Reprinted from Beggruen Insights, Issue 4, with permission.

Nostalgia often arises out of a real experience of loss. It needs to be addressed and redirected, not ridiculed or denounced. And that applies to the nostalgia that motivates a considerable number of Trump supporters.

I have spent most of my career pointing out the dangers of imagining a Golden Age in the past that we should try to recapture. Nostalgia offers a warped explanation of what actually did work in the past and airbrushes out what did not. It leads to the scapegoating of those who supposedly ruined “the good old days” while providing no tools for coping with the new realities that underlie contemporary challenges.

That said, nostalgia often arises out of a real experience of loss. It needs to be addressed and redirected, not ridiculed or denounced. And that applies to the nostalgia that motivates so many Trump supporters.
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Families at all levels of income are struggling in our economy simply because it does not allow congenial coexistence of work and family life. Lives have become busier and busier and policies have not changed to reflect that. In her book, Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict (Harvard University Press), Heather Boushey thoughtfully and comprehensively explains the problems with work-life conflict for women. Her book presents a set of solutions, too, that could make work-life conflict a thing of the past. While the story leads with the tale of what happens to women, Boushey takes the very issues that working women with families face and shows how these dilemmas are not about being a woman, they are about economics, and are shackling our entire economy. A valuable contribution is her portrait of contrasting work-life conflicts across income groups and family composition. She uses data as a skilled economist—which is her discipline—yet builds sensitively from history and social theory in a compelling book. Ultimately, her grounded arguments deliver detailed explanations as to why family policy needs to change and change quickly. Boushey, who is Executive Director and Chief Economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, has decades of work bringing careful research to bear on key policy issues—and is successful at making the research and policy issues understandable to people who are really affected by the policies.

DUAL EARNING FAMILY DEPENDENCE

Boushey sets the table with locating economics in social context. The deal with capitalism is that by design the economy is ever-changing. Since the 1970s it has become heavily dependent upon women’s earnings. Families can no longer get by on the earnings of just one parent as they could before around 1979. So if our economy is so dependent upon a dual income family, then why aren’t there policies that support families’ need to manage work and family care? In Boushey’s words: “The hodgepodge of work and family policies that has evolved over the years does not address how people can have the time to deal with conflicts between work and home life” (p. 250). Finding Time explains the factors that determine what needs to change and how that change can happen.

COMPOSITION OF THE FAMILY IS CHANGING

The composition of families, Boushey reminds readers, are a lot different now than they used to be. While in the past families typically consisted of a mother, a father, and children, families now are more complex and could be classified in a burgeoning array. Single parent families make up about 27 percent of families today, for example. While in the past families could survive off of one parent being the breadwinner, that is nearly impossible now, especially for single parent families. She explains that single parent families are more likely to be low-income than families that have two (married) parents. Where are U.S. policies that make single-parent families able to thrive? Yes, they are already at a disadvantage with only one income, but policies that work will empower single parents to earn money and do the carework, which are two key things parents need to do.

WHO WILL BE THE “SILENT PARTNER” NOW?

Boushey makes a great point when she explains that women have always been the “silent partner” to businesses. Starting with the 19^th century “family wage” and ending somewhere after the 1950s boom, men could go to work and not have to worry about their family because they knew their wives would be taking care of it. Businesses never had to take family into account because men never had to worry about theirs. In Boushey’s phrase, women were the “silent partners” to business. However, now that women’s incomes are key to family survival, the country is still not doing anything to lessen the burden of the work-family conflicts. Meanwhile, businesses reap benefits from having more capable workers in a larger labor pool, for whom wages are stagnant.

HOW CAN WE BE HERE, THERE, PROVIDE CARE, AND MAKE SURE ITS FAIR?

Women do not have a “silent partner.” But Boushey has a recommendation to fix this. She found that there is not one sure-fire way to fix the work-life conflict that families are facing. She argues that we need solutions in four areas that she calls Here, There, Care, and Fair.

Here: Policies for when women need to be Here (in the home). These policies include paid sick leave for medical needs and other time that would need to be spent with children.

There: Policies to make sure that the amount of hours that women are working leaves room for managing their family so that they do not always need to be There (at work).

Care: Policies regarding high-quality Care for children and aging family members.

Fair: Overall, policies need to be fair for everyone. This means that no matter what your income or familial composition is, you are still afforded the same work-family policies and no added responsibilities should hinder that.

Not only would adding this support make it less stressful for families to balance work and life, but such supports decrease costly turnover rates and increase productivity.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Women (and men!) need family policy as our silent partner to help us provide for our families. The “family policy” men had in the past was a housewife—and this policy is out of date. The economy has grown with the growth of women’s participation in the work force. It is time, Boushey demonstrates, that this growth should extend to benefits for women and their familial responsibilities.

This book was a great read. Along with clear explanations of economic concepts, Boushey uses her personal experience growing up in a working-class, union family in Washington State along with her knowledge of economics and history to show that to grow our economy and bring us out of the doldrums, working women need family-friendly policies. As a young woman looking ahead to a life of work-life conflict, I gained clarity and direction for my own work. Work-life conflict is a topic that needs recognition and Boushey is helping to spread knowledge and awareness. Boushey’s book still left me wondering how race may factor into this work-life conflict, maybe in a future addition we will be given some insight!

Molly McNulty is a CCF public affairs intern at Framingham State University. She is a senior Sociology and Education major.

A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Jennifer Glass, University of Texas; Robin Simon, Wake Forest University; and Matthew Andersson, Baylor University

June 16, 2016

Many people now know that parents in the United States report being less happy than nonparents, but there is considerable disagreement about why parents pay a “happiness penalty,” along with conflicting reports about whether this is true in most contemporary cultures. To explore these questions, our team, with support from the National Science Foundation, examined comparative data from 22 European and English-speaking countries. We utilized two well-respected surveys (the International Social Surveys of 2007 and 2008 and the European Social Surveys of 2006 and 2008), confining ourselves to data prior to the global recession in order to avoid confusing reports of happiness in a period of relative prosperity with reports taken in a period of economic stress.

The good news is that parents are not doomed to be unhappier than non-parents. Our results indicate that the parental “happiness penalty” varies substantially from country to country, and is not an inevitable accompaniment of contemporary family life. In fact, in some countries, such as Norway and Hungary, parents are actually happier than non-parents!

The bad news is that of the 22 countries we studied, the U.S. has the largest happiness shortfall among parents compared to nonparents, significantly larger than the gap found in Great Britain and Australia.

But why are parents so much less happy than the childfree in the U.S., when other countries show different patterns? This is a somewhat complicated question to answer because of cultural differences in people’s definitions, standards, and self-reports of happiness. People in the U.S. tend to say they are pretty happy overall: On a scale from 1-10, Americans hover in the 8-10 range. People in France tend to rate their levels significantly lower – in the middle of the scale from 5-7. We aren’t sure if this means the French are truly less happy than Americans, or just don’t think it is appropriate to use the extremes of any scale.But why are parents so much less happy than the childfree in the U.S., when other countries show different patterns?

Accordingly, we focused on the differences between parents and nonparents in the same country, or the relative effects of parenting. What factors are associated with parents being less happy than nonparents, given their country’s overall average level of happiness? Is it levels of unplanned parenthood or perhaps larger overall family sizes that depress parental happiness? Perhaps countries with more unexpected births and larger families end up with more parents who are unhappy and stressed-out. We checked out this hypothesis, but our data revealed that these factors were relatively unimportant in understanding why parents are less happy than childfree individuals in many countries.

So maybe parental happiness gaps are related to the differing costs — in time, money, and energy — of raising children in the countries we studied. We looked at several specific government policies that we thought would make a difference in the lives of employed parents – the duration and generosity of paid parenting leave, the number of annual paid sick and vacation days guaranteed by law, the cost of child care for the average two-year old as a percent of median wages, and the extent of work schedule flexibility offered to parents of dependent children. We also constructed a summary policy measure, combining all these, to differentiate countries with good parental policy “packages” from countries with weak parental policy “packages.” We gathered this policy information for all 22 of our countries, along with their Gross Domestic Product and their fertility rate, to make sure that our findings were not simply reflecting the effects of living in a richer country versus a poorer one.

What we found was astonishing. The negative effects of parenthood on happiness were entirely explained by the presence or absence of social policies allowing parents to better combine paid work with family obligations. And this was true for both mothers and fathers. Countries with better family policy “packages” had no happiness gap between parents and nonparents.Countries with better family policy “packages” had no happiness gap between parents and nonparents.

Furthermore, the positive effects of good family support policies for parents were not achieved at the expense of nonparents, as some commentators have claimed might be the case. The policies that helped parents the most were policies that also improved the happiness of everyone in that country, whether they had children or not. Policies such as guaranteed minimum paid sick and vacation days make everyone happier, but they had an extra happiness bonus for parents of minor children.

The same pattern held even for policies such as subsidized child care, which one might assume would only benefit parents. Countries with cheaper out-of-pocket costs for child care had happier nonparents as well as parents.

Another striking finding was that giving money to parents in the form of child allowances or monthly payments had less effect on parental happiness than giving them the tools to combine employment with parenting. Many European countries have child allowances in varying amounts, but few of these policies had a significant impact on the relative happiness of mothers or fathers compared to nonparents.Giving money to parents in the form of child allowances or monthly payments had less effect on parental happiness than giving them the tools to combine employment with parenting.

There were a few differences in what increased the happiness of fathers compared to mothers. Fathers’ happiness was slightly more sensitive to money policies (child care costs, specifically), and mothers’ happiness was slightly more sensitive to time policies (especially paid sick and vacation days). But these differences were minor. The most important predictor of higher relative levels of happiness for parents was the presence of family policies making it less stressful and less costly combine childrearing with paid work. And such policies seemed to increase the happiness level of childless individuals as well.

Concerned about an onslaught of enfeebled old people? Don’t worry, robots will take care of them! American techno-optimism knows no bounds, and so-called “age-independence” technologies are proliferating like crazy. But in a profoundly ageist culture, the implications can be disturbing. Here’s a critique of the latest article to catch my eye, “As Aging Population Grows, So Do Robotic Health Aides,” which appeared in the New York Times on December 4, 2015.

Let’s start with the hand-wringing opener [emphasis mine]: “The ranks of older and frail adults are growing rapidly in the developed world, raising alarms about how society is going to help them take care of themselves.” Frailty is indeed the biggest threat to an active old age, although only a subset of olders are at risk. It’s also easily detectable and the most remediable. Even very old people who are already frail see huge gains from modest interventions, like walking more or doing simple weight training exercises.

Next up, the inevitable alarm about global wrinkling: “An aging population will place enormous burdens on the world’s health care system by 2050.” In fact, older people are not inevitable money pits for health dollars. People aren’t just living longer; they’re healthier and are disabled for fewer years of their lives than older people of decades ago. According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, the share of US health care spending going toward nursing and retirement homes has declined since 2000 and been flat since 2006. The ten-year MacArthur Foundation Study of Aging in America concluded that once people reach sixty-five, their added years don’t have a major impact on Medicare costs. People over eighty actually cost less to care for at the end of life than people in their sixties and seventies. It’s high-tech interventions, not older patients, that make modern medicine so expensive.

On to another bit of problematic language: “Despite a patchwork of research and some commercial products, the United States appears to be lagging Japan and Europe in developing solutions.” Solutions to what? Aging is a natural, lifelong process, not a problem to be solved. Longevity is a fundamental hallmark of human progress.

Population aging—the prospect of many more of us living into our 80s and 90s— does mean that people will require more assistance of various kinds. Technology can indeed help us address some of these legitimate challenges.

• Problem: limited mobility. Solution: small autonomous drones that will carry out household tasks, like reaching under a table to grab an object, fetching something from the other room, and cleaning. This sounds nifty. Please, though, do not call mine a “Bibbidi Bobbidi Bot,” as University of Illinois robotocist Naira Hovakimyan has dubbed the prototypes to make them less intimidating. I can handle “drone.” Even people with severe Alzheimer’s have been shown to react aggressively to infantilizing language.
• Problem: “wandering.” Solution: smart pendants that track location. That makes sense.
• Problem: tracking health status. Solution: “room and home sensors” that presumably verify that you’re up and around and have opened the fridge; devices with screens for video conferencing with health care providers. Those, too, make sense, and many more healthcare-related technologies are in the works.
• Problem: driving. Solution: “Driver assistance [that] will turn cars into elder-care robots.” This is a great freakin’ idea. Google’s driverless cars are safer than human-operated vehicles, and Americans who can’t drive are hostage to lousy alternatives or homebound.

These benefits are real, but they’re limited. Technology, as we should know by now, is no panacea for complex social problems. Looking for ways to profit from the fast-growing “silver market,” thousands of companies are pitching devices as a solution not only for mobility and wellness issues but to remediate loneliness and isolation. “In addition to smart-home sensors and mobile robots,” the article continues, “there are a variety of other efforts to add stationary robots to provide everything from coaching to communications to companionship.”

Communications, absolutely. Skype, Facetime and other web-based technologies are terrific ways to help people of all ages stay connected. Coaching, why not? Lots of learning involves the kinds of drills and repetition that machines are made for. I can envision some kind of gym droid making me stretch and sweat and work on my balance. I’d name it and curse it and grow attached to it, and probably do the same for the drone carrying my shopping bag and the bot beating me at Boggle.

But that’s not companionship. Facetime is not the same as being together. A robot is not the same as a friend. I’m willing to bet that even people with advanced dementia can tell the difference, and I’m not surprised by the response of a 91-year-old woman to “an Internet-connected tabletop robot with a round swiveling screen that portrays a friendly robotic face” called Jibo. “If Jibo were my last friend,” she said, “I would be very depressed.” Danger, Will Robinson, danger!

As advertised, all these assistive technologies will help people stay in their own homes longer. That’s a priority for many and a boon for the insurance industry, because “aging in place” is cheaper than institutionalization. But they are no remedy for the “epidemic levels” of loneliness that an executive at Brookdale Senior Living describes in the article. Just the opposite, in fact, because staying at home all too often means ending up alone.

Sure, machines could be trained to do a great job. The presence of a sophisticated, infinitely patient robot designed to show pictures of your kids or play Scrabble or drive you to the movies might arguably be better than that of a human trained only to keep you safe, whose thoughts are likely on the faraway children her minimum wage supports. Those marvelous robots will inevitably serve the wealthiest consumers, however, widening the inequality gap and distracting us from the kinds of communitarian solutions that will help us all.

The fact that many people end up lonely and isolated is not inherent to growing old. It reflects some regrettable—and very American—priorities:

• We don’t value caregiving, work largely performed by women who are unpaid or underpaid.
• We idealize self-reliance. This downplays life’s challenges, and shames us when, inevitably, we fall short.
• We value youth over age. Internalized ageism makes people reluctant to adopt technologies that might telegraph vulnerability. At the other end of the spectrum, technophiles embrace “anti-aging” biotechnologies in the hopes of transcending senescence and even mortality. The denial is collective as well. It’s why the US is so ill-prepared for a demographic transition that’s been on the horizon since the 1950s.

Neither the “problem” nor the “solution” is technological. It is social.

Humans are social animals, and we’re meant to live in community. Social connections give life meaning, and are key to a happy and healthy old age. Instead of focusing on devices that reduce the need for human contact, why not make the most of our human resources?We already have something really good at looking after humans: other humans. Millions of people are out of work and a caregiver crisis is growing more acute.

If we genuinely care about well-being in late life, we need to create opportunities for older people to come together with people of all ages, ways to get there, and meaningful activities to engage in, from the mundane to the metaphysical. Older members of society are uniquely qualified to be watchdogs, advocates, educators and futurists. Not to mention backwards-understanders; as Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard observed, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

Our drones can come along.

Ashton Applewhite began blogging about aging and ageism in 2007 and started speaking on the subject in July, 2012, which is also when she started the Yo, Is This Ageist? blog. Her book, This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism, was published in March, 2016. This column is reposted from Ashton’s blog.

A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Sharon Sassler, Professor, Department of Policy Analysis & Management, Cornell University. You can also see some of the popular impact here. 

In the 1940s and 1950s, the consensus of the emerging profession of marital counseling was that marital happiness and sexual satisfaction depended upon a couple’s adherence to traditional gender roles, with the husband doing the bulk of the breadwinning and the wife doing most of the housework. Influential economists such as Gary Becker (A Treatise on the Family, 1981) argued that following such a conventional division of labor by gender would lead to the greatest marital intimacy and sexual attraction between husband and wife.

Indeed, as recently as 2013, an article in the American Sociological Review found that couples who divided housework more equally had lower marital and sexual satisfaction and less frequent sex than couples where the woman did the bulk of the household labor.[i] The authors concluded that conventional masculine and feminine behaviors at home served as sexual “turn-ons” for men and women, while nontraditional behaviors, consciously or unconsciously, turned people off.

But these studies relied on data from the 1980s and early 1990s, and thus represented marriages formed before the recent surge in dual-earner families and social approval of egalitarian gender roles. My co-authors and I compared findings based on data collected 22 to 24 years ago, in the second wave of the National Survey on Families and Households, with data from the 2006 Marital and Relationship Survey. As we describe in a forthcoming study in The Journal of Marriage and Family, the association between a non-traditional division of labor at home and couples’ sexual satisfaction and frequency has changed dramatically over the past two decades. By 2006, couples who reported sharing housework fairly equally, with the man doing more than a third and up to 65 percent of the housework, reported having sex significantly more often than did couples where the woman (or the man) did 65 percent or more of the housework.

In fact, contemporary couples who adhere to this more egalitarian division of labor are the only couples who have experienced an increase in sexual frequency compared to their counterparts of the past, whereas other groups – including those where the woman does the bulk of the housework – have experienced declines in sexual frequency. This finding is particularly notable given reports indicating that sexual frequency has generally declined worldwide over the past few decades.[ii]

What’s going on here? Couples report having more and higher quality sex when they are satisfied with their relationships. In today’s social climate, relationship quality and stability are generally highest when couples divide up the household labor in a way they see as equitable or fair. And the evidence shows that when men do a greater share of housework, women’s perceptions of relationship fairness and satisfaction are greater. In fact, how housework was arranged mattered more for couples surveyed in 2006 than it did among those interviewed in the late 1980s. It is therefore not surprising that couples with more egalitarian divisions of routine housework report being more satisfied with sexual intimacy today than they did 20 years ago. Sharing housework is now perceived as a sexual turn-on.

In our study, the reported sexual satisfaction of couples with egalitarian housework arrangements was about the same as that of more traditional couples, even though sexual frequency was higher. A different analysis of the same data–which compared the sexual satisfaction of couples who shared childcare equally, couples where the woman did most of the childcare, and couples where men did most of the childcare–found that the egalitarian child-raising couples not only reported more frequent sex but also higher sexual satisfaction than couples where the woman did most of the childcare. Today’s sexual scripts clearly have been realigned to value sharing the housework load over role specialization.

As June brides and grooms settle in for the long haul after coming back from the honeymoon and writing their thank-you notes, they might want to make sure their “to do” lists include a fair division of the dishes and laundry.

First published 6/20/2016.

About the author: Sharon Sassler is Professor, Department of Policy Analysis & Management, Cornell University. (Sharon.Sassler@Cornell.Edu).

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[i] Kornrich, S., Brines, J., & Leupp, K. (2013). Egalitarianism, housework, and sexual frequency in marriage. American Sociological Review, 78, 26–50. doi:10.1177/0003122412472340.

[ii] Mercer, C. A., Tanton, C., Prah, P., Erens, B., Sonnenberg, P, Clifton, S., … Johnson, A. M. (2013). Changes in sexual attitudes and lifestyles in Britain through the life course and over time: Findings from the National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles. The Lancet, 382, 1781–1794. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(13)62035-8.

When New York Magazine published a story about eight adults and three kids sharing one big house as a modern-day family of choice, it was shared more than 4,000 times in just the first few days. In the research I did for my latest book, How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21^st Century, I interviewed people across the nation who were creating their own intentional families or designing other innovative ways of living. In this two-part series, I am sharing excerpts from the book. Part 1 was originally titled “The Way We Live Now: Intentionally with Others, and Joyously Alone.” Here is Part 2, from pages 1-4 of How We Live Now.

In the fall of 2012, an article in the “Great Homes and Destinations” section of the New York Times began like this:

“In a slowly gentrifying section of Bushwick, Brooklyn, where gunshots are no longer heard and the local brothel has been turned into a family home, five friends made a 10-year commitment.

The group— two architectural designers, two fashion designers and one advertising executive, all in their 20s — rented 2,700 square feet of raw space and agreed to fix it up and live there for a decade. Two years into that commitment, it seems to be going pretty well.”

In just a few understated sentences, the Times captured a way of living that would have been nearly unthinkable not so very long ago. A confluence of cultural, demographic, and economic factors have turned the opening decades of the 21^st century into a time of unprecedented innovation and experimentation as Americans search for their place, their space, and their people.

The choices of the five twenty-somethings are remarkable in a number of ways:

• Demographics and Relationships: The five men and women in their twenties are making a 10-year commitment, and it is not to a spouse, nor even to the goal of finding a spouse, though that is not out of the question. It is a commitment to one another, a set of friends. In 1956, the median age at which Americans first married was as young as it has ever been—22.5 for men and 20.1 for women. By 2013, though, the respective ages had jumped to 29.0 and 26.6—and that’s just for those who do marry. Today, the twenties can be devoted to all manner of pursuits; marriage and children, while still an aspiration for many, no longer dominate.
• Geography: They are staying in the city, and not looking toward the distant suburbs. That’s new, too. For the first time in at least two decades, cities and surrounding suburbs are growing faster than exurbs.
• Architecture and Design: A century ago, many Americans were selecting houses from a Sears catalog. Now, adults can step into a big hunk of raw space and envision a place they will call home that stretches beyond a space fit for a couple or a traditional nuclear family.

The friends have separate bedrooms. They share showers, a bathroom, and space for entertaining. They are also sharing their lives. They consider themselves family.

These five people could have followed a more familiar script. Instead, they dreamed. They designed their own lives, with their own place, their own space, and their own people.

Another group of young New Yorkers, all heterosexual single men, began living together just after they graduated from New York University. That was 18 years before they were interviewed about their experiences by the New York Times. When the rent for their loft in Chelsea doubled after fourteen years, they could have gone their separate ways. But they are close friends, and they instead chose to look for another place they could share.

The four men, all approaching 40, found two stories of a concrete building in Queens which they affectionately call Fortress Astoria. The men have their own rooms (more like tiny apartments) and share a kitchen, living room, and garden. None of the bedrooms are adjoining, so the men have privacy when they want to bring dates home.

“We are really close, and care about each other deeply,” one of the men told Times reporter Hilary Howard. “And yet we give each other lots of space…We’ve got all the benefits of a family with very little of the craziness that normally comes along with them.”

Not one of the men is a parent. That doesn’t make them all that unusual. In 2012, the birthrate in the United States fell to the lowest level since 1920, when reliable records first became available.

The ease and comfort they feel with one another is clearly one of the main attractions of the way the men live, but so is the money they save by splitting the rent and utilities four ways. Without the pressure of a pricier housing tab, the men can pursue circuitous, risky, and exhilarating career paths that the company men of eras past could not imagine. One of the men tried an office job for a while. The health insurance was nice, but the work wasn’t. He is now a personal trainer. His roommates are in film-making, acting, and the design of role-playing fantasy games.

In a vibrant Seattle neighborhood, complete with markets, cultural venues, and convenient public transportation, a group of artists longed to find affordable housing. There wasn’t any. There was, though, an old hotel that captured the fancy of their dreamy minds. With help from the city, they converted the hotel into a cooperative home with 21 living spaces, including doubles, triples, and solo “Zen” units.

The housemates—who range in age from 19 to 50—share kitchens, bathrooms, lounges, laundry facilities, and a roof deck. It is their responsibility to keep the building in good shape, but they throw work parties to get that done so it doesn’t feel like a chore. They have potlucks at home and organize outings to local stomping grounds.

The Brooklyn, Queens, and Seattle stories are all examples of one of the newly fashionable ways of living in twenty-first century America: under the same roof with people who are not your spouse or family. The bond that unites the housemates is not blood or marriage, but friendship.

The trend, however, is not confined to urban areas, to young adults, or even to artistic types. All across the nation, unrelated people who once went their separate ways (often with a spouse and kids in tow) are now living together.

Bella DePaulo (PhD. Harvard) studies single life and contemporary versions of home and family. She is the author of books such as How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21^st Century and Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After. She writes the “Living Single” blog for Psychology Today and the “Single at Heart” blog for Psych Central. Visit her website at BellaDePaulo.com.

Before you tell your intimate partners, “It’s not you, it’s me,” take a look at the media reactions to two new reports from the Council on Contemporary Families released this month, one on parenting the other on sex, and both relating to policy.

Journalists at several outlets including New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and AlterNet reported that there was a reason—that didn’t justify blaming parents—to explain the “happiness gap,” or the fact that parents in the United States, particularly when compared to parents in other countries, were less happy than non-parents. According to CCF expert Jennifer Glass, “The negative effects of parenthood on happiness were entirely explained by the presence or absence of social policies allowing parents to better combine paid work with family obligations. And this was true for both mothers and fathers. Countries with better family policy ‘packages’ had no happiness gap between parents and non-parents.” Boston Globe writer Duggan Arnette identified “paid sick and vacation leave, child care costs, and work schedule flexibility,” or lack thereof, as specific factors that were shown to influence the “happiness gap.”

Yet the happiness gap is not a universal problem, and some countries have addressed it. Quartz journalists Solana Pyne and Michael Tabb created a video that compares the United States to 22 other countries in terms of parent and non-parent happiness, as well as the availability of various kinds of social supports. The narrator says that “if you’re a working parent,” the reason for the happiness gap “is basically what you’d think.” The happiness gap will seem less inevitable, and its solutions more achievable, however, after seeing visuals comparing the presence of specific policies in countries in which parents are just as happy, if not happier than non-parents, with the absence of those policies in the United States, where the happiness gap is the largest.

What about romantic relationships? Emma Lousie-Pritchard of Cosmopolitan UK reported that, “To have more sex, couples have to agree to this one, brilliant rule.” That rule is dividing household work equally between men and women. CCF expert Sharon Sassler reported that couples in which men did between one-third and 65% of the housework tended to have more frequent sex. As personal as this sounds, though, there are still policy implications in that progressive work-family policies are a twofer: they are both family-friendly and promote equality in couples.

The notion of the policy twofer was made by Fusion’s Jennifer Gerson Uffalussy. She cited a Department of Labor report to connect Glass and colleagues’ findings on parental happiness with couples’ relationship satisfaction: “families with fathers who take more leave also share chores and childcare more equally between mothers and fathers. So paid leave and equitable paternity leave policies not only give dads the time to be parents, but cause a trickle-down effect of creating greater gender equity.”

Taking turns and “get[ting] out the toilet bleach and your sexiest pair of rubber gloves” might be good relationship advice, but improved work-family policies will make it easier for couples to do so equitably, and still have the time and money to spend with their children.

Read the full reports here:

“Parenting and Happiness in 22 Countries,” by Jennifer Glass, Robin Simon, and Matthew Andersson.

“A Reversal in Predictors of Sexual Frequency and Satisfaction in Marriage,” Sharon Sassler.

The demographic face of the nation has changed dramatically over the past half-century. Today, the number of unmarried adults in the U.S. is nearly equal to the number of married ones, and more and more women of all marital statuses are opting not to have children at all. Only about 20% of all households are comprised of mom, dad, and the kids. So how are people living now? For my most recent book, How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21^st Century, I traveled around the country asking people to show me their homes and tell me about their lifespaces – the domestic places, spaces, and people who are most important to them. I combined their personal stories with relevant research from the social sciences and some historical context to show the innovative ways in which contemporary Americans have moved beyond the paradigm of living in a nuclear family home in the suburbs. In this post and the next, I share excerpts from How We Live Now. This is the first, from pp. xiii-xv.

When I asked the people I interviewed what mattered to them in deciding how and with whom to live, they mentioned everything from dealing with the tasks of everyday life to existential concerns about who would care for them in later life. On a psychological level, there were two things that just about everyone wanted, though in vastly different proportions. You won’t find them mentioned in real estate circulars, in reports from demographers about the ways we live, or (with rare exceptions) in the writings of architects or builders or city planners.

They wanted time with other people and time to themselves. Everyone was seeking just the right mix of sociability and solitude. They would like their time with other people to be easy to come by. Sarah Stokes, who lives on her own, sometimes has so many social invitations that she stops answering her phone. Other times, though, her social circle is too quiet, and she is disheartened by having to be the one to initiate.

By living in cohousing, Karen Hester has found a way to have a place of her own and easy sociability, too. Just steps outside her door she will probably find neighbors in the courtyard or in the common house. There will always be community dinners several times a week, and a day now and then when the group comes together to keep the grounds in good shape. Anja Woltman and Tricia Hoffman live at opposite ends of a duplex, so each has a home of her own as well as a friend right next door. Robert Jones lives in a big old Southern house in a charming small town. It is a family home which he shares with his brother and sister-in-law. He finds his easy sociability, though, with his poker buddies and his theater group, and the neighbors he sees everyday as he walks to work.

In choosing a way to live, people are also regulating access to themselves, in ways that are both profound and mundane. Whether they end up satisfied with their situation depends on the fit between what they want, psychologically, and what their living arrangements afford. The important questions include:

• To what extent do you want to know other people and be known by them?
• How much control do you want over the depth to which you are known by other people?
• Do you like the sense of presence of other people?
• Is solitude something you enjoy now and then or something you crave?

People who want to know other people and be known to them are happy to engage in the day-to-day exchanges of pleasantries, but they don’t want their contacts with their fellow humans to end there. They want to be friends, and not just acquaintances.

A New York Times story captured the essence of the conditions conducive to the development of close friendships, as documented in social science research: “proximity, repeated and unplanned interactions, and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other.” The rhythms of cohousing, with regular or semi-regular dinners, meetings, and the occasional workdays—together with the spontaneous chats along the pathways of neighborly spaces—offer magnificent opportunities to develop relationships with breadth and depth. In cohousing, relationships can grow in their own good time. The more deliberative versions of house-sharing, which go beyond the mere roommate mentalities, are also rich with the potential for forming close personal bonds.

Maria Hall, who lives in a home of her own, is happy to cede some control over the access that people have to her and her house. “I don’t have a ‘you have to call me before you come over’ policy,” she told me. “If the truck is in the back, just come on in. If there’s something on the floor, step over it.” When I visited Diane Dew, who lives on the first floor of a two-story building, I noticed that the people on the top story across the way could probably see into her windows. That might make some people feel observed and self-conscious. Diane, though, told me that she loved opening her shades in the morning and waving to the children eating breakfast near their kitchen window; they, in turn, blow kisses to her.

Not everyone wants closeness from the people around them. That’s what Lucy Whitworth learned from her community of women who live in a house and two duplexes arranged around a generous stretch of gardens and fruit trees. Telling me about the kinds of people who have fit in well over the years, Lucy said that it is important that “you don’t mind if people know about who you are.”

The sense of the presence of other people, though distracting to some, is reassuring to others. One of two widows who live next door to each other told me that in the evenings, when she looks outside, she is comforted by the sight of the light on in the home of her friend. Marianne Kilkenny, who shares a house with four other people, likes the privacy she has in her own suite. At the same time, she enjoys hearing the soft sounds outside her door of her housemates going about their daily routines. She missed that when she lived alone.

Just about everyone I interviewed wanted at least some time to themselves. I thought for a moment that I had found one person who didn’t, Danica Meek, a 21-year-old who lives in a tiny room in a big house that she shares with one other woman and three men. When I asked Danica what she liked to do by herself, at first she couldn’t think of anything. Then she said she might like to do some writing but had not done any yet. As we continued to talk, though, she mentioned how much she enjoyed being the first one up in the morning, and starting her day in peaceful solitude. Len, a 91-year-old widower who opened his home to his daughters and grandsons, does not see the appeal of living alone. But he also shared with me what he remembered of a quote from Einstein: “being alone can be painful in youth but sweet in old age.”

For some, solitude feels more like a need or a craving than a mere desire. Arlia, who has a committed relationship but insists on living on her own, explained that she “requires” time alone “to get centered and balanced, to feel solid.”

Bella DePaulo (PhD. Harvard) studies single life and contemporary versions of home and family. She is the author of books such as How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21^st Century and Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After. She writes the “Living Single” blog for Psychology Today and the “Single at Heart” blog for Psych Central. Visit her website at BellaDePaulo.com.

Media have tended to depict childfree people negatively, likening the decision not to have children to the decision “whether to have pizza or Indian for dinner.” Misperceptions about those who do not have children have serious weight, given that 15 percent of women, and 24 percent of men had not had children by age 40 between 2006 and 2010, and that nearly half of women aged 40-44 in 2002 were what Amy Blackstone and Mahala Dyer Stewart refer to as childfree, or purposefully not intending to have children. Their forthcoming July 2016 article in The Family Journal, “There’s More Thinking to Decide”: How the Childfree Decide Not to Parent, engages the topic of childfree that extends much scholarly and public work Blackstone has done, including at her shared blog, We’re Not Having a Baby.

When researchers explore why people do not have children, they find that these reasons are strikingly similar to reasons why people do have children. For example, “motivation to develop or maintain meaningful relationships” is a reason that some people have children–and a reason that others do not. Scholars are less certain on how people come to the decision to to be childfree. In their new article, Blackstone and Stewart find that, as is often the case with media portrayals of contemporary families, descriptions of how people come to the decision to be childfree have been oversimplified. People who are childfree put a significant amount of thought into the formation of their families, as they report.

Blackstone and Stewart conducted semi-structured interviews with 21 women and 10 men, with an average age of 34, who are intentionally childfree. After several coding sessions, Blackstone and Stewart identified 18 distinct themes that described some aspect of decision-making with regard to living childfree. Ultimately, the authors concluded that being childfree was a conscious decision that arose through a process. These patterns were reported by both men and women respondents, but in slightly different ways.

Childfree as a conscious decision

All but two of the participants emphasized that their decision to be childfree was made consciously. One respondent captured the overarching message:

People who have decided not to have kids arguably have been more thoughtful than those who decided to have kids. It’s deliberate, it’s respectful, ethical, and it’s a real honest, good, fair, and, for many people, right decision.

There were gender differences in the motives for these decisions. Women were more likely to make the decision based on concern for others: some thought that the world was a tough place for children today, and some did not want to contribute to overpopulation and environmental degradation. In contrast, men more often made the decision to live childfree “after giving careful and deliberate thought to the potential consequences of parenting for their own, everyday lives, habits, and activities and what they would be giving up were they to become parents.”

Childfree as a process

Contrary to misconceptions that the decision to be childfree is a “snap” decision, Blackstone and Stewart note that respondents conceptualized their childfree lifestyle as “a working decision” that developed over time. Many respondents had desired to live childfree since they were young; others began the process of deciding to be childfree when they witnessed their siblings and peers raising children. Despite some concrete milestones in the process of deciding to be childfree, respondents emphasized that it was not one experience alone that sustained the decision. One respondent said, “I did sort of take my temperature every five, six, years to make sure I didn’t want them.” Though both women and men described their childfree lifestyle as a “working decision,” women were more likely to include their partners in that decision-making process by talking about the decision, while men were more likely to make the decision independently.

Blackstone and Stewart conclude by asking, “What might childfree families teach us about alternative approaches to ‘doing’ marriage and family?” The present research suggests that childfree people challenge what is often an unquestioned life sequence by consistently considering the impact that children would have on their own lives as well as the lives of their family, friends, and communities. One respondent reflected positively on childfree people’s thought process: ‘‘I wish more people thought about thinking about it… I mean I wish it were normal to decide whether or not you were going to have children.’’

Braxton Jones is a graduate student in sociology at the University of New Hampshire, and serves as a CCF Graduate Research and Public Affairs Scholar.

I work with one of the most heartbroken groups of people in the world: fathers whose adult children want nothing to do with them. While every day has its challenges, Father’s Day—with its parade of families and feel-good ads—makes it especially difficult for these Dads to avoid the feelings of shame, guilt and regret always lurking just beyond the reach of that well-practiced compartmentalization. Like birthdays, and other holidays, Father’s Day creates the wish, hope, or prayer that maybe today, please today, let me hear something, anything from my kid.

Many of these men are not only fathers but grandfathers who were once an intimate part of their grandchildren’s lives. Or, more tragically, they discovered they were grandfathers through a Facebook page, if they hadn’t yet been blocked. Or, they learn from an unwitting relative bearing excited congratulations, now surprised by the look of grief and shock that greets the newly announced grandfather. Hmm, what did I do with those cigars I put aside for this occasion?

And it’s not just being involved as a grandfather that gets denied. The estrangement may foreclose the opportunity to celebrate other developmental milestones he always assumed he’d attend, such as college graduations, engagement parties, or weddings. Maybe he was invited to the wedding but told he wouldn’t get to walk his daughter down the aisle because that privilege was being reserved for her father-in-law whom she’s decided is a much better father than he ever was.

Most people assume that a Dad would have to do something pretty terrible to make an adult child not want to have contact. My clinical experience working with estranged parents doesn’t bear this out. While those cases clearly exist, many parents get cut out as a result of the child needing to feel more independent and less enmeshed with the parent or parents. A not insignificant number of estrangements are influenced by a troubled or compelling son-in-law or daughter-in-law. Sometimes a parent’s divorce creates the opportunity for one parent to negatively influence the child against the other parent, or introduce people who compete for the parent’s love, attention or resources. In a highly individualistic culture such as ours, divorce may cause the child to view a parent more as an individual with relative strengths and weaknesses rather than a family unit of which they’re a part.

Little binds adult children to their parents today beyond whether or not the adult child wants that relationship. And a not insignificant number decide that they don’t.

While my clinical work hasn’t shown fathers to be more vulnerable to estrangement than mothers, they do seem to be more at risk of a lower level of investment from their adult children. A recent Pew survey found that women more commonly say their grown children turn to them for emotional support while men more commonly say this “hardly ever” or “never” occurs. This same study reported that half of adults say they are closer with their mothers, while only 15 percent say they are closer with their fathers.

So, yes, let’s take a moment to celebrate fathers everywhere. And another to feel empathy for those Dads who won’t have any contact with their child on Father’s Day.

Or any other day.

Josh Coleman is former Co-Chair, Council on Contemporary Families, and author most recently of When Parents Hurt.