Reprinted with permission from Rotman School of Management

That gender discrimination is wrong is beyond argument. But identifying which incidents are cases of it is not always so clear cut.

That’s why researchers are recommending that organizations develop processes that encourage workers to share their concerns when they suspect but aren’t sure that they have experienced discriminatory treatment based on their gender. While employees may want to keep suspicions to themselves for fear of reprisal if they’re mistaken, the consequences of doing so carry risks to workplace culture and performance, the researchers say.

“Not every ambiguous incident is discriminatory — some are simply misunderstandings,” says researcher Laura Doering, an associate professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. “In order to adjudicate between discrimination and misunderstandings, we suggest that organizations look for patterns. Are people repeatedly sharing concerns about the same person or situation? If so, it’s worth investigating as possible cases of discrimination.”

More than 2000 women working in professional roles participated in the research through personal interviews, a survey, and a study where respondents were asked what they would do when faced with scenarios involving different levels of certainty. Prof. Doering and two co-researchers found that women were likelier to speak up when they experienced what felt like overt discrimination, such as a supervisor assigning male workers a more challenging project while giving their female peer a less valued administrative task.

But when women weren’t so sure — for example, when a supervisor might have overlooked a woman’s contribution because a phone rang while she spoke and he couldn’t hear her idea — the researchers found that they “turned inward,” doubling down on their own work habits and keeping the incident to themselves. “They plan to change things about themselves like speaking louder, working harder, and calling more attention to their efforts at work,” says Prof. Doering. Ambiguous incidents happened more frequently than overt ones, the researchers found, becoming a ruminating distraction for the women and even interfering with their confidence to advance through their organization.

Organizations can reduce uncertainty, the researchers suggest, by making internal processes more transparent such as widely advertising job opportunities and spelling out their criteria, and clearly explaining the process and rationale for particular hiring and promotion decisions.

Cultivating an environment where employees feel comfortable to share their concerns informally, such as through an equity and diversity officer or ombudsman’s office, and where colleagues and leaders can serve as supportive allies if they witness potential gender discrimination can also help, says Prof. Doering. Employees unsure whether they’ve experienced gender discrimination might also seek out a trusted colleague as a sounding board if they don’t have other places to go.

When women stay silent about ambiguous incidents, it limits not only their careers but the potential for change that benefits everyone. “If organizations don’t know about experiences that are discriminatory – and, if these things are happening to multiple women suffering in isolation – then there’s no capacity for leaders to take action to address these problems,” says Prof. Doering.

The research was co-authored by András Tilcsik, the Canada Research Chair in Strategy, Organizations, and Society and a professor of strategic management at the Rotman School, and Jan Doering, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Toronto.

The study appears in Sociological Science.

Bringing together high-impact faculty research and thought leadership on one searchable platform, the Rotman Insights Hub offers articles, podcasts, opinions, books and videos representing the latest in management thinking and providing insights into the key issues facing business and society. Visit www.rotman.utoronto.ca/insightshub.

The Rotman School of Management is part of the University of Toronto, a global centre of research and teaching excellence at the heart of Canada’s commercial capital. Rotman is a catalyst for transformative learning, insights and public engagement, bringing together diverse views and initiatives around a defining purpose: to create value for business and society. For more information, visit www.rotman.utoronto.ca  

Laura Doering, is an Associate Professor of Strategic Management and is cross-appointed in the Department of Sociology. As an economic sociologist, she examines how interactions and social psychological processes shape outcomes for households, organizations, and markets. You can follow her on Twitter @Laura_B_Doerin

Jan Doering is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. His research is situated in two, sometimes overlapping areas: 1) social control and conflict in urban neighborhoods and 2) individual experiences and responses in relation to discrimination. You can follow him on Twitter @jandoering

András Tilcsik holds the Canada Research Chair in Strategy, Organizations, and Society and is a Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. He also serves as the Deputy Editor of Administrative Science Quarterly. Tilcsik studies organizations, occupations, and work.

Dear Readers, as college students march off to campus, enjoy this reprint from our blog

The month of May means graduation. This is the time of the year to celebrate accomplishment, take pride in completing degrees, and look to the future. In fact, college graduation is called “commencement,” signaling the beginning of something—for many, it’s what they hope is the beginning of independent adulthood.

But in our recently published research, we found that college graduation doesn’t always bring the commencement of “adulthood” if adulthood is defined as financial or residential independence. Especially among college graduates with loans.

To find out about how students and college graduates with and without loans rely on family for housing and financial help, what kinds of help they give to their families in return, and how they feel about it, we interviewed and surveyed students and graduates at two public universities. Our data were all collected before the pandemic-spurred loan pause started in March 2020, allowing us to examine how student debt repayment obligations shaped young adults’ experiences of relying on and helping family before and after graduation.

Our research suggests rising student debt is reshaping the experiences of young adulthood for college graduates. Graduates often must live with parents or other family members to be able to afford other expenses and student loan payments. We found that financial support from family and living with family were both common, and graduates with loans were more likely to rely on regular financial help from parents, even though they had been less likely to have that support while they were still in college. After graduation, Alice[1] was living with her mother and contributing to some household bills in exchange, and told us “It’s definitely saving me money, and I have to place a live, so I’m thankful for that.”

At the same time, research participants felt that living with family kept them from crossing a threshold to adulthood. Ava, who was living with her parents, told us, “I just feel like you can’t be grown up living with your parents.” Yet, delaying residential independence also positioned graduates better for loan repayment, a major obstacle in reaching financial stability—another marker of the transition to adulthood. Participants Leo and PJ were both able to pay off all their student loans while living with their parents rent-free!

Sharing housing and pooling resources with family members helps graduates with loans. But it also often feels like an obligation, since their resources help their families, too. Some interview participants shared that they faced expectations of reciprocity—obligations to help family members in return for help they received—that were sometimes quite burdensome. In our survey, both students and graduates with loans were significantly more likely to give money to their families compared to those without loans, deepening their financial difficulties.

Two years after graduation, Monique was giving $300 a month to her mother and did a lot around the house. Monique’s romantic partner was also staying there and contributing $300 a month. Monique reported feeling overwhelmed at times: “I do a lot around the house, like besides work. I come home and I’m cooking because I have three younger siblings. I’m cooking dinner, I’m getting kids home from school and giving baths and getting them to bed. I take them to school in the morning, I get them dressed…I’m doing a lot.”

But Monique reported mostly feeling like the arrangement was working well, even if there were days her contributions felt weighty, and she knew she did a lot around the house because she hadn’t always been able to contribute financially.

We found that it is common for graduates to contribute monetarily to their households, and over half of graduates with loans reported giving money to family (compared to 28% of graduates without loans). But among those who gave money to their family, over half of graduates with loans (and over 70% of graduates without loans) also lived with their families. The financial contributions they gave usually amounted to less money than they would have to pay for housing if they were living independently. Ashley said it would be “cheaper than it would be if I was living by myself.” Noah told us that his decision to live at home and pay his parents several hundred dollars each month was “just the smartest thing financially.” He explained that “I can save my money, pay my loans, and then help my parents too.” He added, “the fact that I can contribute, it just feels more like a partnership more or less…. We help each other out.”

The changing funding structure for higher education—coupled with steeply rising college costs over the last several decades—has made college far more expensive for students and their families. The majority take out thousands of dollars in loans to fund their education. Completing their degrees positions graduating students to be much more likely to pay off their student loan debt, but it can take years or even decades. The pause on student loan repayment, interest, and collections has now been extended through August 31, 2022 after being repeatedly extended. People are wondering now, will student loan payments resume September 1, be paused again, or might student debt even be canceled? We’ve written before about how college students and graduates would approach their futures if their student debt were forgiven.

Our new findings suggest that if debt payments resume, college graduates will increasingly rely on their families for help, affecting multiple generations. If public higher education were adequately funded, college costs would be lower, loans would be less burdensome, and the experiences of college students and graduates would depend less on family resources. In the current higher education funding system, the outsized role that family resources play in paying for higher education instead contributes to persistent and deepening inequalities.

But given the current system, family help can be vital in enabling some graduates with loans to pay down their debt and eventually transition to independence—even if that independence is a bit delayed. So this commencement season, if you or someone you love is approaching college graduation: remember that it’s now common for graduates to live with family after completing their degrees. Given the high cost of college and the difficult burdens loans create, it’s often the best—or only—option that graduates have.

—

Joan Maya Mazelis is the author of Surviving Poverty: Creating Sustainable Ties among the Poor (NYU Press 2017). She is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice and Acting Director of the Gender Studies Program at Rutgers University–Camden. Follow her @JoanieMazelis.

Arielle Kuperberg is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and Chair of the Council on Contemporary Families. Follow her @ATKuperberg

[1] All names used are pseudonyms.

Rebecca L. Davis is a Professor of History and of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Delaware. Her most recent book is Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America (Norton, 2024). She is also the author of Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions that Changed American Politics and More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss. She writes the Carnal Knowledge newsletter and is co-host of This Is Probably a Really Weird Question, a podcast about LGBTQ health and history. Here, I ask her about her new book, Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America published by Norton. You can follow here on Twitter @historydavis and on Instagram @rebeccadavisinsta

How have debates over the meaning and importance of sexuality shaped life in the U.S. over time? 

There is a common, but mistaken, view that it was the “Puritans” of the 1600s who most strictly governed sexual behaviors as part of their pursuit of a godly society. What the evidence shows, instead, is that it was typically only when sexual behaviors threatened to upend the community’s cohesion—or drain local treasuries—that early American officials charged people with sex-related offenses. What was most important to them was the cohesion of the household, a unit that included a male husband/father with his dependent wife and children, as well as any servants or enslaved people. For that reason, we see large numbers of prosecutions for fornication (sex with an unmarried woman) and bastardy (a child born out of wedlock) and very, very few charges for sodomy. A child born to an unwed mother disrupted the patriarchal order: to whose household would they belong? Who would pay for the child’s upbringing?

The growth of the federal government after the Civil War and the expansion of local police powers in the late 1800s were major turning points. Now, local, state, and federal authorities increasingly recognized sexual behavior as an arena for government power. A key example of this shift is the Comstock Act of 1873, which barred the use of the US mail for anything considered “obscene” or related to contraception or abortion. So is the Dawes Severalty Act of 1888, which broke up Indian tribal lands and forced the formation of male-headed nuclear households. At the local level, police forces across the United States increasingly prosecuted “vagrancy” and “public disturbances,” laws that targeted growing numbers of sex workers, transgender people, men having sex with men, and other sex/gender nonconformists. During World War Two, Selective Service boards screened inductees for signs of homosexuality, and the military instituted a new policy banning gay men and lesbians—policies that would have been utterly inconceivable at any prior point in the US history. The sexual equality and liberation movements of the post-World War II United States attempted to reverse these and other punitive sexual regulations.

Today, we’re witnessing a resurgence of the regulatory impulse. But now it is confronting entire movements organized around the idea that the freedom of sexual self-expression is intrinsic to each individual’s very identity and that to punish that expression is to violate an American’s civil liberties.

How did we as a society shift from understanding sexual behaviors as personal traits to understanding sexuality as a fundamental aspect of who someone is?

This shift is one of the main threads in my book. On the one hand, Americans long believed that some people had particular “tendencies,” or “inward dispositions.” The idea was, you were supposed to be able to control those urges, so that your outward behavior reflected a morally correct character. But the government’s expansion into the regulation of sexuality, as I was describing it above, created new ways of “seeing” and thinking about a person’s erotic interests. At the same time, the expanding world of urban nightlife allowed people to create and enjoy their sexualities, whether as creators or consumers of erotic or queer performances. Individuals who resisted the government’s intensifying censure of nonheterosexual sex began to express a new theory of sexuality as a fundamental, intrinsic aspect of what makes a person who they are. By the mid-20^th century, that new concept competed with the older idea that sexual behaviors reflect personal morality. Today, those two ways of viewing sexuality are in conflict.

How new are gender nonconformity, queer love, and abortion? 

They are not new at all! My book opens with a story about Thomas/Thomasine Hall, an indentured servant who was investigated in 1628–1629 because members of the community disagreed over whether Hall was male or female. Hall, for their part, said they were “both.” We also know that two-spirit people existed in most Indigenous tribes across North America. We likewise can see from prosecution and church records that couples in queer or same-sex relationships lived in colonial settlements and in Indigenous nations. In single-sex schools, the military, and prisons, and also within working- and middle-class homes, queer desire was ubiquitous and occasionally even celebrated. Widespread arrests for sodomy began only in the 1890s and after, as local police forces expanded and attacked urban “vice.”

Fertility management also has ancient origins. Stress and poor diets can cause a missed period, so its absence was often interpreted as evidence of poor health, not necessarily the start of a pregnancy. Women ingested herbal concoctions to “restore” their regular flow. Those remedies might have ended a pregnancy, stimulated ovulation, or done nothing at all. In this way, women did not think of themselves as necessarily aborting a pregnancy so much as keeping themselves healthy. Well into the nineteenth century, “quickening” (the first indications of fetal movement felt by the pregnant person) was understood as the onset of a pregnancy; it might not occur until week 18–21 of a pregnancy. Historians estimate that American women aborted as many as one-third of their pregnancies during the nineteenth century.

A key contention in the movements against transgender rights, legal abortion, and queer/same-sex equality is that these are novel ideologies (rather than identities or rights) foisted on American youth by a woke left-wing sex mafia intent on corrupting minors. My book debunks all such arguments. Transgender and queer people existed long before an identity-based language of homosexual / lesbian / gay / straight and so on was coined. Movements against abortion access and queer rights ground much of their heft in a set of “history and traditions” that exclude all but straight monogamy. They ignore the powerful and widely held understanding of sexuality as a fundamental aspect of what makes a person who they are, essential to human liberty and self-expression.

Alicia M. Walker is Associate Professor of Sociology at Missouri State University and the author of two previous books on infidelity. She is the current editor of the Council of Contemporary Families blog. Learn more about her on her website. Follow her on Twitter at @AliciaMWalker1 and Instagram @aliciamwalkerphd

Many Americans believe that mothers should spend as much time as possible with their children for their children to grow up all right. Childrearing experts advise that mothers spend time with their children purposefully in age-appropriate activities, such as providing basic care, playing games indoors or outside, doing arts and crafts, singing, reading, and outings to enriching spaces like libraries, sporting events, or children’s museums.

Accordingly, research has focused on investigating subpopulations of mothers who spend lesschildcare time in these activities and identifying what factors prevent them from investing more time in childrearing. The findings, the researchers argue, can inform policymakers to generate intervention programs that help resource-deprived mothers spend more time with their children in a “proper” way.

Racial/ethnic minority mothers are among such subpopulations that researchers care about. Researchers tend to ask: Do racial/ethnic minority mothers spend less childcare time than White mothers due to constraints such as financial strain, long work hours, single parenthood, or language barriers? 

In our recent research, we argue that if we seek to understand racial/ethnic variation in maternal time, we need to transform our perspectives.

First, we should question the assumption that all subpopulations can fit into one childrearing ideal similarly. Research has long documented that racial/ethnic minority Americans generally agree with the mainstream parenting/mothering norms, but they also recognize that their childrearing practices cannot be the same as White parents’ practices. To ensure their children are well-cared for and well-prepared for an unequal society, minority communities have built alternative childrearing strategies that are rooted in their historical and social locations in the U.S., as we describe below when we discuss the findings of our study. Hence, the kinds of activities in which mothers spend time with children may differ across racial/ethnic communities. 

Second, we need to expand the scope of the investigation to go beyond mothers’ time spent in childcare activities. Childcare time is a small portion of the total time mothers spend with their children. Mothers spend a lot more time accompanied by their children in daily routines (e.g., meals, housework) or leisure activities (e.g., watching TV, visiting friends), which we call mother-child copresence. To capture variation in how mothers in different racial/ethnic communities spend time with children in diverse ways, it is critical to include mother-child copresent time in our analyses.  

We use data collected from 44,372 mothers who participated in the 2003–2019 American Time Use Surveys to examine how Black, Latina, Asian, and White mothers spend time with their young, elementary-school-age, and adolescent children differently from other racial/ethnic groups. We pool the multiple years of data to ensure enough sample sizes for each racial/ethnic group in each of the three age groups of children.

We find that some racial/ethnic differences in maternal time spent with children are related to disparities in socioeconomic characteristics and differences across other demographic characteristics, such as mothers’ education, employment hours, family income, and immigration status, across the four racial/ethnic groups. However, some distinct patterns for each racial/ethnic group in maternal time still exist even after these other factors are held constant.

Black mothers spend more time with children in religious activities while spending less in terms of the total amount of time with their children, particularly activities like play, meals, housework, and shopping, compared with mothers in the three other racial/ethnic groups. These patterns make sense if we consider Black communities’ communal mothering. Black communities conceive good mothering as in part delegatory, given the history that breadwinning is a primary responsibility for Black mothers to fulfill and therefore they rely on trusted others within extended families and local communities for the day-to-day care of their children. The central role that religious communities play in Black communities as a source of social support is well known. 

Latina mothers spend more copresent time with elementary-school-age children, particularly while shopping, watching TV, and attending or hosting social activities, compared with mothers in the three other racial/ethnic groups. This pattern is aligned with Latinx communities’ emphasis on family-centered, as opposed to individualistic, child-centered, childrearing. We also find that Latina mothers spend less childcare time with their young or elementary-school-age children in educational activities, but they spend more time managing their children’s lives. These patterns are consistent with prior findings that during the summer break after first grade, Latina mothers do educational activities with their children less often but are more likely to have them tutored, compared to parents in the three other racial/ethnic groups. These findings indicate that Latina mothers tend to be behind the scenes making sure that their children have things that they need, perhaps particularly if their first language is not English. 

Asian mothers spend more time teaching young or elementary-school-age children than mothers in the three other racial/ethnic groups. They also spend more time providing basic care for young children. Asian communities, which in the U.S. consist of a large proportion of immigrants with highly skilled occupations, stress that raising academically competitive children is a parental obligation to honor their extended families. Another notable finding is that Asian mothers spend more mealtime with young and elementary-school-age children, consistent with anecdotal evidence that Asian parents and children maintain pride in their cultural heritage through their ethnic food. 

White mothers spend more time playing with young and elementary-school-age children and spending more time with elementary-school-age children doing physical activities, consistent with other research findings that outside play is emphasized by White parents, but not so much by other racial/ethnic groups. These reflect the mainstream emphasis on the importance of parent-child play and physical activities for the proper development of children. 

Together, we argue that racial/ethnic variation in maternal time should be theorized and interpreted by centering each minority community’s perspective, not simply using the majority’s ideal as the “gold standard.” Using each community’s perspective can allow us to regard mothers—and other adults—as active agents, within their larger social contexts and communities, who spend time with their children to ensure that their children are well prepared for life. 

Kei Nomaguchi is Professor of Sociology at Bowling Green State University. Her research interests focus on parenting, parent-child relationships, work-family linkages, and health and well-being. She can be reached at knomagu@bgsu.edu. Follow her on X/Twitter at @kei_nomaguchi.

Melissa A. Milkie is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, Professor Emerita at the University of Maryland, and recently served as President of the Work and Family Researchers Network (WFRN). Her research centers on gender, work-family intersections and well-being, with a unique focus on time use and culture. She can be reached via email at: melissa.milkie@utoronto.ca; on Linked In at www.linkedin.com/in/melissa-milkie-64345136, and on X/Twitter at @melissamilkie.

Imagine trying to juggle a career and family life without a reliable safety net—this is the reality for many parents, especially mothers, in the U.S. Finding affordable, dependable, and high-quality childcare can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack.

The COVID-19 pandemic made things worse. Two-thirds of childcare centers had closed by April 2020, and one-third remained closed in April 2021. With childcare centers and schools closed, many parents struggled to work from home while caring for their children. Many other parents who did not have the option to work from home had to quit their jobs due to childcare needs. This was particularly tough on mothers and families with fewer resources.

Families usually turn to informal sources of childcare, such as babysitters/nannies, extended family members, older children, friends, neighbors, or in-home group childcare when formal childcare is disrupted. However, the pandemic made it harder for some families to access these options than others. COVID-19 disproportionately affects older populations and people of color, and families of color disproportionately relied on older relatives for childcare before the pandemic. This left many families, especially those with limited financial resources, struggling to find the care they needed.

When the pandemic upended formal childcare, who stepped in to help U.S. families? And how did these shifts affect parents’ work hours? We examined these questions in our recent research published the Journal of Family Issues. Our study was based on data from a nationally-representative survey of 1,954 U.S. parents. The Institutions Trust and Decisions Study was conducted online from November 30 through December 30, 2020 on Qualtrics by researchers from Indiana University.

We found that 60% of U.S. parents received informal childcare help during early stages of the pandemic. Notably, care provided by older children emerged as the most common form. Around 50% of parents relied on older children as caregivers. About 40% of parents received help from extended family members. These patterns were likely facilitated by the shift to remote instruction, which left older and younger children at home together during the day, even if their parents had to leave home to complete their paid work. Our finding suggests that childcare help from older children was at least as important as extended family childcare, which has been the main focus of prior studies on informal childcare.

Secondly, families from different socioeconomic backgrounds differ in terms of the kinds of informal care they used. Parents with at least a college degree and those with family income above $150,000 were most likely to have received informal help, especially from paid care workers. Latinx, and other/multiracial families were less likely to use paid care workers than White families.

Finally, receiving support with informal childcare potentially helped parents with young children, especially mothers who lost or left their jobs during the pandemic, work more hours. More flexible forms of informal childcare, such as care provided by older children, extended family, neighbors, friends and pandemic pods, was especially important in helping these mothers work more hours.

Our research reveals a stark divide: low-income, less-educated, and families of color, especially mothers with young children, faced major childcare hurdles during the pandemic. Meanwhile, wealthier and White families often had the means to secure the few available paid caregivers. To keep disadvantaged families in the workforce, we must support them better. Policymakers should recognize and assist the unsung heroes—grandparents and older children—who stepped up as informal caregivers despite facing heightened health risks and stress during such crises. Remarkably, older siblings often took on the role of caregiver, balancing schoolwork and the responsibility of looking after their younger brothers and sisters. These young caregivers played a crucial part in helping their families navigate the challenging landscape of the pandemic.

Milly Yang is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at Yale University. She can be reached at milly.yang@yale.edu. Twitter: @MillyYYang.

Emma Zang is an Assistant Professor of Sociology, Biostatistics (Secondary) and Global Affairs (Secondary) at Yale University. She can be reached at emma.zang@yale.edu. Twitter: @DrEmmaZang.

Jessica Calarco is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She can be reached at jcalarco@wisc.edu. Twitter: @JessicaCalarco.

Elias Nader is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Kent State University. He is a criminologist who studies the maturation of young adults and their desistance from crime, as well as evaluating justice system policy and practice. His most recent work has been published in Criminal Justice and Behavior and Crime and Delinquency, and his research funded by the Russell Sage Foundation.  Here, I ask him about his new book, Growing up and out of crime: Desistance, maturation, and emerging adulthood, which is out now from Routledge. You can find out more about Elias and his work on his university profile. And you can follow him on Twitter @eliasnader_

AMW: How have the developmental norms and expectations for young people aged 18-25 shifted from previous generations?

EN: This has really been the question on the minds of developmental psychologists for the past decade or two! We’ve seen some major shifts in the demographic profiles of today’s young people compared to previous generations for reaching milestones of adulthood such as older ages for marriage, becoming a parent, and home-ownership. These shifts are the result of changes in our societal norms and expectations over the last quarter of the 20^th century, such as women entering the workforce and an increased emphasis on higher education, as well as structural shifts such as in the economy, job market, and housing market.

The delays in achieving the milestones of adulthood have created space for young people to explore their identities and roles in society – who they are, who they want to be, what they want to do, and how they want to contribute. Young people spend the ages of 18-25 exploring and testing out identities and experiences across the domains of their relationships (friends, family, romantic), employment and education, values, and perspective of the world. This exploration is acceptable and encouraged, meaning that young people are spending this time slowly emerging into adulthood until they are about 25, instead of viewing themselves as adults immediately at 18.

Our understanding of this social and structural context has been coupled with evidence that most of our brains typically continue to develop until we are around 25 years old. Thus, it makes sense why more people tend to behave impulsively or act “immaturely” during this phase in the life course while their brains finish developing.

AMW: How do delays in young people achieving typical turning points into adulthood affect how maturation influence folks to refrain from committing crime?

EN: These delays have major implications for the study of desistance, or the cessation of crime. Classical criminological theory argues that youth are generally more impulsive than adults and are more likely to take risks including violating societal norms, breaking rules, and engaging in crime. As young people age into adulthood, they embrace “turning points” in their life course that allow them to view themselves as adults. These are the adulthood milestones I mentioned, things like getting married, buying a house, getting a job, etc. These turning points have an added benefit of facilitating the desistance from crime. As young people take on these turning points into adulthood, they become less impulsive and are less willing to take risks as they have more to lose. This process is somewhat natural or automatic for the majority of young people engaged in delinquency or crime. They will just grow up and age out of crime.

So, if we are expecting young people to use the time from 18-25 to explore their identities and their place in society, how are those who rely on adulthood markers to stop engagement in crime affected by this shift? Essentially, they are under an extended period of impulsivity and risk for crime. Behaviors that might be typical of adolescents or teenagers can extend into this period of the early twenties as young people are still developing biologically, socially, and psychologically. Young adults, however, have left the purview of protections provided to juveniles through the juvenile justice system and the education system. While their impulsive behavior might be developmentally appropriate, society can only label them as deviants and criminals. This likely has a huge impact for young people who are trying to find out who they are and what they want to do in society. When they get labeled as criminals in this phase of life, it might be a label they internalize as defining their identity.

AMW: How do relationships and social supports play a role?

EN: Relationships and social supports play a major role in influencing the maturation of young people. They provide the context and conditions for who we are, and for young adults they are the place where identity exploration and access to turning points largely exists.

Within the ages of 18 – 25, the context of a young person’s relationships is shifting as they emerge into adulthood. Their expectations of relationships and social supports are changing from adolescence, providing new challenges and opportunities for pathways in and out of deviance. Peers and friends, for example, are amongst the most important of relationships, and potentially the most criminogenic. Juveniles tend to prioritize larger groups of friends with more acquaintances, valuing things like popularity. Juveniles are also often more likely to participate in deviant behavior with peers or when members of their social networks are already involved in crime. As young people emerge into adulthood, the value they place on these relationships shifts to emphasize the quality of friendships. Young people begin to prioritize smaller, more intimate friend groups where they can rely on and trust their peers at a deeper level. They actively engage in a process of trimming down their friend groups, often cutting criminogenic friends out of their networks.

Relationships with parents and families are also amongst the most important for keeping young people out of crime. The expectations of the relationship with parents in young adulthood shifts from adolescence and the teenage years. Young adults often express better relationships with their parents when they are able to establish autonomy from them. Material independence from parents, such as being able to pay your own bills or living outside the family home, are important markers for today’s young person in their transition to adulthood. While material independence is prioritized, young adults also emphasize building or maintaining close emotional attachments with their parents and families. So, the protective nature of familial relationships shifts from one of oversight and material support to one of emotional support.  

These changes extend to a myriad of relationship types and social supports. For example, marriage has historically been one of the largest protective factors against criminality and facilitators of the cessation of crime. Young people in previous generations often got married below the age of 25. Today’s young person is spending this time exploring romantic relationships and partnerships and getting married closer to 30. Changes such as these shift how romantic relationships can protect against delinquency. In this case, this positive turning point into adulthood is often absent in the 18-25 period, leaving these young people at a risk for prolonged engagement in risk taking and exploration, and thus potentially deviance and crime.

Alicia M. Walker is Associate Professor of Sociology at Missouri State University and the author of two previous books on infidelity. She is the current editor of the Council of Contemporary Families blog. Learn more about her on her website. Follow her on Twitter at @AliciaMWalker1 and Instagram @aliciamwalkerphd

For parents of color in the U.S., talking to their kids about race and racism is a fundamental aspect of parenting, but for white parents, most try to avoid these topics, or offer unhelpful lessons to “treat everyone the same.” This approach ultimately perpetuates colorblind racism and allows white privilege to remain a “lived but not seen” aspect of growing up white. However, a growing minority of “antiracist” white parents have begun intentionally speaking with their kids about systemic racism and whiteness. Both white moms and white dads report a desire to raise racially aware white children, but little is known about who is leading these efforts within white families and why.

In our recent Social Problems article, we examine this question using interview data from 28 “antiracist” white parents in heterosexual marriages to examine how and why gender influences which parent is more likely to discuss race/racism with their children.

In theory, the white moms and dads shared similar beliefs about race/racism and the importance of discussing these topics with their kids. In practice, however, moms disproportionately led these conversations. We trace this divergence between parents’ shared principals but unequal practices back to moms’ distinctively antiracist embrace of intensive mothering—a cultural ideology with extremely high expectations for moms’ involvement in their kids’ lives. More specifically, we highlight how moms refashioned three intensive mothering practices to develop the tools, resources, opportunities, and a sense of integrity needed to proactively talk with their kids about race.

(1) Moms pursued expert-guided education on race/racism. They listened to podcasts, joined book clubs, attended workshops, and followed DEI professionals on social media. Gracie, for example, described seeking guidance before her son was even old enough to talk: “I did research one night about talking to your kid about race, and found a book…I was just like, I need a place to start. I need some ideas. Let’s go to a professional.”  

(2) Moms took a hands-on role in their kids’ education, which allowed them to recognize racism in their children’s classrooms and curricula. These observations gave them concrete examples to discuss with their kids. Through classroom-volunteering, for instance, moms saw that teachers were “treating kids of color differently [and] disciplining them differently” (Heidi) and used their evolving race-related knowledge to explain to their kids that “the teachers are probably having unconscious bias in the classroom” (Audrey). 

(3) Moms strategically cultivated activities for their kids that de-centered whiteness or sought to advance racial equity. Moms joined antiracist community organizations and “racial equity teams” at their churches or synagogues, workplaces, or their kids’ schools, and would bring their kids to organization events, as well as marches/protests, whenever possible. These events served as natural conversation-starters, as Gabby explained: “It’s really easy to just invite conversation. We’ll go to things like protests, we’ll go to marches, so we’ll be surrounded by messages.” Getting involved in antiracist community coalitions also gave moms a sense of integrity to talk about racism with their kids. As Nadia explained:

I feel like if you aren’t doing anything it can be hard to talk about…it can be a little embarrassing [to say] like about race, “I should be making sure things are fair” but like not reading or doing anything actively…having even the small tiny thing that I’m doing…helps me feel empowered to talk about it more.

Culturally, dads don’t face the same intensive parenting pressure that moms do. Perhaps as a result, the dads in our study didn’t pursue the same level of racial re-education that moms did; they didn’t look for everyday examples of racism and inequality in their kids’ classrooms or curricula; and they didn’t plan race-related activities for their children. Consequently, they felt ill-equipped and unprepared to initiate conversations about race/racism, commonly saying they “don’t know how” (Erik). They were also less comfortable discussing race because as Nadia described, it feels awkward and phony to preach one thing but practice another. Whereas moms’ antiracist intensive mothering prompted them to pursue personal- and community-level work aimed at social change, dads weren’t “in the mud doing this type of stuff” (Miller), so they felt “bad and uncomfortable” (Jacob) talking about racism. As Jacob explained, “We don’t like to say we’re the foot on the neck of people who are different from us.”

Because dads were ill-equipped and uncomfortable initiating conversations proactively, they took a more passive approach. They were willing to answer their kids’ questions when asked but believed their kids should “dictate how much information they want” (Frank) and “tell you what they need to know” (Daniel). In other words, they looked to kids to instigate these conversations.

However, since moms had already established a communication line and demonstrated ongoing interest/knowledge about race, kids logically brought any questions about race to their moms instead of their dads. Together, moms’ proactive approach, dads’ passive approach, and kids’ response to this contrast created a reciprocal cycle that allowed race to become a “Mom topic” within these white families.

Why does it matter if antiracism is primarily moms’ domain? We suspect that gendered divisions of labor threaten the sustainability of antiracist parenting practices.

Norms of colorblindness and white silence are hard to break in white families, and new habits are even harder to maintain (and encourage kids to practice) if one parent is still practicing old ones. While there can certainly be “racism without racists,” white people also have significant agency in reducing racism, and white parents have an important part to play. Parents of color have always talked to their children about race and racism, because they do not have the privilege to remain silent. It’s time for more white moms and dads to follow suit and start talking with their white kids about these issues too.

Reilly Kincaid is a PhD Candidate at Purdue University. Her research focuses on family, gender, work, and social inequalities. You can follow her on Twitter/X at @ReillyKincaid.

Megan R. Underhill is an associate professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina Asheville where she teaches and researches about race and racism among white Americans. You can follow her on Twitter/X at @Soc_Seeker.

When COVID-19 shuttered college campuses in March 2020, many—but not all—undergraduates sought refuge in their parents’ homes. Why did some students fall into this parental “safety net” while others did not? As three sociologists who have studied young adults’ relationships with their families, we suspected the answer would be more complex than need and availability alone would predict.

In a new study published in Socius, we analyzed survey data we collected from 750 undergraduates at two regional public universities in the United States to understand who moved home with their parents during the pandemic and who didn’t. We focused on whether students reported moving in with a parent because of the pandemic between March 2020 (when campus closed) and March 2021 (when we collected the survey).

Unsurprisingly, we found that students’ housing and financial needs influenced their decisions to return home. Students living in dorms, who were asked to leave the dormitories during the pandemic at the two universities we surveyed, were over three times as likely to move in with a parent compared to their off-campus peers (66% vs. 18%). For off-campus students, problems with their jobs such as being furloughed or laid off led to higher rates of moving to a parent’s home.

However, material needs weren’t the only factors in these decisions. Among students living off campus at the start of the pandemic, older students and those living with a romantic partner were less likely to move home with parents. The off-campus group included many students who would be considered non-traditional undergraduates: just over half (52%) were above the age of 24 and 38% were living with a romantic partner (including some who were married). Students who might be considered more “adult” by one or both measures were far less likely to move in with a parent, possibly because those students’ primary safety nets had shifted from their parents to their partners. Off-campus students living with siblings or extended family were also less likely to move home with their parents, which suggests that these relatives, like romantic partners, may have provided an alternative safety net.

On-campus students showed more similar rates of returning home across the different factors we analyzed, likely because their immediate housing needs took priority over other considerations. However, there was one notable exception: on-campus students who expressed negative feelings about asking their parents for money were more likely to move home.

At first glance, this may seem counterintuitive: if sharing housing is a form of help from parents, wouldn’t students reluctant to ask their parents for money also be reluctant to ask to move back home?

But this finding fits with our other research on family support in young adulthood. In interview projects examining young adults’ experiences with student loans, help from family after having a child, and understandings of financial (in)dependence, we found young adults viewed housing support as distinct from (and typically preferable to) direct financial help from their parents, often viewing it as less stigmatizing or imposing less of a burden. And those who were more reluctant to ask for money may also have found it more difficult to pay for the costs of independent housing once their dormitories closed. 

Given that students were surveyed a year after the initial campus closures, we may have also captured how the experience of living with their parents during the pandemic negatively influenced students’ feelings about asking parents for money. Students who moved in with a parent may have felt that asking for additional money would be too great of a burden on their families or would signal a failure to achieve adult independence (when that was already compromised). They may also have resented restrictions on their freedom they experienced in terms of rules in their parents’ homes during the pandemic and thus felt more reluctant to acknowledge needing help. Regardless of the direction of influence, the link between moving home and negative feelings about asking parents for money highlights the emotional tensions that so often characterize parental support at this life stage.

Overall, our study builds on past research describing social class divides in undergraduates’ reliance on parents during the pandemic by demonstrating how parents’ roles also change within families throughout young adulthood. The findings also highlight the role of other close relationships—romantic partners, siblings, and extended family members—as alternative sources of support for some undergraduates. And they offer a window into the tensions surrounding parental support during this transitional stage of life. Beyond increasing our understanding of the unprecedented historical event of the COVID-19 pandemic, the findings provide broader insight into the complicated social factors affecting whether young adults ask for help from their parents during times of need and uncertainty.

About the authors:

Elena G. van Stee is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and an Exchange Scholar at Harvard University. She’s also the Blog Editor for Contexts, the public-facing periodical of the American Sociological Association. Follow her @elenavanstee.

Arielle Kuperberg is Professor of Sociology at UNC Greensboro, incoming Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Chair of the Council on Contemporary Families. Follow her at @ATKuperberg.

Joan Maya Mazelis is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice at Rutgers University-Camden and the author of Surviving Poverty: Creating Sustainable Ties Among the Poor. Follow her @JoanieMazelis.

Sociologist and Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Jessica is an award-winning teacher, a leading expert on inequalities in family life and education, and the author of the forthcoming book Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Social Safety Net (Portfolio/Penguin, 2024). Her previous books include Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research (with Mario Small; University of California Press, 2022), Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School (Oxford University Press, 2018), and A Field Guide to Grad School: Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum (Princeton University Press, 2020).

Jessica has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and CNN. She also blogs at ParenthoodPhD and is a mom of two young kids.

Here, I ask her about her new book, Holding it Together: How Women became America’s Safety Net, which is out now from Portfolio. You can find out more about Jessica at her at website. And you can follow her on Twitter @JessicaCalarco

AMW: How do we groom girls to stand in for the social safety net and when does that grooming start?

JC: Other high-income countries have invested in social safety nets to help people manage risk. They use taxes and regulations, especially on wealthy people and corporations, to protect people from falling into poverty, give people a leg up in reaching economic opportunities, and ensure that people have time and energy to help take care of their communities, their families, their homes, and even themselves.

In the US, we’ve tried to DIY society. We’ve kept taxes low, slashed huge holes in the meager safety net we do have, and we’ve told people that if they just make “good choices,” they shouldn’t need a safety net at all. 

The problem, of course, is that we can’t actually DIY society. Forcing people to manage all that risk on their own has left many American families and communities teetering on the edge of collapse. 

And yet, we haven’t collapsed because women are holding it together, filling in the gaps in our economy and the gaps in our threadbare safety net. In the US, women are disproportionately the default caregivers for children and for the sick and elderly and destitute. They’re also the ones who disproportionately fill the lowest-paid jobs in our economy—jobs in essential service sectors that are too labor-intensive to be both profitable and broadly accessible, including jobs in childcare and home health care. 

As I show in Holding It Together, women’s unpaid and underpaid labor helps maintain the illusion of a DIY society by making it seem as though we can get by without a net. And American culture grooms, guilts, and gaslights them into fill those gaps.

From the time girls are old enough to hold a babydoll, they’re taught to see themselves as helpers and treated by adults as mothers-to-be. Young girls are tasked with caring for their siblings, cleaning up around the house and the classroom, and even being teachers’ assistants and keeping their peers on track at school. 

This early socialization grooms girls to stand in for the social safety net. It leads many girls and women to see themselves as “naturally” suited for caregiving and thus to accept both paid and unpaid caregiving roles.  At the same time, and even if girls are skeptical of the idea of “naturally” gendered caregiving proclivities, their early experiences with caregiving also teach them that if they don’t do this work or do it well enough, there’s a good chance that no one else will. Which means that the choice not to step in and fill those gaps means letting down their family members, friends, and communities, who, in the context of a DIY society, may have nowhere else to turn for support.  Which is part of why women in the US experience a disproportionate amount of guilt. 

Meanwhile, a lack of similar socialization for boys grooms them to buy into the idea that caregiving is women’s work. That belief, as we saw on full display with NFL kicker Harrison Butker’s recent graduation speech, then allows boys and men to exploit the labor of girls and women without any feelings of guilt. ​Put differently, those beliefs allow boys and men to see themselves as “good guys” even if they do little or none of the work of care. 

AMW: What is the Supermom myth?

JC: The Supermom myth is one of a set of myths that I talk about in the book—myths that operate to delude Americans into believing that we can get by without ​a decent social safety net and to divide us by race, class, gender, religion, politics, and other life circumstances in ways that keep us from coming together to demand the kind of net that would better support us all. 

The Supermom myth, in particular, is the idea that American children are under threat and that only their mothers can protect them from harm. As I show in the book, many Americans believe this idea, at least in part, because of fear-mongering efforts intended to persuade them to think that way. And believing that myth operates to create the perception that we don’t need a social safety net, because mothers are the only ones capable of keeping their children safe. 

Take, for example, the Satanic Panic around childcare in the 1980s/90s. Conservative pundits and policymakers used wildly inaccurate allegations against childcare providers to stoke parents’ fears and create the perception that children are only safe at home. In light of those fears, and despite clear evidence of the benefits of communal care for both children and parents, many families pulled their children out of childcare centers or tried to avoid enrolling them if they could. And that pullback on trust in formal childcare also helped stemmed the tide on maternal employment, which had been increasing for decades and suddenly stalled. 

This fear of childcare has also persisted and continued to drive down maternal employment and drive up the guilt that American mothers feel when they engage in paid work. In a representative survey of more than 2,000 parents of children under 18 from across the US, I found that almost half (47 percent) of parents believe that it’s best for children if their mothers stay home and don’t work for pay. As I show in the book, those beliefs are attractive to women, particularly if their paid work opportunities are limited, or if they struggle to find the affordable childcare they would need to engage in full-time paid work, because being the Supermom offers them a way to feel that their work is valuable, even it isn’t highly paid or paid at all. At the same time, those beliefs also discourage mothers from fighting for a stronger social safety net, because, despite the toll this work takes on them, they’ve made doing the work of holding it together the source of their self-esteem. 

In the book, I also extend these analyses to include newer fears around childhood, including the panics around Critical Race Theory and transgender kids. And I show how conservative Christian mom-fluencers are stoking these fears and using them to undermine trust in schools and other government institutions while also promoting the “tradwife” trend. 

AMW: What would a better net mean?

JC: A better social safety net would use taxes and regulations, especially on wealthy people and corporations, to protect people from poverty, give people a leg up in reaching economic opportunities, and ensure that people have the time, energy, and incentive help take care of their communities, their families, their homes, and even themselves. As we saw with relief programs put in place during the Covid-19 pandemic—which included everything from student loan moratoriums to child tax credits and stimulus checks to rent relief and universal free school lunches—supporting people can dramatically improve their lives. 

In practice, a better net would strengthen the formal care system and make it more possible for families to outsource the help they need with caregiving through programs like free universal healthcare, eldercare, childcare, and education from early childhood through post-secondary school. Ideally, those programs would also be funded not only to a high level of quality but also to the level of sustainability—ensuring that caregivers are cared for, as well. At the same time, a better net would also strengthen the informal care system, allowing people to contribute more equitably to a shared project of unpaid caregiving by guaranteeing them universal paid family leave, ample paid vacation time, limits on paid work hours, and stipends for families with dependent-care responsibilities. And finally, a better net would also allow all people to live with dignity, regardless of their choices or their circumstances. It would raise the minimum wage, increase protections for paid workers and their unionizing efforts, ensure access to affordable food, housing, communication, transportation, and other basic necessities, and eliminate the punitive checks on “deservingness” we have built into the meager safety net we currently have. 

We got close to building key parts of this net with Build Back Better. ​And there’s no reason we couldn’t try again. 

Alicia M. Walker is Associate Professor of Sociology at Missouri State University. She is the current editor of the Council of Contemporary Families blog. Follow her on Twitter at @AliciaMWalker1.

Vicki Larson specializes in writing about living and loving outside conventional models of coupling and the nuclear family as well as busting ageist and sexist narratives about aging as a woman and women’s sexuality and desire. The former longtime lifestyles editor, writer and columnist for the Marin Independent Journal, her writing can also be found in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Newsweek, AARP’s The Ethel, The Huffington Post, Medium and elsewhere. Here, I ask her about her new book, LATitude: How You Can Make a Live Apart Together Relationship Work. You may find more about her on her website https://www.vicki-larson.com, and follow her on Twitter/X at https://twitter.com/OMGchronicles, Threads: https://www.threads.net/@omgchronicles?hl=en and Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/omgchronicles.

AMW: Why is the secret to stronger long-term relationships spending a healthy amount of time together and apart?

VL: I think famed Belgian psychotherapist and author Esther Perel said it best in her 2006 book, Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence—“separateness is a precondition for connection: this is the essential paradox of intimacy and sex.”

According to many who study romantic relationships, we have come to rely on our romantic partners to be our everything—best friend; soulmate; lover; co-parent; great communicator; romantic, intellectual, and professional equal; companion, and financial partner, and also provide us with happiness, fulfillment, financial stability, intimacy, social status and fidelity. More and more, however, we are seeing how unstainable that is in the long term. Many people are seeking out what’s been called OSO, other significant others—whether family members,  friends or other types of platonic relationships to fulfill some of those needs.

Research by David M. Frost, a psychologist and professor of population and family health at the Mailman School at Columbia University, indicates that it really doesn’t matter how physically close you are to your partner as long as each of you feels as close as you want to be, even if it isn’t close by other people’s desires.

As much as we may want to be close to our romantic partner, we also have agentic needs, meaning our sense of freedom, independence, and self-mastery. If closeness interferes too much with our agentic needs, it’s troubling for the relationship.

How much time together and apart is up to a couple to decide, hopefully a healthy balance that honors the desires of each person as well as the couplehood.

AMW: Why do you think that live apart together relationships have been making headlines and sparking online conversations in recent years? Why the sudden interest?

VL: LAT relationships have long existed and been studied in England and Europe, where they are more common, but they’ve garnered more attention recently in the States because of two things—the rise of so-called gray divorce and the pandemic lockdowns.

Divorced and widowed women in their 60s and older are overwhelmingly driving the live apart together lifestyle in part because they feel like they’ve “been there, done that” in previous heterosexual relationships and see LAT as a way to “undo gender.” They can enjoy the best of a committed, loving romantic relationship without having to give up their freedom. In fact, LAT relationships have been called the “gender revolution continuing into old age,” according to two Swedish researchers —a nod to the fact that baby boomer women have been on the forefront of restructuring family life in the past few decades, especially after no-fault divorce was written into law across the United States.

Also, the pandemic revealed the difficulties of living 24-7 with a romantic partner. Unable to go to work, school or other activities that got people out of the house for a few hours, it was the first time many couples experienced so much togetherness, and it felt suffocating for some. Too much closeness can negatively impact a relationship as well as each person’s well-being, research has shown. Then, some people had to sleep and live apart temporarily, such as health care workers who were caring for COVID patients or a family member who came down with COVID and had to isolate themselves to protect their loved ones, and some came to realize that they actually liked some time and space to themselves. So, an unplanned global event gave some couples a chance to experience a different way of being together.

AMW: What are the myths about live apart together couples?

VL: There are several, but one of the biggest is that LAT relationships are only for the wealthy. Except all romantic couples start off living in separate households, whether solo or with parents, friends, roommates, or some other configuration. Nothing about their living situation has to change just because they found someone they’re in love with. Yes, it’s cheaper to live together, but that’s turning a romantic decision into a financial decision.

Another myth is that LATs are more likely to cheat. It’s true—sometimes LATs cheat on their partner. But so do people who live together. It’s hard to know how many people fool around on their romantic partner—people aren’t always honest about such things— but since many more couples live together than live apart, it’s obvious that living together doesn’t prevent anyone from cheating.

Others look at all LAT couples as just dating, not as committed loving unions whether they’re married or not. Some people who live apart are indeed dating, but many are what have been called “partner LATs,” who are deeply enmeshed in each other’s lives, are executors of each other’s estates, have each other’s powers of attorney, etc.

Some see the lifestyle as being bad for the environment. It’s true that many housing units, whether a 250-square-foot studio or a 2,500-square-foot single-family house, have their own appliances, and heating and cooling systems, etc. All that has impacts on the environment.

More important, however, is how the people in those units actually live. If you’re a family of three or four in one household, yes, you are sharing resources and that can be better for the environment. But if that family often flies for work or vacations, drives gas-guzzling luxury cars, trucks or SUVs, dines on beef a few times a week and has remodeled their perfectly fine kitchen or bathroom to keep up with new decor trends, their carbon footprint will likely be much higher than that of a solo LAT dweller who lives minimally, perhaps walks, bikes, uses mass transit, or has an electric vehicle; shops at consignment and resale stores; and is vegetarian or vegan. Lifestyle matters.

Finally, many don’t believe that you can live apart and raise children together. But there are many children being raised with one parent at home and one who commutes for work and only comes back to the family home for short visits, or who is deployed overseas, or is incarcerated, or any configuration that keeps them apart for lengths of time. Plus, many people in platonic relationships co-parent in separate places as do divorced parents. All that matters is that the parents put their children’s needs—to feel safe, secure and loved—first. According to the research-based center Zero to Three, children need “parents who, whether living together or not, demonstrate respect for each other, communicate calmly and without anger, and who make their child’s needs the central focus of their decision-making.”

Vicki Larson is a longtime award-winning journalist, author of Not Too Old for That: How Women Are Changing the Story of Aging, coauthor of The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists, and Rebels, and author of the upcoming book, LATitude: How You Can Make a Live Apart Together Relationship Work. You may find more about her on her website https://www.vicki-larson.com, and follow her on Twitter/X at https://twitter.com/OMGchronicles, Threads: https://www.threads.net/@omgchronicles?hl=en and Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/omgchronicles.

Alicia M. Walker is Associate Professor of Sociology at Missouri State University. She is the current editor of the Council of Contemporary Families blog. Follow her on Twitter at @AliciaMWalker1.