Public discourse in the U.S. has long viewed teen childbearing and nonmarital parenthood as social problems that threaten the well-being of women, children, and society at large. Popular media, like 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom reinforce more academic assessments. That delaying teen births will benefit women seems so obvious that this assumption has received little empirical scrutiny. Our new research, however, challenges this conventional wisdom and further raises questions about the potential costs of encouraging young unmarried mothers to marry.

Analyzing 29 years of data on a nationally representative sample of 2,900 women, we find no evidence that delaying births from adolescence to early adulthood (age 20-24) improves women’s long-term health. In many ways, this is not surprising. As rates of college attendance and completion have grown, particularly among women, early adulthood has become an increasingly important time the acquisition of resources necessary for later socioeconomic attainment. Like teen births, births during this stage likely create barriers to educational and occupational success necessary to healthy functioning across the life course.

In fact, for white women, we find that it is only young adult births and not teen births that are linked to health detriments in midlife. Because teen mothers are more likely than young adult mothers to live with their parents, the greater availability of economic and instrumental support from parents may minimize the negative consequences of childbearing for white women. For black teen mothers, high levels of economic disadvantage may limit the resources their families can provide, with negative consequences for health later in life.

Contemporary demographic trends underscore the importance of our findings. Although teen childbearing has declined steadily for the last two decades, reaching its nadir in 2013, childbearing in the young adult years remains high. In 2010, nearly 30 percent of 1^st births in the U.S. occurred to women between the ages of 20 and 24 (36% among African American women) and the majority of these births are nonmarital. The result is that the birth timing of a large proportion of U.S. women may place them at risk for health detriments in midlife.

Is Marriage the Answer? Declines in teen childbearing in the U.S. have occurred alongside an explosive growth in nonmarital childbearing, particularly among women in early adulthood. In approximately 20 years, rates of nonmarital childbearing have risen by 46%–from 28% of all births in 1990 to 41% in 2009. In conjunction with the 1996 welfare reform bill and its reauthorization in 2006, federal and state government has taken an increasingly active role in promoting marriage among low-income single mothers (a substantial proportion of whom had teen births) through efforts such as public advertising campaigns and relationship skills training. Yet whether marriage can improve outcomes for single women who had teen births is unknown.

Our findings suggest that subsequent marriage after a nonmarital early first birth (that occurs prior to the age of 24) may pose health risks for black women. Being unmarried at birth does not itself appear to be a health risk factor for black young mothers as long as they remain unmarried. Rather, those who subsequently marry have worse midlife health compared to similar young mothers who were married at birth and, more importantly, worse health than those who, by age 40, have never-married.

Explaining the health risks of later marriage for young unmarried black mothers is beyond the scope of our study, but prior research provides important clues. Given high levels of economic disadvantage and rates of male incarceration in their communities, black single mothers who later marry are disproportionately likely to marry men who have lack a high-school diploma and who have limited economic and occupational resources—factors known to be linked to high levels of stress and conflict in marriage. Our own previous research finds low levels of relationship quality and high rates of instability in the new unions that single mothers form. Thus, rather than being a source of emotional and instrumental support that is beneficial for health, subsequent marriage may introduce additional strains into the lives of Black young single mothers in ways that ultimately take a cumulative toll on their health.

What about Children? Improving the well-being of children is a central aim of efforts to reduce teen pregnancy and promote marriage among single parents. Much evidence indicates that children born to teen mothers are disadvantaged on a range of indicators of socioeconomic and educational attainment and they are more likely to experience early childbearing themselves, although the causal order here is unclear. Our study considers only mothers’ outcomes, but a growing body of research indicates that the impact of fertility timing and mother’s subsequent marriage on children’s well-being is more complex than previously believed. For example, research in Britain recently showed that children born to mothers in their early 20s fared worse on several socioeconomic and educational outcomes later in life than those born to older women. And earlier work by Elizabeth Cooksey using the same data as ours found that a mother’s subsequent marriage even to the child’s biological father did not close the gap in academic success between children born to young single mothers and those born to married mothers.

In sum, our findings for mothers indicate that it is important to consider how different groups of children are differentially affected by factors assumed to be universally harmful such as teen and nonmarital childbearing. Even well informed social policy based on empirical evidence may produce unintended negative consequences when average effects of complex social phenomena such as marriage and childbearing are assumed to apply equally to all.

Implications. Although it seems obvious that discouraging teen childbearing is a desirable goal, our results suggest that delaying childbearing to the young adult years offers few benefits to women’s health. In recent years, The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy altered its title, now the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, to better address the rise in unplanned pregnancy occurring to women in their twenties. Our findings indicate that our myopia on the challenges inherent in becoming a mother immediately after the age of majority, together with a failure to consider race/ethnic differences in the likely impact of a range of reproductive and family policies may result in unintended negative consequences, often for the most disadvantaged or vulnerable groups.

This point also applies to our findings regarding the impact of marriage. Although decades of research indicate that married individuals are healthier on average than the unmarried, one cannot conclude that marriage is a panacea that will solve a range of individual and societal ills or that it is equally beneficial to all individuals. Our findings indicate that marriage may pose long-term health risks to some women who have births in adolescence or early adulthood. More broadly, they sound a cautionary note about the long-term consequences of attempts to intervene in women’s personal decisions about childbearing and marriage.

Kristi Williams is Associate Professor of Sociology, The Ohio State University and Senior Scholar at the Council on Contemporary Families.

You can view the press release for her study: Timing of First Child Influences Women’s Health at Age 40. 

“What do we want? JUSTICE. When do we want it? NOW.”

I chanted along as I watched my son engaged in social protest. My palms began to sweat and my jaw tense as I watch him. I wondered if my son was at the line of civil disobedience or had he already crossed it. He is an absolutely beautiful young man, tall with broad shoulders and a smile that melts my heart. I am his mother and I love him dearly.

I know he has the right to protest what he sees as injustice. I have taught him, and countless college students that it is our duty to participate in the struggle to create a just society. From schoolyards, where they might encounter someone bullying someone else, to encountering homeless people on the streets of Los Angeles, I have taught my children that to ignore injustice is to further inflict it. However, in this moment, I am his mother. In this moment, as police surround him as he angrily argues his rights, I am afraid for my beautiful son, my man-child. I am acutely aware that Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Sandra Bland have mothers that thought them beautiful and whom now, mourn them. In this moment, my pride that my in my 17-year-old son has learned, and is extending my life lessons regarding social activism are mixed inextricably with a mother’s fear.

In 1955, a fourteen-year-old boy was brutally murdered in Mississippi. Emmett Till, like many young African American boys today, lived with his mother in a single-parent household. Mamie Till, anguished at the loss of her only child, nevertheless decided upon an open casket to make sure the world knew what happened to her son. Many scholars, myself included, believe the choice to make public and lay bare the horrors of the murder was pivotal in launching the beginning of The Civil Rights Movement.

On April 27th 2015, a video of rioting in Baltimore was broadcast on the news and shared widely on social media. In the video, a woman wades through the crowd and hits and yells at her rioting son. An angry crowd of rioters had exploded in response to the gruesome death Freddie Gray, a young black man who died while in police custody. Media stories and interviews with ‘Baltimore Mom’ generally deemed her actions as necessary to keep the city, and her son, safe. See was celebrated by many as “Mom of the Year”.

My response, the actions of Mamie Till and “Baltimore Mom” represent the weight of black motherhood. In the United States, around 67 percent of black families with children live in households with an unmarried mother. In fact, then, as now, women like Baltimore mom, Mamie Till, and myself, are portrayed as emblematic of “THE REAL” problem besetting black communities. Like Mamie Till, I am divorced from my son’s father. Although the fact that his father and I continue to co-parent our children despite the change in our marital status, and the fact that I am a professor with an advanced degree, should both be logically considered mitigating factors, our family is nonetheless included in statistics described by The Moynihan Report as representing “a tangle of pathology.” The Moynihan report, written 50 years ago to buttress Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty”, is among the most famous pieces of social scientific analysis. In my twenty years of research of African American families, I have yet to see policy or research on black family that fails to reference it. While the report cogently assessed the constraining impact of discrimination on intimate relationships options available to Black men and women, it also imposed a biased and limiting meaning regarding marriage fragility. The Moynihan Report, and contemporary popular opinion both generally place single-black motherhood at the top of the list of self-inflicted harms, right alongside discussions of “black-on-black crime.” The Moynihan Report explicitly asserted that Black women’s strength emasculated Black men and thereby caused criminality and a host of other pathologies. Today the harms of black, single mother families are unarticulated but nevertheless presumed. Post-Civil Rights Movement changes in welfare policy, along with ‘War on Drugs’, are key components in the emergence of what law professor and author Michelle Alexander calls The New Jim Crow. In Baltimore, in Ferguson, in Los Angeles, as well as in urban Black communities everywhere, the impact of the “New Jim Crow” has been deeply felt. High numbers of community residents are incarcerated in prisons all over the country and are therefore absent from their families. “Baltimore Mom’s” response seemed to me to be emblematic of the toxic circumstances brought on by the criminalization of entire communities.

In 2015, as was the case in 1965 and 1955 before that, single motherhood continues to be associated with poverty and inequality, as well as with cultural arguments about the social problems observed in urban black communities. Simply put, race continues to influence how most people in society think about the links between marriage, childbearing, and the host of structural problems confronting African American communities. Oddly, even as American families have become far more diverse, and increasingly we interrogate the collateral costs of the “War on Drugs”, critical interrogations of the logic of “family dysfunction” as the cause of black people’s problems, is rare. In fact, even President Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States, and himself a product of a single mother, began several initiatives to build “strong communities” by promoting “responsible fatherhood” as a primary strategy.

Americans of every race continue to decry the “deterioration” of urban black communities as being directly linked to family behavior, and lament the tragic impact of the loss of “traditional family values”. This is indeed the context for “Baltimore Mom’s” initial elevation.

I did not succumb to fear as I watched my son impolitely assert that “Black Lives Matter” in an uncivil protest in front of the church that night. Instead, I saw myself joined with my son and countless other mothers, fathers, step-fathers, siblings, cousins and play-cousins, across time and geography to stand together and unapologetically demand meaningful political response to police abuses. Because, Black Lives Matter, really.

Professor James is co-author, along with Donna L. Franklin, of the newly revised paperback edition of Ensuring Inequality: Structural Transformations of the African American Family, Oxford University Press. 2015. She has devoted her academic life to understanding racial inequality, and her personal life to eradicating it.

When New York Magazine published a story about eight adults and three kids sharing one big house as a modern-day family of choice, it was shared more than 4,000 times in just the first few days. In the research I did for my latest book, How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21^st Century, I interviewed people across the nation who were creating their own intentional families or designing other innovative ways of living. In this two-part series, I am sharing excerpts from the book. Part 1 was “The Way We Live Now: Intentionally with Others, and Joyously Alone.” Here is Part 2, from pages 1-4 of How We Live Now.

In the fall of 2012, an article in the “Great Homes and Destinations” section of the New York Times began like this:

“In a slowly gentrifying section of Bushwick, Brooklyn, where gunshots are no longer heard and the local brothel has been turned into a family home, five friends made a 10-year commitment.

The group— two architectural designers, two fashion designers and one advertising executive, all in their 20s — rented 2,700 square feet of raw space and agreed to fix it up and live there for a decade. Two years into that commitment, it seems to be going pretty well.”

In just a few understated sentences, the Times captured a way of living that would have been nearly unthinkable not so very long ago. A confluence of cultural, demographic, and economic factors have turned the opening decades of the 21^st century into a time of unprecedented innovation and experimentation as Americans search for their place, their space, and their people.

The choices of the five twenty-somethings are remarkable in a number of ways:

• Demographics and Relationships: The five men and women in their twenties are making a 10-year commitment, and it is not to a spouse, nor even to the goal of finding a spouse, though that is not out of the question. It is a commitment to one another, a set of friends. In 1956, the median age at which Americans first married was as young as it has ever been—22.5 for men and 20.1 for women. By 2013, though, the respective ages had jumped to 29.0 and 26.6—and that’s just for those who do marry. Today, the twenties can be devoted to all manner of pursuits; marriage and children, while still an aspiration for many, no longer dominate.
• Geography: They are staying in the city, and not looking toward the distant suburbs. That’s new, too. For the first time in at least two decades, cities and surrounding suburbs are growing faster than exurbs.
• Architecture and Design: A century ago, many Americans were selecting houses from a Sears catalog. Now, adults can step into a big hunk of raw space and envision a place they will call home that stretches beyond a space fit for a couple or a traditional nuclear family.

The friends have separate bedrooms. They share showers, a bathroom, and space for entertaining. They are also sharing their lives. They consider themselves family.

These five people could have followed a more familiar script. Instead, they dreamed. They designed their own lives, with their own place, their own space, and their own people.

Another group of young New Yorkers, all heterosexual single men, began living together just after they graduated from New York University. That was 18 years before they were interviewed about their experiences by the New York Times. When the rent for their loft in Chelsea doubled after fourteen years, they could have gone their separate ways. But they are close friends, and they instead chose to look for another place they could share.

The four men, all approaching 40, found two stories of a concrete building in Queens which they affectionately call Fortress Astoria. The men have their own rooms (more like tiny apartments) and share a kitchen, living room, and garden. None of the bedrooms are adjoining, so the men have privacy when they want to bring dates home.

“We are really close, and care about each other deeply,” one of the men told Times reporter Hilary Howard. “And yet we give each other lots of space…We’ve got all the benefits of a family with very little of the craziness that normally comes along with them.”

Not one of the men is a parent. That doesn’t make them all that unusual. In 2012, the birthrate in the United States fell to the lowest level since 1920, when reliable records first became available.

The ease and comfort they feel with one another is clearly one of the main attractions of the way the men live, but so is the money they save by splitting the rent and utilities four ways. Without the pressure of a pricier housing tab, the men can pursue circuitous, risky, and exhilarating career paths that the company men of eras past could not imagine. One of the men tried an office job for a while. The health insurance was nice, but the work wasn’t. He is now a personal trainer. His roommates are in film-making, acting, and the design of role-playing fantasy games.

In a vibrant Seattle neighborhood, complete with markets, cultural venues, and convenient public transportation, a group of artists longed to find affordable housing. There wasn’t any. There was, though, an old hotel that captured the fancy of their dreamy minds. With help from the city, they converted the hotel into a cooperative home with 21 living spaces, including doubles, triples, and solo “Zen” units.

The housemates—who range in age from 19 to 50—share kitchens, bathrooms, lounges, laundry facilities, and a roof deck. It is their responsibility to keep the building in good shape, but they throw work parties to get that done so it doesn’t feel like a chore. They have potlucks at home and organize outings to local stomping grounds.

The Brooklyn, Queens, and Seattle stories are all examples of one of the newly fashionable ways of living in twenty-first century America: under the same roof with people who are not your spouse or family. The bond that unites the housemates is not blood or marriage, but friendship.

The trend, however, is not confined to urban areas, to young adults, or even to artistic types. All across the nation, unrelated people who once went their separate ways (often with a spouse and kids in tow) are now living together.

Bella DePaulo (PhD. Harvard) studies single life and contemporary versions of home and family. She is the author of books such as How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21^st Century and Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After. She writes the “Living Single” blog for Psychology Today and the “Single at Heart” blog for Psych Central. Visit her website at BellaDePaulo.com.

The demographic face of the nation has changed dramatically over the past half-century. Today, the number of unmarried adults in the U.S. is nearly equal to the number of married ones, and more and more women of all marital statuses are opting not to have children at all. Only about 20% of all households are comprised of mom, dad, and the kids. So how are people living now? For my most recent book, How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21^st Century, I traveled around the country asking people to show me their homes and tell me about their lifespaces – the domestic places, spaces, and people who are most important to them. I combined their personal stories with relevant research from the social sciences and some historical context to show the innovative ways in which contemporary Americans have moved beyond the paradigm of living in a nuclear family home in the suburbs. In this post and the next, I share excerpts from How We Live Now. This is the first, from pp. xiii-xv.

When I asked the people I interviewed what mattered to them in deciding how and with whom to live, they mentioned everything from dealing with the tasks of everyday life to existential concerns about who would care for them in later life. On a psychological level, there were two things that just about everyone wanted, though in vastly different proportions. You won’t find them mentioned in real estate circulars, in reports from demographers about the ways we live, or (with rare exceptions) in the writings of architects or builders or city planners.

They wanted time with other people and time to themselves. Everyone was seeking just the right mix of sociability and solitude. They would like their time with other people to be easy to come by. Sarah Stokes, who lives on her own, sometimes has so many social invitations that she stops answering her phone. Other times, though, her social circle is too quiet, and she is disheartened by having to be the one to initiate.

By living in cohousing, Karen Hester has found a way to have a place of her own and easy sociability, too. Just steps outside her door she will probably find neighbors in the courtyard or in the common house. There will always be community dinners several times a week, and a day now and then when the group comes together to keep the grounds in good shape. Anja Woltman and Tricia Hoffman live at opposite ends of a duplex, so each has a home of her own as well as a friend right next door. Robert Jones lives in a big old Southern house in a charming small town. It is a family home which he shares with his brother and sister-in-law. He finds his easy sociability, though, with his poker buddies and his theater group, and the neighbors he sees everyday as he walks to work.

In choosing a way to live, people are also regulating access to themselves, in ways that are both profound and mundane. Whether they end up satisfied with their situation depends on the fit between what they want, psychologically, and what their living arrangements afford. The important questions include:

• To what extent do you want to know other people and be known by them?
• How much control do you want over the depth to which you are known by other people?
• Do you like the sense of presence of other people?
• Is solitude something you enjoy now and then or something you crave?

People who want to know other people and be known to them are happy to engage in the day-to-day exchanges of pleasantries, but they don’t want their contacts with their fellow humans to end there. They want to be friends, and not just acquaintances.

A New York Times story captured the essence of the conditions conducive to the development of close friendships, as documented in social science research: “proximity, repeated and unplanned interactions, and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other.” The rhythms of cohousing, with regular or semi-regular dinners, meetings, and the occasional workdays—together with the spontaneous chats along the pathways of neighborly spaces—offer magnificent opportunities to develop relationships with breadth and depth. In cohousing, relationships can grow in their own good time. The more deliberative versions of house-sharing, which go beyond the mere roommate mentalities, are also rich with the potential for forming close personal bonds.

Maria Hall, who lives in a home of her own, is happy to cede some control over the access that people have to her and her house. “I don’t have a ‘you have to call me before you come over’ policy,” she told me. “If the truck is in the back, just come on in. If there’s something on the floor, step over it.” When I visited Diane Dew, who lives on the first floor of a two-story building, I noticed that the people on the top story across the way could probably see into her windows. That might make some people feel observed and self-conscious. Diane, though, told me that she loved opening her shades in the morning and waving to the children eating breakfast near their kitchen window; they, in turn, blow kisses to her.

Not everyone wants closeness from the people around them. That’s what Lucy Whitworth learned from her community of women who live in a house and two duplexes arranged around a generous stretch of gardens and fruit trees. Telling me about the kinds of people who have fit in well over the years, Lucy said that it is important that “you don’t mind if people know about who you are.”

The sense of the presence of other people, though distracting to some, is reassuring to others. One of two widows who live next door to each other told me that in the evenings, when she looks outside, she is comforted by the sight of the light on in the home of her friend. Marianne Kilkenny, who shares a house with four other people, likes the privacy she has in her own suite. At the same time, she enjoys hearing the soft sounds outside her door of her housemates going about their daily routines. She missed that when she lived alone.

Just about everyone I interviewed wanted at least some time to themselves. I thought for a moment that I had found one person who didn’t, Danica Meek, a 21-year-old who lives in a tiny room in a big house that she shares with one other woman and three men. When I asked Danica what she liked to do by herself, at first she couldn’t think of anything. Then she said she might like to do some writing but had not done any yet. As we continued to talk, though, she mentioned how much she enjoyed being the first one up in the morning, and starting her day in peaceful solitude. Len, a 91-year-old widower who opened his home to his daughters and grandsons, does not see the appeal of living alone. But he also shared with me what he remembered of a quote from Einstein: “being alone can be painful in youth but sweet in old age.”

For some, solitude feels more like a need or a craving than a mere desire. Arlia, who has a committed relationship but insists on living on her own, explained that she “requires” time alone “to get centered and balanced, to feel solid.”

Bella DePaulo (PhD. Harvard) studies single life and contemporary versions of home and family. She is the author of books such as How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21^st Century and Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After. She writes the “Living Single” blog for Psychology Today and the “Single at Heart” blog for Psych Central. Visit her website at BellaDePaulo.com.

If you didn’t watch it, then you may have heard the clips or perhaps viewed the mansplaining vine that characterized the mean-spirited and prosecutorial tone of the September 29^th House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s five-hour grilling of Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards. In September, amid rumors of staffers profiting from selling fetal tissues and a flurry of purportedly incriminating video content, Congress voted 241-to-187 to strip Planned Parenthood of some $500 million in federal family planning funds for a year. Women’s reproductive health remains a deeply political issue.

Planned Parenthood provides women’s health services that span beyond constitutionally- protected abortion services to include contraceptives like the Pill or LARCs (long-acting reversible contraceptives), screening for sexually transmittable diseases and infections, cancer screenings, and treatments for other women’s health issues, all of which represented 97 percent of the services delivered in 2013-14 – according to their own reporting. However, it’s pointless to get stuck trying to make an apolitical argument that the non-abortion services provided by Planned Parenthood justifies their continued public funding, because all of Planned Parenthood’s services bear the same end goal of empowering women to take control of their sexual and reproductive lives — and that’s the part that is inescapably political. It’s disingenuous to say this is about the law or fetal tissue or video or the sanctity of life or anything other than what it is: the agency of women.

Research demonstrates that empowerment through expanding access to and use of subsidized birth control reduces abortion rates and helps more women avoid unplanned births, so spending on contraception more than pays for itself. Fifty years of access to birth control and increased reproductive health has brought about a 60 percent decrease in adolescent birth rates since 1991 (Future of Children), which is good news when we calculate the social costs of unprepared or premature parenting. However, the U.S. adolescent pregnancy rate remains the highest in the developed world (at 57 per 1,000 in 2010) outside the former Soviet Bloc (Guttmacher Institute). A recent policy brief from the Future of Children argues that the increased access to LARCs could play a major role in reducing adolescent pregnancy, although only about 12 percent of women aged 15–44 using birth control use them. The authors suggest “LARCs are effective in large part because they change the default for women from having to take action to avoid pregnancy (that is, consistently take a pill or use a condom) to having to take action to become pregnant (that is, remove an IUD or an implant).”

Last week in Colorado, a bill to continue funding of a program to promote the use of LARCs was blocked by the Republican-dominated Senate – some opponents claimed that existing public programs already provide funding for birth control, that birth control encourages sex among teenagers and unmarried young adults, and that abstinence only programs are the most appropriate programs for teens. The most seditious and misguided claim was that the particular LARC to be funded by the bill (the intrauterine device [IUD] Liletta) is an abortifacient – meaning that it works by terminating a pregnancy. This claim does not hold up to scientific scrutiny, nor does it fit with the definition widely accepted by experts, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which explicitly states in a position paper “IUDs are not abortifacients—they work before pregnancy is established—and are safe for the majority of women, including adolescents and women who have never had children.”

Dressing down Planned Parenthood and blocking access to legal, affordable, safe, and constitutionally protected birth control are not the only facets of the disempowerment strategy. The Department of Health and Human Services’ Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative (TPPI), which awards five-year grants to teen pregnancy prevention programs, recently announced that additional funding will be committed to new programs in 31 states this year, but the remaining four years are in jeopardy. Last summer, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted to cut funding to the program by 80 percent, and the House Appropriations Committee voted to terminate it altogether.

Like the crusade to defund Planned Parenthood, the resistance to providing access to all forms of women’s reproductive health services is a misguided mission. The transparent and mendacious attacks on women’s autonomy proves to be less focused on protecting the sanctity of human life or fetal tissue, or videos, or legal requirements, than on penalizing women for having non-reproductive sex or empowering them to have greater control over their lives. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood and a tireless advocate for a woman’s right to control her own body, said “woman must have her freedom, the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she will be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man’s attitude may be, that problem is hers – and before it can be his, it is hers alone.” And so goes the politics of the women’s bodies with a white-hot heat.

Perry Threlfall is a recent graduate of the doctoral program in sociology at George Mason University. She studies gender, racial, and class stratification across institutional and structural contexts, e.g. education and family. Her current research examines the contextualized experience of non-traditional higher education degree seekers. You can read her occasional blog at the Single Mother Sociologist.

So you or your child wants to go to college? Terrific. Investing in education is a wise use of time, helping to ensure that communities are full of well-rounded, engaged people who actively participate in the world.

But the challenge remains: which college to choose?

It’s never been so hard to answer that question. There are thousands of colleges and universities all over the country, and college can cost a lot of money. Everyone wants to find the “right” college, but what that means varies from person to person.

There are college counselors and magazines, websites, and friends who offer information; the government wants to help too.

A few weeks ago U.S. Department of Education released a mountain of data about colleges and universities as part of a revamped “College Scorecard.” This tool, partly of ED’s College Affordability and Transparency Center, aims to help people assess a school’s affordability and value so that they can pick an appropriate institution. Some even claim that the Scorecard will change how students choose colleges.

But it shouldn’t.

Yes, it’s possible to use the new tool to look up a college you think you want to attend and find out that it’s too expensive, or that most students who go there end up in debt they have trouble paying off. You might even be surprised to learn that while the college charges a lot of money, most of the students don’t earn a lot of money after college. That’s good to know, but you can be easily misled.

Consider that the school that seems most affordable and open to students who have little money or are the first in their family to attend college is…Harvard. That’s because the Scorecard focuses on price and graduation rates and earnings after college, and neglects to mention a really important factor: admissions. For that information, you have to cruise over to College Navigator, where you’ll learn that Harvard receives more than 34,000 applications a year and admits just 6% of those people. It doesn’t help much if the most affordable college with the highest graduation rate is impossible to get into, yet according to the Scorecard Harvard is tops, along with MIT and Stanford.

It’s also a problem that the Scorecard implies that what a given college’s students earn, or how they do at paying off their debt, has nothing to do with who attends that college or what they did in college. We should expect colleges that mainly enroll wealthy students to have high graduation rates, low debt, and high post-college earnings. These students would have these advantages almost no matter where they went to college. But the wealth of a college’s students cannot be observed using the Scorecard.

Even so, you’ll be tempted to ask—why does College A look like this and College B look like that? And that precisely what the Scorecard really isn’t good for answering. Comparing colleges requires a lot more work and information than the Scorecard or any comparable simple tool provides. Taking the graduation rate or the earnings of a college that admits 80% of applicants and enrolls loads of students from low-income families and comparing those outcomes to those of a college that cherry-picks the wealthy students it admits is irresponsible. You shouldn’t conclude that New York University is “better” because its graduates earn more than the City University of New York’s graduates. They serve very different students.

So here’s what the Scorecard is good for:

1. Looking up information to get to know a college better. Test your assumptions. Did you think College X admitted a lot of low-income students or had a high overall graduation rate? Maybe you’re wrong. Good to know. You can see who pays what and where. That’s helpful.
2. Using the information when discussing college with people advising on the decision. The Scorecard can help identify topics to discuss and guide the conversation. The person you work with should be able to tackle questions you have about the Scorecard, and if they don’t, you need to keep asking until you get answers.

But please, don’t act as if the Scorecard actually gives a college a score. It doesn’t.

Families shouldn’t rule out a college or decide on one using this information. If students want to reach for college, they need to talk to knowledgeable people who can help.

Start there.

Sara Goldrick-Rab is Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also Senior Scholar at the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education and an affiliate of the Center for Financial Security, Institute for Research on Poverty, and the Consortium for Chicago School Research. In 2014, she founded the Wisconsin Harvesting Opportunities for Postsecondary Education (HOPE) Lab.

Over at Families as They Really Are, Erin Anderson has posted about men’s lagging uptake of family leave when it is available. Over here, we have prepared a round-up on how men are doing in families by looking back at papers from the Council on Contemporary Families.

An issue related to use (or not) of family leave has to do with the underlying security of jobs: In the CCF June 2013 Symposium on the Equal Pay Act, economist Heidi Shierholz wrote about the erosion of men’s wages in the past few decades. She explains, “In the late 1970s, after a long period of holding fairly steady, the gap in wages between men and women began improving. In 1979, the median hourly wage for women was 62.7 percent of the median hourly wage for men; by 2012, it was 82.8 percent. However, a big chunk of that improvement—more than a quarter of it—happened because of men’s wage losses, rather than women’s wage gains.” Read more here.

Some models show how to change men’s behavior. Anita Patnaik wrote this spring about Quebec’s non transferrable leave program and the positive results. In particular, the study demonstrates just how effective this generous benefit is in getting fathers more involved at home. With new benefits, fathers increased their participation in parental leave by 250 percent. In households where men were given the opportunity to use this benefit, fathers’ daily time in household work was 23 percent higher, long after the leave period ended. Background and details of economist Ankita Patnaik’s innovative study are provided in this briefing report.

Men’s engagement is looking pretty good, too, to several international scholars. Oriel Sullivan and colleagues compare national patterns in gender equity and housework, and note in their 2015 CCF brief, that the trend of men’s engagement with family is fundamentally forward and upward. “We argue that like most momentous historical trends, we shouldn’t expect progress towards gender equality to happen in an uninterrupted way. Just as we still see cold snaps within a process of longer-term climatic warming, the progress of gender equality should be seen as a long-term, uneven process, rather than as a single, all-at-once revolution.” You can read more here.

Arielle Kuperberg, also writing in a 2015 CCF brief, highlights good news about men in families more recently, too. In a report on cohabitation trends and best methods for studying those trends, she finds that marriage doesn’t have the kind of traditionalizing impact on participants than it has in the past. In reviewing some of the 21^st century data (versus data from the 1990s), she noted, “By 2001-3, however, men who had lived together before marriage and men who were living together without marriage and thought they would marry their partner were doing the same amount and the same type of housework. This suggests that marriage had ceased to have any effect in making men feel that they ought to play more traditional roles, or can opt out of less traditional ones.” She notes, however, that when children arrive, some of this ground is lost. Read her report here.

U.S. fathers are eager to be more involved in the care of their infants and young children—per much research and

many people’s personal accounts. The New York Times recently reported on men who have pursued legal action against their employers as a challenge to discriminatory policies and practices that prevent or limit the time they have available to utilize parental leave. Additionally, a recent survey of American fathers found an overwhelming majority, 89 percent, rated paid parental leave provided by an employer as an important workplace benefit. But consider this: there is also significant evidence that men are not likely to use parental leave, even when it is paid.

Because the leave mandated by the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act is unpaid (and simply unavailable to many Americans), many fathers can’t use it due to financial constraints. If paternity leave was paid, and resulted in no lost income, would men be more likely to take it? In our current economic climate, the answer is not so clear. My recent research on men in academia reveals that many fathers are uninterested, hesitant, or fearful that if they step away from their workplaces for most or all of the 15 weeks their employer offers in parental leave, their careers will suffer.

Some people think that academic institutions are paragons of research, discovery, and innovation that would, of course, be on the leading edge of progressive policies that would allow employees to balance the needs of work and family. This, however, is not the case. Few colleges and universities offer paid leave for mothers that doesn’t require the use of sick or vacation time to cover lost wages, and many schools actually violate federal law with their parental leave policies. Fewer still extend parental leave benefits to fathers. Furthermore, the tenure process puts pressure on young faculty, those who might be looking simultaneously at the tenure clock and their biological clocks. And the vulnerability of some staff positions or the demands on administrators means they are also not likely to take any extended leaves for the birth or adoption of a child.

Originally impressed by the decade long policy of gender neutral parental leave at the institution I recently studied, I ultimately found that policy and practices were seldom in alignment. Through interviews with men, both faculty and staff, employed in higher education within an institution with a generous parental leave policy, I learned that the opinions of colleagues and the needs of co-workers often took precedence over the wishes of a spouse and the needs of a new baby. In general, the men I interviewed still defined a significant part of their family role as that of provider, regardless of their partner’s employment status. Even though a policy of parental leave existed, and even though many of the women with whom they worked had utilized the leave, many fathers worried about the future consequences for their careers if they took any significant time out for parenting. Would co-workers resent them for taking the time off and possibly burdening colleagues with additional responsibilities? Would supervisors question their commitment to their careers or the institution? Would they lose future opportunities or rewards in their workplace if they took parental leave?

Without a doubt, we need more realistic and generous policies that allow workers, men and women, to meet the needs of their families and their workplaces. But people also need to use the policies that are available. The fact that this workplace offered a policy, but few men felt they could use it without suffering consequences, demonstrates the power of the workplace culture and the resistance many employees feel to rocking the boat, especially following a period of economic tumult. Moreover, when it is largely women who utilize parental leave, we reinforce gendered patterns of care work and continue to disadvantage women in the workplace.

These and other issues related to the individual and institutional factors that influence combining paid work and care work in academia are examined more closely in a collection I recently co-edited with Catherine Richards Solomon, Family Friendly Policies and Practices in Academe.

Erin K. Anderson is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Washington College. Her research focuses on the experiences of gender at individual, interactional, and institutional levels. Her most recent work appears in Family Friendly Policies and Practices in Academe.

Sixty-seven million women in the U.S. are employed today, which represents nearly half of the entire labor force. According to a new policy brief from the Center for American Progress, 40 percent of American households have mothers who are sole or primary breadwinners and another 25 percent are co-breadwinners. Sixty-four percent of women with children under six are working, but when considering the staggering cost of child care, it is difficult to understand how they are coping.

Rising Cost of Child Care: The Status of Women in the States: 2015, released earlier this year by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, indicates that after correcting for inflation, the weekly out-of-pocket expenditures on child care for families with an employed mother almost doubled between 1985 and 2011, by which time 30 percent of the income of families below the poverty level was being spent on child care. In 2014, the cost of center-based infant care averaged over 40 percent of the state median income for single mothers and rivaled other budgetary items such as housing and transportation, according to a 2014 report by Child Care Aware. In every state, the cost of center-based care for two children exceeds the median cost of rent, and in at least 31 states and the District of Columbia, the price tag for a year of child care exceeds the cost of two semester’s tuition at a public university (Child Care Aware).

To cope, many families devise strategies that include multiple care arrangements and reliance on family members to care for young children. This trend was documented by sociologist Madonna Harrington Meyer (Grandmothers at Work, Juggling Families and Jobs 2014) who argued that in the wake of changing family structures, reduced support from the state, and increasingly limited access to affordable and flexible child care, today’s grandmothers are doing more care work with their grandchildren than their own mothers had done when they were raising families. It is not surprising, then, that a recent Pew Research survey revealed 72 percent of grandparents report they provide child care occasionally, and 22 percent report they do so regularly.

Government Support for Child Care: Reliable and affordable child care is an important factor in enabling mothers in low-wage jobs to maintain stable employment, and for low-income parents to sustain livable conditions for their children. Additionally, inadequate access to child care hampers economic growth because it prohibits the ability of parents to fully participate in the workforce. However, there is little remedy emerging from the government, and according to the CAP proposal:

“Many of the current work-family policies stem from a time period when families had a full-time, stay-at-home caregiver, typically the mother.”

The cost of full-time annual center-based care for infants varies from state to state. This is partially due to considerable variability in state regulatory policies and partially the result of distribution variability of the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG). The grant provides $5.3 billion to subsidize states’ costs in ensuring high-quality standards for child care and offsetting the cost of child care with vouchers to low-income families, which the states must partially match with their own funds. Each state is required to provide this assistance to families with incomes below 85 percent of state median income, yet they have considerable flexibility in determining extended eligibility. In 2013, the grant was extended to the lowest number of families in 15 years and the average subsidy – at $4,900 annually – covered only half the average cost of quality child care, leaving families with limited options. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, only 17 percent of potentially eligible families (under the federal CCDBG parameters) received any assistance, and the recent Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) report, Policy Solutions that Work for Low-Income People, reveals that in 2013, the total combined federal spending on child care fell to the lowest level since 2002.

The other government sponsored child care relief program is the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC), which provides an income adjustable portion (20-35 percent) of up to $3000 in child care expenses for up to two children ($6000 max). According to recently released data from the Department of Treasury, families with incomes over $100,000 benefit the most from the program, which provides benefits retroactively when families file their taxes in the spring – a delay low income families cannot wait for when managing tight month-to-month expenses. In addition, because the credit is non-refundable, the deduction cannot exceed the amount of taxes owed. This means families with incomes slightly above the poverty level or lower, whose other exemptions may zero out their income tax burden, are left unable to take advantage or the credit.

Proposed New Child Care Tax Deduction: Neither the Child Care and Development Block Grant or the Child or Dependent Care Tax Credit is enough to close the gap on assisting families with the unmanageable cost of child care. Therefore, Carmel Martin, CAP’s Vice-President of Policy, argues:

“It’s time for a pathway that will significantly expand access to high-quality child care for those who need it most. When we talk about an inclusive economy, we need to make sure that all parents—men and women—can participate in the workforce.”

The proposed policy (High-Quality Child Care Tax Credit) would make provisions for families earning up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level and provide up to $14,000 per child under age three. Families would contribute up to 12 percent of their income toward child care fees on a sliding scale. The size of the tax credit reflects the cost of high-quality child care, builds in higher wages for providers, and would be paid directly to high-quality providers selected by parents. Parents with unpredictable work schedules could use providers that met health and safety standards if a high-quality child care provider were not available during a needed time. The proposed policy would make high-quality and affordable child care a reality to millions of American families for the first time and increase economic growth through increased labor force participation. Furthermore, the added benefit of early education available from high-quality child care providers could ensure the long term security of a strong future workforce.

Download the Center for American Progress policy brief here.

Perry Threlfall is a recent graduate of the doctoral program in sociology at George Mason University. She studies gender, race, and structural mobility through the lens of policy and practice, particularly for single mother families. You can read her occasional blog at the Single Mother Sociologist.

The commercialization of everyday life usually gives me a headache, but I guess I can always take a Tylenol. After all, as Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who directed Tylenol’s recent #HowWeFamily advertising spots, put it, the “family brand” is “helping to dispel the fears around difference,” to “get people to understand diversity” by introducing them to a wide range of families in videos that show that “at the end of the day, no matter the gender of the parents, the color of the family’s skin, the religion that they come from, the background that they come from, all of these families have the same concerns. They want what’s best for their kid, they want to care for each other and create a home that’s safe and happy.” And sometimes, of course, they need a decent painkiller.

The Tylenol spots—of immigrant families, of mixed-race families, adoptive families, gay-parent families, military families, step-families, stay-at-home dad/working-mom families, and so on—are charming, well produced, and surprisingly rich and moving. The parents, some of whom are also celebrities, are appealing and articulate, the kids are cute, and the politics are unapologetically liberal. The introductory video takes direct aim at old notions of what and who makes a family, offering the company’s “modern take on the Norman Rockwell family.” It’s an easy target, but still.

“When were you first considered a family? When you fell in love? When you got married? When you had kids?” a kind woman’s voice asks over soft music and images of straight couples holding hands, getting married, holding kids. Then, over similar images of same-sex couples and mixed-race families: “When did you first fight to be considered a family? When you fell in love? When you got married? When you had kids? Family isn’t defined by who you love, but how.” (Pause, then: “Tylenol.”) Many of the participants challenge the idea of a “normal” family, while also asserting that, as one of them puts it, “We are, at heart, all the same.”

That people have families in a wide variety of ways, throughout history and across cultures, is well established if also still widely ignored. These Tylenol images, along with TV shows like Modern Family, are part of an ongoing demotion of the ideology of One True Family (married, heterosexual man and woman with kids), and an emerging celebration of family diversity, in popular culture —even as the legal system lags behind. That’s great, and certainly better than the stigma, discrimination, and sanctimony which nontraditional families still routinely face.

Still, it strikes me as significant that the Tylenol campaign, like the similar family representations that have been popping up, downplays the ways these families move differently through the world, glosses over the origins of the new kinds of families, like my own, that they celebrate, and focuses on only particular forms of non-traditional family. One might wonder, for instance, about the experiences of the white parent of kids of color in the face of racism, immigrant families in the midst of Trump-driven nativism, same-sex parents whose children participate in a fiercely heterosexist culture. One might wonder, too, why we don’t get sunny videos about women who chose to be, or have found themselves as, single mothers, or about multi-parent-by-design families, or #HowWeFamilyWithoutMoney. One might wonder about the birth families, egg and sperm donors, surrogates, and ex-spouses whose lives, labor, and emotions were part of the family creation process but who are invisible in #HowWeFamily. One might wonder about those marginalized members of our broader family—in the communal membership sense of “family” long used by queer people—who can’t, don’t, or don’t want to benefit from the respectability garnered by participation in conventional marriage and family institutions. One might wonder, that is, whether the demolition of the idea that there is a single “normal” family requires the erasure of the ways social inequality shapes family creation and family life.

We really shouldn’t expect advertising to show that to us, of course. That’s not Tylenol’s job. Sometimes corporate actions contribute to progressive social change—in this case, when their branding interests are served by presenting non-traditional families as symbols of liberal tolerance—and oftentimes not. But we should wonder, and we should talk, about the less comfortable, less pretty inequities that are an inherent part of family-making old and new. That family diversity has become a corporate marketing tool can be flattering to some of us. But buyer beware.

Joshua Gamson (@joshgamson) is Professor of Sociology at the University of San Francisco and a Fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. His most recent book is Modern Families: Stories of Extraordinary Journeys to Kinship.