The family-building landscape for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) people has changed a great deal over the past several decades. My new book, LGBTQ Family Building: A Guide for Prospective Parents, covers a variety of pathways to parenthood, as well as guidance about how to navigate and circumvent various challenges that may arise along the way. I also share stories and statistics from “The LGBTQ Family Building Project,” my study of over 500 LGBTQ parents who built their families in various ways.

LGBTQ people report a number of barriers to pursuing parenthood. In the LGBTQ Family Building Project, for example, stigma and support related barriers included worries about teasing/harm for children (endorsed by 35% of parents), worries about discrimination in the family building process (30%), lack of LGBTQ role models (25%) and support from family 22%). Structural/practical barriers included financial considerations (58%) and geographic considerations (e.g., living in an LGBTQ unfriendly area) (18%). Personal circumstances also played a role (e.g., health concerns, 19%; partner who is uninterested in parenthood, 10%). 

Ultimately, all of these individuals did become parents, the majority through adoption or reproductive technologies (e.g., donor insemination). Adoption may be particularly appealing to cisgender male couples, who have fewer affordable options when it comes to family building, as surrogacy is quite expensive (over $100,000). LGBTQ people may be drawn to adoption as a means of building their families because it is appealing from an altruistic perspective, affordable (if via the child welfare system, as opposed to private domestic adoption), does not introduce genetic or gestational inequities in parents’ relationship to their child (as is often the case in parenthood pathways involving reproductive technologies), or because other methods (e.g., donor insemination) failed. For LGBTQ folks who choose donor insemination or surrogacy, this is often desirable because partner has a strong desire to carry, give birth to, chestfeed (i.e., nurse), and/or be genetically related to a child. They also cite various deterrents to pursuing adoption, such as perceived costliness, the unpredictability and uncertainty associated with both the adoption process and child outcomes (e.g., emotional, behavioral, and health issues), as well as legal barriers and adoption agency stigma.

There are many ways that LGBTQ people can self-advocate for themselves in the process of building their families. They can evaluate adoption agencies, medical providers, sperm banks, and other family-building resources for their LGBTQ-competence and inclusion. For example, they can examine websites and other public-facing materials for the presence of inclusive language and images (e.g., photos of same-gender couples and people with diverse gender presentations) and apparent knowledge of the unique issues present for LGBTQ folks. They can speak to staff members, and ask them directly about whether and how their policies, staff training, staff, and clientele reflect and include LGBTQ people. Further, they can ask staff directly for referrals of prior LGBTQ clients as well as inquire about the presence of LGBTQ specific resources (e.g., legal resources; support groups).

Ultimately, LGBTQ people benefit when they share knowledge and resources with each other. In turn, LGBTQ people who have successfully navigated the family building process will ideally share this knowledge informally through community and friendship networks. 

Abbie E. Goldberg is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she also currently serves as the Director of Women’s & Gender Studies, and is the current holder of the Jan and Larry Landry Endowed Chair (2020-2023). Follow them on Twitter @DrAbbieG

Imagine a world where everyone searches for their one true Friend, someone they hope to spend the rest of their life with. You can have as many lovers as you’d like, as long as those extra relationships don’t interfere with or detract from this central Friendship. Ether Rothblum, a psychologist whose work centers lesbian relationships and LGBTQ+ life, proposes this thought experiment to highlight how our culture privileges romantic relationships over friendships in all areas of life.

Defining “friend” is surprisingly difficult, and friendships are often conceptualized in contrast to other types of relationships. A friend is likely someone who you know, like, and trust more than someone you consider an acquaintance. You might think of a friend as someone who you love but don’t want to have sex with. Or a friend may be someone who you like to hang out with, but who you wouldn’t want to hang out with over an expensive candlelit dinner surrounded by other romantic couples.

We usually treat friendships like “extra” relationships that add a little fun to our everyday lives, but we don’t organize our lives around them. For instance, most people wouldn’t turn down a dream job because their best friend didn’t want to move to another city with them. If you noticed that someone brought their best friend to a wedding as their +1, rather than their romantic partner, you might wonder if they broke up. Spending too much time with a friend or appearing “too close” may solicit inquiries and rumors questioning if you really are “just friends.” These examples reveal the cultural assumption that everyone wants sexual and romantic relationships, but this isn’t the case. What is friendship when romantic and sexual relationships are not a relevant point of comparison?

First, we can turn to asexuality, which commonly refers to the experience of little or no sexual attraction. Although asexual people often do not experience sexual attraction, many report experiencing other forms of attraction, including romantic and platonic attraction. Based on this framework of multiple forms of attraction, many asexual people combine their romantic and sexual attractions to form identities like heteroromantic asexual, homoromantic asexual, panromantic asexual, etc.

But what is romantic attraction in the absence of sexual attraction? Without sexual attraction, how can you tell if you are drawn to someone as a friend or as a lover? Put plainly, when you can’t define a friend as someone you like but do not want to have sex with, the line between friend and lover becomes much fuzzier. Because of this, asexual folks often think of relationships as a spectrum rather as either friendships or romantic relationships.

Further complicating all of this, some individuals (and not just those under the asexuality umbrella) experience little or no romantic attraction, often described as aromanticism. Where asexuality blurs the line between friendships and romantic relationships, aromanticism challenges the idea that romance is the pinnacle of emotional intimacy. People who are aromantic call us to question why, exactly, romantic relationships are privileged over all other relationships, and why sex and romance are so tightly linked.

Other sexual and romantic relationship lifestyles challenge similar assumptions. For example, people who have sex with friends or are in consensual non-monogamous relationships also challenge the idea that sexual experiences should be limited to romantic relationships. Polyamorous folks and those who practice relationship anarchy do not restrict emotional intimacy to one central relationship, opposing the idea that romantic love should be exclusive and scarce. Queer folks have contested the boundaries between friend and family, creating chosen families that are accepting and loving.

The privileging of romantic and sexual relationships creates barriers for anyone who does not follow the “traditional” trajectory of heterosexual, monogamous marriage. Relationships that are not family or marital relationships don’t receive institutional or legal recognition. There is no ceremony to solidify and celebrate your status as friends. Many benefits and rights allotted under family law cannot be extended to friends, such as insurance coverage, filing joint taxes, visitation rights for someone in the hospital, and the release of deceased to next-of-kin for burial or cremation.

In other words, challenging the privileging of sexual and romantic relationships involves coming up against various cultural, legal, and economic institutions. How would our world look different if all types of connection and closeness were recognized and celebrated? The perspectives of asexual, aromantic, queer, and non-monogamous folks raise perhaps more questions than current research has answers to—but they point toward the cultural assumptions that underlie dominant understandings of “friendship.”

Emily Fox (@fox_emilyc) is a sociology Ph.D. student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on gender and sexuality in the context of friendship.

Canton Winer (@CantonWiner) is a sociology Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Irvine. His dissertation, part of which received honorable mention for the 2022 Best Graduate Student Paper from the ASA’s Section on Sexualities, examines the intersection of gender and sexuality through interviews with individuals on the asexuality spectrum.

Personal Perspective: What has sex got to do with it?

Reprinted from Psychology Today July 12, 2022

Key points

• A sexual culture that values pleasure depends on the ability to control fertility.
• The loss of abortion rights are likely to change our cultural expectation that sexual pleasure is a human right.
• Past research suggests that a culture that values sexual pleasure for its own sake depends on the right to end unwanted pregnancy.

The pain of realizing that people like me, those of us with the capacity to become pregnant and give birth, are no longer full citizens of the United States is deep and sharp. Others such as Tressie McMillan Cottom have written about this denial of full citizenship rights more powerfully than I could. As a feminist scholar who has spent decades studying gender inequality, I realize that one court decision has set back changes toward gender equality that generations have fought for.

In my research I have often studied intimacy between sexual partners, and how it has changed between the 20th and 21st Century. We have gone from alarm at the increasing number of women with pre-marital sexual experience to being perplexed at the decreasing sexual activity of teenagers today. But through it all, the right of women and people who can become pregnant to control their own fertility has allowed the right to sexual pleasure for all to be taken for granted. No one beyond those bound by a literalist religious theology expects to have to wait until marriage to explore their own sexual desires, and surely no one expects to return to abstinence in the event of a divorce. One of the too-rarely-acknowledged consequences of Roe vs. Wade was women’s full access to the rights to sexual pleasure without the fear of an unwanted pregnancy that they are forced to carry to term. Thus, reversing Roe is an assault on bodily autonomy in all forms, including an assault on the right to sexual pleasure.

My own research, co-authored with Rachel Allison, suggests that the expectation of recreational sex has gone far beyond simply being an expectation of adulthood; hooking up has come to define the “college experience” among young people privileged enough to go to residential, four-year colleges. Even among students at primarily working-class urban campuses where many students live with their families, young people still believe “hooking up” defines the college experience, and they are disappointed that they can’t afford to live in a dormitory far from their parents policing. Research by Lisa Wade suggests that the culture of casual sex is so strong that even those who would prefer to have deep relationships feel pressured to pretend they do not want to mix feelings with sexual activity while in college.

It has only been since the legalization of birth control for single women in the 1960’s—and then the national availability of abortion soon after, in 1973, with the Roe vs. Wade decision—that sexual culture in America could change to allow for recreational sex. Only when heterosexual women were totally sure that sexual activity would not result in an unwanted child could they be free to enjoy, and even seek out, sexual pleasure outside the bounds of relationships. And change came quickly: In the 1950’s most women were virgins until marriage, or if not, they had sex with one partner before the wedding night: their fiancé. By the turn of this century, few brides were virgins because most young women had explored their own sexual desires during their emerging adulthood. By the time they choose a partner, most of us, whether heterosexual or not, cis-gendered or not, have had years of experience in dating and with sexual activity. Recreational sex is a normal part of young adulthood, useful for understanding one’s own sexual desires, likes, and dislikes. The rising age of marriage, and with it, the falling rates of divorce, are no doubt related to young people being able to have good sex lives without committing to the wrong person too early, just to have an available sexual partner.

The pain of realizing that people like me, those of us with the capacity to become pregnant and give birth, are no longer full citizens of the United States is deep and sharp. Others such as Tressie McMillan Cottom have written about this denial of full citizenship rights more powerfully than I could. As a feminist scholar who has spent decades studying gender inequality, I realize that one court decision has set back changes toward gender equality that generations have fought for.

In my research I have often studied intimacy between sexual partners, and how it has changed between the 20th and 21st Century. We have gone from alarm at the increasing number of women with pre-marital sexual experience to being perplexed at the decreasing sexual activity of teenagers today. But through it all, the right of women and people who can become pregnant to control their own fertility has allowed the right to sexual pleasure for all to be taken for granted. No one beyond those bound by a literalist religious theology expects to have to wait until marriage to explore their own sexual desires, and surely no one expects to return to abstinence in the event of a divorce. One of the too-rarely-acknowledged consequences of Roe vs. Wade was women’s full access to the rights to sexual pleasure without the fear of an unwanted pregnancy that they are forced to carry to term. Thus, reversing Roe is an assault on bodily autonomy in all forms, including an assault on the right to sexual pleasure.

My own research, co-authored with Rachel Allison, suggests that the expectation of recreational sex has gone far beyond simply being an expectation of adulthood; hooking up has come to define the “college experience” among young people privileged enough to go to residential, four-year colleges. Even among students at primarily working-class urban campuses where many students live with their families, young people still believe “hooking up” defines the college experience, and they are disappointed that they can’t afford to live in a dormitory far from their parents policing. Research by Lisa Wade suggests that the culture of casual sex is so strong that even those who would prefer to have deep relationships feel pressured to pretend they do not want to mix feelings with sexual activity while in college.

It has only been since the legalization of birth control for single women in the 1960’s—and then the national availability of abortion soon after, in 1973, with the Roe vs. Wade decision—that sexual culture in America could change to allow for recreational sex. Only when heterosexual women were totally sure that sexual activity would not result in an unwanted child could they be free to enjoy, and even seek out, sexual pleasure outside the bounds of relationships. And change came quickly: In the 1950’s most women were virgins until marriage, or if not, they had sex with one partner before the wedding night: their fiancé. By the turn of this century, few brides were virgins because most young women had explored their own sexual desires during their emerging adulthood. By the time they choose a partner, most of us, whether heterosexual or not, cis-gendered or not, have had years of experience in dating and with sexual activity. Recreational sex is a normal part of young adulthood, useful for understanding one’s own sexual desires, likes, and dislikes. The rising age of marriage, and with it, the falling rates of divorce, are no doubt related to young people being able to have good sex lives without committing to the wrong person too early, just to have an available sexual partner.

But this is all old news; old news that is newly relevant in a post-Roe world where safe and legal abortions will once again become beyond the reach of many American women. A caveat is important here: Abortion will not be beyond the reach of Americans who know how to scour the internet for pills that induce medical abortions, even if the pills themselves are not legal in their state. Nor will abortion be unavailable to people who can afford to travel to a state that provides full health care to women. But for minors whose parents are disapproving of their sexual activity and oppose abortion, and for those who do not have the funds to go elsewhere, the cost of sexual activity can be a life disrupted, if not forever damaged. Indeed new research just published by Hutchens (2022) in the journal that I edit, Gender & Society, suggests that there are religiously motivated women across the country who volunteer in “pregnancy crises” centers that disguise themselves as places to help women with unwanted pregnancies, but actually seek to convince them to carry the unwanted fetuses to term. Hutchens’s research shows that these women may be effective because they do not openly proselytize but rather offer empathy while dissuading women from seeking the health care they desire. In the coming years, such delays may be even more detrimental if the women who have been deceived waste precious time that needed to be spent driving out of state to end their unwanted pregnancy.

So what will the cultural ramifications be of depriving women, and others who can become pregnant, of the right to fully control their fertility? Will men step in to assure their sexual partners that contraception is everyone’s concern, and step up to take responsibility for that cntraception, from condom use to vasectomies? More research in Gender & Society suggests that men will not step in and save the day. Dalessandro and his colleague’s research shows that men have little inclination to take responsibility for contraception, presuming it to be a women’s responsibility. They find that college men presume their sexual partners are STI-free, responsible for contraception, and will pursue abortion services if necessary. So they leave women’s fertility up to the women themselves. If women and others who can become pregnant cannot control when and whether to have children, our attitude toward sex cannot help but to change. Just how much pleasure is worth an unplanned pregnancy that cannot be terminated?

Since women’s right to bodily autonomy is no longer guaranteed by our Constitution, it seems quite plausible that interest in casual recreational sex will diminish as well, at least heterosexual intercourse. The freedom to seek pleasure, for its own sake, rests on the presumption that a mistaken pregnancy can be ended and not result in a forever changed life, an education rather than a fetus aborted, too many mouths to feed with too small an income, or too many sleepless nights to continue to progress in one’s chosen career. Women have always had to struggle to juggle their work and motherhood, but that can only be successful when motherhood is freely chosen. The right to bodily autonomy does not guarantee this free choice for all, but it is a necessary pre-condition. When the state forces parenthood upon those unwilling because of unintended pregnancy by a denial of comprehensive health care, the survival of sexual culture that values pleasure is unlikely. Perhaps that is the goal of Christian conservative judges in the first place: to assure that women fear heterosexual sex itself. When men do not fear sex but women do, the power of patriarchy has increased as women have one more reason to fear men themselves. But pleasure for men who have sex with women decreases as well, as enthusiastic sexual partners disappear due to the fear of pregnancy.

Sociological research has long shown that culture reflects the opportunities and limitations we face in our every day lives. When those who can become pregnant lose the right to control their fertility, all people lose a culture that celebrates pleasure. We lost the right, and expectation, to anxiety-free heterosexual sexual intercourse simply for the sake of pleasure on the day Roe V. Wade was overturned. It’s one more loss for future generations, and one more way that future generations’ lives have been diminished by the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

Barbara J. Risman is a sociology professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of Where the Millennials will Take Us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure. You can follow them on Twitter @bjrisman

Reprinted from Health Affairs Reports, July 8, 2022

The scientific process is a dynamic one of building models, testing assumptions, and constructing a theory of how the world works—all based on the quality of the evidence at every turn. What this process accomplishes does not simply explain reality; it can create a reality. Historically, this has had dangerous implications for women’s health. Rethinking what research is funded could change that.

Take, as an example, what was long considered to be the scope of heart disease. What cardiovascular research had uncovered, broadly, about the most common diseases of the heart led to screenings later in life, tests that looked for arterial blockages, and treatments for those blockages, such as valve replacement. But these approaches are sufficient for only about half of the population; they unintentionally distort reality. That’s because nearly all foundational cardiovascular research—the studies that laid the groundwork to construct our picture of what this family of ailments entailed—was primarily performed on male bodies, to understand and address cardiovascular disease in men.

When the focus finally shifted to what was happening in women’s cardiovascular systems, a different reality emerged. Beginning in the 1990s, C. Noel Bairey Merz, MD, among other researchers, began interrogating the tools she had at her disposal, and the framework she’d been taught to apply to how the disease presented itself. In women, she was finding, the symptoms of cardiovascular disease were often less clear and more diffuse. She was searching for blockages in major arteries, but she wasn’t finding them. She was hearing a wide range of symptoms from her patients, from back pain to nausea, but she just didn’t have a framework that made sense of those symptoms. She also knew the statistics: Cardiovascular disease was the leading cause of death in women in the United States and, unlike among men, it was actually getting worse, not better, over time. Women had a higher mortality and worse prognosis after an acute cardiovascular event. Clearly, the existing diagnostics were missing something.

Merz threw out the old model and found that the sex differences in the cardiovascular system began right at the very beginning: from different gene expressions in sex chromosomes and hormones. She discovered that, in women, cardiovascular disease is much more a micro-vascular disease, so the blockages the tests would be looking for weren’t in the major arteries but in smaller arteries. This new picture of the disease changed the testing, treatment, and prevention of cardiovascular disease in women.

What Is Funded Creates What Is Known

The problem of generalizing from research that is not representative of all sexes cuts both ways. Men suffer because of it, too. There currently aren’t great treatments for osteoporosis in men because it occurs four times as often in women, and most of the research on osteoporosis is based on women’s bodies. Much the same is true with other perceived “women’s diseases,” such as breast cancer. We understudy, underfund, and under treat these diseases in men—often with devastating results. However, the evidence base generally is biased toward the male body. This is the result of a long history of providing generous funding for diseases that predominantly impact men and underfunding those that predominantly impact women. This problem, and the resulting distortions, continues today. What is funded creates what is known.

Still, if science shapes reality, it can reshape it, too. Last year, I helped oversee a study commissioned by Women’s Health Access Matters, a nonprofit advocacy organization that works to increase awareness of and funding for women’s health issues. This study assessed the return on investment (ROI) we might conservatively expect if the National Institutes of Health (NIH) doubled its funding for research assessing women’s health. This wouldn’t be hard to achieve. As a case in point, only 12.0 percent of the NIH funding on Alzheimer’s disease and 4.5 percent of that on coronary artery disease went to studies that specifically addressed how the disease plays out in women. We estimated that the ROI of doubling funding for research varies across diseases. If an additional $288 million was invested to address questions about women with Alzheimer’s disease, we estimated that the ROI would be 224 percent. The ROI for additional investment of $20 million for research on coronary artery disease and women’s health would be 9,500 percent. And the ROI for investing an additional $6 million spent on researching rheumatoid arthritis in women would be 174,000 percent.

How Investing In Research On Women Benefits All

The model we used in our study considered the downstream effects of these one-time increases in the NIH’s budget: the new knowledge gained; the new treatments developed; and the lives prolonged, saved, and made more productive due to better treatments. For example, for coronary artery disease—assuming a 0.01 percent improvement in disease age-incidence, slowed disease progression, and improved quality of life over 30 years—our microsimulations show a one-time investment would save more than 15,000 years of life for women and 6,000 for men; eliminate nearly 31,000 years living with the disease for women and more than 10,500 for men; and eliminate nearly 6,500 years of lost productivity for women with coronary artery disease, and more than 2,500 for men. Finally, such an investment would add nearly 28,000 quality-adjusted life years for women, and almost 10,000 for men. The billions generated by such relatively modest investments provide evidence that these are, in fact, solvable problems. If we could simply reinvest even a fraction of the health care savings created by this initial investment, we might begin building the same robust evidence base for women’s health that already exists for men, thus creating even bigger returns and life improvements for both sexes.

As it turns out, the cost of the science pales in comparison to the price we continue to pay for what we don’t know about caring for women.

Author’s Note

The author helped lead a study at RAND coauthored and funded by WHAM (Women’s Health Access Matters), which is mentioned/disclosed in the article.

Chloe E. Bird (she/her), an adjunct sociologist at the RAND Corporation and professor of policy analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School studies women’s health and determinants of sex/gender differences in health and health care. Bird has served as senior advisor in the National Institutes of Health’s Office for Research on Women’s Health and editor-in-chief of Women’s Health Issues, where she is now associate editor. You can follow her on Twitter @ChloeBirdPhD

Talking with your children about sex is important in setting them up for healthy sexual development, but it’s also really hard work! It can be difficult to know what information your children need from you if you’re not sure where they are at with their own sexual feelings, behaviors, and concerns. You may wonder: “Is my child sexually active or just spending romantic time with her girlfriend?” or “Does my child have questions or insecurities about their body I’m not aware of?” or “Is the information I’ve provided my child enough for where he’s at in his development?”

This is where our research comes in! We wanted to know if how often parents talked with teens about sex, and how open they were during these conversations was related to how much the child would open up to parents about their sexual feelings, concerns, and behaviors. We wanted to know so we could provide tips for parents on how to potentially help their child feel like they can open up about these topics.

Our Study

We surveyed 603 pairs of mothers and their teenage children ages 12-17. We asked each of them questions about how often they talk about sex-related topics together (frequency) and the level of communication openness of these conversations (openness). More open conversations were more comfortable, interactive, honest, and involved the mother actively listening to the teenage child. We also asked about how often the teenager deliberately told their mom about their sexual feelings, concerns, and behaviors (disclosure) and how often they kept secrets related to sex from their mom (secret keeping).

Our analysis showed that:

• Teens who talked with moms more often about sex-related topics were more likely to disclose to mothers about sex, BUT were also more likely to keep secrets from moms about sex.
• Teens who talked with moms more with a more open communication style were more likely to disclose to mothers about sex AND were also less likely to keep secrets from moms about sex.
• When communication about sex-related topics was BOTH frequent AND open, teens were more likely to disclose to mothers about sex AND were also less likely to keep secrets from moms about sex.

What Does It Mean?

Our findings show that how often you talk with teens about sex and how open you are during these talks are both important.

Talking frequently in a way that is not open (e.g., lecturing, not respecting the child’s point of view) may create more conversational opportunities for a child to answer questions, but it may also send negative messages to the child. If parents are constantly lecturing to their children or sending messages that children don’t agree with, children will likely feel unable to disclose certain information about their beliefs, identity, or experiences to parents. For example, a child who is constantly lectured that sex is only okay in marriage may be unlikely to tell their parents if they are sexually active or if they’ve experienced sexual violence, even when they need support.

This is why openness during parent-child talks about sex-related topics is so important! As shown in our analysis, if these conversations were frequent AND open, children shared more with their mothers. Even if parents are talking with their child about sexuality regularly, if these conversations are one-sided, parent-dominated, and discouraging or dismissive of child input or perspectives (typical of most parent-child conversations about sex), this may further cement the message that parents do not want to hear about the child’s true experiences and feelings. Children may not feel safe, comfortable, or able to share secrets related to sexuality.

Start Having Open Conversations with Your Child Today!

If you want to set up a foundation for your child to share with you about their sexual concerns, feelings, and behaviors, you can start today by having open conversations about sex-related topics with your child- no matter what age! Visit my favorite resource Sex Positive Families for tips on how to get started. Parents can be extremely influential in positively influencing their child’s sexual development, so I encourage you to start today!

Shelby Astle, MS, CFLE is a Ph.D candidate in Applied Family Science at Kansas State University. Her research interests include parent-child sexual communication and sexual self-concept. The ultimate goal of her work is to improve young people’s sexual well-being by improving how they are socialized around sex-related topics. You can follow her research on Twitter @astleshelby and LinkedIn

Reprinted from Gender & Society April 20, 2022

In 2021, the number of stay-at-home dads in the United States reached record highs. Does this mean that cultural views about gender, masculinity, work, and family—particularly the idea that men should be breadwinners—are changing? Not necessarily.

Our recent research in Gender & Society assesses cultural views of stay-at-home fathers over three decades, by examining their portrayal in leading newspapers and magazines between 1987 and 2016. We found that news portrayals of stay-at-home dads have indeed become more positive over time. But the growing support for full-time caregiver fathers is conditional. Dads who lost their jobs because of involuntary unemployment are viewed sympathetically, especially since the Great Recession. But dads who are able to work, but choose to stay home with children instead, are still described negatively. As much as we’d like to think that the gender-bending phenomenon of (slightly) increasing numbers of dads at home is a harbinger of more fundamental gender liberalization, our results suggest that this is not unambiguously the case.

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News articles about stay-at-home dads often focused on the stigma and hardships that these dads faced in their everyday lives. In the 94 articles we analyzed, stay-at-home dads discussed being laughed at, dismissed, or even accused of being a pedophile while at the playground with their child. They were often described as being shunned by mothers and ridiculed by their friends. Fathers discussed feeling like “less of a man” because they could not financially provide for their families, and over half were described as feeling isolated and experiencing stress because of their role. Many recounted being called “Mr. Mom”, the title of a 1980s movie about an inept stay-at-home dad. This phrase reinforced the idea that active parenting was something that women do, not men. Further reinforcing this idea, some dads were instead excessively praised for doing the most basic chores with their child (like bringing them to the grocery store).

But the focus on stigma lessened over time, as more dads began to stay home with children. After the Great Recession resulted in high rates of unemployment, dads who had lost their jobs and took on caretaking roles at home were no longer described as experiencing stigma, and were discussed sympathetically and supportively. Accounts of stigma experiences didn’t disappear, however; instead they were mostly confined to another type of stay-at-home dad—those who had chosen to stay home with their children, and hadn’t been forced into the role by lay-offs.

In our article we also compared stay-at-home dads’ depictions to demographic trends. In the figure below, we extend this analysis to 2021 to include another major economic shock—the COVID pandemic. What is clear is that the rate at which fathers were at home rose in the wake of economic downturns, but eventually reversed course and reverted to near pre-downturn levels upon economic recovery. Over the period we studied, staying home became more common among dads—especially after the Great Recession of 2007-9. But the number of dads who reported they were home specifically to take care of children was still very low—less than two percent in 2021. And prior to the pandemic, rates of staying home had begun to go down among dads of younger children, declining almost to pre-Great Recession levels by 2019. These patterns also suggest that the post-recession increase in dads staying home was not a result of long-lasting changes in attitudes and ideologies about gender and work, but rather was a temporary response to economic precarity.

_{Figure 1: Percent of U.S. fathers out of the labor force, and out of the labor force specifically to care for children, 1980-2021.}

Taken together, our findings indicate that cultural views on stay-at-home dads may be changing, but mostly for dads who stay home because they don’t have any other choice. The stigma about stay-at- home dads has been reduced, but only because more dads are out of the workforce because of broader economic circumstances that make it impossible for them to be breadwinners. Dads who choose to stay home and not contribute financially to the family are still stigmatized, presumably seen as failures as breadwinners or as deadbeats for ducking this responsibility entirely. But dads who began to stay home because of the pandemic (or other future economic events) are likely to be viewed sympathetically, suggesting some relaxing of strong male-breadwinner social norms.

And cultural views may continue to change. A recent report found that over 70% of mothers will spend at least part of their children’s childhood as the main financial provider, with the average mother spending 6 years in this role. The pandemic also reversed the beginning of a decline in staying home rates among fathers of young children, and dads are now out of the labor force and home with kids at record high rates. The sustained rate of dads staying home with kids may reduce the stigma of this role even further, as more children grow up with dads at home as caregivers for at least some portion of their childhoods.

On the other hand, support for dads staying home may be reduced if economic conditions improve more broadly, reducing the number of men in that role involuntarily. And during the pandemic, while more dads withdrew from the labor force and increased the time they spent on housework and childcare, in 70% of families it was mothers who were primarily responsible for homeschooling when schools went virtual. Mothers were also far more likely than fathers to withdraw from the workforce or reduce their hours in paid work. These pandemic trends also reinforce the idea that the recent uptick in dads staying home is not an auger of radical gender change, but that traditional ideas about gender and parenting and divisions of labor are still going strong. Until these ideas change, and the stigma of men voluntarily staying home with children is reduced, few men will be willing to take on this role, preventing advancement towards full gender equality in work and family roles.

Arielle Kuperberg is Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and Chair of the Council on Contemporary Families.

Pamela Stone is Professor Emerita of Sociology at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Follow them on twitter @ATKuperberg and @profpamstone.

Every spring 80,000 NYC eighth-graders receive their matched high school offer. The offer ends a months-long process when families search for potential schools and submit an application to the NYC Department of Education ranking their top twelve preferred schools. And every spring, the high school match season sparks a passioned conversation about how NYC school choice policies abate, reflect, and/or exacerbate racial inequities and segregation. Although students are key policy recipients and actors in school choice and segregation, student perspectives are often absent from this policy debate.  

I wanted to understand students’ opinions of high schools. Unlike elementary and middle school selections, students are deeply involved in their high school selections. I conducted an experiment with over 1,000 NYC eighth grade families to understand their preferences for potential high schools. I separately asked parents and students their willingness to attend hypothetical majority White, Latinx, and Black schools with randomized graduation rates and safety indicators. These schools were essentially the exact same but differed by their racial compositions.

Emphasizing the importance of students to the school segregation conversation, I found that students express different race-based preferences for schools than their parents.  

White and Latinx students’ preferences for schools were less anti-Black than White and Latinx parents. White and Latinx parents’ aversion to attending the Black school compared to White and Latinx schools was two to three times larger than White and Latinx students’ preferences to avoid the Black school. The differences in White and Latinx parents’ and students’ race-based school preferences could be driven by younger generations being less likely to desire racially segregated schools and to endorse anti-Black sentiments and stereotypes. Parents may also feel particularly anxious about making educational decisions that secure students’ socio-economic future and use race as a signal for schools’ academic quality.

Among Black respondents, Black students preferred to avoid the White school relative to the other school options, while Black parents did not express race-based preferences for schools. Black students’ caution with attending the White schools could be due to their awareness and apprehensions about potential racial biases, discrimination, and violence in White social spaces.

Student perspectives of schools yields cautious optimism about the future of segregation.

We could see racial segregation decline, as this generation of White and Latinx students mature into adulthood. They could continue to be less anti-Black than their parents and less avoidant of schools, universities, neighborhoods, and jobs with more Black people. However, as White and Latinx youth become parents, they could also adopt the same socio-economic anxieties and anti-Black preferences as their parents. They could avoid Black spaces and, accordingly, school and residential racial segregation could persist.

As Black youth continue to grapple with publicized racial violence and discrimination, they may choose to avoid predominately White universities and neighborhoods and to select HBCUs and Black neighborhoods. These students could also eventually believe, like Black parents, that there is no right choice that shields them from structural and individual racism.

In cities across the country, like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, politicians, education administrators, and parents intensely contest school choice policies and segregation. However, we must center student voice in these conversations to both garner hope and grapple with potential difficulties with the future of educational equity.

Chantal A. Hailey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research is at the intersections of race and ethnicity, stratification, urban sociology, education, and criminology. She is particularly interested in how micro decision-making contributes to larger macro segregation and stratification patterns and how racism creates, sustains, and exacerbates racial, educational, and socioeconomic inequality. You can follow them on Twitter @ChantalAHailey

Recent Articles:

 “Racial Preferences for Schools: Evidence from a Survey Experiment with White, Black, Latinx, and Asian Parents and Students”  Sociology of Education

“Racialized Perceptions of Anticipated School Belonging” Educational Policy 

Reprinted from The Inquirer, March 9, 2022

I’ve been interviewing struggling Philadelphians for decades. “I can’t go to work Monday,” one mother told me. “I have no money to pay the day care.”

When I first met lifelong Philadelphia resident Colleen in 2004, we talked about child care. In the past, she had struggled to pay for care for her child as a part-time server in a restaurant. She felt lucky when she landed a full-time job making $7 an hour but found that it was not enough to afford the reliable child care she needed for her new work schedule. And when she turned to options for child-care subsidies, she was only offered a spot on a months-long waiting list.

The realization stung. “I can’t go to work Monday,” she told me. “I have no money to pay the day care.” Left without any options, Colleen had to quit her new job to take care of her child.

n his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden made clear that he intends to lower the high costs of having a family in America. That includes fixing the decades-long issues plaguing our nation’s child-care system, which has driven costs for families through the roof.

This is particularly crucial in Philadelphia, where the median family income lags more than $20,000 behind the median U.S. household, making child-care costs even more overwhelming.

President Biden’s plan to fix it — including curbing child-care costs to less than 7% of family income for most people, outlined in last year’s Build Back Better Act — would be a major step in the right direction. His State of the Union address should be a wake-up call for our members of Congress to finally come together and pass meaningful child-care reform. Our nation’s families depend on it.

When I first began interviewing people who were financially struggling throughout Philadelphia in the 2000s, I heard many stories from low-income parents like Colleen who were trying to cover the costs of necessities.

Even when the minimum wage was raised to $7.25 per hour in 2009, it was not nearly enough to offset increases in child-care costs. And the fact that the federal — and Pennsylvania — minimum wage has not been increased in nearly 13 years means that families are facing this pinch even more today.

The simplest way to help parents like Colleen, and to get child care to the greatest number of kids, is to expand universal and public options and make child care more affordable for everyone.

In Pennsylvania, kindergarten is not state-mandated. Where kindergarten is available, it is not always full-day. For working parents, half-day kindergarten means they have to spend another year paying exorbitant child-care costs to cover the hours when their child isn’t in school.

The government needs to fully fund public elementary education so that every school district can offer full-day kindergarten and free pre-K. This would enable parents to go to work knowing their children are cared for and that they won’t lose most of their earnings to child care. And we must increase subsidies and federal dollars for child-care providers so that the workers providing this crucial care can finally be paid what they’re worth.

These programs would substantially reduce the cost of child care for families and support an industry that has long been losing talented and passionate workers who are often paid poverty-level wages.

Such proposals were not possible when Colleen was trying to navigate the world of low-wage work. But now there is an opportunity to make child care more affordable for countless families just like hers, including many in the Philadelphia area. Congress should support Biden’s agenda and finally pass meaningful child-care reform.

Joan Maya Mazelis is an associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University-Camden and the author of “Surviving Poverty: Creating Sustainable Ties among the Poor.” @JoanieMazelis

At wedding showers, guests are often asked to provide advice to the newlyweds. As someone who values my alone time, one of my favorites has always been, “The key to a happy marriage is spending lots of time apart.” But for many married couples in the US in March 2020, “spending lots of time apart” became unattainable due to workplaces, schools, churches, restaurants, gyms, and other public or semi-public spaces closing their doors. Other couples—in which one or both spouses worked “essential” jobs with high risks of COVID-19 infections—contended with very little time together. At the same time, although shutting down public gathering spaces and public health officials cautioning against social interactions outside of households was clearly beneficial to reducing the spread of COVID-19, it also likely posed unique risks for the mental health and social well-being of single adults, especially those who lived alone or provided care to children and other family members.

These complex dynamics point to a likely reality: Families have been especially salient for our health and well-being during the pandemic period. Family scientists have long shown that family status—including relationship status—is linked to health, with most studies finding (broadly speaking) that married adults have better health outcomes than never married, divorced, and widowed adults. Yet these patterns, like all social science patterns, are context-specific, and studies are only beginning to consider how this may have shifted during the COVID-19 pandemic.

To address this, in my recent study (2022), I analyzed survey data from April to December 2020. I found that never married respondents had increased probabilities of fair or poor health, depression, and anxiety relative to married adults as the pandemic progressed. The dominant ideology within the US even before the pandemic privileged marriages and legal families, as reflected in public policies such as people having access to their spouse’s employer-based health insurance and “greedy marriage” norms which encourage married couples to prioritize their spouse above other relationships. The pandemic may have amplified this social advantage for the married, as the pandemic period was generally characterized by increased reliance on families—giving adults with a spouse a potential health-related benefit. Spouses likely provided important financial and practical support for each other in the context of unstable employment and childcare and emotional support while navigating the death and illness of loved ones and uncertain social times. Given limited opportunities to gather and socialize outside of the household, single adults who lived alone may have had less access to these supports. These dynamics together for never-married and married adults perhaps underlie the patterns I found in my survey analysis of widening health disparities for these two groups.

Yet I also found a narrowing of the difference in health outcomes for married compared to previously married adults over these same months, demonstrating the need to disentangle groups of non-married adults and not treat the “marital advantage” as universal. Although these survey data did not allow me to examine marital quality, other studies have shown that relationship strain increased as the pandemic progressed. Being isolated together as a couple—alongside new financial and health stressors—may have increased tension within relationships. Additionally, many couples experienced conflict around discordant views on masks, social distancing, and (in later months) vaccines. As an additional caution against seeing marriage as universally beneficial for health during the pandemic, my analysis further showed that marriage was more meaningful for men’s mental health than women’s, in line with feminist understandings of his and hers heterosexual marriages where men and women in the same marriage experience starkly different dynamics and benefits.

Figure: Estimated Trends in Reporting Fair or Poor Health by Relationship Status, Household

Pulse Survey, April-December 2020

Note: N=1,422,733. Weighted. Models adjust for gender, race/ethnicity, age, educational attainment, household income, coresidential children, and pandemic-related stressors (lost income, food insufficiency, delayed medical care, and issues with paying for housing).

The patterns I showed in this analysis are not inevitable but rather reflect the public policies and organizational decisions across the pandemic months. Health disparities, including family-based health disparities, are not static, but dynamic—shifting alongside changes within society. During the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, public policies were created to specifically strengthen the social safety net, including changes to unemployment benefits, stimulus payments from the federal government, and protections against evictions and debt repayment. Yet rather than extending these policies, many expired after a short period of time, likely to the detriment of the most vulnerable within society and resulting in strains on families and individuals. Within the current environment, married couples are generally at an advantage because society privileges marriage above friendships, siblings, cohabiting and dating relationships, and other social arrangements. We should aim to create policies that support multiple types of family arrangements beyond marriage, recognizing the multiple forms and functions that families and communities take, and in turn reduce disparities across these diverse family types—not broaden them.

Mieke Beth Thomeer, PhD is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and a Deputy Editor at the Journal of Marriage and Family. Follow her @miekebeth

Marriages and Divorces and the COVID-19 Pandemic in the U.S.

There is no doubt the COVID-19 Pandemic effected multiple domains of American’s lives. Specific to marriage and divorce, these effects were immediate creating literal barriers to those marriages and divorces that were already in motion. Later, as the pandemic continued the economic consequences of the illness, and the mitigation measures became more personally relevant and apparent. But at a population level, how did these events effect Americans’ marital behavior? Recent research on the effect of economic downturns on marriages and divorces suggest they lead to declines in both (see Hellerstein & Morrill, 2011; Schaller, 2013). Looking at data on the effects of The Great Recession I found a significant drop in divorces during the crisis followed by a slight uptick following the recovery (Payne, 2014). These findings led to questions regarding the institution of marriage as the pandemic and mitigation measures wane. Also, marriage and divorce were already on a downward track before the pandemic (Westrick-Payne & Manning, 2022), so it is important to consider these trends in assessments of marriage and divorce during the pandemic. If changes in marriage and divorce are evident, will they be short-term, or will they represent longer term shifts in behavior?

The National Center for Family and Marriage Research has been tracking and archiving national, state, and county-level trends in marriage and divorce over time. When the world began to shutter in response to the COVID-19 pandemic we anticipated rippling effects on marriage and divorce and were well positioned to investigate them as they unfolded. Our initial examination was limited to states with published monthly vital statistics for the year 2020 (Arizona, Florida, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Oregon). Like estimates of excess mortality, we computed expected numbers of marriages and divorces based on what was observed in the months prior to the pandemic. We then compared how the expected number compared to the number that took place. Overall, the pattern indicated shortfalls in both marriages and divorces compared to what we would have expected. However, it’s important to note that, even among the few states in our case study, we found variation. It appeared, by as early as September of 2020, Arizona had nearly recovered all marriages and divorces.

As more data were released, we were able to expand our investigation in our most recent data viz publication to include marriages in 20 states and divorces in 35. Here again, we found shortfalls–10.7% fewer marriages and 12.3% fewer divorces—compared to what we would have expected given counts in the prior 24 months. Likewise, variation between states persisted with marriage shortfalls as high as 43.7% in Hawaii and 20.3% in Nevada. Regarding divorces, most states (31) posted fewer than expected with South Carolina experiencing the largest shortfall (32.9%).

The most recently released data on marriages and divorces by state by National Center for Health Statistics is consistent with our findings. At the Population Association of America’s 2022 Annual Meeting in April and in the NCFMR Family Profile series we presented estimates of shortfalls and excesses in marriages and divorces based on the NCHS report. Consistent with our prior investigations, we found evidence of a 12% decline overall. Forty-one states and Washington D.C. experienced declines and nine states did not. Hawaii, California, and New York had the largest shortfalls and Texas, and Montana had the largest increases. Although four states did not report divorces in 2020, of those that did we expected nearly 715,000 divorces but only observed about 630,000—a shortfall of 12%. Louisiana and Maryland had the largest shortfalls, 57% and 43%, respectively. There were eight states with no shortfalls, with Illinois and Mississippi leading the pack at 42% and 30%, respectively. Arizona ended 2020 with about 300 more divorces than expected. These findings were remarkably consistent with our predictions with over 231,000 fewer marriages and nearly 85,000 fewer divorces. Further, preliminary estimates of states with available monthly counts in 2021 show a continuation of these trends with fewer marriages in six out of seven states and fewer divorces in four out of five states.

In sum, while some states had recovered in respect to marriages and divorces by the close of 2020, the handful of states with available data for 2021 still indicate possible lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on marriage and divorce in the United States. Larger questions remain. Do these results represent marriages and divorce merely postponed, or will they never occur? Only time will tell how far the ripples will extend.

Source: NCFMR analyses of CDC/NCHS, National Vital Statistics System; U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division Annual Estimates of the Resident Population; U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 American Community Survey, 1-year Experimental PUMS

Krista K. Westrick-Payne, PhD, (kristaw@bgsu.edu) is the assistant director for the National Center for Family & Marriage Research, and research affiliate of the Center for Family & Demographic Research both at Bowling Green State University. She is also the data technician for the Henry County Health Department. Trained as a family demographer, her work encompasses a broad range of topics related to marriage, family, place, and health throughout the life course. She also has a particular interest in data visualization. You can follow them on Twitter @kkaypayne. You can follow the NCFMR @NCFMRBGSU

References:

Amato, P. R., & Beattie, B. (2011). Does the unemployment rate affect the divorce rate? An analysis of state data 1960–2005. Social Science Research, 40(3), 705-715.

Hellerstein, J. K., & Morrill, M. S. (2011). Booms, busts, and divorce. The BE Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 11(1).

Payne, K. K. (2014). The Divorce Rate and the Great Recession. Family Profiles, FP-14-19. Bowling Green, OH: National Center for Family & Marriage Research. http://www.bgsu.edu/content/dam/BGSU/college-of- arts-and-sciences/NCFMR/documents/FP/FP-14-19-divorce- rate-recession.pdf   

Manning, W. D. & Payne, K. K. (2021). Marriage and divorce decline during the COVID-19 pandemic: A case study of five states. Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, 7, 1-3. https://doi.org/10.1177/23780231211006976 

National Center for Health Statistics. (n.d.). Marriages and Divorces. Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Retrieved March 1, 2022, from https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/marriage-divorce.htm?CDC_AA_refVal=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cdc.gov%2Fnchs%2Fmardiv.htm

Schaller, J. (2013). For richer, if not for poorer? Marriage and divorce over the business cycle. Journal of Population Economics, 26(3), 1007-1033.

Westrick-Payne, K. K., Manning, W. D. (2022). Marriage, divorce, and the COVID-19 Pandemic in the U.S. Family Profiles, FP-22-12. Bowling Green, OH: National Center for Family & Marriage Research. https://doi.org/10.25035/ncfmr/fp-22-12

Westrick-Payne, K. K., Manning, W. D., Carlson, L. (2022). Pandemic shortfall in marriages and divorce in the United States. Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic Work, 8, 1-3. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/23780231221090192

Westrick-Payne, K. K., Manning, W. D., Carlson, L. (2022). “Marriage and divorce during the COVID-19 pandemic: State-level analysis” Population Association of America, Atlanta, GA.