uncommitted couples we often hear about, who have a short fling, leaving the woman pregnant and the man long gone. It is the committed couples who do not regularly use birth control, and the report explains why;

What issues create conflict for low-income couples with children, and why it is women who usually initiate the breakup;

What predicts good fathering in a relationship when a man has a child from a previous relationship, as so many of the men (and women) in these couples do.

This briefing paper summarizes findings from a new book, entitled Unmarried Couples with Children, edited by Stanford sociologist Paula England and Harvard sociologist Kathryn Edin, published in 2007 by Russell Sage Foundation.  England and Edin conducted in-depth interviews with unmarried couples right after their baby was born, and followed and reinterviewed them until their baby turned 4, whether they married, stayed together unmarried, or broke up.  Parents were interviewed together and apart.

September 4, 2007

By Sanjiv Gupta, Professor of Sociology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; sanjivgupta1@gmail.com; 413.577.1773

What reduces women's housework burden? A new study shows that on average it doesn't have much to do with her husband's help or his earnings, but how much money SHE earns. The more she earns, the less housework she does.

May 4-5, 2007

By Molly Monahan Lang, Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology, Social Work, and Criminal Justice, Bloomsburg University; mlang@bloomu.edu; 216.577.7527; and Barbara J. Risman, Professor and Head of Sociology, University of Illinois at Chicago; brisman@uic.edu; 312.996.3005

After over 35 years of continuous change toward more egalitarian gender attitudes and behaviors, recent signs of a slowdown have led some observers to suggest that the gender revolution is coming to an end.  Evidence for this claim includes a slight dip in women's labor force participation, a rise in support for traditional gender attitudes among adults, and an increase in the age of sexual initiation among the young.  In the past year, the Council on Contemporary Families has received many enquiries from the press and general public about whether the transformation of men's and women's roles has now run its course.

In a review of this question prepared for the Tenth Anniversary Conference of CCF, we conclude that these short-term countertrends do not amount to a revival of traditional family roles and beliefs.  Instead, we show that the evidence overwhelmingly shows an ongoing shift toward what we call "gender convergence," an ever-increasing similarity in how men and women live and what they want from their lives.

March 8, 2007

CONTACT: Michael J. Rosenfeld, Professor of Sociology, Stanford University
mrosenfe@stanford.edu, 415.205.1892

The year 2007 marks the fortieth anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court case that declared states could not prohibit interracial marriage. It is remarkable to realize that when presidential candidate Barack Obama's parents were married in 1960, that marriage would have been illegal -- and Obama would have been illegitimate -- in half the states in America.  This briefing report from the Council on Contemporary Families sums up the trends in interracial marriage since that time and provides a list of experts who can speak to various issues connected to the topic.

November 15, 2006

CONTACT: Patrick Heuveline, Population Research Center, University of Chicago
pheuveli@uchicago.edu

In a research brief from the Council on Contemporary Families, University of Chicago's Patrick Heuveline explains how divorce rates get calculated. If you ever report on divorce rates, this article will give you confidence in how you interpret them, and will show you the key questions to ask your sources when they are reporting on divorce statistics.

May 8, 2006

The new HBO television show, "Big Love," has led many people to contact the Council on Contemporary Families for background on polygamy. Historian Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education at the Council, has put together the following background information.