Paid leave is an increasingly popular and important issue in the United States. The problems associated with not having a national paid leave policy in the U.S. were clearly evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic. As congressional leaders currently debate implementing a federal paid parental leave policy, it is important to reflect on the benefits of paid leave for society and how to design paid parental leave policies that will work for American workers.

The benefits of paid parental leave are well-known. Paid leave is associated with better health for parents and children, greater father involvement, and stronger coparenting relationships. Paid leave also helps businesses attract and retain productive employees. Paid leave may also facilitate greater gender equality within the U.S. Despite these benefits, workers are often discouraged from using leave due to our work-first culture. Specifically, taking leave signals that workers are less committed to their jobs, resulting in workers being stigmatized and penalized for taking leave.

While implementing a national paid parental leave policy is essential and long overdue, such a policy will only be useful if workers actually use paid leave and are not penalized for doing so. In a recent study published in Social Science Research, we sought to identify aspects of leave policy design and workplace culture that reduce the stigma associated with leave-taking. We conducted a survey experiment involving approximately 1,700 participants. We presented participants with an HR form detailing an employee’s inquiry about taking paid leave for the birth of a new child, and manipulated various aspects of the leave policy that the worker had had access to (length of leave offered, amount of wage replacement, whether the policy is a “parental” or gender-specific leave policy, and whether the policy is a state or company policy) and whether the workplace culture was supportive of leave-taking. Participants then reported on their perceptions of the leave-taking employee’s commitment to their job.

We find that both mothers and fathers experience a commitment penalty for taking paid parental leave, and penalties are higher when parents take longer leave. But, we find that perceived commitment varies by context. When paid leave is taken in a more supportive context – specifically when parents receive longer periods of paid leave and higher pay while on leave – perceived commitment is higher. Favorable leave policies may signal that organizations are willing to support their employees, which may in turn increase employee commitment. We find that perceived commitment is higher in organizations with favorable leave policies for all workers, regardless of workers’ leave-taking behaviors. As such, implementing better paid leave policies could help change our perceptions of workers.

We also find that perceived commitment is higher for fathers when there is a specific paternity leave policy and workplaces support leave-taking. Because fathers are less likely to take leave and may be uniquely penalized for valuing family over work, organizational context is particularly key for increasing the acceptance of fathers’ leave-taking. However, because favorable leave policies have a larger effect on perceived commitment for fathers than mothers, these policies actually exacerbate gender gaps in perceived commitment. That is, the gender gap in perceived commitment is greater within organizations with better leave policies than in organizations with less favorable leave policies. While this unintended consequence is concerning, more favorable leave policies may still help facilitate greater gender equality over the long-term if these policies encourage and enable more fathers to take leave and be engaged in their family life.

Passing a national paid leave policy is essential for providing needed support to millions of Americans who have caregiving responsibilities yet currently lack access to leave. Based on our experiment, relatively low wage replacement for some workers (as low as 66%) in the national proposal may affect perceived commitment. The lack of leave specific for fathers may also have the unintended consequence of perpetuating the idea that leave policies are for women and not men. As such, we must continue to not only increase access to leave, but to design policies and change the culture surrounding leave to enable more workers to take leave when needed and without penalty. By doing so, the benefits of paid leave for families, companies, and society can be better realized.

Richard J. Petts is a Professor of Sociology at Ball State University. You can read more about his research at www.richardpetts.com and can follow him on Twitter @pettsric.

Trenton D. Mize is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Purdue University. You can read more about his research at www.trentonmize.com and can follow him on Twitter @MizeTrenton.

Gayle Kaufman is Nancy and Erwin Maddrey Professor of Sociology and Gender & Sexuality Studies at Davidson College. You can read more about their research at www.gaylekaufman.com and can follow them on Twitter @gakaufman22.

I am thrilled to announce that Dr. Alicia Walker has take over as the new editor of this blog. Dr. Walker is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Missouri State University, and author of two books: The Secret Life of the Cheating Wife: Power, Pragmatism and Pleasure in Women’s Infidelity (Rowman & Littlefield,  2017) and Chasing Masculinity: Men, Validation and Infidelity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). More broadly her research focuses on concealed sexual practices, and I have been lucky enough to coauthor two articles with her – one on self-described heterosexual college students who hookup with same sex partners, and a forthcoming article on patterns of entry into BDSM. Below I interview Dr. Walker:

AK: Your research has been discussed widely in the media, and you have worked to help CCF in various capacities before now. Can you tell us about your experience with and commitment to Public Sociology?

AM: In order for our research to have a wider impact, it must reach a wider audience. We don’t just research for the benefit of other scholars. Yes, we research to answer our own questions, but we hope others have those questions as well. Having other scholars read and engage with your work is terrific. But I hope to produce scholarship that helps folks outside the academy as well.

Because I’ve been lucky enough to have my work discussed in the media, people sometimes reach out to let me know that they saw themselves in my work, or that my findings helped them make sense of their situation. Nothing moves me more than knowing that my work has touched someone, made their life easier, or helped them process their feelings. And that cannot happen if my work is only ever read by other scholars doing similar work.

When I published my first book, The Secret Life of the Cheating Wife: Power, Pragmatism, and Pleasure in Women’s Infidelity, I was just a couple years out of graduate school. But thankfully, someone involved with CCF took an interest in me and my work, which helped me engage with a wider audience. I have even written some blog posts for CCF about previous research.

I later entered the Twitterverse, which has also connected me with a wider audience as well. I’ve met such amazing people on Twitter.

Publication can’t be the final step in our research. We have to make sure our work reaches beyond other scholars in our field. Writing about it for blogs, tweeting about it, sharing our findings with journalists are all ways we can reach out and share what we’ve learned.

AK: What are your favorite sociology blogs and/or twitters to follow?

AM: There are so many terrific scholars on Twitter. I follow lists of nonbinary scholars, female scholars, and academic moms. I also maintain lists of scholars: sociologists, sex researchers, and other researchers. Twitter is a terrific place to meet new scholars and find out about newly published work. I follow a variety of scholars who study a wide range of topics and disciplines. As a result, I get exposed to research I wouldn’t otherwise see.

My favorite sociology blogs include Sociological Images and the Sociologist’s Dojo.

AK: What topics are you hoping to feature more on the CCF blog?

AM: I am excited to showcase researchers doing interesting work on topics of family, relationships, sexuality, childhood, race, non-heterosexual families and relationships, and the ways that gender comes to bear on those dynamics.

I’d love to showcase junior scholars as well as more senior researchers. I’m excited to connect with more scholars.

Arielle Kuperberg is Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is the chair of the Council of Contemporary Families and was editor of this blog from  2017-2021. Follow her on Twitter at @ATKuperberg.

A few days before Father’s Day in June 2021, I found myself in the greeting card aisle leafing through the rows of cards capitalizing on the celebration of men’s parenting. One in particular caught my attention. On the front was a pale-yellow image of a modern living room scene with an open pizza box on the coffee table and books and a stuffed teddy bear lying on the floor. The caption read: “Thanks for being the kind of dad who never refers to watching our kids as ‘babysitting’,” and upon opening, “You’re a good one. Happy Father’s Day.” Did the card represent progress by implying that “good” dads take for granted that caring for their own children is parenting, not babysitting? Or did it reflect the ever-low bar for fathering and the idea that men deserve appreciation when they do the bare minimum of carework?

My card conundrum took on special meaning given that 2021 marked the 111^th annual Father’s Day, a holiday that can be traced back to Sonora Smart Dodd’s efforts to honor her father, a widower who single-handedly raised six children. It also marked 15 months – well over a full year – that many families had been working and learning remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In a country where the vast majority of fathers take less than 10 days of paternity leave from paid work after the birth or adoption of a child, the pandemic was the first time many men spent most of their awake hours in the vicinity of their children. Historically, moms have done the bulk of childcare, homework help, and housework necessary to keep kids clean, educated, fed, and clothed. Has the pandemic changed that?

Much like with that Father’s Day card, the answer depends on how you look at it. The pandemic compelled many families to reevaluate the starkly lopsided gendered division of household and parenting labor. Early in the pandemic, both mothers and fathers reported that they were sharing housework and childcare more equitably. Lost jobs, income, and work hours meant more economic stress for families, while closed workplaces, schools, and daycares forced more paid and unpaid labor into the home. Fathers picked up some of the slack. But mothers picked up even more. And they didn’t always agree about who was doing how much. The pandemic certainly hasn’t closed the persistent gap between our cultural views of fatherhood that have long included expectations for men to be involved dads who provide care and time, not just money, and men’s actual parenting behaviors. The lag separating the culture and conduct of fatherhood that historian Ralph LaRossa described over three decades ago endures.

Yet, now over a year and a half into the pandemic, evidence suggests that we have reasons to celebrate. Fathers have spent more time with and felt closer to their children. They’ve gotten to know their children more and discovered new shared interests. Some laud more paternal playtime as a “gift of the pandemic.” Many became more involved in their children’s education and stepped up in other ways around the house that became workplace, schoolroom, and daycare facility all wrapped into one.

But the pandemic didn’t upend deeply entrenched gender inequities in carework – the devalued, often invisible, and less playful aspects of parenting that include cleaning, cooking, and cognitive burdens such as grocery list-making and tracking homework due dates. A huge gap remains between our cultural ideas of “involved” dads and the reality that the labor burdens of parenthood still fall much more heavily on women. A major reason for that is that American fathers tend to fall back on their breadwinner responsibilities in times of economic crisis. It didn’t help that women lost more paid jobs during the height of COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders, nor that governmental responses to the crisis were slow and uneven across different states and communities.

In our work-first culture, we still hold men accountable for families’ financial well-being, despite how women have long been primary or co-breadwinners in most families. This was especially evident in my research on fatherhood programs for low-income fathers of color who worked hard to cast off the “deadbeat dad” label so often applied to marginalized men who struggle to live up the masculine breadwinner norm. Directly challenging racist stereotypes that fathers of color are more likely to be absent and less involved with children, Black fathers are actually more likely than white dads to feed, eat meals with, bathe, diaper, dress, play with, and read to their children. Provider expectations, especially for men who face limited job prospects, can undermine a personal sense of parental value and worth.

We saw this too during the pandemic. During a social and economic crisis when mothers were more likely to lose their jobs and governments and employers did little overall to help them manage the unprecedented COVID care burdens, it’s no wonder that traditionally gendered roles of parental responsibility shaped how much dads stepped up – and then stepped out. We still give dads more credit for paid work and breadwinning than for unpaid care and breadmaking.

I’m still not sure how I feel about that Father’s Day card and whether it reflects how far we’ve come in creating equitable conditions of parenting – or rather just how far we have left to go. One thing is certain. Regardless of gender, parents in the United States lack adequate public support for the labors of parenting as the pandemic continues to unfold. Maybe next year there will be a Father’s Day card that honors the work, both paid and unpaid, that it really takes to raise children. Perhaps I’ll find one that harkens back to the original vision of Sonora Smart Dodd who wanted to celebrate her father stepping up to the role of primary parent – not babysitter – when a crisis demanded it.

Jennifer Randles is Professor and Chair of Sociology, California State University, Fresno

Quick Summary: New study shows that couples justified relying on mothers as the “default” parent during the pandemic, seeing those arrangements as “practical” and “natural” because of longstanding gendered norms about caregiving and inequalities in parents’ work roles.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many mothers stepped into the “default” parent role. They took on more of the parenting, even when they were working for pay. And they often did so without any real discussion or negotiation over who would do more of the care.

Given the toll these arrangements took on mothers – undermining their mental health, causing stress in their relationships, forcing them to scale back their work hours, or even pushing them out of their careers – it’s important to ask: how did couples justify having mothers do so much more?

My coauthors Emily Meanwell, Elizabeth M. Anderson, Amelia S. Knopf and I answer this question in a new study, recently published in the open access journal Socius, and supported in part with funding from the NIH through the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute.

Drawing on two waves of in-depth interviews with 55 mothers and 14 fathers in different-sex dual-earner couples, we found that cultural and structural inequalities made it seem practical and natural for couples to rely on mothers as the “default” parent for care. Justifying these arrangements, mothers and fathers pointed to fathers’ status as primary breadwinners, mothers’ disproportionate availability at home, and gendered ideas about who would be more patient with the kids.

In couples where fathers were the primary breadwinners, both mothers and fathers described mothers’ work as “less valuable” than fathers’ and thus more easily sacrificed during the pandemic. Because dads earned more and usually worked more hours, they were allowed to “hole up” during the workday while moms had to simultaneously managing working and caring for the kids. As a Latina mother told us, explaining why she did her part-time data analysis job while caring for her two children, while her husband worked from their bedroom all day: “whatever pays the most wins.”

In other couples, particularly where moms had higher levels of education than dads, moms were able to work from home while dads had to work outside the home. This led moms to do more of the caregiving at home, even when they were the primary earner and working from home full-time. As a Black mother told us, explaining why she was the one caring for her three children during the day while also working full-time as a customer service representative: “[My husband] works in construction. I work from home.”

Gendered caregiving norms allowed couples to justify these arrangements as natural and desirable. Some mothers even described themselves as fortunate to have lost their jobs during the pandemic, because it allowed them to give their undivided attention to their kids. That included a white mother who lost her job in food service and told us: “With my older kids being out of school… I realize how fortunate I am that I got to be home. So I didn’t get faced with daycares being closed and schools being closed but still having to go to work…. I got the easy option.”

At the same time, gendered caregiving norms also limited mothers’ sense of entitlement to support with childcare from partners and other potential caregivers. A white mother we interviewed, who we call Candice, continued working full-time from home as a nonprofit administrator. When her husband lost his job in food service, they planned to have him provide full-time care. Yet, because their toddler gravitated toward Candice, she remained highly involved in care, saying: “It’s mostly [my husband]’s responsibility, I guess, to watch her, but I’m definitely involved throughout the day, as well. I sit on the couch with her playing in her toys. So I’m there and interacting with her but also still doing work…. So it’s not the same quality of work, but it’ll pay.”

Those norms also made mothers feel guilty and selfish for sending their children back to in-person school and childcare. As a white mother we interviewed explained, “[My daughter has] really struggled with in-person kindergarten…. And then [sending my toddler back to childcare] just broke my heart. I was so scared for her because she had no recollection of being in daycare because she’d been out for almost a year.” Similarly, a Black mother we interviewed called herself “selfish” for choosing in-person school and childcare, saying “without it I wouldn’t be able to do what I need to do from a work aspect.”

Of course, there were some couples that divided care more equally during the pandemic, and a few where fathers did more. Over time, though, many of those couples abandoned their more egalitarian arrangements. Particularly when fathers who were working from home had the chance to go back to work in the office. Or when couples perceived mothers as more suited for care. Fathers in these couples told us things like: “How she does it, I don’t know. Like, where she finds the time. Days I’m home with the boys by myself, all I can do is focus on keeping ’em alive, and she’s doing it all.”

In sum, we found that many mothers and fathers in dual-earner different-sex couples perceived traditional parenting arrangements as justified and desirable even when those arrangements damaged mothers’ careers, relationships, and well-being.

These findings help explain why many women have remained out of the workforce even as hiring signs have returned. They help explain why early increases in father involvement declined over the pandemic. And they help explain why opinion polls show growing preference in the United States for traditionally gendered divisions of parenting and paid work.

We conclude that structural changes—things like paid family leave, affordable childcare, and higher minimum wages–are needed to keep women from becoming the “default” parent when care arrangements break down. And yet, we also acknowledge that because current structural and cultural inequalities allow couples to justify mothers’ default status, those same couples may not advocate for policies that would support a more egalitarian division of care. Essentially, some mothers may reject the need for big structural and cultural changes, even if they would benefit the most.

The Great Recession a decade ago led a lot of college students back to their parents’ homes because they couldn’t find jobs and had a lot of student debt, thus stalling the path toward financial and housing independence for these “boomerang kids.” The COVID-19 pandemic led more young adults ages 18-29 to live with their parents than we have seen since the Great Depression (the Pew Research Center reported 52%); some researchers note that the pandemic has stalled young people’s paths to adulthood, especially those in economic precarity and in racial groups underrepresented at U.S. colleges and universities.

Many of us have had our temporal and spatial worlds disrupted by the pandemic, moving workspaces into dining rooms (like me), shifting schedules to accommodate the harrowing (and gendered) tasks of doing paid work while helping children with at-home online learning, and spending time worrying (at home) about whether there’ll be another paycheck from jobs that were eliminated or stalled due to pandemic restrictions and economic precarity.

I study how living spaces matter in people’s social roles and relationships, and how the boundaries between spaces and time periods come to be socially defined and made salient by people in their everyday lives. I’m interested not just in how the transition into adulthood is studied using concrete markers such as financial independence and moving out of a childhood bedroom, but also in the ways these markers subjectively matter. After seeing my own undergraduate students have their lives, homes, and learning disrupted in the spring of 2020 (and then deal with the uncertainty of what college would look like in the fall of 2020), I wondered what impact the COVID-19 pandemic had on college student living situations and, in turn, how these living situations mattered in how students perceived their transition into adulthood. When I started working with several undergraduate research assistants, we agreed on some questions to further investigate in a survey of 339 U.S. college students: Did students who stayed or returned to their parents’ homes during college perceive a stall on their path toward adulthood? Did students who left home during the pandemic see themselves as more adult-like?

As we have been analyzing the survey responses, we have found not only that the interplay between time and living spaces plays a role in college students’ perceptions of adult-like experiences, but also that these perceptions come about when students make relative comparisons between time periods and living spaces based on changes in their living arrangements.

We focused on group differences, with four groups defined in terms of changes in their pre-Fall 2020 and Fall 2020 living arrangements:

• those who lived in their childhood homes before and during Fall 2020
• those who lived in their childhood homes before Fall 2020 but left during Fall 2020
• those who lived away from their childhood home before Fall 2020 and returned home during Fall 2020
• those who lived away from their childhood home before and during Fall 2020

We defined “childhood home” as “the primary place(s) you lived when you were a teenager.” We included a Global Change in Adulthood index consisting of 27 individual measures compiled from past studies and conversations with current college students. These measures were also subdivided into four sub-indexes of Autonomy (e.g., “I had control over my living spaces”), Financial Independence (e.g., “I was financially independent”), Responsibility (e.g., “I had adult responsibilities”), and Identity (e.g., “I thought of myself as an adult”). We asked students to note if these markers occurred in both or neither time periods, or if they occurred more in 2020 than 2019 or more in 2019 than 2020.

The Global Change in Adulthood index and the sub-indexes of Autonomy and Responsibility showed statistically significant group mean differences. Despite being younger and less likely to have started college, students who left their childhood home in Fall 2020 showed the greatest perceived increase in adult experiences, especially when compared to students who had already left and returned home.

Importantly, the questions asking about whether there was a change in adulthood markers between 2019 and 2020 required a comparative assessment across time and space. To unpack our findings, we delved into social comparison and temporal comparison theories. Intrapersonal (rather than just interpersonal) comparisons are important to consider when individuals assess their opinions, abilities, and experiences. Temporal comparison theory suggests that a person may assess the efficacy of their present situation in terms of their own history, thus subjectively deciding whether their current self is better off than their past self. This comparison can exist alongside an assessment of whether their situation diverges or converges with social expectations for their group, which is the primary focus of social comparison theory.

Students who left home in Fall 2020 comprised the only group of students who followed a normative path toward adulthood that was embedded within our living arrangements variable: leaving home. What someone thinks about where they live now may be impacted by whether they compare their living situation with a previous residence, rather than a static assessment isolated from past conditions. If a college student who leaves home perceives their path as aligning with group norms for young adults who are supposed to venture away from a parental home, and if that student perceives leaving home as making sense in light of their own personal history as they move from childhood into adulthood, then it is more likely that this student would consider their path to be normal and acceptable. Further, this student may perceive this path to be acceptable even in light of other more objective measures that may indicate a stall or movement backwards on the path toward adulthood, such as decreased household responsibilities.

For students who left and then returned to a childhood home because their college shut down, they had health concerns, or they had financial strain, the same processes of social and temporal comparison apply. This is the group who showed the biggest perceived decline in adulthood markers. Students who returned home after being away were disrupting their trajectory toward adulthood by virtue of going “backwards” into a parental home. This reversal, along with challenging role negotiations and the violation of a social ideal, likely had a powerful impact on students’ belief that they were moving less into adulthood because of returning home. That they were a year older or had gained autonomy as a result of moving away from home did not add up to enough adult-like currency to counteract the relative impact of moving back home, which was likely seen as taking a step backwards on the path toward adulthood. As Arnold Mont’Alvao, Pamela Aronson, and Jeylan Mortimer reveal in their study of COVID-19 impacts on paths to adulthood, “delay in family related transitions interferes with adult identity formation and fosters feelings of being ‘off time’ in acquiring markers of adulthood. Thus, those who perceive themselves as ‘late’ with respect to family-related markers have difficulty thinking of themselves as adults.” For these students, while they may not be objectively delayed as compared to the numerous others in their group who may also be returning home (due to the pandemic), they may perceive themselves to be delayed in terms of a normative idealized path to adulthood, as if they are going backwards to a moment in time in their own biographies that signifies childhood.

What the survey data in our study reveal is that a temporal comparison not only consists of assessing one’s current situation with a past one; it may also consist of assessing one’s current situation with an imagined current situation that would signify a preferred temporal trajectory and a preferred spatial transition: moving from childhood toward adulthood over time and in spaces that move away from a childhood home, and not the other way around.

Analyzing what students think about where they lived, especially when they compare the arrangements from one year to the next in terms of a childhood home (and, by extension, they compare their current selves with both past selves and idealized current selves that develop from past selves), adds nuance to existing knowledge about college student living experiences, the boundary between childhood and adulthood, and COVID-19 social impacts.

More practically, findings like ours can help parents understand why their pandemic-induced “boomerang” kids may be feeling out of sorts and why role renegotiation that was already challenging became even more harrowing in a world filled with social disruption and confusion. College and university residence life professionals can see how the ways that living spaces are seen by students often involves a comparison, which can be difficult to reframe if powerful ideals about social roles are attached to those spaces in a time when being “at college” has changed meaning. And students themselves can use our research to better equip themselves for enhanced self-awareness as they navigate the difficult path to adulthood in times where disruption and uncertainty are the new normal.

Why do time and space feel weird for college students? Because both real and imagined reference points for both have been turned upside down. That weird feeling, though, can have a poignant impact on future assessments of life stage transitions, which is why it is crucial to study the perceptions themselves.

Thanks to student researchers Julian Landau, Jess Lilly, Ruby Matthews, and Kaia Roast.

Michelle Janning is the Raymond and Elsie Gipson DeBurgh Chair of Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Her research focuses on the intersection of spaces, material culture, and interpersonal roles and relationships. She has conducted several studies about the impact of COVID-19 on social roles and inequalities. Her son attended high school online in their basement while she taught and researched in the dining room upstairs during 2020-21. Her work is featured at www.michellejanning.com.

The appointments were all scheduled; the preliminary tests were done; the co-parenting agreements were signed; and the flights were booked. My wife and I were counting the days until our sperm donor, Steffan, would arrive in the U.S. to deposit his sperm. This was February 2020. Steffan was due to arrive in the U.S in April to provide his sperm donation, then several months later we planned to start our journey to grow our family in August 2020.

However, then came March 2020 and with it came COVID. Now fertility clinics were closed, international travel was limited, and our carefully thought out, well-timed plans had come to a screeching halt. Like many couples planning to conceive in 2020, the new reality drastically changed what is already a nerve-wracking endeavour.

Family building for LGTBQ folks has never been easy. For most cis/het couples who don’t face infertility issues (85-90%), the process is ideally a time for connection, romance, and the inevitable lovemaking. But for LGBTQ folks, the process is often filled with filling out legal forms, doctors’ visits, psychological tests, and major financial decisions – exacerbated by the cost of conception. Yes, technology has eased this process, given the relative accessibility of assisted reproductive technology (ART), the availability of sperm banks, and the advent of online support groups. Less and less do you hear of the queers making children in an awkward, often substance filled, turkey baster situation. However, there are still major structural barriers and a series of daunting hurdles we need to traverse.

The average fertility treatment cost without insurance ranges from $12,000 to $75,000 per treatment. This presents a significant barrier for many LGBTQ families, who are, on average, more likely to have lower incomes and less wealth than cis/het families. This means that LGBTQ families face heightened financial barriers from the get-go. Even if LGBTQ families choose not to follow the reproductive route, adoptions can cost upwards of $15,000 to $40,000 depending on the state.

LGBTQ families also face additional structural barriers, from donor/surrogate selection, to added testing, to increased FDA regulated wait-times for directed known donor sperm (6 months compared to no wait for a sexually intimate partners). And on top of these barriers, LGBTQ families must navigate a draconian legal maze as they seek to secure their family choices with individual legal protections to affirm parental rights, ensure various kinds of access and birth certificate recognitions, and correct parental genders. For families who desire to have three or more recognised parents, there may be no legal protections to ensure that all parties are recognised appropriately. All of these barriers are coupled with additonal challenges like finding a donor and/or surrogate, co-parent agreements, and increased fertility issues – as LGBTQ folks are more likely to start trying to conceive later in life and likely have engaged in substance use, both of which significantly affect fertility.

In March 2020, most fertility clinics closed their doors due to the risk of COVID, the lack of medical equipment/supplies, and the unknown risk of virus transmission through sperm. This was a devastating blow to many prospective parents planning to conceive during this time period. Every missed cycle was a missed chance to try for a child. I saw first-hand the effect this was having in my many ‘how to conceive’ support groups. I felt all my plans slipping away. I had waited so long to try to start a family. There was so much in my life it could not control from an uncertain job market, to publications, to finishing my PhD. Before COVID the choice to at least try to start a family felt in my grasp. So as an academic, I stepped back, critiqued the systems, and turned my frustration and fears into research. My co-author and I began compiling news stories and academic research to make sense of everything we were witnessing.

We found that in the U.S and many other countries, fertility clinics closed due to uncertainty about procedure safety and lack of medical equipment. While we support a brief initial closure, many closed for an extended period, citing fertility treatment as a ‘non-essential medical service’. Other clinics opened but did not take in new patients, forcing many prospective families, both cis/het and LGBTQ, to put their plans put on an indefinite hold. In addition to fertility center closures, prospective LGBTQ families uniquely had non-medicalised methods interrupted or halted.

Social distancing, lockdown, and travel laws meant that many people could not make the necessary connections to provide or receive biological materials. This affected lesbian couples who were unable to drive a state away to collect a sperm deposit, gay couples whose surrogate was in another country and barred from entering the U.S., and multi-parent families whose households were not allowed to meet – or felt it was too dangerous to meet – to try to conceive.

There were, of course, other effects as well. Recent research has shown that having fertility plans put on hold is psychologically equivalent to a miscarriage, and this situation is exacerbated when there is no definitive date to resume.

In the future, experts forecast that it’s not unlikely that we will encounter other pandemics over the coming years, or at the very least, a series of local and global disasters! Therefore, we have several recommendations that will benefit both LGBTQ families (and cis/het folks) facing infertility:

1. Access to fertility treatments should not be deemed non-essential, which would include addressing the problem of medical gatekeeping to ensure that treatment is accessible to all who desire it.
2. Federal guidelines for donor waiting periods should be significantly reduced or removed and replaced with an informed consent risk awareness procedures.
3. Medical and insurance companies should redefine infertility as all families who cannot conceive without the aid of medical assistance.
4. Federal aid should be enacted that reduces the inequality widening effects of the pandemic.

In addition, many folks are still banned from traveling, continuing the wait for many. We also recommend that governments, now with increased testing and vaccines, provide the possibility for people to travel to see family (broadly defined).

My story has a happy ending, for which I’m deeply grateful, given the barriers I’ve cited above that affect so many LGBQT+ folks. During the height of the pandemic, my wife and I were privileged to fly to my home country of England. With the help of Steffan and his wife Laura, we created our tiny human. Avril was born almost one year later in April 2021.

Penny Harvey is an assistant professor of human sexuality studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies. They research gender, sexuality, health, culture, and media. They can be reached at Pharvey@ciis.edu

Link to full article here Harvey & Ingraham, 2021

Reposted with permission from the Gender & Society Blog

Black Lives Matter, the anti-racist movement that spread globally after the tragic death of George Floyd on May 2020 in the US, had an unintended but very welcome consequence in India: national debate on India’s deep-rooted and highly gendered practice of color discrimination.

Calls for racial justice around the world resonated with dark-skinned Indians who face colorism, or dark-skin prejudice, in their everyday lives. The backlash forced skin-whitening multinational companies, which rake in an annual revenue of $500 million, to change the names of skin-lightening products.

Growing up in North India as the daughter of a fair-hued mother and dark-skinned father,  the prejudice of colorism was intimate.  Accustomed to hearing “thank god she is ‘wheatish’ in complexion. Imagine if she had inherited her father’s dark skin,” I would then wait for the anticipated dramatic pause from a well-meaning relative or friend of my mother as they assessed me on the color hierarchy. We were all expected to shudder at the imagined future horrors from which  my “wheatish” skin had saved me.  One such possible horror  was rejection by appropriate suitors when I became of marriageable age.

Fast forward with me to a few decades to a village in rural West Bengal in east India. I was conducting a study on a new trend of marriage migration in North India that involved men sourcing brides from remote corners of India. Most homes of prospective, poor, marriageable women that I visited had tubes of frequently used skin-whitening creams lying alongside combs and bindis on the ledges of plastic mirrors hung on walls. Dark-hued young women admitted using these creams to gain favourable marriage prospects and lower dowry demands from local suitors.

Despite the vast majority of India’s people being dark-skinned, the obsession with fair skin dates back historically to the oppressive and exploitative caste system of the Hindus. Fairness is linked to higher caste status, while a darker hue is seen as a feature of  the low caste and those who do menial labor.

Colorism is starkly visible  in India’s arranged marriage market. Fairness of prospective brides is highly prized and newsprint or e-matrimonial advertisements use “fair complexioned” as a desired trait to filter out darker-hued women. In India, global capital has leveraged this national obsession to its advantage by marketing skin-bleaching products as an antidote to matrimonial hurdles.

THE RESEARCH

In my recently published research article in Gender & Society, I show that colorism is foundational to a new form of gendered violence for dark-skinned poor women. Skin fairness emerges as pivotal marriage capital and diminishes the chances of dark-complexioned poor Dalit (a politically self-aware term for untouchable castes) women to marry in their own communities.

I conducted interviews across 57 villages in the North and East Indian provinces of Haryana, Rajasthan, West Bengal, and Odisha. My interviews and focus groups with women and men in such marriages, their families, and villagers have revealed that light skin operates as a “currency” tradeable for a lesser dowry. North Indian bachelors, faced with a bride deficit due to the sex selective abortion of female fetuses, have begun traveling across the breadth of India to deliberately “source” wives from remote corners of the country. They offer the carrot of “no dowry and all wedding expenses paid” to poor families with darker-hued daughters of marriageable age. This results in women entering colorism-coerced marriage with rural North Indian men. This colorism-coerced marriage migration leads to a lifetime of cultural exile and internal othering in their marital homes and communities.

MARRIED LIFE SHAPED BY COLORISM

This oppressive skin-tone bias haunts such migrant brides as married women.  They have fewer fallback options due to distance from their parents and they must contend with their lack of ability to bargain about their own labor with their new conjugal families. Out of 113 interviewed brides, 57 told me that their husband and his family used dark-skin shaming to discipline them into docility and compliance whenever they resisted demands for excessive work.

These women face forcible cultural assimilation in North India, where the culture, language, customs, food habits, and even physical environment is different from their own. Caste discrimination within the family and in the community ranges from caste slurs, exclusion from family and kin gatherings, and segregation because of perceived untouchability. North Indian ethnocentrism, a peculiar blend of ethnic chauvinism, caste discrimination, and colorism directed specifically against east Indians from the provinces of Bihar and West Bengal, exacerbates the stigmatization of dark-hued migrant brides. Their very identity gets invested with connotations of crime, filth, savagery, and dim-wittedness, exposing them to ridicule and hate. My study also revealed that ethnocentric hate extends intergenerationally to the women’s children.

WE MUST “OUT” THIS NEW FORM OF GENDERED VIOLENCE

It is important to understand how new forms of gendered violence emerge for poor women in contemporary society. Such gendered violence builds patriarchy and caste oppression. Colorism creates a situation ripe for marriage brokers and traffickers to take advantage of poor women’s vulnerability. Societal pressure to marry off adult daughters renders poor parents gullible in the face of such offers and they often fail to check the prospective groom’s background, consigning their daughters to a lifetime of misery.

Multinational companies aggressively peddle feminine skin fairness as “marriage capital” to drive up the sales of their skin-bleaching products. The seductive narrative of a better life outcome has an estimated 60–65 percent of India’s women between 16 and 35 years of age using skin bleaching  products. Global capital which produces and markets these products has a vested interest in keeping such discriminatory hierarchies alive as India is one of its biggest and fastest growing markets. We need to rid ourselves of skin-tone bias and disrupt profiteering by transnational capital if we want to truly dismantle colorism and ensure that this new form of gender oppression gets stamped out.

Reena Kukreja is Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Development Studies at Queen’s University, Canada. She is cross-appointed to the Department of Gender Studies and Cultural Studies Program at Queen’s University. She divides time between teaching, research, and film-making. Her forthcoming book Partial Truths Negotiated Existences focuses on cross-region marriage migration in India and how the neo-liberal accumulative process in India has dispossessed poor women of matrimonial choice.

Reposted with permission from the UT Austin Population Research Center. 

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) recommends that healthcare providers routinely offer their patients intrauterine devices (IUDs) immediately after delivery of the placenta and contraceptive implants prior to hospital discharge. ACOG recognizes that IUDs and implants, collectively called LARC (for long-acting reversible contraception), are a safe and effective contraceptive option for patients right after delivery. These immediate postpartum LARC insertions are effective in decreasing the rates of unintended pregnancies and short intervals between pregnancies.

Previous studies in Texas have shown that many women want to obtain an IUD or implant after delivery but are unable to do so.

Starting in July 2014, physicians at a large public safety net hospital in Texas, which serves a predominantly Hispanic population, began offering their patients immediate postpartum LARC methods. In this hospital, all women could potentially receive an IUD or implant prior to discharge, regardless of insurance coverage, if they did not have any medical contraindications to the device and were offered it.

After immediate postpartum LARC became available in the hospital, providers were instructed to include counseling about immediate postpartum LARC during prenatal care and at the time of admission for delivery. The goal in the contraception counseling sessions was to discuss all forms of birth control with all patients, even with those desiring sterilization, and for the patient and the provider to make a patient-centered decision about the patient’s contraceptive method preference.

During the study period, many physicians relied on trained or ad hoc interpreters to provide contraceptive counseling to their non-English-speaking population during prenatal care and hospital stays. Trained interpreters typically conducted the service over the phone whereas ad hoc interpreters, usually family members, translated for the physician in person.

This research brief reports on a recent study in which the authors analyzed data from 199 women who delivered a baby in the safety net hospital and wanted to wait at least two years to have another child. Participants were interviewed before hospital discharge and followed for two years.

The authors document who was offered and not offered immediate postpartum LARC, and who received it. Among those who received an IUD or implant immediately following delivery, they describe when women were offered these methods, as well as their satisfaction with the methods, and whether they continued using them in the two years after delivery.

Key Findings

• Who was offered an IUD or implant for the immediate postpartum period?
  • 52% were offered an immediate postpartum LARC method
  • English-speaking Hispanic women were 3 times more likely than Spanish-speaking Hispanic women to be offered an immediate postpartum IUD or implant
• Who received an immediate postpartum IUD or implant?
  • 37% of all participants
  • 72% of the women who were offered an immediate postpartum LARC method
• Among the people who received a LARC method before hospital discharge:
  • 59% were offered it during prenatal care; 41% while at the hospital
  • 72% were very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with the method at 3 months postpartum; this dropped to 65% by 6 months postpartum. Main reasons for a drop in satisfaction: undesirable menstrual changes and pain
  • 77% were still using an IUD or implant two years after delivery.

Policy Implications

Immediate postpartum LARC is safe and acceptable and should be widely available throughout the state. Covering the costs of this postpartum contraceptive option for all patients, regardless of insurance status, should be the goal for all hospitals that offer the service.

Health care providers could improve patient satisfaction by ensuring that they present the full range of contraceptive options throughout pregnancy to all women. In addition, it is critical that providers work with patients to come to a patient-centered decision on their contraceptive method of choice.

Providers should also strive to deliver more consistent unbiased contraceptive counseling for all patients throughout prenatal care, which may help to decrease the impact of providers’ implicit biases.

Finally, high-quality formal interpretation services should be the gold standard for all clinical encounters to ensure that all patients, regardless of their native language, are offered the full range of contraceptive methods in a way that respects patients’ reproductive autonomy.

Reference

Wallace Huff, C, Potter, J.E., & Hopkins, K. (2020). Patients’ experiences with an immediate postpartum long-acting reversible contraception program. Women’s Health Issues 31(2):164-170.

Suggested Citation

Wallace Huff, C, Potter, J.E., & Hopkins, K. (2021). Who is offered and who gets an IUD or implant before leaving the hospital after having a baby? PRC Research Brief 6(6). DOI: 10.26153/tsw/12388.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation and a center grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P2C HD042849), awarded to the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Cristina Wallace Huff, wallacehuff@uthscsa.edu, is an assistant professor in Obstetrics and Gynecology at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio; Joseph E. Potter is a professor of sociology and a faculty research associate in the Population Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin and Kristine Hopkins is a research scientist and faculty research associate in the PRC. 

Reposted with permission from the Texas PRC 

Emotion work, or devoting effort toward assessing and managing another person’s emotional needs to support their emotional well-being, is a common dynamic in intimate relationships that helps foster intimacy and closeness between spouses.

Emotion work is generally understood to benefit the well-being of the recipient. However, providing emotion work can be stressful and might undermine the emotion worker’s psychological well-being. Previous research on different-sex couples suggests that emotion work is a gendered process in which women provide more emotion work than men and that women are more concerned with the importance of emotion work within their relationship. For these reasons, emotion work may more strongly undermine psychological well-being for women than for men. Finally, prior research also suggests that when a spouse has depressive symptoms, emotion work may be more stressful.

This brief reports on a recent research study¹ which explored the psychological toll of emotion work in contexts often overlooked in family studies, namely same-sex compared with different-sex marriages and marriages in which a spouse has depressive symptoms.

The authors analyze daily experiences data—based on questionnaires completed daily for 10 days—from both spouses in same-sex and different-sex marriages (n = 756 cisgender women and men, 378 married couples). Using these data, the authors employ a gender-as-relational perspective in which gendered relationship dynamics reflect one’s own gender in relation to whether one is interacting with a woman or a man. They do so to explore how the association between emotion work and psychological well-being may differ for women and men in same-sex compared with different-sex marriages and to address how having a spouse with elevated depressive symptoms may affect this association.

Key Findings

• Emotion work appears to negatively affect the worker’s own psychological well-being.
• The provision of emotion work, in general, is associated with lower levels of well-being for both women and men and in same-sex compared with different-sex marriages, with two important exceptions.
  • The provision of emotion work may be more psychologically taxing when one’s partner is a man, perhaps because men are less likely to be aware of, or to reciprocate, emotion work exchanges.
  • The well-being of women married to women, compared with women married to men, seems to be less negatively affected by emotion work.
• Whether the emotion worker is in a same-sex or a different-sex marriage, the provision of emotion work seems to undermine psychological well-being more when the spouse:
  • has elevated depressive symptoms or
  • is a man rather than a woman. See figure below.
• In sum, not only is it more challenging to provide emotion work to a spouse with elevated depressive symptoms or to provide emotion work to a spouse who is a man, it is particularly more challenging when that spouse is a man with elevated depressive symptoms.

Spouses who provide emotion work to a depressed man report the lowest levels of psychological well-being

Emotion workers married to a non-depressed man or a depressed woman also report lower levels of psychological well-being

This figure shows that whether the emotion worker is in a same-sex or different-sex marriage, providing emotion work to a depressed male spouse is the most detrimental to psychological well-being. In addition, doing emotion work for a male spouse, whether he is depressed or not, is detrimental to well-being, as is providing emotion work to a depressed spouse, whether male or female.

Note: The most emotion work = emotion worker reported one standard deviation above the sample mean; the least emotion work = reported one standard deviation below the mean.

Policy Implications

These findings imply that a more nuanced understanding of the marital dynamics that influence the psychological well-being of both partners in a relationship—with potentially different costs and benefits for women and men in same- and different-sex relationships—is needed to ground effective policies and interventions to support couples and their mental health. The strain of emotion work likely takes a toll on marital quality as well as the health behaviors and health of both partners. Moreover, given that emotion work is more taxing if it is given to a male spouse who has depressive symptoms, it is important for mental health professionals to pay more attention to the marital context when treating both the providers and recipients of emotion work.

Reference

¹Umberson, D., Thomeer, M.B., Pollitt, A.M & Mernitz, S.E. (2020). The psychological toll of emotion work in same-sex and different-sex marital dyads. Journal of Marriage and Family, 82, 1141-1158. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12686

Suggested Citation

Umberson, D., Thomeer, M.B., Pollitt, A.M & Mernitz, S.E. (2020). Emotion work exacts a psychological toll on the emotion worker in both same-sex and different-sex marriages, but the toll is highest when the spouse is a depressed man. PRC Research Brief 5(7). DOI: 10.26153/tsw/9563.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by grant R21AG044585 from the National Institute on Aging (awarded to Umberson) and grant P2CHD042849, Population Research Center, and T32HD007081, Training Program in Population Studies, both awarded to the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. This study was also funded in part by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism grant number F32AA025814 (awarded to Pollitt). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health

Debra Umberson (umberson@prc.utexas.edu) is a professor of sociology; Christine and Stanley E. Adams, Jr. Centennial Professorship in Liberal Arts; and director of the Population Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin; Mieke Beth Thomeer is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham; at the time of publication Sara Mernitz and Amanda Pollitt were NICHD postdoctoral fellows at the Population Research Center. Amanda Pollitt is now an assistant professor in the department of health sciences at Northern Arizona University. 

Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, Ph.D. is a professor of Psychology and the director of the Children and Parents Lab at the Ohio State University. Dr. Schoppe-Sullivan is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the National Council on Family Relations, and a member of the board of the Council on Contemporary Families. Her research focuses on coparenting and father-child relationships. Her website can be found here.

I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Schoppe-Sullivan regarding her recent publication The Best and Worst of Times: Predictors of New Fathers’ Parenting Satisfaction and Stress. The data used in this research come from a longitudinal study, the New Parents Project (NPP), which was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and Ohio State’s Institute for Population Research. The study included 182 dual-earner different-gender couples who were expecting their first child and followed these fathers (and mothers) across their transition to parenthood.

MP: Much of your research includes fathers. Why it is important to include fathers in parenting research?

SS: Ideals about fathers as parents have changed and fathers’ involvement in parenting has increased. Many more men today want to be more involved in parenting than their fathers or grandfathers were. There is also a greater expectation that fathers will be more actively involved in parenting. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to only focus on mothers in parenting research when we have fathers that are spending more time with children and are more invested in building close relationships with them.

MP: One of the key findings in your study was that new fathers—especially those less confident in their romantic relationships—were more satisfied in parenting when mothers used more gate opening behavior. You define maternal gate opening as encouragement by mothers regarding the partner’s parenting. How might mothers exhibit gate opening behaviors?

SS: Gate opening can include proactive behaviors, such as saying, “hey, why don’t you take the baby for the afternoon”. This actively facilitates the father’s involvement. However, more reactive behaviors can also be encouraging, such as positive reinforcement—telling the father he did a good job after changing the baby’s diaper or giving the baby a bath. Mothers can also say things like “wow, the baby really enjoys being with you”. Praising the father to other important people, like grandparents and neighbors, while the father is within earshot can also boost fathers’ confidence.

MP: Even as men become more involved in parenting, mothers are still devoting more time to parenting and related responsibilities. In asking new mothers to increase their gate opening behaviors, are we placing yet another burden on mothers?

SS: Yes, this comes up a lot. In the consideration of maternal gatekeeping, it is important that we don’t place too much of a burden on new mothers and suggest that it is their responsibility to encourage fathers to be more involved. Mothers should never need to take responsibility for getting a father who is not interested or motivated, or who has attributes that result in less desirable parenting behaviors, to be involved in parenting. On the other hand, for many families it is critical for both parents to positively reinforce each other, especially in those very early weeks and months of parenthood. It is important to recognize when your partner, regardless of whether they’re a mother or a father, is doing a good job. I would place more emphasis on positive reinforcement rather than that mothers need to be nagging or pulling unwilling, uninterested dads to be involved, because that isn’t going to be good for the child or family.

MP: How might new parents work together and recognize each other’s anxieties in order to assist each other in the transition to parenthood?

SS: It is a really good idea for expectant couples and new parents to have frequent conversations and check-ins regarding how they are doing and feeling. Often couples may participate in childbirth education classes or go to a hospital to learn how to properly install a car seat. Those things are very important, but they don’t necessarily take the place of facing the emotional and relationship changes that are also happening. So having those conversations are important both before the child is born and afterwards too. A quick “how are you doing?” or “can I help you in any way?” can be useful and help bridge disconnection that can happen when you are focused on your baby and can hardly find time to take a shower.

MP: Your findings suggest that expectant fathers who are more confident in parenting adjust better to parenthood. Do these findings apply to families welcoming a second or third child?

SS: Fathers who already have experience with infants might have an advantage. It is often true that women have had more experience with infants and young children than men have had before becoming parents themselves. So, men who have actively cared for a first child may adjust better to parenting subsequent children.

MP: The results of this paper are from a study of dual-earner, high socioeconomic status families headed by mothers and fathers. Are your findings applicable to other types of families, such as same-sex parent families, or families from different socioeconomic backgrounds?

SS: Looking at most of the findings, they are not terribly specific to fathers only, or only new fathers who are partnered with new mothers. For example, we found that expectant fathers who were more anxious were at risk of experiencing elevated stress postpartum. I really think that would apply to parents in many different circumstances. The finding that entering into parenthood with greater parenting confidence predicts less parenting stress and greater satisfaction would also likely hold across different populations of expectant and new parents. There is also evidence that gatekeeping occurs in same-sex couples too. Therefore, many of the factors that we examined—anxiety, parenting cofidence, gatekeeping—may be fairly universal influences on adjustment to parenthood.

Madeline is a recent graduate from the Ohio State University and will be beginning her studies in Developmental Psychology at the University of Missouri’s graduate school this fall.