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.