Reprinted from NBC News

Dear Readers, as we enter wedding season, enjoy this reprint of an op-ed by Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education for the Council on Contemporary Families and emeritus faculty of History and Family Studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. She is the author of five books on gender, family, and history, including Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage and the forthcoming, For Better AND Worse: The Problematic Past and Challenging Future of Marriage.

Couples who follow stereotypical ideas about what a wife should do report the least satisfaction and the most conflict.

It’s July, which means wedding season, especially in America. And few events in modern life are wrapped in as much “tradition” as engagements and weddings — especially for heterosexual couples. Surprise proposals from men on bended knees; diamond rings; virginal white dresses with flowing trains; proud fathers walking glowing daughters down the aisle to waiting grooms.

Not all traditions match modern tastes, of course. Instead of a cake, for example, it was customary in the Middle Ages to serve a “bride pye” at wedding celebrations. The earliest recorded recipe for such a pie included lamb testicles, oysters, sweetbreads, fruit, butter, egg yolks and lemon.

While many of the rituals we embrace today — or have thrust on us by wedding planners — sound more palatable, they too can leave a bad aftertaste, especially when they reinforce the notion that marriage is the biggest day in a woman’s life and becoming a wife the most important identity she will ever acquire. You see, even when we “just play” at stereotypes, we absorb some of them — and they affect other people’s expectations of us. Studies show, for example, that when a woman is described to people as a wife, rather than, say, a friend or colleague, they expect her to take major responsibility for cleaning, even if they know she works full-time. They hold a “wife” to higher standards of cleanliness than a man or a single woman, even a cohabiting one, and judge her more harshly when she doesn’t meet those standards.

While many of the rituals we embrace today — or have thrust on us by wedding planners — sound more palatable, they too can leave a bad aftertaste,

Far be it for me to suggest that women give up white dresses, dispense with the father-daughter dance, or even challenge the convention that the man must surprise the woman with an elaborate proposal. Still, it’s worth updating some of these traditions or seeking out others that offer more realistic visions of the marital partnership most couples now hope to establish.

To craft a wedding that takes the best of different traditions and integrates those with the values of contemporary couples, it helps to reflect on where those traditions came from, when they came into being and what alternative traditions they pushed aside. Take the custom of the man asking the woman’s father for her hand in marriage, a tradition that wedding industry analysts claim has recently come back in style.

For most of recorded history, this was not just a polite gesture. In ancient empires and in medieval Europe, a woman who accepted a marriage proposal without her father’s permission could be beaten and imprisoned until she changed her mind. In 16th-century Europe, governments could dissolve any match made without the consent of either partner’s father. Any child born before the marriage was invalidated was thereby rendered illegitimate — becoming a “filius nullius,” or child of no one, legally entitled to nothing. In 18th-century New England, a man who “insinuated” himself into a woman’s affections without permission from her father could be whipped.

The tradition of the father “giving” the bride to the groom reflects the fact that until the middle of the 19th century, marriage permanently transferred legal authority of a woman from her father to her husband. An unmarried woman could escape her father’s control over her finances only once she turned 21. But in the 1950s and ’60s the majority of women married before turning 21, and for them the transfer from father to husband meant they never became fully adult in the eyes of the law. Until the mid-1970s, a wife still needed her husband’s permission to take out a loan, sign a lease, open a business or even apply for a credit card.

Some couples have modernized this ritual by asking both sets of parents to approve the match and get to know each other as in-laws. In one marriage I attended, the bride and groom, accompanied by their entire families, walked to meet each other, and then the couple proceeded together to face the officiant.

Such modifications actually draw on a very different, and even more ancient, marital tradition. Among the earliest hunting and gathering bands of the Paleolithic world, and still today among some of their descendants, marriage was a way of turning strangers into relatives. Weddings were about creating ever-widening relationships and mutual obligations among new in-laws and neighboring communities. At my son’s wedding, he and his bride “gave” both sets of parents away to each other, having us exchange leis to symbolize our commitment to the new network of relatives we had acquired.

Many of the most popular “traditional” wedding customs today actually come from a small sliver of history when women were bring pushed out of their central roles in economic and social life and offered idealization of their beauty and purity as (rather scant) compensation. The gasp of surprise, pretended or not, when presented with a ring; the emphasis on the size of the ring and the beauty of the bridal gown, the father walking the bride to the waiting groom, and later the groom lifting her over the threshold — all these rituals come from a time when women had to rely on men to take the initiative in all things and hope that their husbands would provide for them.

That’s not how medieval and early modern Europeans regarded marriage. Everyone knew that a man could not run a farm or business on his own, and in colonial America it could be hard for a man to get a license to open an inn unless he had a wife to be his co-worker. Wives were sometimes called “yoke-mates.” The old German wedding custom of Baumstamm sägen nicely sums up the idea that marriage depends on the woman’s contributions as well as the man’s. There, the first thing a bride and groom do after the ceremony is to each take hold of one end of a cross-cut saw and vigorously saw the log in half to demonstrate they can work together.

The word “Mrs.” was originally derived from the female equivalent of the title “master.” It designated a “mistress” — a woman “who governs” — whether married or unmarried. Only in the 19th century, at the height of what historians call “the cult of female domesticity,” did “Mrs.” came to indicate a woman’s marital status rather than her socioeconomic status. And that marital status was considered far more important than any of her individual achievements. Women increasingly lost even their first names when they wed, becoming only “Mrs. John Smith.”

Women’s understanding that marriage required them to subordinate their personhood to the role of devoted wife helps explain why so many women began to think of their wedding day as their last occasion to shine.

A name was not all women lost. As the perceptive French writer Alexis de Tocqueville explained, 19th-century American women “irrevocably” surrendered their legal independence and access to public life once they entered the bonds of matrimony. When one man heard that his childhood friend was engaged, he confided to his diary that the “idea of her being married seems to me much the same as her being buried.” Many women recorded similar fears in their own diaries.

Women’s understanding that marriage required them to subordinate their personhood to the role of devoted wife helps explain why so many women began to think of their wedding day as their last occasion to shine. When Queen Victoria married Prince Albert in 1840, her ornate white wedding dress with its long train created a sensation. Being a real queen, Victoria had to propose to Albert, a piece of pageantry that few women have adopted even now. But copying Victoria’s wedding dress — and later the three-tiered white wedding cakes that were introduced at her daughters’ weddings — was a different matter.

It’s often suggested that the white wedding dress caught on because it stood for purity, signaling that the bride had protected her maidenhood until the ceremony. But probably more important was its role as a uniquely female status symbol in a world where women could no longer become entrepreneurs or “mistresses” in their own right. Dresses with trains at least three yards long were what women wore when in attendance at the royal court, and white was the color debutantes wore when presented to the queen. The fact that white dresses were expensive to make and exceptionally difficult to keep clean in a world where rooms continually accumulated soot from fireplaces and most streets were unpaved only added to their cachet. As Bride’s Magazine put it in 1949, wearing such a dress could make a woman “queen of the day, surrounded by your ladies-in-waiting.”

Fifty years ago, wedding rituals that reinforced stereotypes of men as protectors and providers and women as delicate homebodies worked well for many couples. As late as the 1970s and ’80s, couples who followed stereotyped gender scripts after marriage reported higher relationship satisfaction than couples who experimented with nontraditional arrangements such as shared breadwinning, housework and childcare. But today, egalitarianism is an increasingly important predictor of marital satisfaction. The good news is that in marriages formed since the early 1990s, couples who share child care and housework equally report the highest relationship and sexual satisfaction. The bad news is that couples who follow traditional ideas about what a wife should do report the least satisfaction and the most conflict. So couples looking for happiness in the years after their wedding day might consider updating old ceremonies, or crafting new ones, that reinforce their commitment to equality from Day One.

Stephanie Coontz is the author of “Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage” and is Director of Research at the Council on Contemporary Families. Her new book, For Better AND Worse: The Problematic Past and Challenging Future of Marriage, is forthcoming in 2025.

Everyone’s relationships are different, with diverse goals, intentions, behaviors, and structures. Interviews with sexual minority, cisgender women (whom we’ll refer to as LGB+ women from now on) left us reflecting about how we can all, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, think more expansively about sex, relationships, and sexual health.

Young LGB+ women are often left out of the picture by researchers and medical professionals  when it comes to sexual health- even though they’re actually at increased risk for getting sexually transmitted infections and becoming unintentionally pregnant. Similarly, LGB+ women are often left out of the picture when we talk about sex and relationships, because so many of the messages we receive about romantic and sexual relationships focus on straight couples and families. Whether we’re aware of it or not, that messaging can influence how we act in our own relationships with our partners. This is sometimes referred to as heteronormative sexual scripts.

What we wanted to find out:

Since heteronormative sexual scripts are pervasive and often unavoidable, we wanted to learn more about how these scripts show up for LGB+ women in their sexual relationships. Thus, our recent study, Queering LGB+ Cisgender Women’s Sexual Health Scripts, explored these questions: How do heteronormative sexual scripts show up in LGB+ women’s sexual relationships and health promotion decisions? If heteronormative sexual scripts do not appear in their relationships, how do LGB+ women construct sexual health scripts that are grounded in their experiences as LGB+ women?

What we did:

To answer our questions, we interviewed 22 LGB+ women about their decision-making processes when it came to their sexual health and relationships (like preventing STIs, condom use, and birth control). Our goal with these interviews was not to say that our sample reflects the sexual experiences or decisions of all LGB+ women. Rather, we used interviews to better understand a shared, lived experience more in-depth, which we can use to inform other research, social and medical policy, or relationship education. We got to listen to LGB+ women tell us about their relationship experiences so we could share the meaningful patterns with others as family and relationship scientists.

Finding 1: Redefining Sex

The women in our sample all discussed expansive definitions of sex. Participants’ definitions of sex included many components such as individual pleasure, sexual behaviors beyond penile/vaginal intercourse (e.g., touching, oral sex, sex toy use), and a focus on altruism and partner pleasure. In other words, re-defining sex had less to do with the “what” (i.e., behaviors) and more to do with the “why” (motivations, like promoting a partner’s pleasure). In this way, LGB+ women moved beyond heteronormative sexual scripts (which would say that sex really boils down to penile-vaginal intercourse) and thought creatively and expansively about what sex can look and feel like.

Finding 2: Leaning into Trust

A second pattern we noticed was that many women talked about establishing trust with potential partners as part of health promotion strategies. Through conversation, STI testing, or just getting to know their partner, they learned that they were able to trust partners to protect their sexual health. This new sexual script contrasted with a heteronormative script, which would tell us that women often act as gatekeepers around potential sexual partners who can’t be trusted. By instead falling back on trust, LGB+ women also enacted agency in their relationships, often sitting in the driver’s seat of their own sexual health decisions. (This was the case regardless of whether participants were partnered to someone of the same or a different gender.)

Finding 3: Thinking Inside and Outside the Box about Safer Sex

We also asked women about using barriers like condoms or dental dams (which are used for oral sex) to prevent STI transmission or pregnancy. Interestingly, while our participants often talked about using condoms to prevent unintended pregnancy, women did not often did not discuss using condoms as STI prevention during interviews. Centering pregnancy prevention over STI prevention is a common heteronormative sexual script. Emphasizing pregnancy prevention  also carried over into conversations about dental dams, which women did not embrace or discuss favorably (often categorizing them as unaffordable, uncomfortable, or inaccessible). Basically, if the barrier didn’t directly prevent pregnancy like condoms, it wasn’t endorsed by LGB+ women. However, women also used creative, expansive health promotion strategies like washing hands and sex toys, or urinating before or after sex with partners. In that way, LGB+ women moved beyond the idea that a barrier method is the only way to practice safer sex.

Takeaways

All in all, LGB+ women’s stories taught us that their relationships and sexual health promotion strategies are creative, expansive, and reflect their own needs and goals. Although some beliefs about sexual health were influenced by dominant heterosexual relationships and scripts (for example, a focus on pregnancy prevention over STI prevention), LGB+ women teach us that there are ways to think with and beyond what we’re told when it comes to our sexual health and relationships.

Mari Tarantino, M.S. (she/her) is a Ph.D. student at Virginia Tech studying Human Development and Family Science. Her research focuses on sexually, gender, and romantically marginalized individuals in partnerships and family contexts, as well as interdisciplinary perspectives on LGBTQ+ health. Her dissertation research will explore how transgender men and their partners make decisions about HIV prevention strategies. You can follow her on Twitter @mari_tarantino

Rose Wesche, Ph.D. (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Science at Virginia Tech. Her research focuses on how diverse interpersonal relationships, including friendships, romantic relationships, and casual sexual relationships, are associated with adolescents’ and young adults’ well-being. Rose uses diverse statistical methodologies and theoretical perspectives to examine how interpersonal relationships create risks and benefits related to health. You can follow her on Twitter @RoseWesche

Reprinted from the Council on Contemporary Families Press Release

AUSTIN, TX – May 11, 2023 

Here’s a great tip for dads who want to give their partners a Mother’s Day gift that will last all year long.  Skip the flowers and commit to sharing more of the invisible mental and emotional work of anticipating the family’s needs over the next year and planning how to meet them. Such cognitive labor is a major but largely unrecognized source of stress and depression for mothers. But here’s the good news: Fathers who take more responsibility for such work report less stress and depression than those who don’t. Sharing the load can make for a Happy Father’s Day as well as a Happy Mother’s Day.  

A briefing paper released today from the Council on Contemporary Families, “Managing the household is a stressor for mothers but not fathers,” summarizes new research on how the sharing of cognitive or mental labor, such as anticipating and monitoring family needs, organizing and planning, and making decisions, related to mothers’ and fathers’ psychological well-being during Fall 2020.

In an article published this week online in Society and Mental Health, professors Richard Petts (Ball State University) and Daniel Carlson (University of Utah) used data from 1,765 partnered parents from the Study on Parents’ Divisions of Labor During COVID-19 to examine parents’ time in, and division of, cognitive labor in Fall 2020. They also examined how the division of cognitive labor related to mothers’ and fathers’ stress levels and depressive symptoms.

Petts and Carlson found that mothers spent over twice as much time on cognitive labor per week compared to fathers (5 hours vs. 2 hours per week). Notably, mothers reported that the division of cognitive labor was more unequal than the division of housework and childcare, suggesting that inequalities in the often “hidden” and never-ending mental work required to run a household may be at the core of persistent inequalities in domestic labor.

When examining associations between the share of cognitive labor and parents’ psychological well-being, mothers who were more responsible for cognitive labor reported feeling more stressed and depressed. However, fathers who took on greater responsibility for cognitive labor actually reported feeling less stressed and depressed.

As Petts and Carlson summarize the takeaway: “As long as gendered norms of care and the parenting double standard persist, gender inequality in domestic labor and well-being will continue. We need to change our cultural expectations about carework and provide more structural opportunities for fathers to be more engaged at home (e.g., remote work, paid leave) to reduce the burdens on mothers, reduce mothers’ stress, and promote greater gender equality at home.”

FURTHER INFORMATION

To contact lead author Richard Petts, email him at rjpetts@bsu.edu. Follow him on Twitter @pettsric 

Follow Daniel Carlson on Twitter @DanielCarlson_1 

LINKS

Brief report: https://sites.utexas.edu/contemporaryfamilies/2023/05/03/cognitive-labor-and-parents-well-being-brief-report/
Press release: https://sites.utexas.edu/contemporaryfamilies/2023/05/03/cognitive-labor-and-parents-well-being-press-release/

ABOUT CCF

The Council on Contemporary Families, based at the University of Texas-Austin, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of family researchers and practitioners that seeks to further a national understanding of how America’s families are changing and what is known about the strengths and weaknesses of different family forms and various family interventions.

The Council helps keep journalists informed of new and forthcoming research on gender and family-related issues via the CCF Network. To locate researchers or request copies of previous research briefs, please contact Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education, at coontzs@msn.com, cell 360-556-9223.

Follow us! @CCF_Families and https://www.facebook.com/contemporaryfamilies

AMW: How has our cultural emphasis on independence and self-reliance led to a caregiving crisis? And what does that crisis look like?

ES: Allow me to take you back with me to my 11th grade English class. I remember the moment our teacher read us Henry David Thoreau, the way her voice deepened and her spine straightened. We were, these physical changes implied, about to confront deep truths about the very nature of life. Pay attention!

Now, I don’t want to pick on Henry here, or discount his many worthy observations…that said, so much of our anti-care, anti-dependency culture can be traced back to this book and his reputation as a real American truth-teller ever since. Thoreau, who found it “wholesome to be alone;” who believed that a “man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone;” who left his home and family and “went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” If I could wave a magic wand, I would make it so Henry wrote a book about the magic of independence and going away from home and his sister, let’s call her Henny, wrote a book about the magic of dependency, and staying put and raising children or caring for her parents with dementia. “A woman is rich in proportion to the number of things which she can not afford to let alone.” Imagine if we also read that in 11th grade English, and it was presented as another, equally important path to finding deeper truths. Imagine how we would value care!

We don’t have support for caregivers because we don’t value care down to our very core. We don’t value care in practical, economic or political terms. And we don’t value it in psychological, philosophical or spiritual terms, as individuals or a collective—it is simply, sadly, not part of the bigger story we tell ourselves about what it means to be a human and live a meaningful life. In my book I look at how that happened, and how that can change. Though I want to be abundantly clear that I don’t think care and dependence are only for women and solitude and independence are only for men. The dream is for both ways of being to be seen by society as equally valuable and fertile–and for people to embrace them no matter their gender identity.

AMW: How can care transcend mere practicality and enrich our lives with meaning, purpose, and a deeper connection to others?

ES: One of the big problems now is that many people are so overwhelmed by the practical demands of care–inevitable in a country that fails to support parents and caregivers and expects them to do everything on their own –that they lack the bandwidth to fully experience the emotional richness of care. This makes me so mad! So many of us are stuck in a battle to make care practically possible, that we don’t get to experience it in all its fullness.

That said, we owe it to ourselves to try to find those moments of epiphany, metamorphosis and transcendence in care, which is one of the richest experiences humans can have. Also, doing so can make the experience more meaningful and even enjoyable. The important of attention, and truly seeing another, has long been held up as an essential component of living an ethical life. Except, surprise, for a long time philosophers didn’t see this in the context of care. Really, is there anywhere the need to really see another, understand them, and anticipate their needs is more essential or complex than in parenting and caregiving? Having someone dependent on us, really puts us to the test- are we able to break through our subjective reality and make space for another? Or, keep on insisting their is one way to live, one way to experience the world, and we have it all figured out.

Or, let’s take spirituality. Care offers us so many opportunities to connect with something we may call divine, the force of life, the mystery of it all. We are, according to the bible, made in the image of God. Why not see our moments of care as important, spiritually and theologically, as going to church or volunteering for the need outside the home. As one source I spoke to for the book said, sometimes the needy are in our home! And yet, those who give to their families, people they can’t walk away from, have never been held up as saints or the righteous. It’s bananas.

AMW: How can we address issues of gender equity within the context of care?

ES: This is a one-two policy and culture change punch. We have many examples of one being not enough; dads were offered paid leave but didn’t take it because they would be punished at work, or dads trying to do more but being held back by a lack of structural support.

In my book I focused on a few things when it comes to men and care. First of all, men can care, they also have the neurological wiring to experience pleasure from giving care, and care changes them physiologically. Indeed, as much of this research shows, we don’t care because we love. We love because we care.

Second, men still do not do enough care for children or ill, older or disabled people, but they are doing way more than their fathers or grandfathers did. Also, many of them like it. They report it to be meaningful and a big part of their identity. But they do need our support because many of them were not raised with training on how to care like girls are.

I hope my book helps men see care as more than an obligation, and, ideally, more than a right. I hope my book helps men see care as an opportunity. Something that could expand their horizons and add meaningful complexity to their lives,  if they’d only let it.

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

Marriage is often regarded as one of the most vital aspects of Hispanic culture. This is largely attributed to the traditional Hispanic cultural values— Familismo. Marriage is not just a union between two individuals, but an extension of the most significant social network – family – over other forms of social relationships, such as friendship networks and professional networks. Because of its cultural significance, marriage can impact many aspects of life, such as health, happiness, and quality of life among Hispanic adults.

One’s social network tends to shrink in later life for three reasons. First, language barriers may prevent making friends and participating in social activities. One in three Hispanic adults are immigrants in the United States, and English may not be their first language. Second, not all Hispanic immigrants or Hispanic Americans are fully acculturated to the mainstream U.S. culture, and therefore, are left behind in cultural and political participation. Third, from a life course perspective, some older adults experience aging-related changes, such as retirement from work (e.g., partial loss of professional network) and functional limitations (e.g., hearing impairment, joint pain). These aging-related changes may make their existing social network smaller and make it challenging for some older adults to be socially engaged. As a result, Hispanic older adults may rely more heavily on their spouses and immediate family for companionship and socialization.

Previous research has shown that the quality of close social relationships — spouses, family, and other social circles — can impact older adults’ health and happiness. One of the longest-running 85-year-old (and counting) research studies by Harvard University showed that people who maintained positive social relationships, regardless of the size of their social circle, are more likely to be happy in later life. Also, a number of research studies show that social relationships are linked with optimal aging, health, and well-being.

So, perhaps it sounds like having a good social relationship is all that matters? Not so fast. Family sociologists Kristi Williams, Adrianne French, and Daniel Carlson explain that marriages can have different impacts on one’s life. On the one hand, the marital resource model suggests that marriage can provide an essential social circle (e.g., a sense of belonging) and a variety of other forms of economic and instrumental support. On the other hand, the marital crisis model suggests that a “bad” marriage and relationship conflicts are major sources of stress, which leads to mental health problems. And it is also possible that people who have good mental health, resources (e.g., financial resources), and social skills just get married and stay married.

What happens when a marital relationship is not entirely positive? Two things. Marital quality matters. Having a close social relationship is one thing, but the quality of that relationship may impact health and well-being. Culture matters. When people value certain aspects of life, such as family relationships, based on their cultural briefs and norms, the impacts on health and well-being become larger. In other words, a “good” marriage may provide more health benefits, whereas “bad” marriage may harm health even more among people with a family-oriented cultural background. Let us also not forget that a marital relationship can be both good in some aspects and bad in other aspects.

Putting these puzzle pieces together, we decided to learn more about marital quality, which is important to our health, and Hispanic older adults who have unique demographic characteristics (e.g., high % of immigrants) and culturally value family relationships (i.e., Familismo) in the United States.

In our recent research, we looked at the relationships between marital quality and depressive symptoms among older married Hispanic adults aged 51 years and older in the United States. We analyzed the data from the 2016 and 2018 U.S. Health and Retirement Study. Positive marital quality of Hispanic older adults is assessed by their ratings of whether their spouses understand their feelings, can be relied on for serious problems, and listen to their worries. Negative marital quality is assessed based on their rating of how often their spouses make too many demands, criticize them, let them down, and get on their nerves.

We found that both positive and negative marital quality are related to the number of depressive symptoms reported. Positive marital quality is protective of depressive symptoms and negative marital quality is detrimental to depressive symptoms. Indeed, Hispanic older adults who reported higher positive marital quality scores (1-4 points: low-high) by 1 point, had about 24% fewer depressive symptoms. Those who reported higher negative marital quality scores (1-4 points: low-high) by 1 point had about 24% greater number of depressive symptoms.

Our research suggests that promoting marital relationships is a public health investment. Family support and social support policies are public health policies in the United States. Throughout adult life stages, aging is related to changing social networks, which may lead to greater reliance on close family relationships in later life. The impact of social relationships and relationship quality on health may differ based on sociocultural background. In this respect, marital quality can be more imperative to Hispanic older adults, as some of them may face limited social circles due to language and cultural barriers in U.S. society, despite the cultural significance of familism. A better understanding of marital quality and sociocultural characteristics can help develop culturally sensitive public health and family support policies. Our research project will continue disentangling complex relationships between marital quality and health among Hispanic older adults. We believe that other cultural characteristics, such as religiosity and alcohol consumption as a stress coping mechanism, can help us better understand what sociocultural factors matter to the health of Hispanic older adults.

About authors:

Jaminette M. Nazario-Acevedo, MPH, is a doctoral student in the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) Gerontology Doctoral Program. Her research interests are aging and health among Hispanic populations in the United States and Puerto Rico. Follow her on Twitter @Jaminettena

Takashi Yamashita, PhD, MA, MPH, FGSA is a professor of sociology and gerontology at UMBC. His research interests are the wider benefits of lifelong learning and education over the life course, health literacy, gerontology education, and social statistics education. You can follow him on Twitter @dryamataka

Jennifer Roebuck Bulanda, PhD, MA, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Gerontology at Miami University. Her research interests include family relationships and their connections with physical and mental health, particularly during the later life course. You can follow her on Twitter at @JenBulanda

J. Scott Brown, PhD, MA, MS, FGSA is Professor and Chair of Sociology and Gerontology and a Scripps Gerontology Center Research Fellow at Miami University. His research interests are inequalities in health across the life course, especially racial and ethnic inequalities, and statistical and quantitative methodologies.

A woman’s independence is often linked to her ability to control her body and her reproductive choices. If women can prevent and plan for pregnancies, they can control not only their bodies but other life decisions. Although the women I interviewed do not necessarily identify with being part of a childfree cultural movement, there is no denying that their individual choices to not parent are part of a choir of voices challenging the expectations of womanhood. One of my participants, Nancy (44), talked about never wanting children and wondered if there was something wrong with her because she never felt the ticking clock:

“Um, I have never wanted children. That’s something that I have known. Gosh, since I was young. And I’ll you know, and I think norms are cultural norms. And society kind of puts a lot of pressures. And I know, I’ve gone through a stage in my life where I’ve questioned it. Even when I was 38-39. I remember seeing my, my doctor and I was like, can you do like a hormone check to maybe like, check, because I’ve never had this like, ticking clock. I just never had had this desire to have children. I love children, I was a school counselor. But personally, I’ve never had a desire to, to have children.”

The women in my study are not women torn between motherhood and profession. Most did not feel they had to make a choice between professional goals or their desire to be mothers. Most of them never wanted to be mothers, nor did they see having children as essential to their lives. They wanted to pursue a life of independence on their terms, and motherhood was incompatible with that lifestyle. Sam (38) also felt she was not emotionally healthy enough to raise a child and thought it would be selfish of her to raise a child without first raising herself:

“Um I don’t want to put another being through what I went through, and I don’t feel

healthy enough that I actually have the capacity to raise a human being. So that’s part of it. Um, that’s absolutely part of it. And like, you know, I think my mother never should have had kids, like she wasn’t capable of raising and caring for beings the way they need. Um, and then the other part is, like, you know, I would call it somewhat jokingly being selfish, but like, I have so much work to do re-raising myself, and putting it like, that I didn’t have as a kid … I am the one, the only one I can get that from. So, I’m already raising a person and it’s me.”

Sam may have been joking (somewhat), but the role of nurturing can be multifaceted. Sam is not incorrect to acknowledge the role we play in nurturing ourselves. For some people, it may take a lifetime of self-care to make them whole. The women in my study are not all carefree following ducks in a park. Some of them are responsible for others in their lives. Two of the women have power of attorney for ailing parents, and others are caretakers for a parent or other family member. They are not immature or selfish. Some of the women in my study took care of others when they themselves were still children and had adult responsibilities. Although this has been viewed as a form of selfishness, I contend that these women have every right to live an autonomous life. Caring for one’s self, including physical and mental health, should not be interpreted as being selfish in the conventional sense of the word. These women have chosen to focus on self-care.

A woman’s body is the battlefield for which the cultural war of motherhood vs. non-motherhood is waged. Yet, this is a war where no one can win. Society has created divisions within divisions, and the divisions of women who are mothers and those who are not mothers are seemingly endless: women who gave birth vaginally or mothers who had cesarean births, women who breastfed or women who bottle fed, women who received an epidural and those who did not, women who carried their baby in their body or women who used a surrogate, and this does even begin to address the women who do not have children voluntarily and the women who wanted children and were not able to conceive. Even the terms childless and childfree are both problematic. These create a moral division between women who want to have children and could not, and women who never wanted children.

Motherhood is not the only important role women can play in society. Single and childfree women are not expendable. Women can fulfill a myriad of roles that help make society better, even if they are not wives and mothers. I argue that womanhood and motherhood are not synonymous and they should be viewed as independent identities. This separation would allow for a broader landscape to describe and define women who choose not to have children. They have chopped down their own trees, cleared the brush, and they are entitled to live a life for which they have created the path for. They are not asking others to live with their choices, nor do they want to be forced to live by the decisions of others. Therefore, there is no need to feel pity for the childfree woman. She has bought her own bed, assembled it herself, and is perfectly content to sleep in it alone – if she chooses.

Kimberly Martinez Phillips is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Sociology Department at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. Her dissertation studies the lives of childfree, never-married single women of color. Follow her on Twitter @ichoosefeminism

It’s nice to be liked—and it even comes with benefits in the workplace. Likeable individuals are seen as nice, sincere, good-natured, and trustworthy, and consequently are more likely to be rewarded at work. Likeability is so widely recognized as desirable for workers that nearly every business-focused website has articles providing tips on how to be seen as more likeable at work.

In a newly published study in Community, Work & Family, we considered whether workers are seen as more likeable when they take longer periods of paid parental leave. While numerous studies document workplace penalties for workers who take paid parental leave (such as assumptions of lower job commitment), we anticipated some positive consequences as well that have mostly been overlooked. Specifically, we suspected that parental leave-taking may demonstrate concern and compassion for others and consequently enhance perceived likeability. To test this idea, we conducted a survey experiment involving approximately 1,600 U.S. participants to assess the general public’s perception of how taking paid parental leave affects perceptions of worker likeability.

We find that workers are generally perceived as more likeable when they take longer periods of paid parental leave. But, there are some important gender differences. For mothers, likeability increases with each week of paid leave-taking. Consistent with intensive motherhood norms, mothers are seen as more likeable when they take longer leaves because they are demonstrating commitment to parenting and adhering to broader gender norms. In contrast, fathers are seen as more likeable when they take most, but not all, of the parental leave offered to them. Although fathers are now expected to be engaged parents, they are also still expected to be breadwinners. Our findings likely reflect these competing expectations, as fathers are seen as most likeable when they appear to balance both parenting and work obligations.

These results provide important nuance to our understanding of workplace consequences associated with parental leave-taking. Americans are largely supportive of paid parental leave policies, but remain fearful about possible workplace repercussions from taking leave. On one hand, our results could be seen as reinforcing these concerns. Mothers are seen as most likeable when they prioritize family over work which could reinforce gender stereotypes and workplace disadvantages for women. And, fathers are indeed penalized if they take especially long periods of paid parental leave. On the other hand, our study demonstrates that there may be positive workplace consequences to leave-taking as well. Knowing this may lead workers to be more willing to take parental leave given that likeability is a desired and rewarded workplace trait. In fact, our analyses also suggest that more likeable workers (both mothers and fathers) are more likely to be recommended for raises and promotions. Thus, expanding access to paid parental leave and encouraging workers to take leave may improve perceived likeability, which may ultimately be beneficial for workers’ careers and help promote gender equality in paid labor.

Richard J. Petts is a Professor of Sociology at Ball State University. You can read more about his research at www.richardpetts.com and can follow him on X @pettsric.

Trenton D. Mize is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Purdue University. You can read more about his research at www.trentonmize.com and can follow him on X @MizeTrenton.

Gayle Kaufman is Nancy and Erwin Maddrey Professor of Sociology and Gender & Sexuality Studies at Davidson College. You can read more about their research at www.gaylekaufman.com and can follow them on X @gakaufman22.

This picture was found on unsplash.com. Caption: “Workers who take paid parental leave are seen as more likeable.”

Christian colleges and universities make up around one-third of all colleges and universities in the United States, and many of these schools maintain policies that make it difficult for people of different genders to interact with each other in campus housing. For example, while an increasing number of secular colleges and universities offer gender-neutral housing, many Christian colleges and universities refuse to do so. Why might this be the case? In our new study, we argue that many U.S. Christian colleges and universities’ decision to maintain “gendered” housing, roommate, and visitation policies may be informed not only by their conservative, cisnormative (the assumption that everyone identifies as the gender they were assigned at birth) views on gender, but also by their heteronormative (a world view that promotes heterosexuality as the normal or preferred sexual orientation) views of sexuality.

Through an analysis of residence life policies at 609 Christian colleges and universities in the United States, we discovered that 27% of Christian colleges and universities segregate women and men into different residence halls. In addition, 86% of Christian colleges and universities require that students room with someone of the same gender. And 72% of Christian colleges and universities maintain gender-specific visitation policies that require students to follow a strict set of rules if they wish to visit the room of someone of a different gender, such as signing in at a front desk, leaving doors propped open, and keeping lights turned on.

Schools’ conservative, cisnormative beliefs about gender certainly inform their decisions to maintain these policies. Specifically, members of white, conservative Christian denominations are more likely to believe that there are only two biologically determined genders and that women and men are characterized by innate, essential gender differences. Such beliefs likely influence some Christian colleges and universities’ decision to place all students into one of two types of residence halls—women’s dorms or men’s dorms—and then enforce roommate and visitation policies that assume all students identify as women or men.

In addition to adhering to such beliefs about gender, most Christian colleges and universities expect their students to adhere to conservative Christian norms regarding appropriate sexual behavior, such as avoiding premarital sexual intercourse. LGBTQ students are also discriminated against at many Christian colleges and universities; for example, in line with prior research, 28% of Christian colleges and universities in our sample explicitly prohibit same-sex relationships. Because many Christian colleges and universities believe that their students are (or should be) heterosexual, and want their students to refrain from sexual intercourse, they place students into rooms and residence halls where they cannot easily be alone with a person of a different gender.

Yet, our work also suggests a deep irony in schools’ adoption of gendered residence life policies. Specifically, the same schools that condemn same-sex relationships and seek to exclude LGBTQ students from their campus actually craft policies that provide more opportunities for lesbian and gay students (as opposed to straight students) to live alongside, room with, or visit the dorms of their romantic partners. Thus, the assumptions about sexuality that underlie Christian colleges and universities’ gendered housing, roommate, and visitation policies are internally contradictory in that they have the potential to enable some of the same behaviors (e.g., same-sex dating) that they seek to prohibit and undermine some of the same behaviors (e.g., heterosexual dating) that those schools support. 

To be sure, we do not suggest that it is easier to be LGBTQ on a conservative Christian campus; many schools continue to punish students who are caught dating people of the same sex, and many schools have chilly campus climates that make it difficult for LGBTQ students to be comfortably out. But what our research does suggest is that schools’ heteronormative residence life policies are not firmly tethered to reality. Crafting residence life policies that assume that all students are men or women who are attracted to the so-called “opposite sex” inevitably means that some students will be living alongside people of the gender to which they are attracted. 

The internal contradictions underlying Christian colleges and universities’ residence life policies suggest that Christian colleges and universities’ residence life policies are in need of rethinking and that attempts to enforce cisnormative, heteronormative policies simply will not work. Although evidence suggests that gendered residence life policies have a negative impact on LGBTQ students’ (and especially transgender and nonbinary students’) mental health, current U.S. Department of Education policy enables religiously affiliated colleges and universities to maintain them. To challenge this state of affairs, organizations like the Religious Exemption Accountability Project have filed lawsuits against many Christian colleges and universities’ policies on gender and sexuality. Many LGBTQ students and their allies also continue to mobilize in favor of more inclusive, equitable policies at their schools. It is possible that such efforts will convince more schools to adopt gender-neutral residence life policies in the years to come.

Jessica Schachle-Gordon is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Oklahoma State University. You can follow her on Twitter @JessicaSchachle

Gabby Gomez is a Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology department at Oklahoma State University. Follow her on Twitter @gabgo128

Jonathan S. Coley is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Oklahoma State University. You can learn more about his work here and follow him on Twitter @jcoleysociology

Dan Morrison is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. You can follow him on Twitter @danielrmorrison

Reprinted from Council on Contemporary Families Brief Reports published on May 31, 2023

Recent infant formula shortages in the United States have reignited debates about the importance of breastfeeding for child health and development. Major health and medical organizations unanimously recommend that mothers exclusively breastfeed their infants for six months or more, and breastfeeding has become a hallmark of ideal parenting. Children who are breastfed generally have lower rates of child obesity, fewer behavior and conduct disorders in childhood, and higher cognitive test scores compared to children who are not breastfed.

Although over 80% of infants receive some breastmilk, only 26% are exclusively breastfed for the recommended six months. This is partially because breastfeeding is time-intensive and requires a lot of support. As a result, breastfeeding is socially stratified in the United States and is most common among those with the most resources. For example, women with a college degree are twice as likely to exclusively breastfeed for six months compared to those with a high school degree.

Public health initiatives suggest that increasing breastfeeding rates among populations that are less likely to breastfeed is an important strategy for improving children’s health and development. But a growing body of research suggests that benefits of breastfeeding may have been overstated. We cannot conduct randomized controlled trials for breastfeeding, so it’s difficult to tell whether it is directly causing improvements in children’s health, or if breastfed children tend to have better outcomes because of their parent’s other socioeconomic advantages. Studies using sophisticated statistical techniques to account for these complicated dynamics find that, all else equal, the causal effect of breastfeeding is weak or nonexistent. For example, when we compare siblings in the same family who were fed differently (one sibling was breastfed and the other was not, or they were breastfed for different amounts of time), they tend to have very similar physical, behavioral, and cognitive development.

The lack of an average causal benefit of breastfeeding, however, does not mean that it confers no advantages.  Averages can obscure substantial variation, particularly for behaviors like breastfeeding that are highly influenced by social and economic factors. In such cases, asking if breast is best is too simplistic a question. Better questions to ask are: Does breastfeeding benefit all children equally? Or do some children reap greater benefits than others?

I conducted a study with my co-authors Kerri Raissian and Jiyeon Kim to answer these questions. Our study analyzed data from a longitudinal nationally representative sample to evaluate the relationship between breastfeeding and a comprehensive set of longer-term developmental outcomes for children ages 4-14. Specifically, we examined body mass index (BMI), three measures of behavioral development, and five measures of cognitive skills. We used statistical techniques to carefully compare children who were breastfed to children who were never breastfed but had very similar characteristics. We also grouped children based on their likelihood of breastfeeding and compared the effects across these different groups to assess whether everyone benefitted equally. We found that breastfeeding provides small benefits for children’s behavioral development, math scores, and academic ability, but only among those that are highly likely to breastfeed. We also found small benefits for children’s reading comprehension and vocabulary, but these effects were concentrated among those who were least likely to breastfeed.

One key takeaway from our study is that breastfeeding does not equally benefit everyone. What explains this variation?

One potential answer is that people experience the costs of breastfeeding differently. Although breastmilk is “free,” breastfeeding is not costless in American society. Breastfeeding is associated with prolonged earnings losses for women, in part due to lack of paid parental leave and time out of the workforce. This economic penalty may be more easily absorbed by women who are financially secure but is a more significant hardship for low-income or single women. Lack of economic resources may offset some of the benefits of breastfeeding for these children who are less likely to breastfeed. This could explain why we found that breastfeeding is related to better behavior, math scores, and academic ability among those who are most likely to breastfeed.

Another potential source of variation is that people experience the benefits of breastfeeding differently. If more advantaged parents are already providing an optimal home environment or parenting in ways that promote their children’s health or cognitive skills, they may not receive an additional boost from breastfeeding. For example, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that all parents read to their children from birth through kindergarten, and it is possible that parents who adopt this practice are also likely to follow the AAP recommendations for breastfeeding. If parents who are less likely to breastfeed do not engage in these early literacy activities to the same extent, the benefits of breastfeeding could be amplified among this group. This might explain why we found that breastfeeding is linked with better reading comprehension and vocabulary among children who are least likely to breastfeed. Parents may be less equipped to compensate for quantitative skills given that we did not find this pattern for math scores.

The second key takeaway is that the benefits of breastfeeding are modest. For example, among children who were least likely to breastfeed, those who breastfed for 6 months or more had about 30% of a standard deviation higher reading comprehension score than those who were never breastfed. In comparison, four extra days of mother-child shared reading time per month increases reading achievement by 32% of a standard deviation. On a broader scale, expansions in Universal Pre-K are linked with larger increases in letter-word identification (79% of a standard deviation) and spelling scores (64% of a standard deviation).

To be clear, we are not saying that breastfeeding isn’t an ideal source of nutrition for infants, or that other parenting practices or policies are direct substitutes. Rather, parents and policymakers should consider breastfeeding as one potential tool among others that may provide comparable or larger benefits for longer-term child development. This is especially useful information given the very real tradeoffs that many mothers make. It may also help to relieve some of the stigma and shame that some mothers experience when they are unable to breastfeed.

Our study provides insights for public policy. We highlight socioeconomic and racial inequality in breastfeeding within the United States. The US provides a weak safety net for parents of young children and offers no federal paid family leave. Factors such as race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, education, income, marital status, and employment are strongly related to the likelihood that a mother will breastfeed.

Furthermore, we demonstrate that the social context not only shapes who breastfeeds in American society, but also who benefits most. Efforts to increase breastfeeding rates among populations that are least likely to breastfeed are unlikely to close disparities in child development. The benefits of breastfeeding are largely concentrated among the populations that are already likely to breastfeed. To level the playing field, rather than merely telling mothers that “breast is best,” policies should focus on reducing structural barriers and economic costs for mothers who want to breastfeed. For many mothers in the United States, breastfeeding is ideal but unattainable.

Jessica Houston Su is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. You can follow them on Twitter: @jesshoustonsu