Nonetheless, Jolie and Pitt did divorce later this year, though probably not due to their pre-marital cohabitation. Pitt’s divorce is, remarkably, a “gray divorce.” Media coverage concerning gray divorce, or divorce of those over 50, has given the floor to CCF scholars to set the record straight about divorce, a trend about which the general public is becoming less accepting: the percentage of respondents to the National Survey of Family Growth who said that “divorce is usually the best solution when a couple who can’t seem to work out their marriage problems” declined by almost 9 percent for women and 5 percent for men, to 38 percent and 39 percent, respectively, between 2002 and 2011-2013. These beliefs are reflected in practice, too: couples who married in the twenty-first century have lower divorce rates than those who married earlier. (Keep in mind: fewer people marry these days.)
Our current contract—“until death”—might have worked when people didn’t live all that long (according to the American [historian] and author Stephanie Coontz, the average marriage in colonial times lasted under 12 years); or when many women died in childbirth, freeing men to marry multiple times (which they did); and when men of means needed women to cook, clean and caretake, and women needed men for financial security. But that isn’t why we marry nowadays.
In an article about Sarah Jessica Parker’s new HBO program Divorce, CCF historian Steven Mintz pointed out in Time that the freedom to divorce has long been an American ideal, whose justification can be traced to the ideology of the American Revolution. Ronald Reagan, a famous conservative, helped to change divorce laws so that people could do so when they had “irreconcilable differences,” according to Stephanie Coontz.
Vicki Larson of Quartz suggested, in light of a longer history of divorce in the United States and more recent social changes such as increasing life expectancy and gender equality, that it might be appropriate for us to “rethink ‘until death’ [do us part].”
Braxton Jones is a graduate student in sociology at the University of New Hampshire, and serves as CCF Graduate Research and Public Affairs Scholar.
Revisiting a NICE WORK column at Girlwpen, written in 2012 during the last presidential campaign.
What to do when I read a study that so appeals to my worldview that I want to shout it out? Should I just kinda act cool, not let on that I wanna say, I knew it! See? SEE?!!!! That is how it is. We all have biases and preferences and a worldview that shape how we process information. And we all have choices about what to do with them. And that brings me to a study about how dudes in traditional marriages have traditional views that influence their judgments at work, too.
The new paper is novel: it asked, is it is possible that there are well-placed pockets of resistance in the workplace that help account for impeded progress? The authors hypothesized that, perhaps, men in cross-sex marriages with stay-at-home wives might have a different view of women in the workplace than married men with full-time working wives.
They hypothesized correctly. In particular, they found that (1) men in traditional marriages (MITM) had more negative attitudes towards working women (controlling for selection!); (2) MITM perceived the workplace as running less smoothly when more women worked there; (3) MITM also found more gender-egalitarian organizations less attractive; and (4) MITM, when asked to rate the quality of workers who were exactly equivalent, rated women lower than men. They controlled for selection (or the way it might be that sexist guys at work choose traditional marriages rather than guys being influenced by their traditional marriages to have traditional views at work) and for education (more educated guys espouse more ostensibly feminist views).
The study excited me because it provided support for that sinking feeling that some of us can have when working with guys who lead traditional private lives. At work, it can seem, they just don’t “get it.” Hard to put one’s finger on it. But they keep doing stuff like thanking their wives for all they do at home, thinking that this shows their respect for women.
The study also excited me because it was an example of the kind of research that I was talking about when I wrote about the neglect of men as focal points for research on gender, and my suspicion that the neglect stems from a sneaky sensibility that men’s vantage point is natural and therefore can go without examination. But without investigating the impact traditional marriages on work practices (instead of the more common investigation of egalitarian marriages on home practices), we are at risk of naturalizing “traditional” just as we naturalize “men.” To understand how gender operates, it helps to look at men at the center of power not just those at the margins. And this study did so.
Perhaps now you see the irony that I felt when I noticed my enthusiasm. The study shows how worldview lines up with personal life. This might influence your judgment at work. Back in the day, feminists said the personal is political. Thing is, the personal is political for everyone, including those who follow conventions. Even for those who don’t believe in this stuff. That means the personal is political, too, for MITM (the M is silent, by the way).
Older generations always seem to fret about the sexual behavior and romantic lives of the younger crowd. In the 1920s, there was alarm when boys stopped visiting in the parlor and started driving girls around in what one newspaper called “a house of prostitution on wheels.” This worry paled in comparison to the panic evoked by the rowdy sexual revolution that began in the late 1960s.
In the 1980s, observers were rightly alarmed by the growing prevalence of early teen sex, AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases. In the first two decades of this century, anxiety shifted to the college hookup scene and the emergence of dating apps to facilitate casual sex.
Recently, however, a new concern has surfaced, with the finding that young adults, those age 20 to 24, are now having less sex than Gen-Xers or baby boomers born in the 1960s did at the same age. Indeed, 15 percent of 20-to-24-year-olds today report having had no sexual partner since they turned 18. (This is more than double the percentage for those born the 1960s; only 6 percent of them reported being sexually inactive at that age.)
Explanations abound. Some experts posit that porn and virtual sex are replacing the intimacy of actual sex. Others blame the distraction of social media, unrealistic expectations of beauty and sexual prowess perpetuated by the mass media, the pressure of preparing for careers, or the inhibiting effect of so many young adults living with parents.
Many worry about the emergence of a generation that fears the physical and emotional risks of sexual entanglements. Could we be headed for the world once described by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, where people have become so accustomed to interacting with other humans only over their devices that robots must arrange reproduction to avoid extinction?
My own sense is that the changes in the sexual behavior of millennials are less dramatic and more positive. This generation is hardly embracing celibacy in significant numbers. Most of the increase in sexually inactive 20-to-24-year-olds occurred among women; much of this is probably due to their rising age of marriage.
At the same time, most millennials have never been the sexual players portrayed in the media, nor were the Gen-Xers. Still, they face an unprecedented romantic and sexual challenge. Never before have young people reached sexual maturity so early, had so much freedom to explore their sexual desires and identities, and yet had such strong incentives to postpone making long-term romantic commitments.
Hooking up at gatherings and having friends with benefits are two ways young people handle this challenge. Whatever the drawbacks of these practices, they are safer and less exploitative than many traditional ways of dealing with unsatisfied sexual desires, such as resorting to prostitutes or seeking one-night stands with strangers.
After interviewing more than 20,000 college students, sociologist Paula England and other researchers found that fewer than half of all campus hookups involve sexual intercourse. When intercourse does occur, it is typically between students who have hooked up before.
Furthermore, hookups are not replacing relationships. Most students hook up and date during their college years. Less than 10 percent reported having hooked up without ever going out on a date or being in a long-term relationship. More than one-quarter had never hooked up at all, but instead had dated or formed long-term relationships.
As an AARP-card-carrying member of the older generation, I am more impressed by the positive changes we see in the sexual behavior of teens and young adults today than by the negative behaviors that persist. Young people are initiating sex later than their peers did in the aftermath of the sexual revolution of the 1970s. They are taking more precautions, whether by having fewer partners or practicing safer sex. The ever-widening acceptance of consensual sex has been accompanied by a much more definitive rejection of non-consensual contact. The incidence of rape and sexual assault has fallen dramatically since the 1970s.
True, in recent decades, sexual frequency among couples has declined in several countries. Distraction by computers, smartphones or work pressures may be part of the story. But another part may be the fact that women today enjoy more equal status in their relations with men and feel more comfortable saying no.
One group of Gen-Xers and millennials, moreover, seems to have discovered a new secret to sexual happiness. Among heterosexual couples married since the early 1990s, those reporting the highest marital satisfaction — and the most sex — are couples who share housework and child care. In fact, these egalitarian couples are the only couples having more sex than their counterparts in the past.
So perhaps we should spend less time worrying about millennials’ sex lives and more time following the models they seem to be pioneering. Don’t feel pressured to have sex unless you really want to. Don’t feel embarrassed about having consensual sex whenever you want to, with whomever you want to, without feeling you need to commit to either the partner or the “lifestyle.” But when you do commit, don’t settle for anything less than the equality that forms the basis of long-term erotic and emotional satisfaction.
SheaMoisture hair products launched the second phase of its national #BreakTheWalls campaign recently with 60-second commercials challenging what it sees as the beauty industry’s outmoded labeling practices. The spots feature a dazzling array of women of all shades, with every imaginable hair texture, color and style asking the singular question, “What is normal?” Or en Español: “Soy normal?” The implication is that in today’s multiracial United States, kinky, curly, wavy and nappy hair textures — rather than straight ones — are the new “normal.”
The spots follow the campaign’s debut in April, which featured a brown-skinned woman staring with trepidation at gleaming rows of products in a drugstore aisle. “There is a section called ethnic. And there is an aisle called beauty,” one of several narrators says. “Do I feel like I’m beautiful? Is ‘ethnic’ not beautiful? … How can I break down those walls?”
Fans responding to the first ad on YouTube described it as “powerful,” “beautiful” and “groundbreaking.” Many expressed their gratitude to Shea simply for acknowledging black female consumers, and for affirming their natural hair-care needs with their chemical-free products. But others took issue with the premise, viewing it as a cynical play for white dollars.
This “has nothing to do with empowering women of color,” MsBgood83 wrote. “They simply used black women to make their company pop and now they are moving on to ‘others.’ ” “This is them saying they dont want to be the “black hair care company,” DAsiaW wrote. “Stop drinking the kool-aid guys.”
What the ads — and the reaction to them — speak to, though, is bigger than just hair care. The campaign is forcing Shea and its customers to think carefully about black ownership and expansion. What belongs to whom and who gets to take it away? It’s understandable that black and brown people are quick to call foul whenever their latest dance move, musical innovation, slang — or in this case, hair product — is suddenly seen as being for “everyone.” “Can’t we just have this one thing?” we seem to plead. (As the enraged reaction to Marc Jacobs’s recent multicolored, dreadlocked, mostly white female models on the catwalk demonstrates.)
And Shea’s push to broaden its reach has had other awkward moments.
In February 2015, the company posted several Twitter ads featuring white and Asian babies and children — a move that prompted black-oriented blogs such as MadameNoire to take them to task for a marketing shift they called “jarring.”
Last September, the company again faced backlash after announcing its new “strategic partnership” with Bain Capital Private Equity, a firm founded by former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Sundial’s reassurances that it would remain “majority family-owned and operated” weren’t enough to escape accusations of “selling out” and abandoning black consumers.
Again and again, black consumers reference the fate of other black-owned hair-care companies such as Soft Sheen, founded in 1964 by Edward and Bettiann Gardner, who sold homemade products from their basement on the South Side of Chicago. Soft Sheen was purchased by L’Oreal in 1998, which two years later merged it with the Savannah, Ga.-based Carson family company, a white-owned leader in black hair products, to form SoftSheen-Carson.
The average Shea consumer is no doubt also keenly aware of the 2014 L’Oreal purchase of Carol’s Daughter, a black-owned company with early investments from rapper Jay Z that markets itself as Brooklyn #BornAndMade. It, too, has been viewed with suspicion by readers of MadameNoire both when it attempted to diversify its advertising with “racially ambiguous models” rather than darker-skinned black women (a lesson Kanye West might have heeded before issuing his recent inflammatory casting call for “multiracial models” only), and after the announcement of the sale.
But this time the complaints feel just a bit off-base.
The skepticism among some black consumers is complicated by the fact that Sundial Brands, the company behind SheaMoisture, is actually owned by Africans, with products manufactured in Ghana. Can it really be white appropriation when it’s black people defining the terms of the giveaway? And it’s not at all clear that white women are the primary target of their expansion.
Instead, it seems to me that the #BreakTheWalls strategy is far more complicated, in a good way; in a way that other forward-thinking companies might emulate.
Sundial chief executive Richelau Dennis talks often of growth and expansion into a “general market.” If black businesses don’t grow, he told MadameNoire, “they die on the vine.” But what he means by the “general market” isn’t necessarily what the word used to mean: It’s no longer code for “white.”
Instead, the campaign is tapping into a submarket that, until recent years, has received little focused attention: multiracials, a population growing at a rate three times faster than the general population. #BreakTheWalls is actually a small stroke of genius in that sense. It’s no accident that both ads feature strategically placed white women, as well as light-skinned Latinas, some of them mothers with brown-skinned children.
When I asked Dennis about the biracial children in the new ads, he explained that for him, they are the new “general” market. “My mother is biracial. My grandfather was white, in a village in Sierra Leone in the 1940s,” he said. “Just because you see someone physically doesn’t necessarily mean you know who they are. That’s not where the world is headed.”
The company’s target audience — young, and increasingly assertive about their complex racial and ethnic heritages — is part of a powerful new contingent of natural hair-care bloggers and vloggers (“naturalistas”) who’ve made it their mission to offer styling tips, advice and encouragement to women both celebrating, and at times wrestling with, their decision not to chemically straighten their hair. As Dennis put it to me, the naturalistas of today are “younger, larger, louder, more educated, and more affluent” than customers of a generation ago.
And now, he’s got their attention.
***
Liberian-born Dennis and Nyema Tubman, Sundial’s co-founders, came to this country in 1987 to attend Babson College, a private business school in Wellesley, Mass. Prevented from returning home after the outbreak of Liberia’s second civil war in 1999, the roommates partnered with Dennis’s mother, Mary Dennis, to create their company using recipes passed down from Richelau Dennis’s grandmother Sofi Tucker, a natural healer who first sold soaps and salves in the village market of Bonthe, Sierra Leone, in 1912.
The partners mixed and packaged their products in a two-bedroom apartment on 168th Street in Jamaica, Queens, a space they shared with 10 other people, and peddled their shampoos and styling products on 125th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem. After incorporating in 1992, Sundial moved to a manufacturing and distribution warehouse in Amityville, N.Y., where it remains today.
The company employs several thousand workers in its northern and southern cooperatives in Ghana, Dennis told me, where he said the highest quality of shea butter is found. Dennis said the firm reinvests 10 percent of all revenue back into those local businesses — funding piping for water so that young girls can go to school, and constructing warehouses so that workers can sell at full price, year-round.
He’s painfully aware of the “selling out” question. When I asked him about that criticism, he acknowledged the trepidation among some consumers and said he understood it. They’re saying, “‘We’ve seen that happen before, and we don’t want it to happen again,’” he said. “So our job is to reassure. To stand up a little more and speak to those who are concerned.”
“What is normal? Soy normal?” Shea asks.
Despite the ad’s sunny optimism as it envisions a multi-textured, rainbow world, the answer to that question remains highly contested in the here and now. It’s just hair, some might say. But in fact, natural black and brown hair is never that simple. Despite Shea’s best efforts to challenge “normal,” its tenacious roots remain thickly locked. In the drugstore aisle, and beyond.
Kristal Brent Zook is a Council on Contemporary Families board member, an award-winning journalist, author of “Black Women’s Lives: Stories of Power and Pain,” and a professor at Hofstra University.
CCF scholar Kelly Musick and researchers Ann Meier and Sarah Flood show that parents in the United States aren’t always unhappy, even though on average, parents are less happy than non-parents. Their new research, How Parents Fare: Mothers’ and Fathers’ Subjective Well-Being in Time with Children, featured in the American Sociological Review, answers questions about the conditions under which mothers and fathers in the United States are happy and unhappy, and how their daily activities impact broader measures of parental well-being.
Musick, Meier, and Flood analyzed data in the form of self-reported well-being (happiness, sadness, stress, fatigue, and sense of meaningfulness) during 36,063 specific market and non-market work, care work, and leisure activities reported by 12,163 parents in the nationally representative 2010, 2012, and 2013 American Time Use Surveys.
The researchers highlight important findings regarding parenting and well-being:
Parent well-being is not static: parents tended to have higher measures of well-being when they were with their children as compared to without their children. Though recent studies have shown parents to be less happy than non-parents, it was not the case that children caused parents to be unhappy. Parents felt a greater sense of meaning and were happier, less sad and stressed, but just as tired, when they were with their children as compared to when they were not with them. The authors suggested that “positive feelings in time with children may thus reflect feeling rushed or guilty in time away from children.”
Mothers’ well-being was greater with than without children, but still not quite as high as fathers’ well-being with children. Specifically, mothers were more tired and stressed when with their children than were fathers. These differences in well-being were not because of the children, but because of the different activities in which mothers and fathers engaged. Mothers were more likely to do “routine” child-rearing tasks (“basic childcare” and “childcare management”) than fathers, but both parents were equally likely to do fun activities like “playing with” and “teaching” children. Mothers were more likely to engage in “solo-parenting,” meaning that they spent time with their children under age 18 without another adult present. Mothers also spent less time on average than fathers in their own leisure activity and had lower-quality sleep. When the “gendered patterns” of moms’ versus dads’ activities were considered, accounting for the greater share of care work and lower quality and quantity of “restorative” activity engaged by mothers, moms fared just as well in terms of well-being as fathers.
Parents, to varying degrees, have higher subjective well-being when they are spending time with their children than when they are not. Mothers, however, have slightly lower well-being than fathers. What does all this mean from a policy perspective? CCF reports point to evidence-based solutions. Affordable childcare and work-family policies should be implemented so that parents can meet the many demands made of them, whether those demands are caring for children and parents, working, or taking time to relax. These policies should be similar for men and women, because when fathers take paternity leave, they spend more time on childcare in the long run; by the logic of “How Parents Fare,” this could eliminate gender disparities in parental well-being. Here’s hoping that the calls for these policies—that have been around for a while—will be heeded at last following our current political season.
Braxton Jones is a graduate student in sociology at the University of New Hampshire, and serves as CCF Graduate Research and Public Affairs Scholar.
In recent months 2016 presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have discussed their childcare policy proposals. The mere fact that childcare found its way into the limelight gives me hope for families going to work while raising children today. Several pieces from the Council on Contemporary Families help to sketch where childcare policy has been and where it might go.
Will Obama’s Vision of Child Care Overcome Nixon’s Legacy?
For a great timeline of when and in what context childcare policy has been a central issue, take a look at sociologist Carole Joffe’s article, “Will Obama’s Vision of Child Care Overcome Nixon’s Legacy?”. Joffe summarizes the events of Nixon’s refusal to allow the Comprehensive Child Development Act to pass and the social implications that accompanied that refusal. She also notes that President Obama’s message of support for quality and affordable childcare has made the issue visible again.
The Nixon record is more complicated than many think. In “Is TANF Working for Struggling Millennial Parents?”—on the 20th anniversary of Welfare Reform–Shawn Fremstad recently noted that in his first administration Nixon called for equal benefits for all children no matter where they were from because, “no child is worth more in one State than in another State.”
America’s Fragmented Child Care and Early Education System
In “America’s Fragmented Child Care and Early Education System,” Sara Gable (University of Missouri), reviews the conditions of childcare in 2015. Gable makes it clear that our current childcare policies are not adequately addressing family struggles. Part-time childcare programs do not align with the needs of working families who are at it full time. High costs mean low-income families must spend significant portions of their income on childcare. When children get to childcare, Gable also notes, their experiences aren’t uniform. Teacher qualification policies across different states and childcare programs are inconsistent, ranging from only needing your high school diploma or GED to requiring a BA in education. Taking these shortcomings into account, Gable suggests raising professional standards for teachers and investing in childcare services the way that Sweden and Finland have.
The State of Affordable Child Care
In “The State of Affordable Child Care” sociologist Perry Threlfall shows how current childcare policies influence financial stability and economic growth for families. Threlfall notes that without affordable and quality childcare programs, working families are not able to fully participate in the workforce. She also brings light to the flaws in both the Child Care and Development Block Grant and the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit programs the U.S. government currently offers. Lastly, Threlfall discusses Center for American Progress Vice-President of Policy Carmel Martin’s proposal to provide a refundable tax credit that would allow low-income families to access quality childcare.
Schools didn’t start it. Achievement gaps start earlier.
In “Schools didn’t start it. Achievement gaps start earlier”Economic Policy Institute’s Elaine Weiss aims to correct the notion that schools are where achievement gaps begin and are responsible for closing them. Instead, she argues that the same system that created our staggering income inequality has also been a force behind the achievement gap. In other words, it comes down to money. Weiss explains that without an influx of educational resources low-income students will continue to enter school at a disadvantage and the schools will not be able to do much to help them. Weiss proposes fixes, including national investments in early education, higher wages for education professionals, and a further push on our current presidential candidates to concentrate on the matter of childcare and the achievement gap.
Megan Peterson is a Council on Contemporary Families Public Affairs Intern and a senior sociology major at Framingham State University in Massachusetts.
Old fashioned, like 1965. Image by Eva the Weather via Creative Commons
In 2015, CCF published an online symposium looking back on the Moynihan Report. The information is useful for those examining #neomoynihanism. Here are highlights and links to papers in the symposium.
A half century ago, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously blamed single-parent families—especially those of African Americans—for poverty and other social ills. An online symposium, “Moynihan+50: Family Structure Still not the Problem,” prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families and published by CCF jointly with the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, demonstrates just how wrong Moynihan was in his still influential report.
In “Moynihan’s Half Century: Have We Gone to Hell in a Hand Basket?” Philip Cohen, Heidi Hartmann, Jeff Hayes, and Chandra Childers explain, “Yes, the changes in family structure that concerned Moynihan have continued. Single parent families have risen, becoming widespread among Whites as well other groups. But single parent families do not explain recent trends in poverty and inequality. In fact, a number of the social ills Moynihan assumed would accompany these changes have actually decreased.” Their paper includes ten graphs that show the continuing diversification of family life, the complicated changes in the relationship between poverty and family trends, and the declines of some social ills that Moynihan thought would get worse.
Why it matters. An accompanying paper, “The Moynihan Report, Then and Now,” by historian William Chafe, reviews the troubling impact of the claims about black families made a half-century ago. Chafe explains, “By framing the report as a description of the breakdown of the black family, Moynihan ended up fueling a bitter controversy about family forms and gender roles instead of contributing to a constructive discussion of how to address the need for more black jobs.”
To demonstrate just how off the dire predictions were, Cohen and colleagues showed:
* In 1967 more than 60 percent of single-mother families were poor. Today, that poverty rate has been almost halved, falling to 35 percent.
* Today, almost 90 percent of Black young adults are high school graduates, compared with only about 50 percent in the 1960s; Black college completion rates have doubled, from less than 10 to almost 20 percent.
* Since 1994 juvenile crime rates have fallen by more than 60 percent for Blacks and Whites alike, even though marriage rates have continued to decline and the proportion of children born out of wedlock has reached 40 percent.
* It is true that single-parent families are more likely to be poor than two-parent ones, but fluctuations in poverty rates since the 1990s cannot be explained by changes in family structure.
* Marriage is no protection against racial inequality. Black and Latino children in married-couple families are, respectively, three- and four-times more likely to be poor than White children in such families.
Taken together, the evidence suggests that economic deprivation and insecurity affect family structure more than the reverse. But it is absolutely clear that American families, especially single-parent ones, face daunting challenges. The report suggests that since marriage promotion has not worked as a solution to family instability, other social policies might have more effect.
This week isn’t the first time the Moynihan Report has been revisited: At the near midpoint of this half century since the Moynihan Report, both Senator Moynihan and CCF research director Stephanie Coontz testified (.pdf) before the House Select Committee on Children and Families on family trends and what was—at the time—the popular buzz phrase of “family values.” While Moynihan predicted social chaos as a result of the destruction of traditional families, Coontz claimed that no family form has ever been able to protect its members from economic stress and interpersonal dysfunction without active support from federal agencies and community organizations. Coontz pointed out that American families have always been diverse, and that the male breadwinner family was a very recent and short-lived historical aberration. Far from being a natural or traditional arrangement, she claimed, it was created by a strong union movement that pressed for higher wages, benefits, and job security and by a government that took a far more activist approach to creating jobs and fostering social mobility than we have seen in recent decades. Its decline over the past 50 years is more result than cause of our current economic insecurity and inequality.
A briefing paper released by the Council on Contemporary Families last year 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.
There is a lot to learn from hooking up—including when you talk to people who don’t do it in any kind of stereotypical way. Some of the clichés that seem to get replayed are that “everyone” at college is doing it (70 percent of college seniors have some experience of hookups). And by “doing it” the perception is doing “it” – even though 40 percent of students who hook up reported doing so in their most recent hook up. Another stereotype is that the hookup scene is typically centered around (straight) men’s desires, even if girls-kissing-girls is part of the action sometimes. Two new hooking up studies take on these views of hooking up.
Is it everyone? What about commuters? University of Illinois-Chicago sociologists Rachel Allison and Barbara Risman reported this week on their study (“‘It Goes Hand in Hand with the Parties’: Race, Class, and Residence in College Student Negotiations of Hooking Up,” forthcoming in Sociological Perspectives). They analyzed 87 in-depth interviews with commuter and residential undergraduates at UIC: turns out commuter students do not typically participate in the hook up culture—but they still believe it is a key feature of authentic college experience.
But is hooking up the “real” college experience? According to Allison and Risman: “Students from a range of class and ethnic backgrounds told us the ‘real’ college experience involves parties and hooking up, but white middle-class students believed they actually live the ‘real’ college experience.” One student (a Middle-Eastern woman) in the study explained about hooking up: “It goes hand in hand with the parties.”
Commuters and minority students talked wistfully about missing what they believe is the “real” college experience–often based on what they see in movies or television of campus life. The researchers explained, “They feel they are getting a second rate experience. It’s not that the commuting students don’t tell us they sometimes have casual sex—they do. But they do not participate in the hooking up culture that most students see as part of college life.”
And girls kissing girls? Is it always about the guys? A study in the April 2014 issue of Gender & Society, reports that for some women the super-straight environment of college hookups is also a setting “to explore and later verify bisexual, lesbian, or queer sexual identities.” Turns out public kissing and threesomes play an important role. Not all of that sex play is about performing for men’s pleasure, and surveys show significant sexual fluidity.
In the Gender & Society study, “Queer Women in the Hookup Scene: Beyond the Closet?” Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor (University of California-Santa Barbara), Shiri Regev-Messalem (Bar Ilan University, Israel), Alison Fogarty (Stanford University), and Paula England (New York University) used the Online College and Social Life Survey (OCSLS) of over 24,000 college students from 21 four-year colleges and universities that was designed to study how college students approach hooking up, dating, and relationships. To this large data set, the researchers added 55 in-depth interviews with women students at Stanford University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, who had had some romantic or sexual experience with other women, to learn more about same-sex activity occurring in hookup settings that are mainly understood to be heterosexual.
Study co-author Paula England—who developed the OCSLS study—explained, “‘Hooking up’ was defined in our survey as ‘whatever definition of a hookup you and your friends use,’ but we know from talking to students that what they usually mean by a hookup is some sexual activity—ranging from kissing to intercourse—outside of a committed relationship.”
Hooking up, women with women, and a puzzle. The investigators reported that of the 14,128 women surveyed in the OCSLS, 94 percent identify as heterosexual. Though identifying as “straight,” these women’s behavior did not always line up with that—instead, women had more sexual fluidity. For example, forty percent of women who called themselves lesbians had had oral sex or intercourse with men; two percent of women who identify as straight report having had oral sex with a woman; compared to straight women, more women who indicated they were not sure about their sexual identities had same-sex sexual experience: 15 percent have given and 18 percent have received oral sex from a woman.
To examine sexual fluidity suggested by these women’s reports, the investigators conducted in-depth interviews. They interviewed women who identified as queer, lesbian, gay, bisexual, or some other non-heterosexual identity in order to learn more about how encounters in the hookup scene played a role in developing their current sexual identities. They learned that, since women making out with other women and threesomes between two women and a man are acceptable as a turn-on for men, this allowed women to expand and explore their sexual identities.
As study coauthor Verta Taylor points out, “Some students are embracing fluid identities and calling themselves ‘queer,’ ‘pansexual,’ ‘fluid,’ ‘bi-curious’ or simply refusing any kind of label. The old label bisexual no longer fits because even that term implies that there are only two options: lesbian/gay or straight.”
Women kissing women. In tune with the Katy Perry song, “I Kissed a Girl”, the interviews revealed that for some women, public kissing—typically seen as for the enjoyment of men onlookers—is a key opportunity for exploring same-sex attractions.
Often alcohol played a role in women’s opportunities to explore same-sex attraction, just as it plays a significant role in hookups in general. While some women who make out with other women in public had a previous same-sex attraction, others told interviewers about experimenting when they had had no previous sexual attraction to women. In sum, the authors note that “Kissing can result from or lead to emotional connections with women. It doesn’t always—but sometimes it leads to more exploration.” The interviews confirmed that public same-sex kissing in the hook up scene is one pathway into same-sex desire and behavior.
Threesomes. About 20 percent of women interviewed for this study reported participating in threesomes. “Threesomes allow same-sex pleasure without the stigma of non-heterosexual identity,” the authors explained. In some cases, women said that threesomes were a way to reduce their anxiety about approaching women on their own. One woman noted, “It’s not clear how you would initiate a relationship with a woman…I’m really inexperienced chasing women, rather more experienced at chasing men.” In other cases, women explained that threesomes were instigated by male partners, but that it led to women following up—solo—with the other woman in the encounter. The authors explain, “Although threesomes may begin with men’s desires, they introduce women to new sexual pleasures or allow them to act on same-sex or bisexual desires.”
Coauthor and historian Leila Rupp explains that this may not be so new: She points to intimate sexual relationships between co-wives in polygynous households in China and the Middle East, romantic friends in heterosexual marriages in the Euro-American world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and “girlfriends” in avant-garde cultural environments such as Greenwich Village and Weimar Berlin in the 1920s. “Bisexual behavior between women has flourished in a variety of societies where women’s same-sex desires and sexual behavior did not pose a threat to the gender order,” explains Rupp. Whether in these historical settings or in the setting of collegiate hookup culture, women’s same-sex sexuality can flourish in tight conjunction with heterosexuality. What is new in the 21st century setting, however, are the ways in which women can go on to have the opportunity to affirm new identities.
Michelle Janning, Emily Tillotson, and and Meagan Anderson-Pira on September 12, 2016
The recent movie “Bad Moms” calls to mind how motherhood is often depicted in extremes and through exaggerated metaphors of hovering helicopter PTA moms.
We three work closely on the topics of parenthood, education, and family in our careers, and we also go to movies together. Sometimes it’s hard for us to find the time to do this. We’d like to say that this is because we each spend oodles of time filling our children’s lunch boxes with organic foods grown in our gardens, but this would only be accurate if our children’s lunch ingredients included slugs.
Did you catch that? How we turned something good into something bad? Or was it the other way around? Is it good to fill lunches with hand-picked organic carrots from our back yards or is it good to embrace slugs and store-bought snack packs? Which is the better “mom achievement?”
This twisting of goodness into badness and badness into goodness for moms is precisely the premise of the movie “Bad Moms,” which we recently saw together on one of those “Girls Night Out Because They Deserve a Break” evenings (okay, that’s not how we think of our time together, but we know lots of people for whom this label hits pretty close to home, and this “self-care” framing matters, as discussed below).
The movie’s premise is as follows: high-heel-wearing-overworked-taken-for-granted mom Amy decides to stop doing the things she (along with the hyperbolic PTA bake-sale-policing ubermoms) defines as good momhood, and that are supposed to make her (and her kids) happy. No more making healthy organic lunches. No more doing her son’s (“I’m a slow learner”) school projects. No more succumbing to the pressure her daughter was placing on herself to achieve achieve achieve. No more enabling of her husband’s juvenile ways that make the audience astounded that he can keep any children alive until the end of the day (the presentation of incompetent dads and the complexity of fatherhood could fill another blog post, by the way).
She. Was. Done.
Amy meets up with new friend Carla – a single mom who works in a service industry job – to realize that kids are probably fine even if you don’t tend to them like a delicate flower in an organic garden (though Carla’s lower SES background is stereotyped in enough ways to fill yet another blog post, where we could discuss how the three of us can drop off an Arby’s bag for our kids’ lunches, but we’ll still have more cultural capital than parents in our town who work three jobs and don’t have a car). Add a third to the mix – Kiki, a stay-at-home meek-to-her-husband’s-demands mom of four – and the audience gets to hear the wishes of moms who just want to be in a small accident so they can be rewarded with hospitalization for a week with lots of peace and quiet and no responsibility. Hospitalization as a means to happiness.
At several points in our viewing, the three of us laughed out loud. At other points we turned to each other to whisper things like “I think this is a good kind of feminism,” or “This is not a good kind of feminism.” By the end of the movie, we observed that the feel-good part with swelling music and welling eyes was all about moms needing to relax about trying to achieve perfection. Stop doting. Stop helicoptering. Stop organic carroting. And stop all of this, by the way, because our kids are swimming in either: a) anxiety pools lined with college applications that require high grades and “voluntouring” at an organic farm in the Global South; or b) quicksand that enables low motivation and necessitates that Mom fills out college applications for the child.
Let’s all just focus on being happy, the movie says. If you’re happy, you’ll win. Your kids will be happy. And if you’re happy as a mom, you’ll also get to drink wine at 9 a.m., drive fast, and become the kind of PTA president that allows some gluten in the bake sale. That’s a far better reward than hospitalization! Happiness is presented in the movie’s climax as being situated at the other end of the spectrum from achievement, for moms AND kids.
But could it be that gaining happiness is just another form of achievement that could land us right back where we started? This happiness v. achievement rhetoric is everywhere. Books that make happiness a project for moms, and books that critique the “science of happiness.” Viral posts about teachers opting not to give any homework this year because it makes kids and parents and teachers miserable. Articles that extoll the virtues of women’s self-care, and articles that critique self-care as a form of soft-core neoliberal brain washing. Indexes of happiness referencing the happiest places where you should all live. And many parents, at some point when talking to children, saying, “What matters most to me is that you’re happy,” while mentally finishing the sentence with “…and obviously that you leave home before you turn 35.”
Earlier we asked whether it was good or bad to reference slugs when talking about our children’s lunches. But very few things in motherhood are about “or,” and comparing real experiences to extremes, even if they’re switched in a comedic way to call attention to their absurdity, may trap us into thinking we’re not doing anything right.
The moms in the movie were at their funniest and, dare we say, happiest, when expressing anger and letting go of all of their achievement demands. Plus they liked each other a lot more. As we finish up our school supply shopping and the kids head back to school, perhaps we ought to be cautious not to fall into the trap of making happiness yet another high achievement that good (bad?) moms have to add to the list.
Michelle Janning is Professor of Sociology at Whitman College, and Chair of the Council on Contemporary Families. She has a blog (www.michellejanning.com) where she wrestles with the realities of social life, which usually requires looking at them as gradations rather than extremes. She is trying to get her garden slugs under control.
Emily Tillotson is Director of the Bachelor of Social Work Program and Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Work at Walla Walla University. She loves to consume pop culture in all forms through a decidedly feminist lens.
Meagan Anderson-Pira is a non-profit director with a Master’s Degree in Psychology who loves talking with sociologists (see above) while watching reality television and funny movies.
All three authors live in Walla Walla, Washington, where thankfully there is a 12-screen movie theater.
About Council on Contemporary Families
The Council on Contemporary Families is a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to providing the press and public with the latest research and best-practice findings about American families. CCF seeks to enhance the national understanding of how and why families are changing, what needs and challenges they face, and how these needs can best be met.
