Nina Bandelj is Chancellor’s Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. She is an economic sociologist interested in how relational work, emotions, culture and power influence economic processes and has published widely, including in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Nature Human Behavior, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Social Forces and Socio-Economic Review. She is the author of From Communists to Foreign Capitalists (2008) and Economy and State (with Elizabeth Sowers, 2010), and co-editor of Money Talks: Explaining How Money Really Works (with Frederick Wherry and Viviana Zelizer), among others. Bandelj served as President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics and as Vice-President of the American Sociological Association. She was a longtime and first woman editor of Socio-Economic Review and an inaugural associate vice provost for faculty development at UC Irvine. You can find Nina on Twitter @BandeljNina. Here, I talk with her about her new book, Overinvested: The Emotional Economy of Modern Parenting, published on January 20, 2026.

AMW: Your research shows that parents today treat children as both emotional treasures and financial investments. What did you learn about how this dual framing actually shapes day-to-day decisions about spending, saving, or even going into debt for their kids?

NB: What really struck me over the many years of research on this topic is how deeply the idea of investment has seeped into everyday parenting. What’s key is that “investment,” and “to be invested into something” has a revealing double meaning. Yes, it is about money, and parents need to pay ever escalating costs of childcare, of extracurricular activities, of college. But investment is also about emotion and identity: the belief that a good parent pours not just financial resources but their whole self into raising children.

We take it for granted that we need to be super invested to be good parents and forget that this hasn’t always been the case. For much of U.S. history, children contributed to the welfare of families, working on farms or through household labor. As Viviana Zelizer famously showed, the social value of children changed around the turn of the 20th century, from economically useful to emotionally priceless, as she called it. But today’s parents are tasked with taking an additional step: we are told we must invest in our precious children, especially their education, to build their human capital, as if children are assets that will appreciate and yield returns in adulthood. We have begun to treat children as investment projects.

In a country where schooling from preschool to college is enormously expensive, that imperative to build children’s human capital quickly becomes about financial resources. And many people assume that how parents save, invest, and yes, also borrow, for the sake of children is a matter of economic calculation. But when we talked to parents –my research team helped conduct 119 interviews– about what they do for their children, parents didn’t talk like economists about investments and returns. Rather, their narratives revealed how much they are devoted to their children and to being good parents. In this context, money has become a language of love. Parents do relational work, as economic sociologists would say, by using money of various forms (savings, expenditures, financial assets, and loans) to express care, commitment, and the kind of bond they want with their child. And it is “heartbreaking,” as one father said, “where the finances are such that you want something for the kids that you cannot afford to get.”

AMW: Across your interviews, you found that parents increasingly view parenting as the “most important job” and feel compelled to give their “entire selves” to it. What social forces most powerfully drive this sense of obligation, and how does it affect parents’ mental health and family well-being?

NB: What I appreciate about this question is that it lets us step back and see parents’ struggles not as individual shortcomings but as reflections of larger cultural forces. Parents we interviewed came from various socio-economic and racial backgrounds. We interviewed moms and dads, and they were of various religious and political dispositions. Still, our interviewees had something in common; they really wanted to do the best for their children. They took on parenting as the hardest but the most rewarding job, as many said.

But we should ask ourselves: why is raising children today financially and emotionally exhausting labor? We should ask this question especially after the pandemic challenges and after the U.S. Surgeon General pronounced the burnout and mental health of parents as a public health crisis in August 2024. In the book I explain that the understanding of parenting as a job is culturally produced and I identify two central social forces that contribute to it.

The first is what I call the rising dominance of the Economic Style, the spread of economic reasoning and influence of financial structures into areas of social life. We have seen this larger phenomenon in the economy and public policy that Elizabeth Popp Berman documented in her recent book, Thinking Like an Economist. What I show is that parenting hasn’t escaped these trends. Through the influence of economists, demographers, developmental psychologists and policy makers, childhood is understood as a development project. Children are treated as investment projects, where every learning activity, enrichment opportunity or school choice becomes a way to optimize investment.

The second equally powerful social change is the rise of the Emotional Style, or a therapeutic culture that urges us to use emotions as moral authority and center how we feel about ourselves and others. An explosion of parenting advice, given by experts but also coaches, popular psychology and social media, constantly disciplines a parent, telling us what we should be doing. And it also channels our focus on children’s emotional well-being, and to how we feel as parents. This means that today’s exhausting parenting reality is as much about parenting—what you do for your child—as it is about parenthood—who you are as a parent.

AMW: One of the most consequential findings in the book is that parental overinvestment—financial, emotional, and time-intensive—ultimately harms children, parents, and society. Based on your data, what specific mechanisms lead overinvestment to produce these negative outcomes?

NB: During the pandemic, there was a lot of discussion about stressed out parents. The New York Times offered a “primal scream” phone line for “a parent who’s tired as hell” to call and scream after the beep. What Overinvested shows is that parental exhaustion, both emotional and financial, didn’t suddenly appear because of the pandemic. The pandemic exposed a system already stretched to its breaking point. And while I mentioned cultural changes as culprits, it is important to emphasize how interconnected they are with the U.S. political system that has not budged on a very family unfriendly policy and, what I call, privatization of childrearing. This means that having to bear the increasing financial pressures—because that’s what’s considered good parenting—has starkly unequal consequences for American families with different income and race backgrounds. The evidence from quantitative analyses based on the data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, Consumer Expenditures Survey and Panel Study of Income Dynamics documented in the book shows that wealthier families accumulate financial assets for children, including in 529 tax-advantaged education savings plans, while lower- and middle-income families increasingly rely on debt, especially mortgage debt to reside in good school neighborhoods and on education debt taken on disproportionately by Black families.

What’s the bottom line? Parenting today doesn’t just reproduce social inequality, as pointed out by an influential study in early 2000s by Annette Laureau on concerted cultivation of the well-to-do who pass on advantages to their children by imparting cultural capital. The new standard of (over)invested parenting seriously deepens economic and racial disparities among American families.

And this is in addition to strong evidence of parental burnout mentioned above, and in addition to now well-documented negative consequences of overinvolved/overmanaged parenting for children’s well being. Indeed, in so many ways the modern emotional economy of parenting is in crisis and, as one book reviewer pointed out, it’s high time to face this “urgent reckoning for American parents.”

Alicia M. Walker is Associate Professor of Sociology at Missouri State University and the author of two previous books on infidelity, and a forthcoming book, Bound by BDSM: Unexpected Lessons for Building a Happier Life (Bloomsbury Fall 2025) coauthored with Arielle Kuperberg. She is the current Editor in Chief of the Council of Contemporary Families blog, serves as Senior Fellow with CCF, and serves as Co-Chair of CCF alongside Arielle Kuperberg. Learn more about her on her website. Follow her on Twitter or Bluesky at @AliciaMWalker1, Facebook, her Hidden Desires column, and Instagram @aliciamwalkerphd

Fatima Suarez is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She specializes in gender, family dynamics, and Latinas/os/es in the United States. Over the past ten years, her research has focused on examining inequality in family life, particularly from the perspective of fathers. Fatima’s research has been supported by a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship in Latino Studies at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Here, I ask her about her new book, Latino Fathers: What Shapes and Sustains Their Parenting, which is out now from New York University Press. You can find out more about Fatima at her website. 

 AMW: You write about the emotional realities of fatherhood: joy, uncertainty, hope, pain. What did their stories reveal about how Latino men themselves make sense of fatherhood in their everyday lives?

FS: Emotions were fundamental in how Latino men made sense of themselves as fathers and their responsibilities toward their children. For example, men’s perceptions of themselves as fathers were influenced by their collective feelings toward their own fathers. Their feelings were shaped by how their fathers behaved as men (i.e., emotionally expressive or stoic, and absent or involved; egalitarian or traditional), how their fathers treated them when they were boys (i.e., chastising them when they didn’t behave like “boys”) and by their interpretations of paternal sacrificial love (i.e, did their fathers tell them they love them or did they recognize fathers’ sacrifices as an expression of love). Based on these factors, men either resented, empathized with, or shared conflicting emotions toward their fathers. In fact, many of the men I spoke with considered themselves to be involved, modern fathers compared to their own, and they cited the previously discussed factors as reasons why. However, at the same time, they critiqued their fathers’ shortcomings and protected their reputations by offering explanations for why their fathers could not be better fathers. These explanations ranged from their fathers growing up in poverty, in large families with limited resources, to growing up without their own fathers. In this vein, Latino fathers’ stories highlight their deep emotional intelligence as they express the complex nature of their relationships with their own fathers.

Emotions were also central to how fathers used what I call a “childhood frame of reference” to evaluate their parenting in comparison to their own childhood experiences. The men I met shared powerful childhood memories of working to support their families’ economic survival, experiencing severe physical punishment, and feeling unwanted or like a “burden” due to colorism or poverty. These experiences were impactful as they did not conform to what we think of as an ideal or “normal” childhood in which children are protected from adult responsibilities, abuse, and prejudice. These emotionally charged memories affected how they raised their children, pushing them to engage in what I call “intergenerational corrective fatherhood” as they sought to change their parenting to give their children a better childhood than they had. In other words, they infused their painful memories of not living a “normal” or “ideal” childhood into their fatherhood. In this case, Latino fathers’ narratives illuminate how emotions underline their parenting goals and hopes for their children.

AMW: Structural forces can support or undermine men’s parenting, whether through work demands, economic pressures, or broader social inequality. What did Latino fathers teach you about how these forces shape, and sometimes constrain, their ability to parent the way they want to?

FS: Work operates in contradictory ways for Latino fathers. On the one hand, work enabled them to provide their families with a middle-class life — the hallmark of the American dream — and an overall sense of belonging to American culture. This included owning a single-family home, multiple cars, a college education for their children, family vacations, and conspicuous consumption. Work also enabled Latino fathers to fulfill traditional breadwinning roles, which can provide them with honor and dignity. This can be especially important for men whose masculinity has historically been problematized by powerful social, political, and legal actors and institutions. For only a few of them, work allowed them to take parental leave when their children were born, which is a significant privilege, as Latino fathers have the lowest rates of access to paid and unpaid family leave among all fathers. Overall, many fathers took pride in being economic providers for their families, which gave them a sense of purpose.
On the other hand, fathers understood the compromises they had to make in their family lives for work. Work constrained their abilities to parent the way they aspired to. Fathers spoke candidly about the lack of time they had to spend with their families and the effects of bringing work stress home. They were especially forthcoming about how their tedious and dreadful commutes on California’s vast freeways further chipped away at the little time they had to spend with their families after work. In fact, Latino fathers taught me that commuting to work IS work. Fathers who had adult children openly lamented the loss of time, with one father noting that now that his children are older, they don’t want to spend time with him, which he doesn’t blame them for. While they provided their families with upward mobility, it came at a cost.

Some fathers resisted letting work dictate their family lives. They put their families before their careers. These fathers were mainly college-educated professionals who could leverage their social and cultural capital at work. However, these fathers paid a different kind of price—a social one in which their colleagues, supervisors, and even family members constantly questioned their commitment to their careers. 

AMW: Your book shows Latino fathers continually negotiating what “good fatherhood” means. What were the most meaningful ways these men upheld, challenged, or redefined culturally dominant expectations of fathers?

In the book, I examine Latino men’s experiences related to childbirth and child custody, which force them to confront medical and legal institutions that uphold gender essentialism in parenting. Fathers’ efforts to be involved and caring parents are constantly compared to those of mothers, who are regarded as the standard for parenting. In fact, some people have asked me if fathers need to behave more like mothers to be considered good fathers. Fathers’ stories illustrated how motherhood shaped their understanding of fatherhood, driving them to see it as something they needed to achieve and, in some instances, fight for. One father astutely described this dynamic when he said, “Men must engage in the verb of the word ‘father.’ You must live it. You must enjoy it and suffer it. It’s an action.”  

During childbirth, fathers often felt isolated, abandoned, and excluded by hospital staff, particularly when complications arose. The fear of losing the mothers of their children made fathers acutely aware of their own vulnerability as parents. Their experiences during childbirth significantly shaped their feelings about their role as parents moving forward. Some believed they could never overcome the deep emotional connections that mothers have with their children, which undermined their efforts to be caregivers. After the dissolution of their marriage or partnership with the mothers of their children, fathers found themselves having to defend their fatherhood in court. These experiences left them with the realization that they are second-class parents who have to prove their capacity to parent. Some used these experiences as a catalyst to redefine their fatherhood, becoming more intentional about how they engaged with their children. 

Alicia M. Walker is Associate Professor of Sociology at Missouri State University and the author of two previous books on infidelity, and a forthcoming book, Bound by BDSM: Unexpected Lessons for Building a Happier Life (Bloomsbury Fall 2025) coauthored with Arielle Kuperberg. She is the current Editor in Chief of the Council of Contemporary Families blog, serves as Senior Fellow with CCF, and serves as Co-Chair of CCF alongside Arielle Kuperberg. Learn more about her on her website. Follow her on Twitter or Bluesky at @AliciaMWalker1, Facebook, her Hidden Desires column, and Instagram @aliciamwalkerphd

Reprinted from Gender & Society

In the United States, there are almost two million people held in jails and prisons today, and 113 million people who have a family member who has ever been incarcerated. Research shows that, of those family members, women do the lion’s share of labor related to caring for an incarcerated person. This includes making long and costly visits to facilities that are often remote and far away from incarcerated people’s hometowns, sending money to subsidize the cost of expensive hygiene and food products, and spending hundreds of dollars a month on phone calls and other telecommunication to stay connected. In “‘It’s Heartbreaking. It’s Expensive. It’s Hard’: How the Carceral Care Economy Harms Black and Latine Mothers”, I examine this resource extraction and the caring labor of mothers to highlight the high financial and emotional costs of having an incarcerated adult child.

Using in-depth interviews with mothers with incarcerated adult children, I found that mothers perform care work and engage with what I call the carceral care economy. I define the carceral care economy as a marketplace of overpriced goods and services for incarcerated people, and labor, time, and money from their family members on the outside. In the article, I argue that under the current neoliberal configuration of the criminal legal system, mothers are forced to participate in the carceral care economy to stay connected to their incarcerated children and ensure their survival. The mothers I interviewed discussed the unaffordable and bloated prices of basic necessities like hygiene products, food and clothing items, and the bureaucratic, time-draining hoops they must jump through to visit their imprisoned children. This engagement with the carceral care economy puts their mothering into sharp focus – they make constant decisions about their employment, other children and dependents, and various responsibilities based on their incarcerated children’s needs.

The mothers in my sample were overwhelmingly employed in care work occupations and often saw their labor market participation as a necessary vehicle to providing unpaid care for their incarcerated children, even if that labor took precious time away from themselves. Though the mothers engaged the carceral care economy, they also resisted it in both formal and informal ways. That is, while caring for an incarcerated adult child is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming, it also engenders resistance in ingenious ways. For instance, some mothers limited their financial contribution, putting caps on what the state was then able to use for restitution. Other mothers directly engaged the facilities where their children were incarcerated to fight for gender affirming care, appropriate substance use treatment, more nutritious food, and better living conditions. Furthermore, some mothers were actively involved in their state’s legislative efforts to reduce the exorbitant fees associated with telecommunications.

Most federal and state prisons contract with private telecommunication corporations, requiring incarcerated individuals to create accounts to communicate with their loved ones on the outside. Family and friends (typically women) deposit money into these accounts so their loved ones can send and receive phone calls, text messages, emails, video calls, or even pictures. A portion of that revenue then goes back to the corporation. The prison telecommunication industry, led by three major corporations, rakes in 1.4 billion dollars annually, extracting from families and, specifically, working-class women of color to fuel it. Though there are now caps by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on the cost of phone calls, fees associated with telecommunication remain a barrier to connection between those on the outside and their incarcerated loved ones. Instead of facilities providing services and goods at little or no cost, earnings from abhorrently low wages and contributions from family and friends must act as scaffolding to support incarcerated individuals’ basic necessities.

A small but important win in Los Angeles made all calls within county jails free of charge starting December 1, 2023. As more cities look to follow Los Angeles’ lead, future advocacy might encourage states to reduce their criminal legal system budgets rather than relying on families, and more often women, for the millions of dollars in revenue fines and fees create.

One thing is clear: our reliance on carceral solutions to social ills is harming families and communities beyond those who are locked up. As Black and Latine men bear the brunt of mass incarceration, the women connected to them are left to fill in the gaping holes of the United States’ so-called social safety net. As I write in Gender & Society, “The tentacles of the U.S. criminal legal system, emboldened by the neoliberal principles of profit and financialization, engulf poor and minoritized communities disproportionately, facilitating social stratification and inequality. This inequality not only impacts currently or formerly incarcerated individuals but is dependent on family and social network members too—many of whom are mothers.”

Raquel Delerme is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Southern California. Her research examines gendered and racialized labor extraction with a focus on incarceration and the climate crisis. Her work has been published in Gender & Society and The Conversation.

Reprinted from the Texas Population Research Center

Healthy cognitive function allows older adults to better maintain their independence and economic productivity. Due to the rapid increase of the population of older adults in the United States and the lack of effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, it is important to identify factors that promote cognitive health prior to late life.

A sense of neighborhood cohesion – the perceived degree of trust, reciprocity, and sense of belonging among members of a community – may be one of those factors that can promote cognitive health and delay the onset of cognitive decline. Indeed, adults’ more favorable perceptions of their current neighborhoods have been related to positive cognitive health outcomes, and shown to be protective against cognitive decline.

Less is known, however, about the potential enduring effects of neighborhood cohesion from earlier stages in a person’s life course. Cognitive functioning in midlife and older adulthood is partly determined by early-life exposures. These early-life experiences and exposures can accumulate and contribute to well-being and better health outcomes in later life.

Engaging in mentally stimulating activities may protect people against cognitive impairment by building stocks of coping strategies that help stave off or protect against brain diseases. Research has found that structural features of a neighborhood provide important sources of cognitive reserve. These features include public infrastructure, such as sidewalks, and amenities such as parks, libraries and access to cafes and other walkable destinations.

A sense of neighborhood cohesion may be beneficial for cognitive health because it provides greater opportunities for physical activity, positive social interactions, and healthy lifestyle behaviors in both childhood and adulthood. On the other hand, people who perceive their neighborhoods as less cohesive tend to experience greater loneliness, isolation, and increased symptoms of depressive and anxiety symptoms, which are well-documented risk factors for cognitive decline and impairment in midlife and late life.

This study, using data from a large sample of U.S. adults, investigated the impact on cognitive aging of perceived neighborhood cohesion at different life stages—childhood, young adulthood, early midlife, and late midlife/late adulthood.

Key Findings

• Greater perceived neighborhood cohesion in childhood (measured at age 10) and at the time of the baseline interview (measured among people ranging in age from 51 to 89, or among people from late midlife through late adulthood) each predicted higher cognitive function at the time of the baseline interview (see figure).
• Neighborhood cohesion at young adulthood (age at first full-time job) and early midlife (age 40) were not significantly associated with cognitive function at the later ages (age 51-89).
• No associations were found between any of the neighborhood cohesion variables in any life stage and with the rate of change in cognitive function.

Policy Implications

Neighborhood contexts are critical yet understudied social determinants of cognitive health. Greater perceptions of neighborhood cohesion in both early and later life can promote better cognitive function in the period spanning late midlife to late adulthood.

Declines in cognitive function can begin prior to old age. Therefore, policies to enhance people’s sense of belonging and trust in their neighborhoods across the life course can be important strategies through which to promote healthy cognitive aging. These policies could include improving the built environment, for example, adding sidewalks and walking paths; and adding amenities, such as parks and community or recreation centers. These additions to the community would provide more opportunities for physical activity, positive social interactions, and healthy lifestyle choices.

Data and Methods

This study used data from up to 10 waves of the Health and Retirement Study (1998–2016), an ongoing biennial longitudinal panel study of over 23,000 households in the United States, comprised of a nationally representative sample of adults over age 50. The authors used data from participants who were aged 51-89 at the time of their first interview (baseline).

Respondents provided ratings of their perceptions of neighborhood cohesion at childhood (age 10), young adulthood (age at the first full-time job), early midlife (age 40), and concurrently at the time of the interview (ages covering late midlife through late adulthood). To measure neighborhood cohesion at age 40 and below, participants were asked to rate how much they felt a part of the area within a mile of their home on a scale of 1 (I felt I didn’t belong in this area) to 7 (I really felt part of this area). To measure how participants felt about their current neighborhood, they were asked to rate, on a scale of 1 to 7, four statements regarding the area within a mile of their home: I really feel part of the area/I feel that I don’t belong in this area; most people in the area can be trusted/most people in this area cannot be trusted; most people in the area are friendly/most people in this area are unfriendly; and if you were in trouble, there are lots of people in this area who would help you/if you were in trouble, there is nobody in this area that would help you. Responses were recoded so that higher numbers corresponded to higher levels of cohesion.

Respondents also completed the modified version of the Telephone Interview for Cognitive Status.

The authors then fit a univariate latent growth curve model of change in cognitive function across waves and tested whether neighborhood cohesion during each recollected life stage predicted the level of cognitive function and change in cognitive function over time. The analyses were based on 25,991 observations collected from 3,599 respondents, equivalent to about 7.22 observations per participant.

Reference

[1] Choi, J., Han, S.H., Ng, Y.T., & Muñoz, E. (2023). Neighborhood cohesion across the life course and effects on cognitive aging. The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 78(10):1765-1774. https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/gbad095 

Suggested Citation

Choi, J., Han, S.H., Ng, Y.T., & Muñoz, E. (2024). Greater neighborhood cohesion in childhood and in older adults’ current neighborhoods each predict higher cognitive function. CAPS Research Brief 3(2). https://doi.org/10.26153/tsw/50159

About the Authors

Jean Choi, jean.choi@austin.utexas.edu, is a PhD candidate in the department of Human Development and Family Sciences (HDFS) and a graduate student trainee in the Population Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin; Sae Hwang Han and Elizabeth Muñoz are assistant professors in HDFS, Center on Aging and Population faculty affiliates, and PRC faculty scholars, UT Austin; and Yee To Ng is a postdoctoral scholar in the department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, University of Michigan.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by grant P30AG066614, awarded to the Center on Aging and Population Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin by the National Institute on Aging, grant R01AG054624, awarded to Debra Umberson, principal investigator, by the National Institute on Aging and by grant P2CHD042849, awarded to the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. Funding for the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) data collection and RAND HRS data development was supported by the Social Security Administration and the National Institute on Aging.

This Center on Aging and Population Sciences (CAPS) research brief is published in partnership with UT Austin’s Population Research Center, which provides CAPS with high-quality services and resources to facilitate large-scale, population-based aging research.

As parents, we’ve all been there: your child breaks a rule, and you’re faced with a decision about how to respond. Do you come down hard with punishment, hoping to prevent future misbehavior? Or do you take a softer approach, explaining why the rule matters? Research from Brazil suggests that harsh discipline might actually backfire, not just in the moment, but in ways that echo throughout adolescence and beyond.

The Discipline Dilemma

My colleagues and I followed 800 Brazilian students from age 11 to 14, tracking how their parents’ disciplinary styles shaped their attitudes toward authority and their tendency to break rules. What we discovered challenges some common assumptions about parenting.

The study asked adolescents about their parents’ disciplinary practices. We also measured whether these young people saw their parents (and other authority figures like teachers and police) as legitimate—that is, as people who have the right to make rules and deserve to be obeyed. Finally, we tracked whether they engaged in rule-violating behaviors.

The results were striking: harsh discipline didn’t prevent rule-violating behavior. In fact, it undermined parents’ authority in their children’s eyes.

Why Harsh Discipline Falls Short

Here’s what we found: when parents frequently yelled, threatened, or used physical punishment, their adolescent children were less likely to see them as legitimate authorities. And this loss of legitimacy mattered. Adolescents who didn’t view their parents as legitimate were significantly more likely to break rules, even when those parents maintained strict discipline.

In contrast, simply having clear rules was associated with children viewing their parents as more legitimate. And crucially, this sense of parental legitimacy was the strongest predictor of whether adolescents complied with rules.

Think of it this way: harsh discipline might get temporary compliance out of fear, but it doesn’t build the internal sense that “my parents have the right to set these boundaries, and I should respect them.” That internal sense—what we call legitimacy—is what leads to lasting cooperation.

The Missing Link: Procedural Justice

But why does harsh discipline erode legitimacy? The answer is procedural justice, which means making decisions and enforcing rules fairly.

When parents use procedural justice, they:

• Give their children a chance to explain their side of the story
• Explain why they’re being reprimanded
• Listen before making decisions
• Speak politely, even when disciplining

Our research found that adolescents whose parents practiced procedural justice were far more likely to see them as legitimate authorities. In fact, procedural justice was the main pathway through which parenting practices influenced whether kids viewed their parents’ authority as valid.

Harsh discipline, by contrast, violates these principles. When parents yell, threaten, or punish without explanation, children don’t feel heard or respected. They may obey in the moment out of fear, but they don’t internalize the lesson or respect the authority behind it.

A Fully Mediated Relationship

Our statistical analysis revealed that perceived legitimacy fully mediated the relationship between parental discipline and rule-violating behavior.

This means that parental discipline doesn’t directly influence whether adolescents break rules. Instead, discipline affects how kids think their parents are, and that determines whether they’ll follow the rules. It’s not about the strictness of the punishment, it’s about whether children believe their parents have the right to set those boundaries in the first place.

This finding flips conventional wisdom on its head. Many parents assume that stricter, harsher discipline will deter misbehavior. But our research suggests that what really matters is whether your approach to discipline helps your children see you as a fair and legitimate authority.

Beyond the Family: A Ripple Effect

Perhaps most importantly, we found that how adolescents view their parents’ legitimacy doesn’t just affect their behavior at home—it shapes their attitudes toward all authority figures. Young people who saw their parents as legitimate also tended to view teachers and police as more legitimate. Those who experienced harsh, unfair discipline at home were more cynical about authority across the board.

This makes sense when you consider that the parent-child relationship is children’s first experience with authority. It becomes a template for how they understand power and rules throughout their lives. If that first experience teaches them that authority is arbitrary, unfair, and based on force rather than legitimacy, those lessons carry forward into their interactions with teachers, police, and eventually their own children.

A Brazilian Context, A Universal Message

We conducted this research in São Paulo, Brazil—a city marked by significant inequality and frequent police violence. You might wonder whether findings from this context apply elsewhere.

In fact, the Brazilian setting makes our findings even more powerful. If procedural justice and legitimacy matter in a context where harsh treatment by authority figures is relatively common, they likely matter even more in contexts where expectations for fair treatment are higher. The basic principle appears to be universal: people—including children—are more likely to cooperate with authority when they believe that authority is legitimate and treats them fairly.

What Parents Can Do

So what’s the takeaway for parents? Here are some practical implications:

Focus on fairness over harshness. When your child breaks a rule, resist the urge to immediately escalate to yelling or threats. Instead, think about how to handle the situation fairly.

Explain, don’t just punish. Help your child understand why a rule exists and why their behavior was problematic. This builds understanding rather than just compliance.

Listen before deciding. Give your child a chance to explain what happened from their perspective. Even if you ultimately decide they were wrong, the fact that you listened matters.

Be consistent with clear rules. Our research showed that simply having clear parental rules was associated with greater legitimacy. Consistency and clarity help children understand boundaries.

Remember that respect goes both ways. You want your children to respect your authority, but that respect is earned through fair treatment, not demanded through force.

The Long View

Parenting is exhausting, and in the heat of the moment, harsh discipline can feel like the fastest way to restore order. But our research suggests this approach comes with hidden costs that accumulate over time. Each instance of unfair treatment chips away at your legitimacy in your child’s eyes, making future cooperation less likely.

The good news? You don’t need to be perfect. You just need to be consistently fair. When you make decisions thoughtfully, explain your reasoning, and treat your children with respect you build a foundation of legitimacy that makes everything else easier.

That foundation doesn’t just make your life as a parent easier right now. It shapes how your children will understand and interact with authority for the rest of their lives. In that sense, choosing procedural justice over harsh discipline isn’t just about preventing tonight’s argument. It’s about investing in the kind of adults your children will become.

Herbert Rodrigues is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Gerontology at Missouri State University. His research focuses on youth development, legal socialization, and juvenile delinquency, with particular attention to how young people from marginalized communities form attitudes toward authority and law. His work has appeared in the Journal of Research on Adolescence, British Journal of Criminology, International Journal of Child, Youth and Family Studies, Journal of Youth and Adolescence, and Social Justice Research.

A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Vanessa Delgado, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Washington State University

Today, the majority of American parents financially support their adult children. Estimates suggest that only a quarter of young adults are financially independent and rely on their parents for financial support well into their 30s. Parents and their adult children are more financially interconnected than ever before.

However, in immigrant families, financial support is reversed.

Studies suggest that young adults with immigrant parents are more likely to “give back” financially when compared to young adults with native-born parents, that is, parents who are born in the U.S. Adult children of immigrants feel a greater sense of obligation to support their parents and actively contribute to medical bills, rent or mortgage, household expenses, and even work-related costs. Notably, adult children of immigrants even “give back” when they no longer live in the parental home.

Existing research assumes children of immigrants’ financial contributions are uniform. But I find they’re not.

In a study published in Social Problems, I argue that parental immigration status shapes adult children of immigrants’ decisions to “give back” in immigrant families. I find that young adults with undocumented parents are more likely to give back financially than young adults with documented parents. I also find that the adult children of undocumented immigrants are more likely to give direct cash transfers, pay household bills, develop financial plans for homeownership and retirement, open credit cards on behalf of parents, take on debt, and worry about their parents’ financial futures.

There are several reasons why the adult children of undocumented immigrants feel more obligated to “give back.” First, undocumented immigrants are more likely to take on precarious jobs that pay very little and do not provide important benefits like healthcare, overtime, and sick leave. Second, undocumented immigrants are prohibited from accessing federal social services such as the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (i.e., Social Security) Program, Medicaid or Medicare, and Food Supplementary Programs (i.e., food stamps). Third, many banks and retirement insurance policies require a social security number to open an account. Fourth, undocumented immigrants are subject to deportation, which financially devastates families. The adult children of undocumented immigrants feel compelled to take on a greater financial role in the family because their undocumented parents experience significant barriers to economic security.

Overall, this study demonstrates that immigration status is a powerful axis of stratification among immigrant families. An undocumented immigration status transforms the needs of immigrant families, as it blocks pathways to upward mobility and positions adult children of immigrants to take on greater financial responsibilities. The imprint of parental undocumented status is likely to follow young adults throughout the life course as the absence of amnesty relief reaches almost four decades and their undocumented parents grow older without access to public safety nets.

For More Information, Please Contact:

Vanessa Delgado, Ph.D
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Washington State University
Email: vanessa.delgado@wsu.edu
Twitter: @VanessaD015

Discussions of trans youth and their families typically focus on relationships with parents: how parents allow, promote, or discourage particular gender identities and expressions. But a family is often more than parents, and relationships with other family members, such as siblings, can be especially important for young people. Correcting an over-emphasis on parents in existing research, my colleagues and I wanted to hear from trans youth about the role their siblings played in shaping their family experience. We interviewed 52 trans youth and asked them what their siblings did and did not do about their gender identities.

Our new study discovered trans youth often identify their siblings as supportive family members. In our interviews, we found that siblings affirm the identities of trans youth by being “chill” when they come out, using correct names and pronouns, and standing up to people who misgender their trans siblings. In turn, we highlight the roles siblings play in challenging cisnormativity—social norms that ignore or harm trans people.

“Chill” responses to coming out

Disclosing a transgender identity to family members is often distressing for youth, and fears of family rejection contribute to anxieties around coming out. Many of our interviewees particularly expected and experienced rejection or stigmatization from parents when they came out as transgender or nonbinary. But Leaf (18, Asian American, trans man, he/him) recalled that his oldest sister was “completely chill” since he told her he is a man. (All names here are pseudonyms participants chose for themselves.) Unlike when he came out to his parents, when Leaf came out to his sister, it was “like telling her, ‘Oh yeah, I dye my hair this color.’ ‘Okay.’”

Leaf is not the only one we talked with who has a “chill” sibling. As Lorren (18, Chicana, nonbinary, they/he/she) explained, “[my sister] knows who I am and she doesn’t care…As long as I’m me, it’s fine.” Leaf, Lorreen, and others we interviewed agree: they felt safe to be themselves around their siblings, because their siblings thought it was no big deal.

Navigating cisnormativity

For many of our participants, siblings also actively affirmed the gender identity of trans youth. For instance, siblings would call trans youth by their chosen name and pronouns. In doing so, they challenged cisnormativity within their family.

Siblings also stood up to parents when they tried to control how trans youth expressed their gender. When parents would criticize how their trans youth expressed themselves through hair styles, makeup, and clothing, siblings sometimes got involved. They discouraged parents from being too controlling and instead encouraged parents to respect the authority of trans youth themselves.

But in some families, outright challenges to cisnormativity did not feel safe to participants. Clay (16, Hispanic/White, trans man, he/him), who has a transphobic dad, explained that he asked his siblings and mom to deadname (use his name assigned at birth) and misgender him around their dad. And yet Clay’s siblings also use his chosen name and gender-affirming pronouns when their dad is not around, which Clay liked because “they know the truth” about his gender.

Trans youth and their siblings strategically navigate gender recognition to promote the safety of trans youth within their family of origin. Safety was an important concern for our participants, who all had negative or mixed relationships with their parents, because of the high rates of homelessness and housing instability for trans youth. But even when it is not safe to be completely out in a family, trans youth found partners in their siblings to feel less alone.

Standing up to others

The support trans youth reported receiving from their siblings also extended beyond the family. Siblings encouraged other people to resist cisnormativity by correcting individuals who deadname or misgender trans youth. For example, Devon (18, Hispanic, nonbinary, they/them) explained that it can be hard for people to use they/them pronouns, but their sisters “are very adamant about correcting people on my behalf.” Even though Devon doesn’t like correcting people because they are shy, their sisters would tell people “It’s they. They’re nonbinary. It’s they.” By correcting how other people refer to trans youth, siblings challenge the assumption that gender is binary and that everyone is cisgender.

What makes siblings important?

The family has been described by some gender scholars as a “gender factory” because of the important role parents play in how their children perform gender, either by reinforcing traditional forms of masculinity and femininity for children assigned male or female at birth, or by encouraging and embracing children’s nonconforming gender expressions or trans identities. The findings in our study highlight the part siblings might play in this “gender factory.” Because of the research design and sample selection in this study, nearly all participants had parents who were unsupportive or ambivalent (a mix of supportive and unsupportive) toward their transgender, nonbinary, or gender diverse identities. However, about 81% of our participants had at least one supportive sibling.

Our study encourages more attention to children and youth as agents of change in families. Understanding how gender norms shift requires looking beyond parents and recognizing the important role of siblings. Even though children and youth are often seen as disempowered within families, our findings show that siblings challenge cisnormativity and encourage others to resist oppressive gender norms.

Katherine Alexander (she/her) is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Rice University. Her research focuses on gender, health and medicine, and family. In particular, Katherine’s research examines the experiences of LGBTQ+ people in navigating and resisting cisnormativity and heteronormativity in areas like family and medicine using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Her research has been published in the Journal of Homosexuality, Social Science and Medicine, and Gender & Society. Follow her on Substack @ksalexander.

Reprinted from Council on Contemporary Families Brief Report

A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Renee Ryberg, Child Trends, and Arielle Kuperberg, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

April 2, 2025

One in five students at community and four-year colleges in the United States are raising children while trying to earn their degrees—and this number may grow as access to abortion becomes more limited. Many student parents find themselves in precarious economic positions, and are often on their own to pay for college. As we found in a new study of students at two public four-year universities, fewer than 1 in 10 (9%) student parents got financial help from their own parents to pay for college tuition or living expenses. By contrast, nearly two-thirds (64%) of childless students received financial help from their parents.

The higher education landscape continues to evolve, serving a more diverse student body. The average college student today is no longer the carefree, wealthy 18–22-year-old highlighted in American movies. Although higher education—and the economic benefits that come with it—are available to more people, there is a fundamental mismatch between how colleges were designed and the realities of many of today’s students. Higher education was designed for students to depend on their families, with students’ parents largely footing the bill.

But, as our new study in The Journal of Higher Education finds, that is often not the reality students with children face. Although student parents tend to be older than students without children, differences in age or background (race, parents’ education, region, gender, grew up in US) don’t explain all of the gap in help from their parents. When examining students of the same age and background, we found that the odds that a student parent received help from their parents to pay for college was one-third of that of a student without children.

This disparity puts barriers to graduation in front of the 3.1 million undergraduate student parents pursuing higher education to better the lives of themselves and their children. Instead of getting help from their parents, student parents must draw on a unique and complex set of resources to pay for tuition and living expenses while navigating a college system that was not designed for them.

Examining how Student Parents Pay for College

To examine how student parents pay for college, we analyzed unique survey data collected in 2017 from 2,830 students at two regional public universities. Of those who completed the survey, 338, or 12 percent, identified as parents—a rate comparable to the national rate of student parents at public four-year colleges and universities.

More than half of the student parents that we surveyed used student loans, Pell grants, or money earned from a job to pay for college—the same resources that many of their fellow students without children rely on. But, parents and nonparents rely on these resources to different degrees. And, student parents can’t count on their families to pay for higher education in the same way that childless students do—and the way the system was designed.

Why don’t students with children get support from their parents when paying for college? After all, they have additional expenses and responsibilities compared to students without children.

One reason is that students who have children are more likely to be considered “adults,” so their families may believe that they should be more financially independent. Or, their families may want to support them through college – but may not be able to do so. Student parents tend to come from families with fewer resources, so their parents may not have extra cash on hand to help them with rent or tuition.

So how do student parents pay for college, if they aren’t getting help from their parents?

Instead of Relying on Support from their Parents, Student Parents Rely on Support from Romantic Partners and the Government

Many student parents rely on support from romantic partners, including spouses: in our survey we found that 43 percent of student parents used a partner’s money to pay for educational and living expenses, compared with less than 10 percent of students without children. 

The support that student parents received from their partners didn’t necessarily make up for not getting financial support from their parents, though. The proportion of student parents who received support from either their parents or partnerswas less than the percent of students without children who received support from their parents.

Student parents also turn to Pell Grants—a federal grant program for students with low incomes or who have parents with low incomes. Two-thirds (66%) of student parents in our study used Pell Grants to pay for college. Once background characteristics are taken into account, the odds that a student parent used Pell Grants was more than three times that of students without children.

Policy Pitfalls for Student Parents

As student parents pursue higher education, they navigate a funding environment at odds with the realities of their lives.

Pell grants do not typically cover the full cost of tuition, much less living expenses. Perhaps because of the relatively low value of Pell grants, and because students with children could not rely on their parents’ financial support, we found student parents took out higher amounts of student loans. They were also more likely to work while in college.

Juggling a job, child care, and college while also navigating a complex financial situation makes it harder to complete a degree. Indeed, research shows that although student parents have GPAs as high as students without children, they are more likely to leave college without a degree.  

But completing a college degree can really pay off for student parents—and their children. One study focused on single mothers found that those who completed a four-year degree were one-third as likely as those who had a high school degree to live below the poverty line, and earned an additional $625,000 across their lifetime. Single mothers who completed a college degree were also less likely to use public assistance programs and contributed more tax revenue.

So what can we do to facilitate success for student parents?

Within the financial aid system, it is critical that financial aid officers are trained to best support students with children. Child care expenses can be factored into loan and grant packages, but many financial aid officers do not communicate this information to students. Pell grants can also be expanded to cover a larger share of tuition and living expenses.

Beyond the financial aid system, many student parents are eligible for federal anti-poverty programs aimed at families with children, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Child Care Development Fund (CCDF), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and tax credits including the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), the Child Tax Credit (CTC), and the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC). Navigation services on campus can help student parents access this disparate patchwork of supports.

Although many student parents turn to these programs to make ends meet, they are often penalized for being in school. Many of these programs are structured in ways that prevent student parents from receiving full benefits. Work requirements in some states do not fully count going to school. And, other programs, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, provide lower benefits to workers who earn the least money.

Schools can also help lower costs for student parents by expanding affordable child care offerings to their students, and building affordable family housing on campus, as most colleges do not allow students with children to move into campus housing or have on-campus child care for students.

Training financial aid officers on the needs of student parents, expanding Pell funding, reforming anti-poverty programs to value the long-term investment of pursuing higher education, and building infrastructure on campus that supports parents could help support student parents to complete their degrees—increasing their long-term economic stability and self-sufficiency—which will benefit their children as well.

Acknowledgements

The study discussed in this briefing paper is published in The Journal of Higher Education. We would like to thank JR Moller and Stephanie Pruitt for their research assistance. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. 1947603, and a University of North Carolina at Greensboro Advancing Research Summer Award Grant and Faculty Research Grant, as administered by the Office of Sponsored Programs.

Links

Brief report: https://sites.utexas.edu/contemporaryfamilies/2025/04/02/student-parents-brief-report/
Full study: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00221546.2025.2480024/

For more information, please contact:

Renee Ryberg, Senior Research Scientist, Child Trends
rryberg@chidltrends.org

Website: https://www.childtrends.org/staff/renee-ryberg
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renee-ryberg-8b2a1a2b/

Reprinted from the Council on Contemporary Families Brief Reports

A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Zhe (Meredith) Zhang, California State University, Los Angeles

Many people have the experience of providing care to family and friends with serious health conditions or limitations. Most people will provide such unpaid care to their loved ones at some point in their lives. In 2020, about 53 million U.S. adults or 21.3% of the population provided unpaid care such as preparing meals, providing transportation, managing medications, dressing, or bathing a loved one with health limitations or disabilities in the past year. This number of caregivers will continue to rise with the aging American population as most of those receiving such care are older adults.

In a class of mine, I asked the students who would come to their minds when they thought about unpaid caregivers. Most of them mentioned a wife, daughter, sister, or mother. Their observations are consistent with the established research, which has found that in general, women are more likely to be providing care than men.

However, one limitation of this prior research is that it seldom considers sexual orientation. A burgeoning literature suggests that sexual minorities may provide more care than heterosexuals, but many questions remain unanswered. Does it mean that gay and bisexual men are more likely to provide care than heterosexual men? Are women’s higher caregiving rates only prominent among heterosexuals? Do sexual minority men have similar caregiving rates as sexual minority women?

We need to consider sexual orientation in a study of caregiving for several reasons. First, the number of Americans identifying as a sexual minority (e.g., gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer) has continued to increase for the past decade (Jones 2022). Second, gay, lesbian, and bisexual adults have lower partnership and childbearing rates than heterosexuals, which may lead to different caregiving networks and demands (Croghan et al. 2014; Ismail et al. 2020). For instance, sexual minorities’ lower partnership rate relative to heterosexuals may mean that they have fewer demands of providing care to an aging partner.

In a paper recently published in Demography (Zhang et al. 2024), my coauthors and I examined how unpaid caregiving is associated with both gender and sexual identity. One of the main findings in our paper is that not all men have lower caregiving rates relative to women. It is only among heterosexuals that we see a lower caregiving rate among men than women. Gay and bisexual men have similar caregiving rates as lesbian and bisexual women. Heterosexual men’s caregiving rate is much lower than that of bisexual men. This low caregiving rate for heterosexual men may reflect their stricter adherence to gender norms around division of labor (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005), which emphasize that men are responsible for paid work and women are responsible for domestic work such as caregiving. On the other hand, gay and bisexual men in the U.S. tend to hold less conservative views on gender (Denise 2019), which may help explain their higher caregiving rates.

Next, we examined whether the association between unpaid caregiving, gender, and sexual identity varied by partnership status (i.e., whether one is married/in a relationship). We found that unpartnered bisexual men were more likely to provide care than unpartnered heterosexual men, unpartnered gay men, and partnered bisexual men. Bisexual people generally report less social support from family, friends, and LGBT+ communities than heterosexuals and gay/lesbian adults (Dodge et al. 2012; Gorman et al. 2015). Additionally, bisexual men may experience unique stressors related to the perceptions that bisexual men are either not fully “out” as gay men or are unfairly tied to straight privilege (Anderson and McCormack 2016). Feeling even more isolated, unpartnered bisexual men may be particularly incentivized to provide care to a loved one to facilitate more social connection.

To further understand the experiences of these caregivers, we also examined caregivers’ relationship to the care recipient. Among the caregivers, we found that gay, lesbian, and bisexual caregivers generally reported less spouse/partner caregiving than heterosexual men and women, likely because they are less likely to have a partner than heterosexuals. The absence of a partner probably makes sexual minorities more available to care for other loved ones, such as grandparents. We found that sexual minority caregivers were more likely to provide care to a grandparent relative to their heterosexual peers. We also found that heterosexual, gay, lesbian, and bisexual caregivers had similar rates of parental caregiving. This echoes prior work, which showed that sexual minority adult children continued to provide care for older parents even when parents disapproved of their sexuality (Cronin et al. 2011; Reczek and Umberson 2016).

Additionally, we find higher rates of friend caregiving among sexual minority caregivers, particularly among lesbian women. Among the caregivers, nearly a quarter of lesbian women were caring for a friend compared to 14% of heterosexual women. In additional analysis that considers partnership status, we also found that gay men without a partner had higher rates of caring for friends (33%) than unpartnered heterosexual (21%) and bisexual men (15%). In general, prior work has shown that sexual minorities, many of whom are alienated from families of origin, have long built families of choice with whom they share no biological or legal relationship (Lavender-Stott and Allen 2023; MetLife 2010). Research has shown that sexual minorities often provide care to friends that are part of these chosen families. During the HIV/AIDS epidemic, most people infected with HIV identified a gay friend as both their primary caregiver and family (Fredriksen-Goldsen 2007). Taken together, our results suggest that caregiving for a friend may be particularly common among lesbian women and unpartnered gay men.

Overall, our study provides a comprehensive overview of caregiving rates by gender, sexual identity, and partnership status among American adults. We find that women’s higher caregiving rate relative to men’s is only prominent among heterosexuals. Caregiving rates do not differ by sexuality among women, but bisexual men (especially those without a partner) have a much higher caregiving rate than heterosexual men. We also find that among the caregivers, adults of varying gender and sexual identity groups may provide care to different social ties (e.g., parents, partners, or friends). Altogether, our findings help advance understanding of caregiving and changing family ties in an era of population aging and increasing diversity in sexual identities.

For More Information, Please Contact:

Zhe (Meredith) Zhang
Assistant Professor of Sociology
California State University, Los Angeles
mzhang19@calstatela.edu

Links

Brief report: https://sites.utexas.edu/contemporaryfamilies/2024/05/23/unpaid-caregiving-brief-report/
Press release: https://sites.utexas.edu/contemporaryfamilies/2024/05/23/unpaid-caregiving-press-release/

About CCF

The Council on Contemporary Families, based at the University of Texas-Austin, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of family researchers and practitioners that seeks to further a national understanding of how America’s families are changing and what is known about the strengths and weaknesses of different family forms and various family interventions For more information, contact Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education, coontzs@msn.com. 

References

Anderson, E., & McCormack, M. (2016). The changing dynamics of bisexual men’s lives: Social research perspectives. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature.

Connell, R. W., & Messerschmidt, J. W. (2005). Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the concept. Gender & Society, 19, 829–859.

Croghan, C. F., Moone, R. P., & Olson, A. M. (2014). Friends, family, and caregiving among midlife and older lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender adults. Journal of Homosexuality, 61, 79–102.

Cronin, A., Ward, R., Pugh, S., King, A., & Price, E. (2011). Categories and their consequences: Understanding and supporting the caring relationships of older lesbian, gay and bisexual people. International Social Work, 54, 421–435.

Denise, E. J. (2019). Americans’ gender attitudes at the intersection of sexual orientation and gender. Journal of Homosexuality, 66, 141–172.

Dodge, B., Schnarrs, P. W., Reece, M., Goncalves, G., Martinez, O., Nix, R., . . . Fortenberry, J. D. (2012). Community involvement among behaviourally bisexual men in the midwestern USA: Experiences and perceptions across communities. Culture, Health & Sexuality, 14, 1095–1110.

Fredriksen-Goldsen, K. I. (2007). HIV/AIDS caregiving: Predictors of well-being and distress. Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services, 18(3–4), 53–73.

Gorman, B. K., Denney, J. T., Dowdy, H., & Medeiros, R. A. (2015). A new piece of the puzzle: Sexual orientation, gender, and physical health status. Demography, 52, 1357–1382.

Ismail, M., Hammond, N. G., Wilson, K., & Stinchcombe, A. (2020). Canadians who care: Social networks and informal caregiving among lesbian, gay, and bisexual older adults in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging. International Journal of Aging and Human Development, 91, 299–316.

Jones, J. M. (2022, February 17). LGBT Identification in U.S. Ticks Up to 7.1%. Gallup News. Retrieved from https://news.gallup.com/poll/389792/lgbt-identification-ticks-up.aspx

Lavender‐Stott, E. S., & Allen, K. R. (2023). Not alone: Family experiences across the life course of single, baby boom sexual‐minority women. Family Relations, 72, 140–158.

MetLife Mature Market Institute. (2010). Out and aging: The MetLife study of lesbian and gay baby boomers. Journal of GLBT Family Studies, 6, 40–57.

Reczek, C., & Umberson, D. (2016). Greedy spouse, needy parent: The marital dynamics of gay, lesbian, and heterosexual intergenerational caregivers. Journal of Marriage and Family, 78, 957–974.

Zhang, Z., Smith-Johnson, M. & Gorman, B. K. (2024). Who cares? unpaid caregiving by sexual identity, gender, and partnership status among U.S. adults.” Demography, DOI 10.1215/00703370-11145841.

Christina J. Cross is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Harvard and a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. Her award-winning writing has been featured in The New York Times and in leading sociology journals. You can follow her on Twitter: @christinajcross or BlueSky: @christinajcross.bsky.social. Here I ask her about her new book, Inherited Inequality: Why Opportunity Gaps Persist between Black and White Youth Raised in Two-Parent.

AMW: Many people believe strongly that growing up with two parents is the main way for children to be successful, and that it especially helps Black families catch up. But your book shows that even Black kids who grow up with two parents often face big challenges that white kids in similar families don’t. What was the biggest or most surprising thing you found that showed you the two-parent family isn’t the “Great Equalizer” people often think it is? 

CC: One of the most striking and disappointing findings that I uncovered in my research was that African American children from two-parent families often experience the same outcomes as white children raised in single-parent families.

Black kids who live with both their parents have virtually the same rates of suspension and expulsion as white kids who live apart from a parent, and both groups have roughly the same average high school GPA and likelihood of on-time high school completion.

It’s bad enough that gaps in outcomes between Black and white kids from two-parent families are as wide as those between the average child who lives in a single-parent versus two-parent family—as I also find. But to think that Black youth who grow up with two parents in the home often find themselves in the same position as white children who experience parental absence from the home really speaks to the limits of the two-parent family for being an equalizer for kids.

AMW: The book talks about looking at the bigger picture around families, not just who lives in the house, but also things like racism, neighborhoods, and schools. Can you explain how things outside a family’s home can make life harder for a two-parent Black family compared to a two-parent white family?

CC: It’s undeniable that what happens at home matters a great deal for children. However, people tend to underestimate the impact of outside forces. And these outside forces can lead to enormous inequalities between children—even among those growing up with two parents.

For example, family income plays a critical role in shaping children’s later life opportunities.  Research has shown that at every level of education, African American men and women are paid less than their similarly qualified white counterparts. And black-white gaps in earnings are higher among those with college degrees than for those with a high school diploma. If each Black parent brings home less money than their similarly qualified white counterpart, then pay discrimination is visited upon Black two-parent households twice. This results in Black couples having substantially less money to invest in their children’s futures. In fact, I found that by adolescence, African American youth from two-parent families have household incomes that are only 60% of their white peers who are raised in this same family structure.

Another area of social life that greatly impacts family life is schooling. I found that Black youth from two-parent families are two to four times more likely to be suspended or expelled from school than their white peers who grow up with both parents. These disparities in school discipline cannot be explained by behavioral differences between the two groups. My data show that both groups engage in similar types of behavior.

What does differ between Black and white children is how these behaviors are interpreted. Research shows that teachers are more likely to view African American students’ actions as threating and disrespectful than white students. This is another way in which discrimination leads to worse outcomes for Black and white children—even when they’re both raised in two-parent families.

AWM: For a long time, the common story about inequality for Black families focused on single parenthood. Your book presents a different understanding. What is the main, new “story” about families, race, and opportunity that you hope your book helps people understand?

CC: The common story treats African Americans as architects of their own fate. They have a harder time getting ahead in life because they have failed to embody the nuclear family ideal. If they could simply get married and stay married, many of the problems that they are facing would go away.

While it’s true that children who live in two-parent families typically have better outcomes than children who live apart from a parent, my book uncovers a critical, but all too often overlooked detail: the resources and outcomes of this family structure are not equally available to all. I found that even when Black and white children lived in the same type of family, their educational and employment outcomes differed drastically. This inequality of opportunity largely reflected resource disparities—like income, wealth, and parent’s mental health— between Black and white two-parent families. And these resource disparities are not random; they are a result of America’s legacy of slavery, racism and social exclusion.

I hope that my book will help to dismantle the common story and replace it with the one that more accurately reflects the experiences of the roughly 5 million African American children who currently live in two-parent families—and whose stories all too often go untold. My results show that even when African Americans live in the “ideal” family structure, the shadow of inequality looms large. Marriage is no panacea for racial inequality.

However, there are things that we can do to help level the playing field. My results show that Black children would perform profoundly better, and their downstream outcomes would dramatically improve, if racial disparities in access to resources were mitigated, and if the harmful effects of racism were redressed. Doing so would get us much closer to achieving the shared goal of generating greater equality of opportunity for the next generation—regardless of the type of family that generation is born into.

Alicia M. Walker is Associate Professor of Sociology at Missouri State University and the author of two previous books on infidelity, and a forthcoming book, Bound by BDSM: Unexpected Lessons for Building a Happier Life (Bloomsbury Fall 2025) coauthored with Arielle Kuperberg. She is the current Editor in Chief of the Council of Contemporary Families blog, serves as Senior Fellow with CCF, and serves as Co-Chair of CCF alongside Arielle Kuperberg. Learn more about her on her website. Follow her on Twitter or Bluesky at @AliciaMWalker1, Facebook, her Hidden Desires column, and Instagram @aliciamwalkerphd