A briefing paper released by the Council on Contemporary Families last year analyzes recent data on parenting practices compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau. Sandra Hofferth, Professor, Family Science, at University of Maryland’s School of Public Health, notes that although the Census Report found some differences by family type, most American parents — married, divorced, or single — read to their children, monitor their children’s media youth, and engage their children in extra-curricular activities.

Overall, reports Hofferth, more than 90 percent of American children were read to during the week. Married parents reported reading to children aged 3-5 an average of 6.8 times a week, compared to 6 times a week for single parents of children the same age. “About half of all 6-17 year olds ate breakfast with their family at least 5 days per week. Nine out of 10 parents of children under 12 had rules about television viewing. And one-fifth to two-fifths of all children participated in sports as an extracurricular activity.”

In general, differences between family types were significant but small. Almost 13 percent of 6-11 year-old children of married parents were enrolled in gifted classes, compared with almost 11 percent of children living with a single parent. Slightly more teenaged children living with a single parent ate dinner with a parent at least 5 days a week than did children living with two married parents. However, only 34 percent of teenagers in single-parent homes, vs. 44 percent of teens from married couple families, participated in sports activities. Children of cohabiting couples had the lowest rates of shared family dinners and extracurricular activities.

Hofferth explains that many of these differences are more closely related to income than to family structure. 42.5 percent of teenagers in families with incomes 200 percent or more of the poverty level participated in sports, compared to only 22.5 percent of teens in poor families. This is a difference of 20 percentage points, compared to only a 10-point difference by family structure.

Such income differences are especially worrisome, Hofferth writes, because more than one-fifth of children of all ages, and more than a quarter of children under age six, live in families with incomes below the poverty line. Another recent report finds that more than half of students in U.S. public schools now come from low-income families.

The negative impact of poverty on parents’ involvement in extracurricular activities may be especially strong in the United States, which has higher levels of extreme poverty than other developed nations, suggests Virginia Rutter, a sociologist at Framingham State University and a Senior Scholar with the Council on Contemporary Families. A recent study of the United Kingdom found that poor parents were equally engaged with their children as middle class parents, despite fewer material resources. The lower level of support systems for low-income families with children in the U.S. may help account for such differences, notes Rutter.

Read Hofferth’s complete commentary here at CCF@ The Society Pages.

Welfare reform hit 20 last month. The Center for Economic and Policy Research has done much work examining how full employment in the 1990s shaped employment, income, and poverty. In observation of this 20^th anniversary, CEPR prepared a graph that tells an important, often neglected, piece of the story:

Using data from the Current Population Survey and Department of Health and Human Services TANF Caseload report, the figure tells a simple story. Never-married mothers with a high school degree or less increased their rate of work from the early to the late 1990s by nearly 30 percentage points. As Philip Cohen also discusses, this trend began well before the 1996 welfare reform, suggesting that the policy was not the source of the rise, but that other macroeconomic forces were helping these families do better.

As the graph also demonstrates, the rise in employment is associated with a decline in reliance on the welfare program, Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF). The line at the bottom of the chart shows a steady decline in the late 1990s that corresponds to the rise in women’s work in the line above.

Here’s the catch: Employment stopped rising, and began to fall by the early 2000s. Yet, TANF, as part of the so-called safety net, did not move upwards as less-skilled jobs disappeared. Instead, the TANF rolls continued to decline, as Shawn Fremstad details in his report on millennial parents.Data, not ideology, will help us reduce poverty.

What does this mean? CEPR director Dean Baker has written extensively about how to fight poverty through full employment. This chart suggests that the current system of welfare is not part of the solution, and stands as a reminder that data, not ideology, will help us reduce poverty.

This is a reprint from Girl w/ Pen – Nice Work.

There is a lot to learn from hooking up—including when you talk to people who don’t do it in any kind of stereotypical way. Some of the clichés that seem to get replayed are that “everyone” at college is doing it (70 percent of college seniors have some experience of hookups). And by “doing it” the perception is doing “it” – even though 40 percent of students who hook up reported doing so in their most recent hook up. Another stereotype is that the hookup scene is typically centered around (straight) men’s desires, even if girls-kissing-girls is part of the action sometimes. Two new hooking up studies take on these views of hooking up.

Is it everyone? What about commuters? University of Illinois-Chicago sociologists Rachel Allison and Barbara Risman reported this week on their study (“‘It Goes Hand in Hand with the Parties’: Race, Class, and Residence in College Student Negotiations of Hooking Up,” forthcoming in Sociological Perspectives). They analyzed 87 in-depth interviews with commuter and residential undergraduates at UIC: turns out commuter students do not typically participate in the hook up culture—but they still believe it is a key feature of authentic college experience.

But is hooking up the “real” college experience? According to Allison and Risman: “Students from a range of class and ethnic backgrounds told us the ‘real’ college experience involves parties and hooking up, but white middle-class students believed they actually live the ‘real’ college experience.” One student (a Middle-Eastern woman) in the study explained about hooking up: “It goes hand in hand with the parties.”

Commuters and minority students talked wistfully about missing what they believe is the “real” college experience–often based on what they see in movies or television of campus life. The researchers explained, “They feel they are getting a second rate experience. It’s not that the commuting students don’t tell us they sometimes have casual sex—they do. But they do not participate in the hooking up culture that most students see as part of college life.”

And girls kissing girls? Is it always about the guys? A study in the April 2014 issue of Gender & Society, reports that for some women the super-straight environment of college hookups is also a setting “to explore and later verify bisexual, lesbian, or queer sexual identities.” Turns out public kissing and threesomes play an important role. Not all of that sex play is about performing for men’s pleasure, and surveys show significant sexual fluidity.

In the Gender & Society study, “Queer Women in the Hookup Scene: Beyond the Closet?” Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor (University of California-Santa Barbara), Shiri Regev-Messalem (Bar Ilan University, Israel), Alison Fogarty (Stanford University), and Paula England (New York University) used the Online College and Social Life Survey (OCSLS) of over 24,000 college students from 21 four-year colleges and universities that was designed to study how college students approach hooking up, dating, and relationships. To this large data set, the researchers added 55 in-depth interviews with women students at Stanford University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, who had had some romantic or sexual experience with other women, to learn more about same-sex activity occurring in hookup settings that are mainly understood to be heterosexual.

Study co-author Paula England—who developed the OCSLS study—explained, “‘Hooking up’ was defined in our survey as ‘whatever definition of a hookup you and your friends use,’ but we know from talking to students that what they usually mean by a hookup is some sexual activity—ranging from kissing to intercourse—outside of a committed relationship.”

Hooking up, women with women, and a puzzle. The investigators reported that of the 14,128 women surveyed in the OCSLS, 94 percent identify as heterosexual. Though identifying as “straight,” these women’s behavior did not always line up with that—instead, women had more sexual fluidity. For example, forty percent of women who called themselves lesbians had had oral sex or intercourse with men; two percent of women who identify as straight report having had oral sex with a woman; compared to straight women, more women who indicated they were not sure about their sexual identities had same-sex sexual experience: 15 percent have given and 18 percent have received oral sex from a woman.

To examine sexual fluidity suggested by these women’s reports, the investigators conducted in-depth interviews. They interviewed women who identified as queer, lesbian, gay, bisexual, or some other non-heterosexual identity in order to learn more about how encounters in the hookup scene played a role in developing their current sexual identities. They learned that, since women making out with other women and threesomes between two women and a man are acceptable as a turn-on for men, this allowed women to expand and explore their sexual identities.

As study coauthor Verta Taylor points out, “Some students are embracing fluid identities and calling themselves ‘queer,’ ‘pansexual,’ ‘fluid,’ ‘bi-curious’ or simply refusing any kind of label. The old label bisexual no longer fits because even that term implies that there are only two options: lesbian/gay or straight.”

Women kissing women. In tune with the Katy Perry song, “I Kissed a Girl”, the interviews revealed that for some women, public kissing—typically seen as for the enjoyment of men onlookers—is a key opportunity for exploring same-sex attractions.

Often alcohol played a role in women’s opportunities to explore same-sex attraction, just as it plays a significant role in hookups in general. While some women who make out with other women in public had a previous same-sex attraction, others told interviewers about experimenting when they had had no previous sexual attraction to women. In sum, the authors note that “Kissing can result from or lead to emotional connections with women. It doesn’t always—but sometimes it leads to more exploration.” The interviews confirmed that public same-sex kissing in the hook up scene is one pathway into same-sex desire and behavior.

Threesomes. About 20 percent of women interviewed for this study reported participating in threesomes. “Threesomes allow same-sex pleasure without the stigma of non-heterosexual identity,” the authors explained. In some cases, women said that threesomes were a way to reduce their anxiety about approaching women on their own. One woman noted, “It’s not clear how you would initiate a relationship with a woman…I’m really inexperienced chasing women, rather more experienced at chasing men.” In other cases, women explained that threesomes were instigated by male partners, but that it led to women following up—solo—with the other woman in the encounter. The authors explain, “Although threesomes may begin with men’s desires, they introduce women to new sexual pleasures or allow them to act on same-sex or bisexual desires.”

Coauthor and historian Leila Rupp explains that this may not be so new: She points to intimate sexual relationships between co-wives in polygynous households in China and the Middle East, romantic friends in heterosexual marriages in the Euro-American world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and “girlfriends” in avant-garde cultural environments such as Greenwich Village and Weimar Berlin in the 1920s. “Bisexual behavior between women has flourished in a variety of societies where women’s same-sex desires and sexual behavior did not pose a threat to the gender order,” explains Rupp. Whether in these historical settings or in the setting of collegiate hookup culture, women’s same-sex sexuality can flourish in tight conjunction with heterosexuality. What is new in the 21^st century setting, however, are the ways in which women can go on to have the opportunity to affirm new identities.

Note: This is based in part on releases I wrote for CCF and Gender & Society. See  “Not everyone is hooking up at college—Here’s why” (CCF) and “Can I watch? Sometimes women kissing women isn’t about you” (G&S) for more links and suggested references.

“Marriage is the foundation of a successful society.”

“Promotion of responsible fatherhood and motherhood is integral to successful child rearing and the well-being of children.”

These were the assumptions that most members of Congress made as they designed the 1996 law that became the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. Welfare reform’s strategy to decrease poverty involved increasing the number of children raised in two-parent, married families.

In the 20 years since President Bill Clinton signed that bill into law, Congress has earmarked $150 million of welfare money annually for marriage promotion and responsible fatherhood programs. Federal funding has been continuously renewed through 2016. That’s almost a billion dollars spent on marriage programs alone since welfare reform. Funding continues to mount through current “Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education” and “New Pathways for Fathers and Families” grants. These grants support state, local government, and community-based programs that provide marriage/relationship and parenting education and services believed to increase the economic stability of participants, mostly low-income parents. more...

The recent movie “Bad Moms” calls to mind how motherhood is often depicted in extremes and through exaggerated metaphors of hovering helicopter PTA moms.

We three work closely on the topics of parenthood, education, and family in our careers, and we also go to movies together. Sometimes it’s hard for us to find the time to do this. We’d like to say that this is because we each spend oodles of time filling our children’s lunch boxes with organic foods grown in our gardens, but this would only be accurate if our children’s lunch ingredients included slugs.

Did you catch that? How we turned something good into something bad? Or was it the other way around? Is it good to fill lunches with hand-picked organic carrots from our back yards or is it good to embrace slugs and store-bought snack packs? Which is the better “mom achievement?”

This twisting of goodness into badness and badness into goodness for moms is precisely the premise of the movie “Bad Moms,” which we recently saw together on one of those “Girls Night Out Because They Deserve a Break” evenings (okay, that’s not how we think of our time together, but we know lots of people for whom this label hits pretty close to home, and this “self-care” framing matters, as discussed below).

The movie’s premise is as follows: high-heel-wearing-overworked-taken-for-granted mom Amy decides to stop doing the things she (along with the hyperbolic PTA bake-sale-policing ubermoms) defines as good momhood, and that are supposed to make her (and her kids) happy. No more making healthy organic lunches. No more doing her son’s (“I’m a slow learner”) school projects. No more succumbing to the pressure her daughter was placing on herself to achieve achieve achieve. No more enabling of her husband’s juvenile ways that make the audience astounded that he can keep any children alive until the end of the day (the presentation of incompetent dads and the complexity of fatherhood could fill another blog post, by the way).

She. Was. Done.

Amy meets up with new friend Carla – a single mom who works in a service industry job – to realize that kids are probably fine even if you don’t tend to them like a delicate flower in an organic garden (though Carla’s lower SES background is stereotyped in enough ways to fill yet another blog post, where we could discuss how the three of us can drop off an Arby’s bag for our kids’ lunches, but we’ll still have more cultural capital than parents in our town who work three jobs and don’t have a car). Add a third to the mix – Kiki, a stay-at-home meek-to-her-husband’s-demands mom of four – and the audience gets to hear the wishes of moms who just want to be in a small accident so they can be rewarded with hospitalization for a week with lots of peace and quiet and no responsibility. Hospitalization as a means to happiness.

At several points in our viewing, the three of us laughed out loud. At other points we turned to each other to whisper things like “I think this is a good kind of feminism,” or “This is not a good kind of feminism.” By the end of the movie, we observed that the feel-good part with swelling music and welling eyes was all about moms needing to relax about trying to achieve perfection. Stop doting. Stop helicoptering. Stop organic carroting. And stop all of this, by the way, because our kids are swimming in either: a) anxiety pools lined with college applications that require high grades and “voluntouring” at an organic farm in the Global South; or b) quicksand that enables low motivation and necessitates that Mom fills out college applications for the child.

Let’s all just focus on being happy, the movie says. If you’re happy, you’ll win. Your kids will be happy. And if you’re happy as a mom, you’ll also get to drink wine at 9 a.m., drive fast, and become the kind of PTA president that allows some gluten in the bake sale. That’s a far better reward than hospitalization! Happiness is presented in the movie’s climax as being situated at the other end of the spectrum from achievement, for moms AND kids.

But could it be that gaining happiness is just another form of achievement that could land us right back where we started? This happiness v. achievement rhetoric is everywhere. Books that make happiness a project for moms, and books that critique the “science of happiness.”  Viral posts about teachers opting not to give any homework this year because it makes kids and parents and teachers miserable. Articles that extoll the virtues of women’s self-care, and articles that critique self-care as a form of soft-core neoliberal brain washing. Indexes of happiness referencing the happiest places where you should all live. And many parents, at some point when talking to children, saying, “What matters most to me is that you’re happy,” while mentally finishing the sentence with “…and obviously that you leave home before you turn 35.”

Earlier we asked whether it was good or bad to reference slugs when talking about our children’s lunches. But very few things in motherhood are about “or,” and comparing real experiences to extremes, even if they’re switched in a comedic way to call attention to their absurdity, may trap us into thinking we’re not doing anything right.

The moms in the movie were at their funniest and, dare we say, happiest, when expressing anger and letting go of all of their achievement demands. Plus they liked each other a lot more. As we finish up our school supply shopping and the kids head back to school, perhaps we ought to be cautious not to fall into the trap of making happiness yet another high achievement that good (bad?) moms have to add to the list.

Michelle Janning is Professor of Sociology at Whitman College, and Chair of the Council on Contemporary Families. She has a blog (www.michellejanning.com) where she wrestles with the realities of social life, which usually requires looking at them as gradations rather than extremes. She is trying to get her garden slugs under control.

Emily Tillotson is Director of the Bachelor of Social Work Program and Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Work at Walla Walla University. She loves to consume pop culture in all forms through a decidedly feminist lens.

Meagan Anderson-Pira is a non-profit director with a Master’s Degree in Psychology who loves talking with sociologists (see above) while watching reality television and funny movies.

All three authors live in Walla Walla, Washington, where thankfully there is a 12-screen movie theater.

Part 2 of the Council on Contemporary Families’ Symposium on Welfare Reform at 20

Twenty years ago this month, Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which repealed the cash assistance program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), and replaced it with a program called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF).

Myths about welfare at the time

Hostility toward AFDC had been building since the early 1980s, as Philip Cohen explains. While some of the criticisms were legitimate, much opposition was spurred by myths about the history of poverty programs. As President Reagan memorably summed up those myths, “We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won.”

The reality is that the War on Poverty was remarkably successful, even though successive administrations fought it with one arm tied behind the back and retreated in the face of economic challenges that should have elicited heightened efforts, such as the oil crisis of 1973, the stock market crash of 1974, and the 1979 energy crisis.

Between the mid-1960s and 1980, poverty rates were almost halved. Poverty rose again in the 1980s in response to deteriorating economic conditions and Reagan-era cutbacks, but economists calculate that in the early 1990s poverty would have been nearly twice as widespread if government programs had not been available.The reality is that the War on Poverty was remarkably successful. Between the mid-1960s and 1980, poverty rates were almost halved.

Racism as well as historical misrepresentation fueled the attack on AFDC. Most Southern states and many Northern ones had successfully excluded Blacks from New Deal jobs and postwar economic assistance programs. As the Civil Rights movement gained clout, this became harder to do and African-Americans, who had long been more likely than whites to experience poverty, now became highly visible on the welfare rolls. more...

Move-in day at four-year residential colleges and universities around the U.S. marks a parenting milestone. But what happens next? Although most parents of college students do not have an embodied presence on their child’s dormitory floor, some provide so much financial, emotional, and logistical support that it seems they never left.

The media refers to these parents as “helicopters” and they are among the most reviled figures of 21^st century parenting (see this recent Washington Post article for an example). They are derided as pesky interlopers in the postsecondary system, who unnecessarily intervene with university programming, test the patience of college officials, and create needy students. Because intensive parenting is a task that falls mostly on the shoulders of women, many critiques also have a mother-blaming bent.

Do involved parents burden the university? In Parenting to a Degree: How Family Matters for College Women’s Success, I followed 41 families as their children moved through a public flagship university between the years of 2004 and 2009. I conducted a year of ethnographic observation in a women’s residence hall, interviewed both mothers and fathers, and conducted five years of annual interviews with their daughters.

The university I studied, like many other public schools, lacked the deep pockets and rich resources of elite privates. Rather than evading helicopters, the school actively cultivated a partnership with involved parents. Out-of-state parents were considered a real asset, as they were typically both affluent and well-educated. In the face of steep state budget cuts and mounting accountability pressures, the institution relied on parents to fill numerous financial, advisory, and support functions. It is not unique in adopting such a strategy.

Net tuition now rivals state and local appropriations as the primary funder of public higher education. In this equation, parents become a crucial source of funds. Four-year schools also structure their classes, activities, and living options around traditional students and expect parents to do the work of maintaining them. Many parents in the middle to top stratum of the class structure readily accept these tasks. They have come to believe that a college experience is something that “good” parents offer, no matter the cost.

The sheer diversity of academic and social options on today’s college campuses means that there are many ways for students make costly mistakes. Yet, as advisor to student ratios steadily rise, tailored advice is typically not coming from public university staff. Students are expected to seek guidance from home. Affluent, well-educated parents—typically mothers—dive headlong into the roles of academic advisor, career counselor, therapist, and life coach. They have flexible careers that allow for emergency visits, a savvy understanding of higher education, the ability to interface with university staff, and money to smooth over every hurdle.

Parents even help translate college degrees into jobs. Elite companies look for markers of status that parents cultivate in their children—for example, skill in upper-class extracurricular activities, a narrative of self-actualization, and delicately honed interactional skills. Universities rely on families to embed these traits, as the degree alone is not enough to get a good job. Internship and job placement services are also outsourced to parents, who craft resumes, tap their networks for opportunities, and enable moves to urban locations.

This arrangement takes a toll on all families. Adults extend parenting responsibilities further into their own life course, undermining their own financial security and draining emotional and psychological reserves. There is also some truth to the notion that the helicoptered children are slow to adapt to adulthood; their academic success can come at the cost of self-development in other spheres.

But families of modest means stand to lose the most ground. University outsourcing to parents increases the salience of family background for academic and career success, exacerbating existing inequities. Well-resourced parents are advantaged when parental labor is built into the very form and function of the university. They can out-fund, out-strategize, and out-network the competition. In contrast, less privileged parents are reliant on what the university offers. They are often deeply disappointed.

The helicopter parent blame game distorts the real issue: Public universities are growing dependent on private family resources for their existence. As parents become more central to the operation of higher education, the social mobility mission of the mid-20^th century public university gradually slips away.

Laura T. Hamilton is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Merced. Hamilton’s new book, Parenting to a Degree: How Family Matters for College and Beyond, was recently released by the University of Chicago Press. In this book, Hamilton vividly captures the parenting approaches of mothers and fathers as their daughters move through Midwest U and into the workforce.

Part 1 of the Council on Contemporary Families’ Symposium on Welfare Reform at 20

The welfare reform bill that emerged in 1996, after a back-and-forth struggle between President Bill Clinton and the Congress (both houses of which were controlled by Republicans), imposed a two-year continuous term limit, and a five-year lifetime limit, on poor cash welfare recipients. It ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), an entitlement program, and replaced it with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, a state block-grant program. The policymakers who engineered this change took advantage of a growing popular expectation that mothers should be in the labor force. There was widespread resentment against those (perceived to be mostly Black) who used welfare payments to shirk the obligation to work, choosing dependence on the state rather than getting married or refraining from childbearing.This policy reform set out to fundamentally alter the relationship between work, parenthood, and marital status for U.S. women.

This policy reform, motivated and supported at least in part by racist ideas and stereotypes, set out to fundamentally alter the relationship between work, parenthood, and marital status for U.S. women. Instead, despite some increase in employment rates, it mostly increased the hardship – and reduced the support – for poor families and their children, who are disproportionately people of color. Reflecting on this anniversary, it now appears this was a tragic misdirection, and we lost an important opportunity to change work family policy for the benefit of all women and poor families. more...

Originally printed on The Conversation.

Last month, Tom Porton, an award-winning, veteran Bronx high school teacher, handed in his resignation after colliding with the school’s principal. Porton had distributed HIV/AIDS education fliers listing nonsexual ways of “Making Love Without Doin’ It” (including advice to “read a book together”).

What does it say when a teacher who encourages students to discuss nonsexual ways to express love causes controversy? And how do discussions at school about sex affect teenagers? Do adults lose teenagers’ trust when they are not allowed to speak frankly about how to create healthy intimacy?

My cross-national research on adolescent sexuality shows a profound discomfort in American society not just with teenage sex, but with teenage love. And the silence among adults that results – in families, schools and the culture at large – may take a particular toll on adolescent boys.

What does love have to do with it? 

Political battles have raged for decades about whether and how public school students in the U.S. should be taught about condoms and other forms of contraception even though the majority of American youth lose their virginity during their teenage years.

The United States has seen more political strife and cultural controversy around adolescent sexuality than many other countries that went through a sexual revolution in the 1960s and ‘70’s. The Netherlands is an interesting comparative case: Like the U.S., Dutch society was culturally conservative in the 1950s. But Dutch society emerged from the sexual revolution with a more positive approach to adolescent sexuality, one that center-stages love.

American curricula tend to focus on physical acts and dangers – disease and pregnancy – often eschewing positive discussions of sexual pleasure or emotional intimacy.

Feminist scholars have critiqued American sex education for its overemphasis of danger and risk, noting the cost to teenage girls. Scholars have argued that the “missing discourse” of girls’ desire impedes their sense of power in and outside of relationships, leaving them poorly equipped to negotiate consent, safety and sexual satisfaction.

But scholars have paid less attention to the missing discourse of teenage love in American sex education, and its effects on boys, who confront a broader culture that provides scant recognition of, or support for, their emotional needs.

In comparison, sex education in the Netherlands tends to frame boys’ and girls’ sexual development in the context of their feelings for and relationships with others. Curricula include discussions of fun and exciting feelings. They also validate young people’s experience of love.

For example, the title of a widely used Dutch sex education curriculum is “Long Live Love, which is notable both for the celebration of sexual development, and for couching that development in terms of love.

Another example is of a PBS News Hour video, which shows a Dutch teacher engaging a group of 11-year olds in a conversation about what it feels like to be in love, and the proper protocol for breaking up (not via text message).

After watching the video, a male student at the University of Massachusetts spoke wistfully about what was missing from his own sex education experiences, stating, with a hint of outrage in his voice, “No one talks with us about love!”

‘Dirty little boys, get away!’ 

The differences between American and Dutch sex education curricula reflect broader cultural differences in the ways adults talk about young people and their motivations.

In interviews I conducted with Dutch and American parents of high school sophomores, the Dutch parents spoke about teenage sexuality in the context of their children falling in love.

One Dutch mother recalled that her son was “interested in girlfriends at a very early age and then he was also often intensely in love.” Her son would not have been unusual. Ninety percent of Dutch 12- to 14-year-old boys, surveyed in a national study, reported that they had been in love.

By contrast, American parents were very skeptical of love during the teenage years. They attributed adolescent sexuality to biological urges – particularly with regard to boys. I found it to be so, across the political spectrum.

Parents portrayed boys as slaves to their hormones. One self-described liberal mother said, “Most teenage boys would fuck anything that would sit still”.

A conservative father, who was anxious about his daughter’s dating, stated: “I’m a parent of a teenage cheerleader. I’m very concerned: ‘Dirty little boys! Get away! Get away!'”

What do boys want? 

I found that boys in both cultures are looking for intimacy and relationships, not only sex. But they differed in how much they believed they fit the norm.

The Dutch boys thought that their desire to combine sex with relationships was normal, whereas American boys tended to see themselves as exceptionally romantic.

Says Randy, an American boy I interviewed:

“If you ask some guys, they’ll say it’s mainly for the sex or whatever [that they get together with a girl], but with me, you have to have a relationship with the person before you have sex with her…. I’d say I’m exceptional”.

Randy is far from exceptional. In one U.S. survey, boys chose having a girlfriend and no sex over having sex and no girlfriend by two to one.

Other research too has shown American teenage boys – across racial and ethnic groups – crave intimacy, and are as emotionally invested as girls are in romantic relationships.

American boys end up paying a price for a culture that does not support their needs for intimacy. For the issue is that while boys crave closeness, they are expected to act as if they are emotionally invulnerable. Among the American boys I interviewed, I observed a conflict between their desires and the prevailing masculinity norms – if they admit to valuing romantic love, they risk being viewed as “unmasculine.”

Unrealistic and unfair expectations about boys’ lack of emotional vulnerability, in turn, make it harder for them to navigate both platonic and romantic relationships. One study found that as boys move through the teenage years, masculinity norms (beliefs that men should be tough and not behave in ways marked as “feminine”), particularly the stigma of homosexuality, make it harder to maintain close same-sex friendships, leaving boys lonely and sometimes depressed.

With less practice sustaining intimacy, boys enter romantic relationships less confident and less skilled. Ironically, many boys end up less prepared for, but more emotionally reliant on, heterosexual contacts.

Talk to us

When I asked my students to brainstorm about ideal sex education programs, based on research, they recommended focusing more on relationships. These young men suggested that having older boys mentor young boys, showing that it is normal for boys to value relationships could challenge the idea that it’s not masculine to need emotional closeness.

Certainly, such peer mentoring might go a long way to counteract the gender stereotypes and rigid masculinity norms that research has shown adversely affect boys’ sexual health.

The flyer Porton distributed invited an intergenerational conversation about emotional intimacy that is missing from most classrooms and boys’ lives. And it’s a conversation boys appear eager to have.

Amy Schalet is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.