A January Huffington Post article reported on a recent study that showed that 43.5 percent of single mothers get fewer than seven hours of sleep, and 52 percent wake up feeling unrested. Kristi Williams, sociologist and senior scholar for the Council on Contemporary Families raised some good questions for HuffPo readers. In the reporter’s words, Williams noted that “the study doesn’t actually show whether single parenthood causes sleep problems. Because single parenthood is also concentrated among poor and racial minority groups, it’s hard to tell whether being a single parent, being poor or being part of a certain minority group is a stronger factor in poor sleep and poor health.” Williams put it succinctly: “Family policy is health policy.” more...

In the midst of the Vietnam War, universities across the country became centers of political dissent against U.S. imperialism abroad and the quagmire that continued for years. Faculty and students galvanized behind anti-war messages that pushed the boundaries of traditional classroom environments. On the 24^th of March in 1965, the faculty at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor came together to disrupt business as usual. Over two hundred faculty cancelled classes in favor of anti-war discussions, seminars, and lectures. These open forums lasted hours – upwards of 12 hours at a time – and engulfed the campus in critical discourse. Shortly after, Columbia University adapted a similar model and soon, so did many other schools. This was the birth of the teach-in.

In 2016, a time in our history when the U.S. incarcerates more of its own citizens than any other country, the time for disruption of business as usual at the university is overdue. As the #BlackLivesMatter movement continues to push the socio-political discourses on police brutality, mass incarceration, and the assaults on communities of color, the call for faculty at Framingham State University to connect our classrooms and teaching in alliance with the movement emerged through conversation, and this is the story of a new kind of teach-in we’re holding this week.

When we talked about a teach-in, we paused at the question, how? Like other colleges and universities, our campus includes many students who are tied to full-time or near full-time employment and intensive family commitments. Students, open to learning and activism, are stretched thin by financial and family burdens. Thus, while #BlackLivesMatter teach-ins outside of traditional classrooms have been occurring at other institutions across the country (Cornell and Missouri to name two), our model was centered within our classrooms, and evolved into a campus-wide re-direction of our courses for a week this semester.

The initial conversations was just with me and my soc colleagues. As sociologists, connecting our classrooms with ongoing issues of social justice is routine. Soc classes are (at times) a site for activism, a place that can push learning towards deconstructing power, and a space that offers transformative lenses on the world. Such ideas are not unique to sociology, but for many other disciplines, the connections between social justice, activism, and teaching are not so intrinsic. We knew we could work with sociology. Yet, we wanted to reach across all the disciplines.

My colleague had a simple idea: why not just ask our fellow faculty if they would adapt their Spring course content to relate to the #BlackLivesMatter movement? Would they be willing to adjust their courses during the same week? We asked…and had 30 classes enrolled after a day of mentioning it to colleagues. And now, for the week of February 22-26, over 88 faculty from 30+ disciplines in 143 classes will explicitly link #BlackLivesMatter to their course content and student communities.

The plans have been remarkable. Communication Arts Professor Leslie Starobin will discuss Life Magazine’s coverage of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s with her Photojournalism students. Psychology Professor Dawn Vreven’s Cognitive Psychology students will look at research related to implicit bias. Flint, Michigan, is a focus in Biochemistry—as well as in Counseling Psychology. Sociology students are taking on topics ranging from Black lesbian families and respectability politics, to the case for reparations, and the foundations of mass incarceration. Many professors report having changed more than just this week in their classes. Online classes, graduate classes, freshman classes, and senior seminars have all found a way to connect.

Colleagues from disciplines that don’t automatically come to mind have stepped up. Physics professor Vandana Singh and her advanced physics students will examine the status of Black physicists in their field. Economics professor Luis Rosero and his Money and Banking students will look at “The Color of Money” and red lining. Computer scientist David Keil and his Information Technology students will examine the role of phone-videoing and social media in revealing the details of events that have needed to come to light.

The culmination is a Town Hall Meeting on Wednesday, March 2. It is a chance for everyone to hear from others about what they did. Our planning for this event, too, is pretty basic. Students will speak in brief at the beginning about the origins and influence of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. The central activity is people sharing their teach-in experiences from the past week—rather than some kind of panel or lecture. The creation of a common space after the week of teach-in courses bridges faculty innovation, student engagement, and activism. Holistically, hundreds of distinct classroom environments from a multitude of applied perspectives will come together to deepen our community’s commitment to the #BlackLivesMatter mission. Rather than a “conclusive” event, the Town Hall Meeting will involve addressing not only where we are in the present but also where we are going.

There will be other days for panels, structured dialogue, lectures, and more planning and other focused and topical demonstrations. Students are developing a speakers’ bureau to continue focused dialogues in dorms, clubs, and classrooms. But, this day is for students and faculty to see how vast and wide the significance of #BlackLivesMatter and to consider deeper engagement. My colleagues Virginia Rutter, Lina Rincón, and Patricia Sanchez-Connally were partners in growing this idea. I’ll report back how it goes. The creation of the necessary spaces, dialogues, and momentum is the spark that bridges classrooms with activism.

Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Framingham State University in Framingham, MA.

In January of 2013, Texas became one of several states to ban Planned Parenthood and its affiliates from using public funds to pay for health care. A February 3 New England Journal of Medicine study, “Effects of Removal of Planned Parenthood from the Texas Women’s Health Program,” examined the consequences, and Joseph Potter, Professor of Sociology at University of Texas-Austin, one of the study’s co-authors, will discuss the results  at the CCF 2016 Annual Conference.

Why is this study so important?

The NEJM study demonstrates the consequences of excluding Planned Parenthood affiliates from Texas’s fee-for-service family planning program. To do this, the authors evaluated rates of contraceptive-method provision, method continuation through the program, and childbirth covered by Medicaid two years before the exclusion and two years after the exclusion. The data in this study was drawn from all Medicaid claims from 2011 through 2014. 

As for results?

Once the exclusion was in place, provision of the most effective reversible methods of contraception (such as IUDs, implants, and injectable contraception) decreased and Medicaid-paid births increased among injectable contraceptive users. Specifically, claims for IUDs and implants declined 31 percent, claims for injectable contraceptives declined 35 percent, and Medicaid-paid deliveries increased by 27 percent among users of injectable contraception. So, by excluding affiliates of abortion providers (chiefly Planned Parenthood) led to reducing women’s access to highly effective contraception and the subsequent increase in Medicaid-paid births.

Dedicated women’s health providers matter.

“Simply put, dedicated women’s health providers matter. Providers who are mission-driven and have the requisite experience and knowledge appear to be critical for the delivery of the most effective methods of contraception—IUDs, implants, and injectables. From a demographic perspective, this is important because both national studies and local studies show that these methods dramatically decrease unintended pregnancy. We also have accumulating evidence that there is unmet demand for these methods in Texas” noted Dr. Potter in a press release from the NEJM. He went on to say “While this paper does not tell us much about women’s experiences after the exclusion, we have evidence from another study, recently published in the journal of Contraception, that Planned Parenthood clients encountered barriers such as unnecessary exams, multiple visits, and additional costs as they tried to find a new provider after January 2013.”

Hear more about this study at the CCF Conference.

The roll-back on women’s access to affordable and accessible reproductive health care is at a record high in Texas and around the country. Dr. Potter will update participants on controversial topics surrounding family policy, as well as outline key aspects of the public debate at The Council on Contemporary Families 2016 Annual Conference: Families as They Really Are: Demographics, Disparities, and Debate. The conference, at University of Texas-Austin, March 4 and 5, will be host to a range of topics and debates that will engage scholars from multiple disciplines. To hear from Dr. Joseph Potter, and learn details about the CCF 2016 Annual Conference visit here.

The NEJM article is coauthored by Amanda J. Stevenson, Imelda M. Flores-Vasquez, Richard L. Allgeyer, Pete Schenkkan, and Joseph E. Potter.

Molly McNulty is a CCF Public Affairs Intern at Framingham State University. She is a joint Sociology and Education major.

I decided to take a methods course in the Women’s Studies department this spring. The first assignment was to identify a word central to our research interests and to trace the etymology of our choice. As a sociologist primarily interested in families and inequality, I decided on the word marriage, thinking it might offer insight into the transformation of American families today.

Although marriage has been a universal social institution throughout recorded history, with one exception (the Na people of China), there is no consensus on a definition of marriage.[i] When researching the word’s origins, I started where I always do, with historian and family scholar Stephanie Coontz. In her book “Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage,” Coontz details in Chapter 2 the historical challenges of defining precisely what marriage means. Across societies and time, marriage has included (but has not been limited to) the union of: two families; one man and one woman; one woman and one ghost; one man and many women; two people who have a child together; and one woman and all brothers in a family. More recently, regulations of personal unions have centered around age, race, and sex (e.g., in the U.S., minimum age limits, Loving v. Virginia, Obergefell v. Hodges).

While marriage regulates social rights and obligations, nearly every function of marriage has been achieved by a mechanism other than marriage in one society or another. According to Coontz, stories that marriage was invented either for the protection of women or to keep women oppressed are probably not true. More likely, Coontz argues, marriage was an informal social mechanism to organize the daily tasks of life, sexual relationships, and child rearing. As greater economic disparity grew, marriage transitioned from functioning as a vehicle for creating community connections into a means to consolidate resources and transmit property. The meaning of marriage shifted dramatically in the twentieth century, moving from an institutional marriage to a companionate marriage.[ii] Essentially, spouses were assumed to be each other’s friend, a role not central to earlier definitions of marriage.[iii] The second transition was from companionate marriages to individualized marriages. In this conceptualization, the emphasis is on personal development whereby marriage leads to fulfillment and growth for both partners.

It is challenging to untangle contemporary definitions of marriage from definitions of wife and husband. Wife is a noun, defined in relation to another. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, wife means “the woman someone is married to.” Wives often take on adjectives such as military wife, political wife, housewife, and so on.[iv] Author Anne Kingston reports the first appearance of the word wife in the Bible is in Genesis 2:18: “And the Lord God said, it is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.” As a concept, wife understood, quite literally, as a helpmate. Husband, on the other hand, is either a noun or a verb, meaning “a male partner in a marriage,” “to save,” “a frugal manager,” or “to till the ground, to cultivate.”

Last year, the definition of marriage was central to the U.S. Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges, which ultimately granted same-sex couples the right to marry in the U.S. While a somewhat oversimplified interpretation, the case hinged on the Justices’ acceptance that the definition of marriage evolves over time.[v] Justice Kennedy wrote, on behalf of the majority: “The history of marriage is one of both continuity and change. Changes, such as the decline of arranged marriages and the abandonment of the law of coverture, have worked deep transformations in the structure of marriage, affecting aspects of marriage once viewed as essential. These new insights have strengthened, not weakened, the institution. Changed understandings of marriage are characteristic of a Nation where new dimensions of freedom become apparent to new generations.” Kennedy added, “This view of marriage as timeless and unchanging was contradicted by an abundance of scholarly work.”[vi]

For further fun, I decided to see what Google images appear with the search term “marriage definition.” Some of my favorites, because they are insightful, funny, appalling, or thought-provoking, are posted below. Full disclosure, I skipped the hate-filled images.

Joanna R. Pepin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland. She primarily researches romantic relationships and inequality, such as power between partners and the association between romantic partnerships and social stratification.

Follow her on Twitter: @CoffeeBaseball

[i] Coontz, Stephanie. 2005. Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. Reprint edition. New York: Penguin Books.

[ii] Cherlin, Andrew J. 2004. “The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage.” Journal of Marriage and Family 66(4):848–61.

[iii] Burgess, Ernest W. and Harvey J. Locke. 1945. The Family: From Institution to Companionship. New York: American Book Company.

[iv] Kingston, Anne. 2004. The Meaning of Wife: A Provocative Look at Women and Marriage in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Picador.

[v] Obergefell v. Hodges. 576 U.S. ___ 2015. Justia Law. Retrieved February 1, 2016 (https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/576/14-556/).

[vi] Perry, David M. 2015. “A New Right Grounded in the Long History of Marriage.” The Atlantic, June 26. Retrieved February 1, 2016 (http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/history-marriage-supreme-court/396443/).

Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz, “Disclosure of Same-Sex Intimate Partner Violence to Police among Lesbian, Gays, and Bisexuals,” Social Currents. 2015

Perception of the police is a heavily discussed topic these days. At the same time, police are often under-utilized when it comes to domestic crimes, such as intimate partner violence (IPV). There is, unfortunately, a history of police homophobia, which means that they are even more under-utilized when it comes to intimate partner violence among lesbians, gays, and bisexuals (LGB). This is the area of focus provided by Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz (twitter: @XGuadalupeDiaz) who analyzed data involving comfort of the LGB community in terms of disclosing intimate partner violence to the police. Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz is an assistant professor of sociology and criminology at Framingham State University who studies applied sociology, intimate partner violence, victimization, and gender and sexualities.

In his recent article, Guadalupe-Diaz analyzed data that was collected by a local nonprofit in the southeastern part of the United States. Through local nonprofits that served LGB-identified people as well as via media popular among LGB-identified people, participants were invited to take an online survey that asked questions about the respondent’s socio-demographics, their intimate partner violence experiences, and their comfort with disclosing information to the police. Some of the questions that they were asked dealt with if the respondent felt that law enforcement officers were sensitive to issues that surround LGB individuals and if the respondent felt that law enforcement officers were homophobic. more...

The Council on Contemporary Families (CCF) is pleased to present its Twelfth Annual Media Awards at 4:15pm on Friday, March 4th at the Liberal Arts Building (118 Inner Campus Dr.), University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, at the CCF annual conference, “Families as They Really Are: Demographics, Disparities, and Debates.”

The CCF media awards honor outstanding journalism that contributes to the public understanding of contemporary family issues. Honorees are invited to speak for five minutes on emerging issues affecting American families and how CCF members and supporters can help the media cover these stories effectively.

The 2016 Award for Print Coverage of Family Issues goes to Ashley Cleek for her piece, “Filthy Water and Shoddy Sewers Plague Poor Black Belt Counties,” which appeared on Al Jazeera America. Her reporting explores the intersections of race, socioeconomic status, and geographic location in terms of a local public health crisis that continues to threaten southern communities and families. Cleek highlights the serious structural challenges these communities face and how ongoing water contamination issues endanger children and families in the “Black Belt,” a poverty-ridden region in Alabama that now faces the emergence of parasitic diseases in children in record numbers.

Ashley Cleek is a radio reporter and producer living in Birmingham, Alabama. Ashley has reported stories in Turkey, Ukraine, India, and Russia for American, German and British radio. Her stories have appeared on radio programs, The World and Marketplace and on websites such as PBS’s The Tehran Bureau, Al Jazeera America, and the Atlantic.

The 2016 Award for Radio Coverage of Family Issues goes to Dan Carsen for his four-part radio series, “Bilingual Education in the South,” originally produced for Renaissance Journalism’s Equity Reporting Fellowship Project. Among other things, this series highlights Georgia’s unusual-for-the-Deep-South efforts to increase academic success and language proficiency by using multi-lingual educational programs in K-12 curricula. Teachers, administrators, parents, and children are all given voice in this series, which blends scholastic research with the pragmatic realities faced by English-as-a-second-language children and families, especially in other Deep South states where politics and policy have not caught up with research. But Dan’s reporting emphasizes the positive impacts these programs can have on a range of outcomes, from knowledge mastery to future economic prospects, and draws attention to overlooked facets of contemporary debates about immigration.

Dan Carsen is the Southern Education Desk reporter at WBHM in Birmingham; his work has been recognized and honored by multiple groups, including previously by CCF in 2013. He’s been a teacher, a teacher trainer, a newspaper reporter, a radio commentator, and an editor at an educational publishing house. His writing and reporting have won numerous regional and national awards. His outside interests include basketball, kayaking, sailing, mountain biking, percussion, and hoping his children let him sleep.

About the CCF Media Awards: The CCF media awards were established in 2002 as part of the Council’s commitment to enhancing the public understanding of trends in American family life. “All too often, changes in U.S. family patterns are painted in stark, better-or-worse terms that ignore the nuanced and complex realities of family life today. The Awards Committee looked for articles that put individual family issues in larger social context. This kind of coverage offers the public a balanced picture of the trade-offs, strengths and weaknesses in many different family arrangements and structures,” explained Stephanie Coontz, CCF’s Director of Research and Public Education. The CCF media awards committee will call for nominations for the 2017 awards in the fall of 2016. Please visit www.contemporaryfamilies.org for information.

The Council on Contemporary Families’ 18^th Annual Conference: “Families As They Really Are: Demographics, Disparities, and Debates,” convenes experts on youth well-being and international adoption, parenting and intimate relationships, fertility, sexuality, and partner selection, transnational families, and interventions for immigrant families that work. The conference will be held at the Liberal Arts Building on March 4-5, 2016, and is hosted by the University of Texas at Austin.

Christie Boxer is Assistant Professor of Sociology & Criminal Justice at Adrian College and is Chair of CCF’s Media Awards Committee. Other media awards committee members included: Ashton Applewhite, Allison Pugh, and Arielle Kuperberg.

CCF former Co-Chair Joshua Coleman posted this on 1/25/16 for The New York Times’ Room for Debate dialogue sparked by the Times’ burning interest “Hillary Clinton Deals with Her Husband’s Transgressions.”

It’s hard enough for couples to navigate the pain of an affair without everybody and their media outlets weighing in on it. To have your child exposed to jokes and lurid speculation about their parents’ marriage, sex lives and motivations is something that would severely test the strongest of couples. But when one or both parents fail that test and join in on the blaming and mudflinging, their children suffer immensely. While Hillary Clinton’s alleged attempts to discredit the women with whom her husband cheated may not be considered a good form of sisterhood, it could be a reasonable act of motherhood.

I’ve seen this dynamic played out in many of the wealthy Silicon Valley families that I work with in the Bay Area after an affair. As a psychologist and family therapist, I’ve witnessed far too many parents perfectly willing to ruin their children’s lives by exposing them to the most unseemly aspects of their mother’s or father’s actions, with the lame explanation that they’re doing it for the child’s benefit.

So while Hillary Clinton’s alleged attempts to discredit the women with whom her husband cheated may not be considered a good form of sisterhood, it certainly could be considered a reasonable act of motherhood.

I don’t assume that Clinton stayed with her husband after his affairs because of her ambition. These are two people who care intensely about shared goals and values, something that can allow couples to recover from infidelity. But I certainly wouldn’t blame her if she did stay for such practical reasons. I also wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t want to put herself or her daughter through a divorce, especially given the tabloid lens through which it would be viewed and commented on daily.

In the United States, we have elevated romantic love to such dizzying heights that staying together for practical reasons or because you think it’s better for your kids is somehow considered an act of existential cowardice. Only the starry­eyed pursuit of romantic love is considered a worthy enough compass on which to navigate one’s life. This is one reason we have higher rates of marital and cohabitation dissolution, and faster rates of recoupling, than most other countries ­­ creating heightened exposure to transitions and instability that are harmful to children.

Children and career often operate in a kind of fog of war where we have to choose our priorities based on our best guess of which commitment should be prioritized. “Life doesn’t always hand us the option of successfully maintaining an alliance between our marital goals, our aspirations for our children and our ideological commitments,” notes sociologist Barbara Risman, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.”

The Clintons have managed to keep their marriage intact, successfully raise a healthy daughter, despite the public humiliation, and Bill Clinton now seems to prioritize his wife’s aspirations in the same way that she had to prioritize his many years before. I’ve sure seen a lot more destructive reactions to infidelity in my practice.

I’ve sure seen a lot more destructive reactions to infidelity in my practice.

Joshua Coleman, the author of “When Parents Hurt: Compassionate Strategies When You and Your Grown Child Don’t Get Along”, is a senior fellow at the Council on Contemporary Families, as well as a private practice psychologist.   

In 2015, the Council on Contemporary Families (CCF) continued contributing to public discourse through the dissemination of reliable research. CCF’s impact has grown over previous years in the quantity of coverage, the diversity of media outlets (and presumably, audiences), and social media influence. This year, nearly 250 unique media pieces have been influenced by CCF briefs and experts, and have been circulated via shares, likes, tweets, pins, etc., on social media more than 149,000 times. Keep in mind that this is an extreme lower bound of CCF’s influence, since we don’t recount the hundreds of reprints of CCF coverage. The five releases below are some of this year’s most successful.

1-28-15: Sandra Hofferth reported in “Child-Rearing Norms and Practices in Contemporary American Families” that on key parenting measures—such as reading and meals together, regulating TV watching, and involving children in extracurricular activities—children in married-parent households fared slightly better than those in single-parent households. The differences were much more stark, however, when poor and non-poor families of all types were compared, suggesting a spurious relationship between family structure and child outcomes. Hofferth argued that those who are poor are less likely both to be able to engage in these crucial child-rearing activities and to marry. Thus, marriage is not necessarily a direct route to improved child welfare. Coverage of this report appeared in least 51 media outlets, including Christian Science Monitor, Good Housekeeping, Real Clear Policy, and NBC News.

3-5-15: On the 50^th anniversary of the release of The Moynihan Report, CCF scholars contributed to the online symposium, “Moynihan +50: Family Structure Still Not the Problem,” in which Stephanie Coontz, Philip N. Cohen, Heidi Hartmann, Jeff Hayes, Chandra Childers, and William H. Chafe focused their attention on Moynihan’s formulation that black poverty is the result of black family structure, especially single-mother households. The series authors argued that Moynihan’s claim of pathology itself created barriers to achieving racial equality. Yes, there was an increase in single-mother families since the 1960s, but poverty and crime decreased, highlighting the weakness of marriage-promotion for poverty reduction. The report was covered in at least 27 media outlets, including the History News Network, Washington Post, New York Times, and Deseret News.

5-7-15: In the “CCF Symposium on Housework, Gender, and Parenting,” CCF’s Stephanie Coontz, Jill Yavorsky, Claire Kamp Dush, Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, Arielle Kuperberg, Oriel Sullivan, Jonathan Gershuny, John Robinson, and Liana C. Sayer acknowledge that men have increased their contributions to housework, but that gender inequality persists in less dramatic and more subtle forms, particularly when the couple are parents. This release informed articles in more than 100 media outlets, including Cosmopolitan, Time, ABC News, Washington Post, Pacific Standard, The LA Times, and Tech Times.

7-1-15: Celeste Curington, Ken-Hou Lin, and Jennifer Lundquist revealed in “Dating Partners Don’t Always Prefer ‘Their Own Kind’: Some Multiracial Daters Get Bonus Points in the Dating Game,” that dating “racial hierarchies” have changed so that some multiracial groups—Asian-white and Hispanic-white in particular—are responded to as frequently, and sometimes more frequently, than certain mono-racial individuals. “Some” is the key word, however; bi-racial blacks appeared more favorable than mono-racial blacks (and mono-racial Asian and Hispanic Men), but still ranked relatively low in response rates compared to white, Asian-white, and Hispanic-white individuals. The study was covered by more than 20 media sources, including Time, NBC News, Washington Post, Market Watch, Vox, and the New York Times. This report was one of many that made its way to overseas audiences, appearing on a Malaysian news source, Astro Awani.

9-16-15: Kelly Musick and Katherine Michelmore provided a new answer to an old question: “What Happens When Couples Marry After the First Baby?” For couples whose first child was born between 1985 and 1995, the risk of divorce was higher among cohabiters (who went on to marry after the baby) versus those who married before the birth of their child. Times changed, though, and cohabiting couples whose first child was born after 1997 were no more likely to divorce than those who married prior to the birth of their child. The researchers found that those couples that never married were still at higher risk for break-up, and outlined potential risk factors for couple instability. This report was a knowledge-base for articles in at least 47 media outlets, including USA Today, Huffington Post, The Stir, and Yahoo Parenting, which were liked or shared more than 28,000 times on social media.

The briefs released from CCF over past years compound our influence. As just one example, Arielle Kuperberg’s March 2014 “Does Premarital Cohabitation Raise your Risk of Divorce?” (it doesn’t) was featured in 11 new articles on the topic throughout 2015 in a variety of media outlets including Cosmopolitan, Deseret News, and Medical Daily, which have been circulated on social media at least 6,200 times! This is added to the 37 times the work was covered in 2014. If history serves as a guide, CCF will bring reliable research on families to an even larger and more diverse audience in the coming year.

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

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.