We have seen enormous changes in how people construct relationships in 21^st century America. Yet, at the same time, contemporary understandings of romance, desire, and intimacy remain firmly rooted in assumptions of gender difference. In my new book published today, The Mating Game: How Gender Still Shapes How We Date, I explore why, even as we see ever more focus by young adults on building egalitarian relationships, most people want dating and courtship to proceed in gender stereotypical ways.

I interviewed 105 college-educated young adults in the San Francisco Bay Area about their dating lives and romantic relationships and found the following:

• Heterosexual men and women express a desire for egalitarian relationships, where both partners are educated, have a career, and share the labor at home. But they still continue to crave old-fashioned dating rituals—the man asks for the date, plans the date, and pays for the date. The man asks for commitment and proposes marriage.
• Although these rituals are viewed as romantic, chivalrous, and fun – and of little long-term consequence – they actually lay the foundation for relationship inequality. The result is: Gender inequality gets disguised as romance.
• LGBQ individuals tend to construct more creative relationships by questioning ingrained norms. Their flexibility makes space for more equal relationships in both the short and long term and may offer a potential model or inspiration.

How we date matters. The heterosexual women and men in this study wanted egalitarian relationships and had the educational credentials to meet each other as equals in their households. Yet they did not. Instead, they continue to believe that men and women are innately different. This belief was used to justify (and even celebrate) gendered dating practices, but then spilled over into their long-term committed relationships in less welcome ways. Heterosexual men and women believe that they have different interests, different skills, and different availability for their personal lives. These assumptions of “difference” limit their ability to question and challenge gendered preferences and arrangements. The result is that women end up with the lion’s share of the care work and household labor, in spite of everyone’s professed egalitarian goals.

On the other hand, LGBQ respondents emphasize egalitarian and flexible relationship practices right from the get-go. Payment for dates wasn’t the sole responsibility of one partner, nor was it expected to be. Nor was it the job of just one person to ask for a date. LGBQ people instead focused on communication, negotiation, flexibility, and building balanced relationships that made space for each individual’s often changing needs. This approach had a real effect on the types of relationships they built. Challenging old norms and drawing on new ones didn’t mean they never struggled with problematic relationship practices, but it did give them a different set of tools with which to work, and their relationships were more equal as a result.

The Mating Game is an accessible and engaging read for undergraduate students and general readers interested in gender, families, sexualities, and intimate relationships. The voices of the participants shine through and the empirical questions that drive the work reflect those that readers will often be considering in their own lives. Not only does the book provide readers with the tools to analyze gendered dating practices, it provides a model for how to creatively reimagine our personal lives.

Ellen Lamont is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Appalachian State University. She can be reached at: lamontec@appstate.edu or on Twitter @EllenCLamont

Last Friday, the Council on Contemporary Families convened for our biennial conference in Austin Texas.  The theme was “Raising Children in the 21st Century.”

The morning keynote speaker Dr. Christia Spears Brown, a developmental psychologist, started off the conference by speaking about gender development in the 21st century and how parents are helping or exacerbating gender inequalities among children. She noted that despite increases in women in STEM fields and sports, there is persistent inequality in confidence in math ability and political representation. Girls are sexualized in the media and taught to focus on appearance, while boys are pressured to conform to rigid and narrow masculinity expectations. A new challenge is that adolescents spend a lot of time on social media and have access to the internet almost constantly, which can help to reinforce these gender binaries.

Her research finds that after showing a picture of non sexualized vs. a sexualized girl to children, they interpreted the sexualized girl as more popular and the non-sexualized girl is rated as more athletic and smarter. Girls tended to highlight these differences- boys made fewer distinctions.  Girls who bought into these stereotypes felt they did worse in school, made less effort to learn in school, and were more likely to say they hide their intelligence (for instance, saying they do not raise their hands even if they know the answer).  Many adolescents, especially boys, admitted to sexually harassing other young adults, and the more they endorsed sexualized stereotypes, the more they were likely to also sexually harass their peers.

Next, a panel of speakers discussed how their research has been put into practice. Dr. Cynthia Osborne discussed a “prenatal-to-3” program to strengthen policies aimed at children in the important early years of childhood development. Dr. Julie Maslowsky discussed her outreach to health care providers to help develop family planning programs for teen mothers in order to prevent “repeat” teen motherhood (having multiple children as a teen).  Dr. David Yeager discussed his research on adolescent mindsets and belief systems (such as their beliefs about their own abilities) and how it impacts motivations. His research found that teaching students that the brain as a muscle that can grow (a “growth mindset”) can change how adolescents approach learning and lead to an increased GPA. Finally, Dr. Delida Sanchez talked about efforts to increase academics’ and practitioners’ knowledge about Black and Latinx youths’ experiences around sexual health.

We next heard from Rachael White who works in public affairs at UT Austin, and CCF research director Stephanie Coontz, who discussed strategies for taking your research public and translating research for a public audience.  Rachael emphasized starting with the ‘why’ of your research before going to the ‘how’ (you did it) and ‘what’ (you found). The why tells you- why should we care? What is the impact? She also emphasized that discussing stories is more compelling than discussing facts (so use stories to display your facts), and to keep your message to 1-3 points.  She also recommends being concise and using visuals.

Stephanie suggested drawing on research to show how your research fits in to a larger story, but cautioned that everything you draw on should be about a single organizing idea.  She advises to find a way to frame your research that is interesting to others. If it’s data driven, you also need to humanize that data- and you can draw on other research to do that. Tell them your point right up front, don’t bury the lead under a lit review.  If you are going to disagree with someone make it very obvious (“The big lie about x”). Avoid jargony words like intersectionality, postmodern, agency, heteronormativity, logistic regression, correlation, “net of”, hazard, and  words that end with “ity” “ism” and polarizing words like “microaggression” and “privilege” which can alienate people in your potential audience. Don’t try to tell too much- you should have a single sentence that can be a takeaway. It has to be interesting and repeatable.  Good sentences will put a spin on conventional wisdom (“what people get wrong about…”) or will help form an interesting headline. Come in at an angle- try to find a new take on a familiar issue. Use short declarative sentences and find simpler words. “Due to the fact” can become “because.” You can start with anecdotes about yourself. Above all, accept editing.

During lunch a number of researchers gave short presentations about their research for a “flash session.” Topics covered included an educational program for homeless parents, stepfamilies, the higher child death rate of boys and how it’s related to parental supervision of boys, parenting in the “experience” economy, in which consumers value memorable experiences over products, and how parental employment instability impacts children.

After lunch, the afternoon keynote speaker, Dr. Cecilia Menjivar addressed how immigration law can impact immigrant families.  She outlined the current detainment and family separation policies, noting that these systems do not only impact Latino families; Asian and Pacific Islanders make up 1.7 million of 11 million undocumented immigrants, and are the fastest growing group being detained. The expansion of enforcement of immigration rules creates fear, which in turn reduces contact with institutions such as the police and health care. The stress of potential deportation can impact prenatal health; one study found that Latina women who experienced an immigration raid had children with a reduced birth rate. Children of immigrants and immigrant children experience increased bullying, and decreased parental involvement at schools.

The next panel had three papers addressing raising children in difficult circumstances.  Dr. Kathleen Roche discussed her research on Latinx adolescents in the new immigration environment, finding that their parents have high psychological stress and often experienced discrimination. Adolescents with a foreign born parent had an increase in suicidal ideation, e-cigarette and alcohol use, and depressive symptoms and anxiety in response to recent immigration news. Dr. Lori Holleran Steiker discussed youth substance misuse and rising drugs deaths in the US, and her efforts to educate and prevent overdoses in schools.  Dr. Germine Awad addressed prejudice towards Arab/MENA Americans, a group that is “othered” in US society and US media.  She notes that Muslim Arabs experience more discrimination than Christian Arabs, and that Arab American students have the highest rates of depression among racial minorities in the US.

During the last panel of they day Dr. Karen Fingerman discussed her research on young adults, finding that intense support from parents and “helicopter parenting,” while disparaged in the media, leads to better results for children, and is not as common as described. Many young adults live with parents and receive income help, but many pay rent and help in return. Dr. Stephen Russel discussed parenting of LGBTQ youth, and that while parental acceptance does not alleviate all the harms of growing up in a prejudiced society, parents matter greatly in terms of making permanent policy change in schools. Dr. Ellen Wartella discussed how many adolescents have experienced violence, and while social media is often cited as a problem, it is not the cause of the problems among the respondents she interviewed.  A lively discussion followed the panel.

After the speeches ended we gathered for a reception, where the award for the 2020 CCF Media Award was presented to USA Today for outstanding coverage of family issues.

Arielle Kuperberg, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at UNC Greensboro, and the editor of the CCF Blog, which you are currently reading. Follow her on twitter @ATKuperberg or email her at atkuperb@uncg.edu.  

January 26 was National Spouses Day, and Valentine’s Day is just around the corner.  If you’re looking for a spouse — or hoping to become a better one — here are a few things you might want to know, including why you shouldn’t panic if no one is on the horizon.

Get a College Education

• As late as 1970 more than 80% of US women age 40-45 were married, with few differences by education but a slight advantage for women with a high school degree. In the last two decades, however, a different and much larger educational marriage gap has emerged. As of 2014, 75% of women aged 40-45 with a Bachelor’s degree or more were currently married, compared to only 65% of those with some college, 59% of women with a high school diploma, and just 56% of women who had not completed high school.
• In the 20th century, women with PhDs or professional degrees were the least likely women to marry. Today, women with such advanced degrees are the MOST likely to marry. More than 80% of women age 40-45 with professional degrees or PhDs were married in 2014.  
• A college education is especially protective against divorce. The Pew Research Center reports that as of 2015, college-educated women had an 80% chance of their marriage lasting more than 20 years. For women with a high school education or less, the chance of a marriage lasting that long is only 40%.

Take Your Time

• In 2018 the average age of marriage reached an all-time high of 30 years for men and 28 for women.
• But these averages reflect far greater variation in the chance of marriage AFTER age 30 than in the past. Sociologist Philip Cohen estimates that 85 percent of White women and 78 percent of Black women will marry in the course of their lives. Although Black women marry later than White women until their early thirties, they marry at higher rates after that age. In fact, Cohen calculates that a White woman who reaches age 45 without marrying has a 26 percent chance of marrying at some later point, while a Black woman still single at 45 has a 49 percent chance of marrying.
• And almost every year a woman postpones marriage, up to about age 49, lowers her chance of divorce.

Get by with a little help from…the internet?

• The most common way heterosexual adults met their future marital partners in the latter half of the 20thcentury was through friends. However, after peaking at 35% in 1990, the percent of heterosexual adults who met their partner through friends had fallen to 20% by 2017. Meanwhile, the number of adults who met their partners online had soared to nearly 40%, up from just 1% in 1995. For heterosexuals, the internet is now the most common way of meeting a marital partner. Bars and restaurants are the second most common place to meet a partner, with 27% reporting they met their partner there, up from 19% in 1990. Yet most of these initial in-person meet ups were actually precipitated by online connections, making the number of couples who owe their start to online dating even greater! Heterosexuals who meet on line tend to enter marriage more quickly than their counterparts who meet in other ways, but they do not have a higher risk of breakup.

Don’t be afraid to buck outdated rules

• As of 2016, one in ten marriages involved partners of different racial/ethnic backgrounds, a more than three-fold increase from 1980. Among newlyweds, approximately one in six is married to someone of a different race or ethnicity.  Many researchers believe these trends reflect an erosion of the traditionally rigid boundaries between different faith communities and racial-ethnic groups.
• In the past, marriages where women had higher education or higher earnings than their husband had an elevated chance of divorce. But in recent decades women’s advancements in education and the work force have ceased to threaten marital stability. Couples where men and women are educational equals are the least likely to divorce and those in which women are more educated than their male partners are no more likely to divorce than those where the man is more educated than the woman. Since the 1990s, couples where women earn as much or more than their husbands no longer have a higher risk for divorce.

When making marital wishes, don’t forget the nightly dishes

• It turns out the best predictor of a happy marriage is not how good-looking, talented or rich your spouse is, but how much you share – in your conversations, your interests, and especially the daily routines of life, such as housework. Gender egalitarian and same-sex couples have some big advantages here, since they tend to share more equally. Sharing housework and childcare, especially, is associated with greater relationship quality – including more satisfying and frequent sex. But have a conversation about who is going to do what, because when it comes to sharing housework, some tasks matter more than others. If you’re a woman in a heterosexual relationship and your partner won’t share the dishwashing, this could mean your relationship is headed in the wrong direction. 41% of women who do the majority of dishes say their relationship is in trouble, compared to just 20% of those who share dishwashing equally. Meanwhile, men are three times more satisfied with their relationships when their partner trusts their judgment enough to share the shopping.
• Talk it out. For women who want their partner to share responsibilities for domestic labor, communication is key. Men who report higher quality communication with their partner are more likely to do an equal share of housework and childcare.

And always remember, single doesn’t mean second-best

• Only 16% of men and 17% of women say that having a spouse is essential to their fulfillment. What IS essential for a fulfilling life, according to 57% of men and 46% of women, is having an enjoyable job or career.
• Once you have an education and a secure income, you do have a better chance of getting married. But you also have a better chance of enjoying health, happiness, and a wide range of friendship networks if you stay single. In fact, at the highest income levels, never-married individuals actually report more supportive friendship networks then their married counterparts.
• This is an important advantage, because having supportive and numerous friendships is a stronger predictor of mental and physical health than being married or living with a partner.

Daniel L. Carlson is Assistant Professor, Department of Family and Consumer Studies, at the University of Utah, and a Board Member of the Council on Contemporary Families He can be reached at daniel.carlson@fcs.utah.edu; 614-286-4104. Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA and is Director of Research and Public Education at the Council on Contemporary Families. She can be reached at coontzs@msn.com; 360 556-9223.

Recently The Wall Street Journal published an article about a new type of online matching site. It’s not for people interested in finding their future spouse, soul mate, or next hook up. It’s for people who want a coparent, someone they can conceive and perhaps raise a child with absent any romantic entanglements or expectations for marriage. Coparenting websites like Pollentree.com and Modamily.com promise that prospective parents can skip the dating and matrimony and go straight to what they really want: finding like-minded adults to share children now. Pitched primarily at affluent singles whose biological clocks are ticking after years spent investing in their careers, these sites claim to meet a growing family-formation need in an era when many don’t want or don’t have time for love and marriage before the baby carriage.

Critics claim that this “coparenting movement”—families that start with the primary intention to raise shared children—is an affront to marriage, denies children the benefits of having coupled parents, and ignores the vast research finding that kids do best when raised by a married mom and dad. If these critiques sound familiar, they are. They are the very same concerns raised about low-income families trying to forge cooperative coparenting relationships in the aftermath of breakups or unplanned pregnancies. Poverty, unemployment, low wages, racism, and other disadvantages make it less likely that low-income parents will follow the marriage before childbearing script. Children born into poverty are much less likely to be born to married parents and more likely to experience their parents’ breakup.

It could be argued that these families, not the relatively privileged ones able to afford online services seeking coparents, are at the forefront of our society’s real coparenting movement. Middle-class families tend to experience parenting as a “package deal,” a clearly defined script that links parenthood to marriage. Yet many mothers and fathers in poverty tend to experience relationships with their children’s other parents as secondary. Dads especially see connections with moms as conduits to primary relationships with their kids. U.S. family policy does not always reflect this reality.

Addressing coparenting challenges has been a primary aim of anti-poverty policies since the federal government first funded marriage education and “responsible” fatherhood initiatives—also known as “family strengthening” policies—over two decades ago. Targeting coparenting makes a lot of sense given that low-income dads cite strained relationships with the mothers of their children as one of the biggest barriers to their involvement. Research also shows that when dads are positively involved, children benefit academically, socially, emotionally, and economically. Simply put, when moms and dads get along, coupled or not, dads are more likely to stick around, and kids do better. Policy certainly has that much right. The problem is assuming that promoting marriage and two-parent homes is an effective way to strengthen families.

Based on my research with more than 60 poor fathers of color in a government-funded responsible fatherhood program I call “DADS”, presuming that moms and dads are together romantically and want to get married can be counterproductive. Only about a third of the fathers I studied were in romantic relationships with the mothers of their children, and many of these were unsure about the future of these partnerships. Most men were not in DADS to improve their couple relationships based on package deal views of committed coparenting as a route to greater father involvement. Half even described how focusing on their relationships with mothers distracted them from their children, especially when persistent conflict over couple issues threatened to derail otherwise cooperative coparenting. They were in DADS to learn how to navigate and negotiate complex coparenting relationships with no hope for romantic reconciliation or marriage. They needed a new script that reflected their family realities.

DADS offered paid job training, a high-school completion program, and fathering and relationship skills classes. These resources gave economically vulnerable men—most of whom were persistently unemployed and struggled with the stigma of criminality—opportunities to prove to themselves and their children’s mothers that they were committed to becoming better fathers. They learned to see their children’s other parents, not as adversarial exes or potential romantic or sexual interests with whom they might reconcile, but as supportive allies equally invested in the well-being of their shared children. “Ricky,” a 22-year-old Black single father of one, told me that he learned: “When it’s just about my son, [his mom] and I talk, and everything is really good. Like she told me, ‘We got to get rid of everything you and me.’ I’m single because I got to have it be all about my son.” Worrying about the likely fighting had they gotten back together would have been a diversion from his fathering.

Other fathers described to me how DADS helped them realize that breaking up was the best way to improve their coparenting relationships. “Jeremiah,” 24, Black, and a single father who shared three children with two women, confided: “We’re a lot better now as parents that we have space from each other. I don’t get how some people, they’re not with their mate, so they don’t be with their children. They’re with somebody else and not paying attention to the kids. I would never do that. I want to be with the baby’s mother, but it’s harder being without the baby.” Like Jeremiah, many men learned through DADS that their best hope for cooperative coparenting was disentangling their romantic attachments, especially any related jealousies and hostilities, from fathering. The classes they took taught them to empathize with mothers and prioritize their shared children’s welfare over anything else. Fathers realized that what they often saw as mothers’ “gatekeeping” were well-intentioned efforts to protect and provide for kids.

Fathers’ financial constraints contributed to their coparenting challenges as much as any interpersonal conflicts and romantic quarrels. This made the school and job components of DADS just as valuable for managing coparenting challenges. Housing and food insecurity, unreliable transportation, and struggles to provide financially all compromised fathers’ abilities to be and be seen by mothers as reliable, responsible coparents. As “Christopher,” a 22-year-old Black father of one, told me: “Me and his mom have separated many times. I absolutely love her. We spend a lot of time together, but I have to float around. I don’t have a place to live right now. You just work it out with what you’ve got going on the next day. If things are going well with her, I have a place to live that day, and I get to see my son. But one time they left me, and she would not deal with me until I tried to better myself. She wouldn’t talk to me, so I went back to the streets and went to jail. I was making more money, but I realized I want to be with this woman. I agreed with her, so I came here. It’s keeping me straight.” Christopher saw DADS as his only chance to make legal money, stay out of jail, afford stable housing, get his on-again-off-again girlfriend to commit, and therefore regularly see his son.

Ricky, Jeremiah, Christopher, and their classmates saw DADS as a rare opportunity to overcome how relational and financial barriers intersected to complicate coparenting. Few of them, however, discussed plans to marry their children’s mothers in the near future. They had much more pressing family goals, including providing for themselves and their children and managing the interrelated strains of poverty and family complexity. DADS may not have gotten them any closer to the altar, but it gave them a way to prove to themselves, mothers, and others that they were capable and dedicated parents. Given that mothers’ views of fathers’ parenting abilities is highly predictive of fathers’ engagement with children, this is a huge success for any policy focused on increasing fathers’ involvement in their children’s lives. Fathers who were married or desired marriage still found support for their family-formation goals. But the more explicit focus on couples working together for the sake of children resonated for everyone in the program.

What about those critiques that prioritizing coparenting over marriage ignores research and denies children the benefits of married parents? What the research really finds is that kids do best when raised by parents and caregivers who get along, cooperate in children’s best interests, and have the resources and support to provide for all their needs. More programs like DADS that reflect how many parents prioritize bonds with children over partner relationships will go a long way in meeting the needs of families as they really are. That means accepting that many families rightly choose to forgo romance and marriage for the sake of the baby carriage. Family strengthening policies will be more effective when they do, too.

Jennifer Randles is Chair and Associate Professor of Sociology at California State University, Fresno. Follow her on Twitter at @jrandles3 and reach her at jrandles@csufresno.edu.

Reposted from the University of Texas at Austin Population Research Center

While it is well-established that marriage benefits physical and emotional well-being, it is not marital status alone that matters but also marital quality. Substantial evidence demonstrates that marital strain increases psychological distress for married people. Most of this evidence is based exclusively on people’s own reports of the strain they feel in their marriages, referred to by researchers as “self-reported marital strain.” However, most research has not considered how a spouse’s perceptions and feelings about the marriage, known as “spouse-reported marital strain,” may also contribute to an individual’s distress.

Obtaining information from spouses is important because even if an individual is generally happy with the marriage, his or her spouse might be unhappy. The individual can then pick up on and be negatively affected by the spouse’s unhappiness. Dyadic data, which obtains appraisals from both spouses, may therefore provide important insights into the association between marital strain and psychological distress.

Prior research, based almost exclusively on different-sex couples, also suggests that marital strain may lead to more psychological distress for women than for men. This gender difference has been theorized by some to be the result of women’s greater interpersonal connections, which may increase their awareness of and reactivity to relationship strain. Others argue that gendered power dynamics, in which women are seen as subordinate to men, explain this difference.

Same-sex couples typically adhere less strongly to gendered norms and expectations and are more egalitarian than different-sex couples. A gender-as-relational perspective – which argues that the way women and men enact gender differs depending on whether they are interacting with a woman or a man – would suggest that the relationship between self- and spouse-reported marital strain and psychological distress might operate differently for women and men in lesbian, gay, and heterosexual marriages.

Conducting research on different- and same-sex couples could shed light on competing theories of why women generally experience more distress as a result of marital strain. On the one hand, if women are more aware of interpersonal dynamics within marriage, they may be more susceptible than men to psychological distress as a result of marital strain regardless of whether they are in a different-sex or same-sex marriage. On the other hand, if women in different-sex marriages are more likely to be in relationships that reflect gendered power dynamics in which they are subordinate to men, they may be especially vulnerable to distress as a result of marital strain.

To examine whether and how self-reported marital strain and spouse-reported marital strain are associated with psychological distress and whether differences exist for women and men in lesbian, gay, and heterosexual marriages, we analyzed ten days of dyadic diary data from 756 U.S. women and men in midlife.

KEY FINDINGS
►►People who report higher levels of their own marital strain (“self-reported marital strain”) have more psychological distress. In addition, people whose spouses report higher levels of marital strain (“spouse- reported marital strain”), also experience more psychological distress.

►►However, there are notable gender differences in these relationships: women in different-sex marriages suffer more compared to women in same-sex marriages and men in same- and different-sex marriages. (See figure)

►►The association of self-reported marital strain with psychological distress is stronger for women in different-sex marriages compared to all other union types.

►►The association of spouse-reported marital strain with psychological distress is stronger for women in different-sex marriages when compared to men in same- and different-sex marriages.

POLICY IMPLICATIONS
Implications for research on marital dynamics and health
Research on marriage needs to consider the perspectives of both spouses when exploring linkages between marital dynamics and well-being. Data from both spouses is especially useful because it allows researchers to explore how perceptions, behaviors, and characteristics of each spouse may independently impact the health and well-being of either one or both spouses.
To fully capture the range of marital dynamics and their impact on health – especially for gender differences in these linkages – future studies should include same-sex couples as well as different-sex couples.

Research would benefit from taking a gender-as-relational approach to studying marital relationships. As this research clearly shows, it is not an individual’s gender but rather an individual’s gender in combination with his or her spouse’s gender that plays a key role in the link between marital strain and psychological distress, with women married to men showing a unique disadvantage compared to other union types. Thus, research must look beyond the individual to consider how gendered relational contexts shape processes of health and well-being.

Implications for mental health professionals
Clinicians would also benefit from considering the gendered relational contexts of marital relationships. In other words, counseling and other professional interactions with couples would be strengthened by thinking of the individual in combination with their spouse’s gender.

Indeed, when mental health clinicians move beyond an exclusive focus on the individual and expand their approach to also consider the gender of their patient’s spouse, they can better understand and thus provide better care to their patients across all marital contexts. This is especially vital for women in different-sex marriages. Given the higher rates of depression and anxiety for women, a focus on improving the marital experiences of women in different-sex marriages may help to reduce mental health disparities.
Study findings also point to the importance of considering how either spouse’s perceptions of marital strain and conflict can undermine the psychological well-being of both spouses. Thus, clinicians should make every effort to collect information about both the patients’ and spouses’ marital experiences.

Michael A. Garcia (michael.garcia@utexas.edu) is a PhD student in sociology and a graduate student trainee in the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin, and Debra Umberson is a professor of sociology and director of the Population Research Center, UT Austin who holds the Christine and Stanley E. Adams, Jr. Centennial Professorship in Liberal Arts.

This research was supported, in part, by Grant R21AG044585 from the National Institute on Aging (PI, Debra Umberson); Grant P2CHD042849 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 (NICHD); and Grant T32 HD007081, Training Program in Population Studies, awarded to the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin by NICHD. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Friendships and romantic relationships are universal experiences, but we know relatively little about them, especially using population-based nationally-representative samples. In The Company We Keep: Interracial Friendships and Romantic Relationships from Adolescence to Adulthood (2019, Russell Sage Foundation), we use The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) to examine interracial romance and friendship among adolescents aged 12-17 and when they are adults aged 25-32. We wrote this book for a broader readership, so we tried our best to only present graphs. There is one table in the entire book, which is pretty good given that we are all social demographers! I think the entire book or single chapters (probably Chapter 1 with any of the substantive chapters) could be assigned to any undergraduate classes on race and ethnicity, youth and adolescence, sociology of education, or marriage and the family.

Kara and I had worked on these topics starting about 20 years ago (our first paper from this work came out in 2000), but when Wave IV of Add Health was released about 10 years ago, we began talking about going back and linking adult relationships with childhood experiences. We were fortunate enough to work with one of Kara’s colleagues, Kelly. We have been working on this book for 6 or 7 years.

Our book has several major findings:

• Interracial friendships are quite rare for white and black youth, but more common for Latinx and Asian youth. Some of these differences stem from the fact that whites and blacks are much more likely to attend schools that are primarily white or black, respectively. Asian and Latinx students are much more likely to attend schools with children of other races.
• Interracial friendship and romantic relationship patterns reveal multiple color lines – not only are race, ethnicity, gender, immigrant status, and socio-economic status important to determining these patterns, but that their relative importance depends on the groups that we analyze.
• Socio-economic status plays a more minor role in determining friendship choices compared to race.
• Adolescent experiences of having friends of another race, a romantic partner of a different race, and/or attending schools with larger shares of individuals who are of a different race each has a positive association with the likelihood that individuals have interracial romantic relationships in adulthood. These effects are durable and persist even with controls for individual background characteristics and current neighborhood racial composition when they are adults.
• We also explored friendships choices by race of Hispanics, multiracials as well as whether there was any homophily by socio-economic status or immigrant status. We also examine same-sex relationships in a few places.

We were also disturbed by the larger numbers of students who did not report having a single friend at school. This was true for less than 10% of white girls, but closer to 30-40% of Black, Hispanic and Asian boys did not have a friend at school. We argue that isolation or marginalization of certain minority gender groups is troubling, and that we should not simply evaluate whether children are earning high grades or test scores, but also whether they are accepted socially at school.

Overall, I think that the book does offer some signs of optimism as well – early interracial experiences via even the most casual contact, has long-lasting consequences on relationships later in life.

Grace Kao is IBM Professor and Chair of Sociology at Yale University. She is also Faculty Director of Education Studies and Direct of the Center for Empirical Research on Stratification and Inequality (CERSI). She is also affiliated with the Ethnic, Race, and Migration Program at Yale University. She is the Past Vice President of the American Sociological Association. Follow her on twitter @Prof_GraceKao.

Reposted with permission from the blog of Chinyere Osuji. 

When I was studying at Harvard in the early 2000s, I had a black immigrant professor who had built part of his career gas-lighting anti-black discrimination in favor of 1990s-style black cultural inferiority tropes. My grad school girlfriends and I awkwardly giggled over “the sex parts” of his book on black assimilation. He cited statistics saying that black women did not perform oral sex as often as white women, making them less desirable sexual partners. Sexual incompatibility on this sex act was part of the motor driving black men to date interracially more than black women. I was struck by how he ignored scholarship showing how white women are lauded as the essence of beauty, domesticity, and ideal womanhood. Instead, in a reversal of the Jezebel stereotype, he explained this race-gender imbalance as due to black women being prudes. I remember that when we stopped laughing, we speculated on which black woman might have hurt him and whether this was scholarly revenge porn against black women. We also questioned how his much paler wife felt about this discussion.

Over a decade later, I noticed the increasing popularity of a similar dynamic: “Black women need to be more open!”

How many black women have heard this in reference to our dating and marriage prospects?

Black women’s inability to “open up” to dating non-blacks (presumably whites) was curtailing our attempts at finding long-term love. Oprah even emphasized this point to her best friend, Gayle, trying to convince her to date non-black men. Once more, statistics showing black men being more likely to interracially marry were used to show how our actions were deficient.

According to the US Census, close to 90% of all marriages take place within the same ethnic or racial group, with whites being the least likely to inter-marry. However, black women’s intra-racial preferences, not anti-blackness and misogynoir, were the cause of our lower likelihood for marriage in comparison to other similarly situated women.

Research by demographers shows that most non-black men, even those open to interracial dating, discriminate against black women in their online dating profiles. At the 2018 American Sociological Association annual meeting, Belinda Robnett (UC-Irvine) presented research showing white men were open to dating black women for interracial sex, but not interracial dating. Together, their studies suggested that, as in all pairings, it takes two to tango and, unless it is solely horizontally, black women indeed have better odds at finding long-term romantic partnerships with black men.

In my book, Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race, I conducted over 100 interviews with people in black-white couples in Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro. I had the privilege of listening to men and women across racial pairings share the monotony, excitement, struggles, and joys of being married to a person on the other side of the ethnoracial hierarchy. Almost all couples seemed content in their relationships. Several were parents navigating how to raise children who were comfortable with the black, white, multiracial, and multi-ethnic sides of their extended families.

One thing that struck me about the black women whom I interviewed was how several of them complained about their white husbands who “just didn’t get it.” As people on the top of gender, racial, and often class hierarchies, these white men often could not make sense of the privileges they accrued in a society that fought very hard to occlude them. The work often fell on their black wives to teach them how they navigated the world as white middle class men. A few white husbands were “woke” to these dynamics. When I interviewed them individually, we laughed about their couple tactic of wives “tagging” them for interactions with customer service representatives and other outsiders. This strategy ensured that they used their race and gender privileges for the good of the family. Still, black women in other relationships described the emotional labor of explaining intersections of disadvantage to their oblivious white husbands.

I asked all of the husbands and wives about their experiences in their “romantic career”— how they understood their desires for spousal characteristics through prior romantic experiences. Unlike the white women whom I interviewed, black women in both Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro described the slights and microaggressions that they had experienced in the past. Several admitted to having been the “black girl in the closet” to nonblack men they had dated. For example, Lana was a 35-year old black woman whom I interviewed in Los Angeles. She recalled a previous relationship with a white guy when she was in college.

Lana: …. I don’t think he ever told his grandparents, for example, that I was black.  And when he told a group of his friends… they were like, “Oh what does your girlfriend look like?” and he kind of described me and was like “Dark eyes, dark hair, dark skin.” They were kind of like “What?” and it was very like “Oh…” like very, very surprised I guess. So there was definitely some of that and it was kind of difficult for me that if the relationship had gotten more serious that I was gonna have to worry about his family would perceive me or if they’d have – obviously they would have had a problem with me if they’d met me…. just because of me being black.  Not his parents but his grandparents because I had met his parents and I got along really great [with them] actually, but I think he was worried his grandparents just wouldn’t be very tolerant.

Lana’s story was similar to several black women that I interviewed in Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro. Like Lana, some black wives saw these experiences as a tactic that their previous white boyfriends used to protect them from anti-black relatives or to avoid white shock. Several black women were surprised at how long it had taken them to meet the friends and families of their white husbands. None of the white wives in either setting described similar experiences with previous same- or different-race partners. Other black wives, especially in Rio de Janeiro, described prior non-black partners being ashamed to be seen with them in public. For obvious reasons, black women who had these experiences expressed discomfort with these previous dynamics.

As Jessie Bernard famously articulated, in every (heterosexual) marriage, there are two relationships: “his” and “hers.” For this reason, it is reasonable to expect that partners were having different experiences in these relationships. When I interviewed white husbands in both places, several described having absolute autonomy to their relationships, both current and past. For them, their relationships were none of anyone’s business. As a consequence, they did not echo their black wives’ sentiments of feeling exceedingly excluded from white family and friend networks before they married. Nevertheless, when white husbands “just did not get it,” it was a source of tension in the relationships.

From a research standpoint, Boundaries of Love shows it is unrealistic and unfair to blame black women for their challenges in finding love when misogynoir is embedded in dating and marriage markets in both the United States and Brazil. In addition, this research shows that interracial dating and marriage may involve its own particular sets of issues. At the same time, since no marriage is without its issues, it also shows that black women can form happy, loving relationships with white men.

On a personal note, as someone who dates black men as well as men of different ethnic and racial backgrounds, being open-minded to love should be a goal for everyone, not just black women. Unfortunately, that is far from our social reality and may decreasingly be the case in the Trump era. Still, when it comes to interracial dating and marriage, it’s time to end arguments of black female deficiency. As Marcyliena Morgan, another black professor at Harvard, advised, it is time to love us or leave us alone.

Friends are important because they help us when we are in need, they make us feel supported, and they make happy events even more enjoyable by sharing those good times with us. Fortunately, almost everyone knows how to make friends with a new acquaintance – you look for common interests, you do nice things for the other person, you hang out with them by engaging in their favorite activities or sometimes by participating in mutually-enjoyable activities. You might help your new acquaintance by giving them advice when it is sought, by listening to them, or by sharing with them things they need or want. Often, just showing an interest in a person is an important step in building a bond of friendship with them.

For over twenty years our research team has been studying a particular kind of friendship, that between a stepparent and stepchild. Stepfamilies are a sizable portion of American families; in a 2011 Pew Center survey, 42% of respondents reported having at least one stepfamily member, and younger adults had more step-relatives than older ones, so the numbers will continue to grow. We have been studying stepparent-stepchild relationships because family clinicians and researchers suggest that stepparents’ ability to develop close bonds with stepchildren may be critical to the well-being of couple and family relationships in stepfamilies.

In our first study of what we called “affinity-seeking,” we examined 53 stepparents’ efforts at building friendships with their stepchildren by doing in-depth interviews with stepparents, their spouses, and stepchildren. We found that stepparents who purposefully made friends and tried to build close bonds with their stepchildren before remarriage, and who continued to maintain those bonding activities after remarriage, felt closer to their stepchildren and reported less conflicts. Stepparents who befriended stepchildren when they were dating, but then stopped after remarriage, were not as close with their stepchildren and had more conflicts. Perhaps not surprisingly, stepparents who never made efforts to build affinity with stepchildren had the most emotionally distant stepfamily relationships. We also found, in another in-depth study of dozens of young adult stepchildren, that stepchildren had to notice what their stepparents were trying to do and respond affirmatively to those affinity-seeking efforts; it was not enough for stepparents to try to build bonds, stepchildren had to recognize their efforts, interpret them in a positive way, and respond in kind. In addition, we learned that stepchildren believe that the initial efforts to build a bond are the stepparents’ responsibility, not theirs.

More recently, we gathered survey data online from 291 heterosexual remarried couples in which we asked them about stepparents’ affinity-seeking with stepchildren, marital quality, stepfamily conflict and cohesion. Information was obtained from husbands and wives separately, which allowed us to look at how stepparent affinity seeking related to both the stepparents’ and the biological parents’ perceptions about their marriage and family relationship quality. To assess stepparent affinity-seeking, we asked the partners individually to select the oldest child in their household who was from one of the partners’ previous relationships, and we asked them to think of that stepchild when responding to questions about stepparents’ efforts to build a friendship.

First, we explored factors related to stepparents’ efforts to befriend their stepchildren. Specifically, we evaluated how biological parents’ efforts at controlling stepparents’ interactions with their children (also known as “gatekeeping”) and stepparents’ self-perceptions of how they viewed close relationships with others (also known as “attachment orientations”) were associated with stepparents’ friendship-seeking behaviors with residential stepchildren. Stepparents who felt confident in their close relationships and, perhaps surprisingly, stepparents who felt anxious when interacting with others to whom they wanted to be close, engaged in more friendship- seeking behaviors with their stepchildren than did stepparents whose orientation was to keep their distance as a way to protect themselves in intimate relationships. We also found that both stepparents and their partners reported that the biological parents’ restrictive gatekeeping was strongly associated with fewer friendship-seeking behaviors by stepparents.

Next, we looked at whether the stepparent-stepchild relationship or marital relationship was more closely linked to overall stepfamily functioning. We did this because a researcher years ago had suggested that step-relationship quality was the most important predictor of stepfamily quality; some stepfamily therapists agree, while others contend that marital quality is key to family functioning. In our study we found that both relationships are important, although couples’ confidence in the future of their marriage was slightly more strongly associated with better stepfamily functioning (i.e., emotional closeness, communication, harmony) than was the quality of the stepparent-stepchild bond.

Finally, in a subsample of 234 stepfather-mother dyads, we found, after accounting for duration of mothers’ previous relationships, duration of the stepcouple relationship, the selected child’s biological sex and age, number of children in the household, and mothers’ report of household income, stepfathers’ perceptions of affinity-seeking with the child significantly predicted both partners’ perceptions of stepfather-stepchild conflict, marital quality, marital confidence, and stepfamily cohesion.

The results of these studies suggest that there are benefits associated with stepparent affinity-seeking – less conflict with stepchildren, better couple relationships, and closer stepfamily ties. Our findings provide evidence for encouraging stepparents to focus on building friendships with stepchildren. Our findings also illustrate that this is not always a simple thing to do. For these efforts to work, stepparents should engage in friendship-building behaviors early in the relationship and continue them as the bond builds. Additionally, the stepchildren must notice those efforts and respond affirmatively to them. Biological parents also need to allow opportunities for stepparents and stepchildren to engage with each other. When these things happen, then everyone in the stepfamily benefits. Stepparents and their partners (the parents of the children) need to think about this as an ongoing, long-term project – we found that some stepchildren disliked their stepparents and resisted any efforts to bond for some time, often months or years, before deciding that their stepparents’ efforts should be reciprocated.

Lawrence Ganong is an emeritus professor of human development and family science at the University of Missouri in Columbia, MO. Marilyn Coleman is a Distinguished Curator’s Professor Emerita of human development and family science at the University of Missouri in Columbia, MO. They have been studying stepfamily relationships for over 40 years.

The recent CCF Symposium, Parents Can’t Go It Alone, introduces you to important new work about what parents need to meet their goals and successfully raise the next generation. The essays range from a comparison of social supports across nations to what worries Latinx parents for their children’s safety.. Other essays highlight the strengths of community support for mothering in the African-American community and the need for change in how we structure low-wage work to support parents who work in those jobs. The symposium also provides evidence that most Americans want to live in families where both parents share the work of making a living and raising the children, so it is vitally important that we don’t leave fathers out of our demands for workplace flexibility.

We have so much in this country, so why is parenting so hard? An online symposium convened by the Council on Contemporary Families—Parents Can’t Go It Alone—illustrates that parenting today is harder because working mothers and fathers are going without the help they need. We are neglecting parents.

Why now? CCF asked scholars who study families to write about the most current research on the needs of parents. We heard that parents have diverse priorities, and that many parents worry about how racism is affecting their children. Some worry about the lack of time for their kids, and others struggle with jobs that seem to demand their attention 24/7 jobs and so interfere with giving children enough attention. These problems are significant, and we see their consequences: The birth rate is falling throughout much of the world.

The symposium offers descriptions of how hard parenting is—and potential solutions to reduce the consequent discouragement for diverse American parents. Each essay suggests possibilities for how our society might come to the aid of today’s parents.

How do families “do it all?” They don’t.

New York University sociologist Kathleen Gerson busts the myth that there is such a thing as “having it all.” On the basis of interviews with 120 young adults (33–47 years old), she found four patterns for managing the conflicts between the workplace and child rearing. Some workers are hyper-traditional, while others remain single or childless. In some families, women “do it all” rather than have it all. A third of her sample can be described as egalitarians, experimenting with building an equal partnership at both work and home despite the obstacles. Only the egalitarians prefer the choice they have made; most of the others would prefer egalitarian relationships but have not found a way to achieve them in today’s world.

It isn’t just time or just autonomy. Both matter for parents.

Maureen Perry-Jenkins from University of Massachusetts Amherst interviewed 360 low-income working families and found that a shortage of time is nearly everyone’s complaint. Parents needed time to sleep, care for babies, and connect with their partner, but they also needed predictability in their schedules. Control over their time makes it possible to have last-minute doctor appointments or a needed sick day. Beyond that, Perry-Jenkins reports that conditions at work affect parents’ mental health and their relationships with their children and partners. One way to support the next generation is to improve the conditions of work for their parents. Work matters.

Parents report fear of violence (from police as well as gangs).

University of Illinois at Chicago’s Lorena Garcia interviewed 68 middle- and upper-middle-class Latinx parents in the Chicagoland area. She found both optimism and worry: The parents had the knowledge and financial resources to help their children pursue their dreams; yet they worried, especially about their sons. They worried about the vulnerability of Black and Latino boys to gun violence in the city. They gave their sons a version of “the talk,” to help them reduce their vulnerability to police racism. Despite economic privileges, the Latinx parents in her study had serious concerns about their sons’ physical safety. Garcia shows us that good family policy must include reducing gang violence and police racism.

African-American communities support employed mothers

Dawn Marie Dow, from the University of Maryland and author of Mothering While Black, offers a view of African-American mothering that contradicts the presumption that all mothers feel a conflict between paid work and parenting. In interviews with middle- and upper-middle-class African-American mothers, Dow found that for African-American mothers, working outside the home is part of mothering work. Unlike other American mothers’ view that parenting is at odds with work, they felt supported by their families and communities for their paid labor. In their communities, being a strong, independent woman is seen as a virtue. Dow’s research reminds us that not only must we change the structures of workplaces to support parenting, but we must support cultural expectations and communities that validate parents’ ability to combine earning a living with caring for others.

Fathers are parents too.

Although some of the essays in this symposium are all about mothering, Stephanie Coontz reminds us that dads count too. She suggests that a major obstacle to the successful coordination of work and family life is the assumption that the problem belongs only to mothers. If fathers were not expected to focus solely on earning a living, mothers would never be required to “do it all.” Coontz provides data on the kinds of parental leave available to U.S. fathers and shows the inequity of providing more or better leave to mothers. Coontz suggests that feminists must work as strenuously for fair and generous paternal leaves as we do for maternal leaves.

How and why work–family policies matter

Caitlyn Collins, author of Making Motherhood Work, takes us on a deep dive into the social policies that make it easier or harder to be an employed parent. She interviewed 135 middle-class working mothers in Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the United States, and learned that while European countries have wide-ranging approaches to social policies, all have more substantial family-related policies than does the United States. Those policies make employed mothering less stressful in those countries than in the United States. Collins suggests that the lack of such policies in the United States sends the message that our families are on their own—that the community owes nothing to those raising the next generation of citizens.

LINKS:

FULL SYMPOSIUM PDF: CCF Parents Can’t Go It Alone Online Symposium 2019

https://contemporaryfamilies.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/parents-cant-go-it-alone-symposium-2019-full.pdf

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:  Children Are Now Back at School, Time to Focus on What Their Parents Need by Barbara J. Risman, brisman@uic.edu

https://contemporaryfamilies.org/parents-cant-go-it-alone-symposium-2019-executive-summary

ARTICLES:

Why No One Can “Have It All” and What to Do About It by Kathleen Gerson, Kathleen.gerson@nyu.edu

https://contemporaryfamilies.org/parents-cant-go-it-alone-symposium-2019-gerson-why-no-one-can-have-it-all

Work that Works for Low-Wage Workers by Maureen Perry-Jenkins, mpj@psych.umass.edu

https://contemporaryfamilies.org/parents-cant-go-it-alone-symposium-2019-perry-jenkins-work-that-works-for-low-wage-workers

Fears of Violence: Concerns of Middle-Class Latinx Parents by Lorena Garcia, lorena@uic.edu

https://contemporaryfamilies.org/parents-cant-go-it-alone-symposium-2019-garcia-fears-of-violence

Mothering While Black by Dawn Marie Dow, dmdow@umd.edu

https://contemporaryfamilies.org/parents-cant-go-it-alone-symposium-2019-dow-mothering-while-black

Dads Count Too: Family-Friendly Policies Must Include Fathers by Stephanie Coontz, coontzs@msn.com

https://contemporaryfamilies.org/parents-cant-go-it-alone-symposium-2019-coontz-dads-count-too

Raising a Village: Identifying Social Supports for All Kinds of Families by Caitlyn Collins, c.collins@wustl.edu

https://contemporaryfamilies.org/parents-cant-go-it-alone-symposium-2019-collins-raising-a-village

Resposted with Permission from This Chair Rocks.

We’ve known for a while that ageism—negative beliefs and stereotypes about aging—make us vulnerable to disease and decline, and also that the opposite is true. People with fact- rather than fear-based attitudes towards aging walk faster, heal quicker, live longer, and are less likely to get Alzheimer’s—even if they’re genetically predisposed to the disease.

Until recently, though, we didn’t know much about whether strategies to reduce ageism actually worked. That changed on June 21, when a report published in the American Journal of Public Health showed for the first time that “it is possible to reduce ageist attitudes, prejudices and stereotypes.” Boom! The results are far more definitive than a single study. Scientists at Cornell University conducted a “systematic review and meta-analysis”  of 63 studies conducted over the past forty years with a total of 6,124 participants. After evaluating three types of interventions designed to curb ageism, they found that the most successful  programs encourage intergenerational contact and educate people about the facts of aging.

“The most surprising thing was how well some of these programs seemed to work,” observed co-author Karl Pillemer, professor of human development at Cornell and gerontology in medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. “The findings really suggest that these interventions had a very strong effect on outcomes, attitudes and knowledge” about aging, concurred study author David Burnes, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Toronto.

Not only that, experts agree that these kinds of interventions shouldn’t cost much money and are easy to implement. Possibilities include after-school mentoring or tutoring programs; college classes on aging and age bias; and activities that involve all ages, like a community garden or putting on a play or organizing around a shared cause.

Author and activist Ashton Applewhite has been recognized by the New York Times, the New Yorker, National Public Radio, and the American Society on Aging as an expert on ageism. She blogs at This Chair Rocks, speaks widely at venues that have ranged from the United Nations to the TED mainstage, has written for Harper’s, the Guardian, and the New York Times, and is the voice of Yo, Is This Ageist?  The author of This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism, Ashton is a leading spokesperson for a movement to mobilize against discrimination on the basis of age.