Recessions, student debt, and the prerogatives of other people with prior accumulated wealth are a few of the things getting in the way of millennials and their families owning a home. While millennials are the up and coming age group in need of supplying their families with a roof over their head, their options are slim.

So, who are millennials? According Pew Research, “millennials” are born during the years of 1981-1997–though the definition keeps expanding, as Frank Furstenberg noted in his recent brief for the CCF Gender & Millennials symposium. This cohort is at the stage in life when they are seeking housing or even aiming to own a home–but that path is challenging. Using old-fashioned definitions, millennials are doing “everything” right. Recent employment data shows that the percentage of 25-to-34 year olds in the labor force is the largest it has been in eight years. Millennials are earning more than the generation that came before it. Though millennials are delaying marriage (or declining to get married), this is the age window for marriage—median age of marriage in 2016 was around 28 to 30 years old. The age of first child—usually born to couples, not always married–is around 26.

So, in familiar and unfamiliar ways, family building begins. While they are finding and being hired into better-paying jobs and building their new families, this is when the home search begins. One problem: though they are ready to buy, few houses are on the market. And another: The homes for sale are priced too high for first-time buyers so millennials are renting for longer periods of time. Since the prices are so high, older people have the advantage over millennials, snatching up what’s available. This leaves millennials with a hazy vision for their future. Homeownership is one of the first and primary ways of creating wealth despite economic changes. If millennials can’t buy their first home, how can they build their own wealth? No property means they stay in a lower economic status with no way of moving up the ladder.

This affects a lot of people. The census assumes that household formation—all those people who are going ahead and having a child, moving in, or getting married–will average to about 1.5 million per year through 2020 which is up from the annual average of 900,000 it has been for the last five years. There are more and more new families, but fewer affordable homes for them. These staggering numbers give you a sense of how the generation’s needs fuel competition and push prices up, too.

What do millennials have to fall back on when trying to gain wealth if even getting their first house isn’t an easy task? Jobs aren’t enough—and working millennials face a housing market with rising prices, fewer options, and feverish competition. Homeownership—historically the American path to wealth and security—is more and more out of reach. What needs to be done? More entry-level homes and communities. If we have more of these homes this creates easier access for millennials who in the future will be experienced homeowners. Won’t this be better for the economy now and in the future? Improving housing and homeownership will certainly be better for millennials.

Originally posted 4/12/2017

Tasia Clemons is a senior sociology major at Framingham State University, a resident assistant, and a CCF Public Affairs Intern.

President Obama recently announced that all federal employees would have access to six weeks of paid leave to care for a new child. He also emphasized the importance of access to affordable childcare in last week’s State of the Union address. Policy initiatives in these areas are an important first step toward bringing the United States up to speed with other nations. Indeed, the United States remains the only country in the industrialized world that does not legislate any form or length of paid family leave, childcare costs remain high, and, for most workers, career success remains contingent on particularly long and/or inflexible work hours.

Many scholars have argued that this current state of affairs is, in large part, responsible for the stalled progress toward gender equity we’ve seen since the late twentieth century: despite their dramatic rise in employment, women still comprise only a small fraction of elite business and government leaders, and they still do the lion’s share of housework and caregiving. This may not be surprising, given that men and women lack access to supportive work-family policies that could otherwise ease the disjuncture between the demands of modern employment—which are currently premised on a worker who is continuously available and who bears few obligations outside of work—and the often intense demands of raising children. Indeed, many women who “opt out” of full-time careers report doing so not because it was their ideal preference, but because the inflexibility of their workplace or the high costs of childcare left them with few options.

However, identifying the extent to which supportive work-family policies may exert a direct effect on individuals’ preferences and choices about how they organize their work and family life has been challenging. Whereas some individuals may make decisions in response to a constrained set of options, others’ decisions may be based on deeply held, and possibly internalized, beliefs and expectations about gender—beliefs which still tend to prescribe men greater responsibility for earning and women greater responsibility for caregiving. Methodologically, disentangling these two possibilities is difficult.

In a new study (pdf),which will appear in the February issue of American Sociological Review, we use a novel technique to shed light on this puzzle. We conducted a survey experiment with a nationally representative sample of unmarried American men and women between the ages of 18 and 32 who do not have children. Each respondent expressed how he or she would ideally prefer to divide work and domestic responsibilities with a future partner. We also varied two aspects of the survey for some subgroups of respondents. Some participants were told to state how they would ideally organize their future work and family responsibilities, assuming that supportive work-family policies—specifically, paid family leave, subsidized childcare, and flexible workplace practices—were in place. For others, we made no mention of such policies, and also removed an egalitarian relationship as an option from the set of choices listed on the survey.

Our results underscore the notion that the current workplace climate fuels the persistently gendered division of labor in employment and in the family. When respondents were simply asked to state what kind of relationship they preferred, the majority of men and women, regardless of their education level, opted to share earning and household/caregiving responsibilities equally with their partner.

Moreover, if told to assume that supportive work-family policies were in place, women were even more likely to prefer an egalitarian relationship and much less likely to want to be primarily responsible for housework or caregiving. This finding shows that supportive work-family policies directly affect the way that young women would prefer to structure their work and family life.

And finally, when participants were not able to select an egalitarian option—a situation that simulates reality for many families in today’s policy environment—they largely favored more traditionally gendered preferences. For example, when respondents could not select an egalitarian relationship – because we had removed it from the survey response options – men gravitated toward a relationship in which they would be primarily responsible for earning, whereas their spouse would be primarily responsible for housework and caregiving.

These findings suggest that, if we were to change the workplace policy environment, we would likely see changes in how people decide to balance work and family life, with fewer women “opting out” and more men taking on a greater share of caregiving responsibilities. At the same time, our results imply that supportive work-family policies are a key mechanism that can promote gender diversity in work organizations—a message that should be of interest to business leaders who now know that such diversity is critically linked to their bottom line.

To be sure, implementing supportive work-family policies that work are an economic and political challenge, and gender inequalities persist even in countries where supportive policies are widespread. But, our findings suggest that these policies do have the power to foster more gender-egalitarian preferences and attitudes, with broad implications for gender inequality in the workplace and the home. In short, such policies may empower people to live the kind of life they would ideally like to live, an ideal that is now more gender-egalitarian than in previous generations, and that is premised on more women “leaning in” at work and more men “leaning in” at home.

Sarah Thébaud is an assistant professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. David S. Pedulla is an assistant professor of  Sociology at University of Texas at Austin.

A briefing paper released by the Council on Contemporary Families today analyzes recent data on parenting practices compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau. Sandra Hofferth, Professor, Family Science, at University of Maryland’s School of Public Health, notes that although the Census Report found some differences by family type, most American parents — married, divorced, or single — read to their children, monitor their children’s media youth, and engage their children in extra-curricular activities.

Overall, reports Hofferth, more than 90 percent of American children were read to during the week. Married parents reported reading to children aged 3-5 an average of 6.8 times a week, compared to 6 times a week for single parents of children the same age. “About half of all 6-17 year olds ate breakfast with their family at least 5 days per week. Nine out of 10 parents of children under 12 had rules about television viewing. And one-fifth to two-fifths of all children participated in sports as an extracurricular activity.”

In general, differences between family types were significant but small. Almost 13 percent of 6-11 year-old children of married parents were enrolled in gifted classes, compared with almost 11 percent of children living with a single parent. Slightly more teenaged children living with a single parent ate dinner with a parent at least 5 days a week than did children living with two married parents. However, only 34 percent of teenagers in single-parent homes, vs. 44 percent of teens from married couple families, participated in sports activities. Children of cohabiting couples had the lowest rates of shared family dinners and extracurricular activities.

Hofferth explains that many of these differences are more closely related to income than to family structure. 42.5 percent of teenagers in families with incomes 200 percent or more of the poverty level participated in sports, compared to only 22.5 percent of teens in poor families. This is a difference of 20 percentage points, compared to only a 10-point difference by family structure.

Such income differences are especially worrisome, Hofferth writes, because more than one-fifth of children of all ages, and more than a quarter of children under age six, live in families with incomes below the poverty line. Another recent report finds that more than half of students in U.S. public schools now come from low-income families.

The negative impact of poverty on parents’ involvement in extracurricular activities may be especially strong in the United States, which has higher levels of extreme poverty than other developed nations, suggests Virginia Rutter, a sociologist at Framingham State University and a Senior Scholar with the Council on Contemporary Families. A recent study of the United Kingdom found that poor parents were equally engaged with their children as middle class parents, despite fewer material resources. The lower level of support systems for low-income families with children in the U.S. may help account for such differences, notes Rutter.

Read Hofferth’s complete commentary here at CCF@ The Society Pages.

In the wake of widespread layoffs of journalists who cover family issues and the closure of several journalism centers that have traditionally featured new family research, the Council on Contemporary Families held a meeting of their national board over the weekend in Walla Walla, Washington, hosted by Whitman College. The agenda included the election of a new Co-Chair and discussion of how to further expand the dissemination of new research to the press and public in the context of the current crisis in print media.

Michelle Janning, Professor of Sociology at Whitman College, was elected a new co-chair of CCF, replacing family historian Stephanie Coontz, who will now devote herself exclusively to her role as Director of Research and Public Education. Janning, who has researched work-family issues, cross-cultural childhoods, changing gender roles, and family dynamics, joins continuing co-chair Joshua Coleman, a San Francisco-based clinical psychologist and author of several books on marriage relationships and the interactions between parents and adult children.

According to Coleman, Janning’s recent work in organizing the 2014 CCF conference, “How Technologies Are Changing the Way Families Live and Love,” puts her at the forefront of CCF’s work in reporting on emerging family trends. Whitman College has recognized the importance of her new position at CCF by providing student assistance, meeting facilities, travel funds, and funding for an annual speakers series on diversity and families. These services are funded by the Whitman Provost and Dean, the Department of Sociology, and the Robert and Mabel Groseclose Endowed Lecture Fund.

Also at the meeting, CCF’s board planned a series of briefing papers summarizing new research on marriage trends, cohabitation, parent-child relationships, and the implications of same-sex marriage, which is now legal in 31 states, containing almost 200 million Americans. Board members also evaluated updates to recent briefing papers on the diversification of  the living arrangements of America’s elementary school children and on the impact of sharing housework on the sex lives and marital satisfaction of couples.

Recent and new briefing reports are available here at The Society Pages. Views and perspectives found on this page!