If I am to believe findings from the media coverage of a recent study, then I should anticipate a life where I return home from work and nonchalantly prop up my feet, crack open a cold beer, and patiently wait for sex once my wife has finished cleaning up the sink full of dishes following a delicious home-cooked meal she singlehandedly prepared while our two young children wreaked havoc on the house. This scenario seems better suited to science fiction than social science, for sure. To say I was skeptical of the study that serves as the basis for this questionable fantasy would be an understatement.

This widely publicized study a few years back ignited a pop culture debate about how men’s contributions around the house impacted a couple’s sex life. Drawing on a large national sample of married couples surveyed once in the early 1990s, Kornrich, Brines, and Leupp found husbands who did more of the housework that women often do (making dinner, cleaning house) had less sex, while men completing more “manly” tasks (mowing the lawn, washing the car) was linked with having sex more often. The authors argued that: “traditionally masculine and feminine behaviors consciously or unconsciously serve as turn-ons for individuals” (p. 31). My coauthors and I interpreted this conclusion as unfortunately implying that “husbands emasculate themselves by completing housework traditionally considered to be women’s responsibility and, therefore, experience reduced sexual frequency because they rendered themselves less sexually appealing … by doing the dishes.”

We explored sex and men’s contributions to chores traditionally done by women (cleaning, shopping) using data from couples repeatedly surveyed every year for five years as part of the German Panel Analysis of Intimate Relations and Family Dynamics (pairfam) study. We considered men’s housework in two ways: actual share and perceived fairness. Actual share was the extent to which men shared traditionally feminine tasks (did more or less than female partner vs. 50/50 split) and perceived fairness was whether men felt their contributions to housework were fair (did more or less than their fair share of housework vs. fairly shared). Our study then looked to see whether actual share and perceived fairness predicted future sex frequency and sex satisfaction of both partners. Such an approach is critical to gain an accurate understanding of how relationship dynamics unfold as couples move through time together. Studies based on data gathered at only one point in time are inherently limited in their ability to identify aspects of intimate partnerships that promote or inhibit later couple sexuality.

Our results demonstrated no association between men’s actual share of housework and sex. However, when men reported making a fair contribution to housework, the couple enjoyed more frequent and satisfying sex in the future. A good deal of social science research and theory indicates the determination of fairness is a subjective process based on comparisons to societal norms, personal expectations, and the circumstances of a particular couple’s daily life. Applied to housework, equal contributions may not necessarily be fair. The optimal amount of housework men should or should not be doing is something to be actively negotiated between partners. When both partners are on the same page regarding household responsibilities, sex may be more frequent and satisfying because feelings of bitterness and anger are less likely to accumulate knowing one’s partner is pulling his weight around the house.

Rather than avoiding chores in the hopes of having more sex, findings from my study paint a different picture. Men are likely to experience more frequent and satisfying (for both partners) passion between the sheets when they simply do their fair share. We suspect this will involve scrubbing dishes from time to time.

Matt Johnson is an assistant professor of family science in the Department of Human Ecology at the University of Alberta. He studies the development of couple relations to identify mechanisms responsible for relationship success or failure. He would like to thank Nancy Galambos for her edits and helpful suggestions on this post.

Public discourse in the U.S. has long viewed teen childbearing and nonmarital parenthood as social problems that threaten the well-being of women, children, and society at large. Popular media, like 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom reinforce more academic assessments. That delaying teen births will benefit women seems so obvious that this assumption has received little empirical scrutiny. Our new research, however, challenges this conventional wisdom and further raises questions about the potential costs of encouraging young unmarried mothers to marry.

Analyzing 29 years of data on a nationally representative sample of 2,900 women, we find no evidence that delaying births from adolescence to early adulthood (age 20-24) improves women’s long-term health. In many ways, this is not surprising. As rates of college attendance and completion have grown, particularly among women, early adulthood has become an increasingly important time the acquisition of resources necessary for later socioeconomic attainment. Like teen births, births during this stage likely create barriers to educational and occupational success necessary to healthy functioning across the life course.

In fact, for white women, we find that it is only young adult births and not teen births that are linked to health detriments in midlife. Because teen mothers are more likely than young adult mothers to live with their parents, the greater availability of economic and instrumental support from parents may minimize the negative consequences of childbearing for white women. For black teen mothers, high levels of economic disadvantage may limit the resources their families can provide, with negative consequences for health later in life.

Contemporary demographic trends underscore the importance of our findings. Although teen childbearing has declined steadily for the last two decades, reaching its nadir in 2013, childbearing in the young adult years remains high. In 2010, nearly 30 percent of 1^st births in the U.S. occurred to women between the ages of 20 and 24 (36% among African American women) and the majority of these births are nonmarital. The result is that the birth timing of a large proportion of U.S. women may place them at risk for health detriments in midlife.

Is Marriage the Answer? Declines in teen childbearing in the U.S. have occurred alongside an explosive growth in nonmarital childbearing, particularly among women in early adulthood. In approximately 20 years, rates of nonmarital childbearing have risen by 46%–from 28% of all births in 1990 to 41% in 2009. In conjunction with the 1996 welfare reform bill and its reauthorization in 2006, federal and state government has taken an increasingly active role in promoting marriage among low-income single mothers (a substantial proportion of whom had teen births) through efforts such as public advertising campaigns and relationship skills training. Yet whether marriage can improve outcomes for single women who had teen births is unknown.

Our findings suggest that subsequent marriage after a nonmarital early first birth (that occurs prior to the age of 24) may pose health risks for black women. Being unmarried at birth does not itself appear to be a health risk factor for black young mothers as long as they remain unmarried. Rather, those who subsequently marry have worse midlife health compared to similar young mothers who were married at birth and, more importantly, worse health than those who, by age 40, have never-married.

Explaining the health risks of later marriage for young unmarried black mothers is beyond the scope of our study, but prior research provides important clues. Given high levels of economic disadvantage and rates of male incarceration in their communities, black single mothers who later marry are disproportionately likely to marry men who have lack a high-school diploma and who have limited economic and occupational resources—factors known to be linked to high levels of stress and conflict in marriage. Our own previous research finds low levels of relationship quality and high rates of instability in the new unions that single mothers form. Thus, rather than being a source of emotional and instrumental support that is beneficial for health, subsequent marriage may introduce additional strains into the lives of Black young single mothers in ways that ultimately take a cumulative toll on their health.

What about Children? Improving the well-being of children is a central aim of efforts to reduce teen pregnancy and promote marriage among single parents. Much evidence indicates that children born to teen mothers are disadvantaged on a range of indicators of socioeconomic and educational attainment and they are more likely to experience early childbearing themselves, although the causal order here is unclear. Our study considers only mothers’ outcomes, but a growing body of research indicates that the impact of fertility timing and mother’s subsequent marriage on children’s well-being is more complex than previously believed. For example, research in Britain recently showed that children born to mothers in their early 20s fared worse on several socioeconomic and educational outcomes later in life than those born to older women. And earlier work by Elizabeth Cooksey using the same data as ours found that a mother’s subsequent marriage even to the child’s biological father did not close the gap in academic success between children born to young single mothers and those born to married mothers.

In sum, our findings for mothers indicate that it is important to consider how different groups of children are differentially affected by factors assumed to be universally harmful such as teen and nonmarital childbearing. Even well informed social policy based on empirical evidence may produce unintended negative consequences when average effects of complex social phenomena such as marriage and childbearing are assumed to apply equally to all.

Implications. Although it seems obvious that discouraging teen childbearing is a desirable goal, our results suggest that delaying childbearing to the young adult years offers few benefits to women’s health. In recent years, The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy altered its title, now the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, to better address the rise in unplanned pregnancy occurring to women in their twenties. Our findings indicate that our myopia on the challenges inherent in becoming a mother immediately after the age of majority, together with a failure to consider race/ethnic differences in the likely impact of a range of reproductive and family policies may result in unintended negative consequences, often for the most disadvantaged or vulnerable groups.

This point also applies to our findings regarding the impact of marriage. Although decades of research indicate that married individuals are healthier on average than the unmarried, one cannot conclude that marriage is a panacea that will solve a range of individual and societal ills or that it is equally beneficial to all individuals. Our findings indicate that marriage may pose long-term health risks to some women who have births in adolescence or early adulthood. More broadly, they sound a cautionary note about the long-term consequences of attempts to intervene in women’s personal decisions about childbearing and marriage.

Kristi Williams is Associate Professor of Sociology, The Ohio State University and Senior Scholar at the Council on Contemporary Families.

You can view the press release for her study: Timing of First Child Influences Women’s Health at Age 40. 

Fifteen years ago, the going wisdom on cohabitation was that marriages preceded by living together were more likely to fall apart—that news is out of date. Several pieces from CCF share more current work on cohabitation, including the key observation that cohabitation itself is no longer associated with more or less risk of divorce in any subsequent marriage. Other recent pieces cover cohabitation and housework, childrearing, and remarriage.

• Does Premarital Cohabitation Raise Your Risk of Divorce?
• First Comes Love, Then Comes… Housework?
• Remarriage in the United States
• Child-Rearing Norms and Practices in Contemporary American Families
• Cohabitating Isn’t What It Used To Be

“What do we want? JUSTICE. When do we want it? NOW.”

I chanted along as I watched my son engaged in social protest. My palms began to sweat and my jaw tense as I watch him. I wondered if my son was at the line of civil disobedience or had he already crossed it. He is an absolutely beautiful young man, tall with broad shoulders and a smile that melts my heart. I am his mother and I love him dearly.

I know he has the right to protest what he sees as injustice. I have taught him, and countless college students that it is our duty to participate in the struggle to create a just society. From schoolyards, where they might encounter someone bullying someone else, to encountering homeless people on the streets of Los Angeles, I have taught my children that to ignore injustice is to further inflict it. However, in this moment, I am his mother. In this moment, as police surround him as he angrily argues his rights, I am afraid for my beautiful son, my man-child. I am acutely aware that Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Sandra Bland have mothers that thought them beautiful and whom now, mourn them. In this moment, my pride that my in my 17-year-old son has learned, and is extending my life lessons regarding social activism are mixed inextricably with a mother’s fear.

In 1955, a fourteen-year-old boy was brutally murdered in Mississippi. Emmett Till, like many young African American boys today, lived with his mother in a single-parent household. Mamie Till, anguished at the loss of her only child, nevertheless decided upon an open casket to make sure the world knew what happened to her son. Many scholars, myself included, believe the choice to make public and lay bare the horrors of the murder was pivotal in launching the beginning of The Civil Rights Movement.

On April 27th 2015, a video of rioting in Baltimore was broadcast on the news and shared widely on social media. In the video, a woman wades through the crowd and hits and yells at her rioting son. An angry crowd of rioters had exploded in response to the gruesome death Freddie Gray, a young black man who died while in police custody. Media stories and interviews with ‘Baltimore Mom’ generally deemed her actions as necessary to keep the city, and her son, safe. See was celebrated by many as “Mom of the Year”.

My response, the actions of Mamie Till and “Baltimore Mom” represent the weight of black motherhood. In the United States, around 67 percent of black families with children live in households with an unmarried mother. In fact, then, as now, women like Baltimore mom, Mamie Till, and myself, are portrayed as emblematic of “THE REAL” problem besetting black communities. Like Mamie Till, I am divorced from my son’s father. Although the fact that his father and I continue to co-parent our children despite the change in our marital status, and the fact that I am a professor with an advanced degree, should both be logically considered mitigating factors, our family is nonetheless included in statistics described by The Moynihan Report as representing “a tangle of pathology.” The Moynihan report, written 50 years ago to buttress Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty”, is among the most famous pieces of social scientific analysis. In my twenty years of research of African American families, I have yet to see policy or research on black family that fails to reference it. While the report cogently assessed the constraining impact of discrimination on intimate relationships options available to Black men and women, it also imposed a biased and limiting meaning regarding marriage fragility. The Moynihan Report, and contemporary popular opinion both generally place single-black motherhood at the top of the list of self-inflicted harms, right alongside discussions of “black-on-black crime.” The Moynihan Report explicitly asserted that Black women’s strength emasculated Black men and thereby caused criminality and a host of other pathologies. Today the harms of black, single mother families are unarticulated but nevertheless presumed. Post-Civil Rights Movement changes in welfare policy, along with ‘War on Drugs’, are key components in the emergence of what law professor and author Michelle Alexander calls The New Jim Crow. In Baltimore, in Ferguson, in Los Angeles, as well as in urban Black communities everywhere, the impact of the “New Jim Crow” has been deeply felt. High numbers of community residents are incarcerated in prisons all over the country and are therefore absent from their families. “Baltimore Mom’s” response seemed to me to be emblematic of the toxic circumstances brought on by the criminalization of entire communities.

In 2015, as was the case in 1965 and 1955 before that, single motherhood continues to be associated with poverty and inequality, as well as with cultural arguments about the social problems observed in urban black communities. Simply put, race continues to influence how most people in society think about the links between marriage, childbearing, and the host of structural problems confronting African American communities. Oddly, even as American families have become far more diverse, and increasingly we interrogate the collateral costs of the “War on Drugs”, critical interrogations of the logic of “family dysfunction” as the cause of black people’s problems, is rare. In fact, even President Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States, and himself a product of a single mother, began several initiatives to build “strong communities” by promoting “responsible fatherhood” as a primary strategy.

Americans of every race continue to decry the “deterioration” of urban black communities as being directly linked to family behavior, and lament the tragic impact of the loss of “traditional family values”. This is indeed the context for “Baltimore Mom’s” initial elevation.

I did not succumb to fear as I watched my son impolitely assert that “Black Lives Matter” in an uncivil protest in front of the church that night. Instead, I saw myself joined with my son and countless other mothers, fathers, step-fathers, siblings, cousins and play-cousins, across time and geography to stand together and unapologetically demand meaningful political response to police abuses. Because, Black Lives Matter, really.

Professor James is co-author, along with Donna L. Franklin, of the newly revised paperback edition of Ensuring Inequality: Structural Transformations of the African American Family, Oxford University Press. 2015. She has devoted her academic life to understanding racial inequality, and her personal life to eradicating it.

This briefing paper was prepared as part of an online symposium Moynihan+50: Family Structure Still not the Problem for the Council on Contemporary Families and published jointly by CCF and the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR).

Executive Summary

In The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, published in 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously argued that the fundamental obstacle to racial equality was the instability of Black families, and especially the prevalence of single-mother families. That same year, he predicted that the spread of single-parent families would result not only in rising poverty and inequality but also in soaring rates of crime and violence. Half a century later, we report that the changes in family structure that concerned him have continued, becoming widespread among Whites as well, but that they do not explain recent trends in poverty and inequality. In fact, a number of the social ills Moynihan assumed would accompany these changes have actually decreased.

• Even as single-parent families have become more prevalent in all race/ethnic groups, especially among Black families, poverty rates have fallen, partly because of effective welfare programs, and partly because of increased education and job opportunities (especially for women). In 1967 more than 60 percent of single-mother families were poor. Today, according to new, adjusted poverty calculations, that poverty rate has been almost halved, falling to 35 percent.

• During the period of greatest change in family structure, educational levels rose for Black children and young adults. Today, almost 90 percent of Black young adults are high school graduates, compared with only about 50 percent in the 1960s; Black college completion rates have doubled, from less than 10 to almost 20 percent.

• Since 1994 juvenile crime rates have plummeted by more than 60 percent for Blacks and Whites alike, even though marriage rates have continued to fall and the proportion of children born out of wedlock has reached 40 percent.

• Although it is true that single-parent families are more likely to be poor than two-parent ones, we show that fluctuations in poverty rates since the 1990s cannot be explained by changes in family structure.

• Marriage is no protection against racial inequality. Black and Latino children in married-couple families are, respectively, three- and four-times more likely to be poor than White children in such families.

One of the legacies of the Moynihan Report has been to focus attention on changing family structure, rather than on other factors that are more amenable to policy intervention. While marriage promotion programs have proven ineffective, evidence suggests that increasing employment opportunities and wage levels, anti-discrimination policies, and social safety nets have considerable potential to reduce poverty, increase economic and educational opportunity, and decrease racial inequality. more...

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 “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.

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.

If you didn’t watch it, then you may have heard the clips or perhaps viewed the mansplaining vine that characterized the mean-spirited and prosecutorial tone of the September 29^th House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s five-hour grilling of Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards. In September, amid rumors of staffers profiting from selling fetal tissues and a flurry of purportedly incriminating video content, Congress voted 241-to-187 to strip Planned Parenthood of some $500 million in federal family planning funds for a year. Women’s reproductive health remains a deeply political issue.

Planned Parenthood provides women’s health services that span beyond constitutionally- protected abortion services to include contraceptives like the Pill or LARCs (long-acting reversible contraceptives), screening for sexually transmittable diseases and infections, cancer screenings, and treatments for other women’s health issues, all of which represented 97 percent of the services delivered in 2013-14 – according to their own reporting. However, it’s pointless to get stuck trying to make an apolitical argument that the non-abortion services provided by Planned Parenthood justifies their continued public funding, because all of Planned Parenthood’s services bear the same end goal of empowering women to take control of their sexual and reproductive lives — and that’s the part that is inescapably political. It’s disingenuous to say this is about the law or fetal tissue or video or the sanctity of life or anything other than what it is: the agency of women.

Research demonstrates that empowerment through expanding access to and use of subsidized birth control reduces abortion rates and helps more women avoid unplanned births, so spending on contraception more than pays for itself. Fifty years of access to birth control and increased reproductive health has brought about a 60 percent decrease in adolescent birth rates since 1991 (Future of Children), which is good news when we calculate the social costs of unprepared or premature parenting. However, the U.S. adolescent pregnancy rate remains the highest in the developed world (at 57 per 1,000 in 2010) outside the former Soviet Bloc (Guttmacher Institute). A recent policy brief from the Future of Children argues that the increased access to LARCs could play a major role in reducing adolescent pregnancy, although only about 12 percent of women aged 15–44 using birth control use them. The authors suggest “LARCs are effective in large part because they change the default for women from having to take action to avoid pregnancy (that is, consistently take a pill or use a condom) to having to take action to become pregnant (that is, remove an IUD or an implant).”

Last week in Colorado, a bill to continue funding of a program to promote the use of LARCs was blocked by the Republican-dominated Senate – some opponents claimed that existing public programs already provide funding for birth control, that birth control encourages sex among teenagers and unmarried young adults, and that abstinence only programs are the most appropriate programs for teens. The most seditious and misguided claim was that the particular LARC to be funded by the bill (the intrauterine device [IUD] Liletta) is an abortifacient – meaning that it works by terminating a pregnancy. This claim does not hold up to scientific scrutiny, nor does it fit with the definition widely accepted by experts, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which explicitly states in a position paper “IUDs are not abortifacients—they work before pregnancy is established—and are safe for the majority of women, including adolescents and women who have never had children.”

Dressing down Planned Parenthood and blocking access to legal, affordable, safe, and constitutionally protected birth control are not the only facets of the disempowerment strategy. The Department of Health and Human Services’ Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative (TPPI), which awards five-year grants to teen pregnancy prevention programs, recently announced that additional funding will be committed to new programs in 31 states this year, but the remaining four years are in jeopardy. Last summer, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted to cut funding to the program by 80 percent, and the House Appropriations Committee voted to terminate it altogether.

Like the crusade to defund Planned Parenthood, the resistance to providing access to all forms of women’s reproductive health services is a misguided mission. The transparent and mendacious attacks on women’s autonomy proves to be less focused on protecting the sanctity of human life or fetal tissue, or videos, or legal requirements, than on penalizing women for having non-reproductive sex or empowering them to have greater control over their lives. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood and a tireless advocate for a woman’s right to control her own body, said “woman must have her freedom, the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she will be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man’s attitude may be, that problem is hers – and before it can be his, it is hers alone.” And so goes the politics of the women’s bodies with a white-hot heat.

Perry Threlfall is a recent graduate of the doctoral program in sociology at George Mason University. She studies gender, racial, and class stratification across institutional and structural contexts, e.g. education and family. Her current research examines the contextualized experience of non-traditional higher education degree seekers. You can read her occasional blog at the Single Mother Sociologist.

So you or your child wants to go to college? Terrific. Investing in education is a wise use of time, helping to ensure that communities are full of well-rounded, engaged people who actively participate in the world.

But the challenge remains: which college to choose?

It’s never been so hard to answer that question. There are thousands of colleges and universities all over the country, and college can cost a lot of money. Everyone wants to find the “right” college, but what that means varies from person to person.

There are college counselors and magazines, websites, and friends who offer information; the government wants to help too.

A few weeks ago U.S. Department of Education released a mountain of data about colleges and universities as part of a revamped “College Scorecard.” This tool, partly of ED’s College Affordability and Transparency Center, aims to help people assess a school’s affordability and value so that they can pick an appropriate institution. Some even claim that the Scorecard will change how students choose colleges.

But it shouldn’t.

Yes, it’s possible to use the new tool to look up a college you think you want to attend and find out that it’s too expensive, or that most students who go there end up in debt they have trouble paying off. You might even be surprised to learn that while the college charges a lot of money, most of the students don’t earn a lot of money after college. That’s good to know, but you can be easily misled.

Consider that the school that seems most affordable and open to students who have little money or are the first in their family to attend college is…Harvard. That’s because the Scorecard focuses on price and graduation rates and earnings after college, and neglects to mention a really important factor: admissions. For that information, you have to cruise over to College Navigator, where you’ll learn that Harvard receives more than 34,000 applications a year and admits just 6% of those people. It doesn’t help much if the most affordable college with the highest graduation rate is impossible to get into, yet according to the Scorecard Harvard is tops, along with MIT and Stanford.

It’s also a problem that the Scorecard implies that what a given college’s students earn, or how they do at paying off their debt, has nothing to do with who attends that college or what they did in college. We should expect colleges that mainly enroll wealthy students to have high graduation rates, low debt, and high post-college earnings. These students would have these advantages almost no matter where they went to college. But the wealth of a college’s students cannot be observed using the Scorecard.

Even so, you’ll be tempted to ask—why does College A look like this and College B look like that? And that precisely what the Scorecard really isn’t good for answering. Comparing colleges requires a lot more work and information than the Scorecard or any comparable simple tool provides. Taking the graduation rate or the earnings of a college that admits 80% of applicants and enrolls loads of students from low-income families and comparing those outcomes to those of a college that cherry-picks the wealthy students it admits is irresponsible. You shouldn’t conclude that New York University is “better” because its graduates earn more than the City University of New York’s graduates. They serve very different students.

So here’s what the Scorecard is good for:

1. Looking up information to get to know a college better. Test your assumptions. Did you think College X admitted a lot of low-income students or had a high overall graduation rate? Maybe you’re wrong. Good to know. You can see who pays what and where. That’s helpful.
2. Using the information when discussing college with people advising on the decision. The Scorecard can help identify topics to discuss and guide the conversation. The person you work with should be able to tackle questions you have about the Scorecard, and if they don’t, you need to keep asking until you get answers.

But please, don’t act as if the Scorecard actually gives a college a score. It doesn’t.

Families shouldn’t rule out a college or decide on one using this information. If students want to reach for college, they need to talk to knowledgeable people who can help.

Start there.

Sara Goldrick-Rab is Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also Senior Scholar at the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education and an affiliate of the Center for Financial Security, Institute for Research on Poverty, and the Consortium for Chicago School Research. In 2014, she founded the Wisconsin Harvesting Opportunities for Postsecondary Education (HOPE) Lab.

Over at Families as They Really Are, Erin Anderson has posted about men’s lagging uptake of family leave when it is available. Over here, we have prepared a round-up on how men are doing in families by looking back at papers from the Council on Contemporary Families.

An issue related to use (or not) of family leave has to do with the underlying security of jobs: In the CCF June 2013 Symposium on the Equal Pay Act, economist Heidi Shierholz wrote about the erosion of men’s wages in the past few decades. She explains, “In the late 1970s, after a long period of holding fairly steady, the gap in wages between men and women began improving. In 1979, the median hourly wage for women was 62.7 percent of the median hourly wage for men; by 2012, it was 82.8 percent. However, a big chunk of that improvement—more than a quarter of it—happened because of men’s wage losses, rather than women’s wage gains.” Read more here. more...