One dominant belief about what it means to be transgender is that transgender people do not have joyful relationships with their families. This can be true for some trans people. As Tomás, a Latinx trans man, told us, “Stuff with my familyis fucked up. My brothers won’t speak to me. My parents have disowned me.”

However, this is just one of many experiences that transgender people can have with family. For example, of the 27,715 respondents to the U.S. Transgender Survey, 60% of those who were out to the family they grew up with reported “that their family was supportive of them as a transgender person.”  There can also be joys in being a transgender parent.

We interviewed a diverse group of 40 transgender people and asked them, “What do you find joyful about being transgender?” As we detail in our recent article in Social Problems, the most common theme that people mentioned when asked about trans joy – the joy of being transgender – was “connection with others.”

Counter to common narratives about trans people, many folks we spoke with mentioned family as a source of joy, particularly families they have created. Several interviewees discussed how their families of origin had not supported them being transgender. However, that form of family rejection made space for them to create new kinds of families with friends and partners who loved them for who they are. Moreover, they attributed the ability to meaningfully connect with others to their trans identity, stating that they now had a loving, supportive chosen family because they are transgender, rather than despite being trans. As Ben, a white trans man, explained:

Sources of joy? I don’t know, I kind of feel like a lot of my life is a source of joy. I was really lucky; if I hadn’t come out to my parents at a young age, I wouldn’t have met these amazing people who are now my family. And there’s so many people that I’ve met because of my experiences. I would definitely say the people I have gotten to interact with are my never-ending source of joy (laughs). I am so appreciative that I have gotten to meet so many of the people in my life, and I wouldn’t have met any of these people without this aspect of my identity.

Julian, a Latinx genderqueer person, had a similar experience, saying:

Things feel good when I feel like I’m in a community where I can make sense. Having room to move around and play with gender is really fun. And, kindness, looking out for people, and almost like family. That shows up in a lot of queer community and I have access to that, which I wouldn’t if I didn’t have this experience.

As Ben, Julian, and other trans people we spoke with revealed, being transgender was a source of connection with others, rather than a deterrent to feelings of kinship and togetherness.

Social connections offer access to vital resources, better health outcomes, and social support. Traditionally, scholarship on marginalized groups has focused on how discrimination hinders these valuable connections with others, particularly for groups like transgender and LGBQ+ people whose families of origin do not usually share their identities. 

Due to the tendency to focus on exclusion and discrimination, scholars, activists, and the general population often fail to observe how being from a stigmatized group is a source of joy and can facilitate connection, including through gaining membership to a community with those who share your identity. Though focusing on “joy” may seem frivolous to some, it is actually a vital form of resistance to oppression.

Although many of our interviewees described feeling alone when first coming out as transgender, the majority shared that the story of coming out does not end in social isolation. 70% explicitly mentioned connections with others as one of the joys of being trans. Thus, rather than resulting in exclusion, being transgender helped them connect with others, bringing them joy. Moreover, that connection often felt like family to them.

Bailey, a white gender fluid person, told us about how some members of the eco-activist community they were part of rejected them when they came out as trans. However, after leaving that group, a friend introduced them to trans community. They explained how that community:

Have come to feel like…family? That word is so much and can be so violent. But they are like my family and have supported me in ways that my former activist community never could. And never did. So I find joy in having this community who has brought me in and fed my soul and helped remind me that I am cared for.

For Bailey, although coming out as trans meant rejection from one community, it also facilitated a closer connection with a group of people who nurtured and supported them for who they were.

Chloe, a white transgender woman, echoed this, saying:

I find generally in trans communities more acceptance and like I have to do less explaining….I just feel like a kinship and like a family. Like the people who are in my chosen family have pretty much been gender variant or trans so yeah, that’s where I’ve ended up and where I feel good so that’s the joy.

Thus, even if being part of a marginalized group may reduce access to some sources of love and support, such as from one’s family of origin, it can provide access to others. As the people we spoke with revealed, rather than reducing joy, being transgender facilitated tremendous amounts of joy, including through the creation of chosen families and communities. It is vital to highlight these aspects of trans life, since trans joy is key to resisting oppression.

Author bios:

Laurel Westbrook (@LaurelWestbr00k) is a Professor of Sociology at Grand Valley State University. They are the author of Unlivable Lives: Violence and Identity in Transgender Activism. Stef M. Shuster (@stefshuster) is an Assistant Professor in Lyman Briggs College and Sociology at Michigan State University. They are the author of Trans Medicine: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender.

As societies become increasingly divided by socioeconomic fault lines, how do we learn about the lives of others? My new research sets out to learn how young Americans growing up in a country defined by inequality and segregation learn about their unequal society. I investigate this question in the context of college. School, more than any other institution today, provides the context for children’s cognitive, social and moral development, for its presence in children’s lives across the Western world is sustained, durable, and compulsory.

I theorize that (young) people learn important lessons about inequality in their society from the economic and racial homogeneity or heterogeneity of their neighborhood, school, and workplace context. I conceive of a process of institutional inference whereby people draw from experience and available information to develop an understanding of inequality. Socializing institutions like college shape this process by providing a durable context to young adults’ interactions with others in this crucial developmental stage.

Through their recruitment and admission practices, colleges determine the exclusivity and heterogeneity of the context in which students learn important lessons about social and racial inequality in the US. In doing so, they shape the development of students’ inequality beliefs by exposing them to a certain type and range of information, but not to their counterfactuals. Through their institution, a person may gain access to experiential evidence and to narratives about the meritocratic and structural causes of inequality that lie outside their own biography.

Crucially, racial and socioeconomic diversity provides students with information indicative of the structural sources of inequality in their society, i.e., how race and family background may help or hinder social mobility. A college environment with minimal diversity keeps this kind of information from students and does not provide counterevidence to the dominant meritocratic view of society.

To empirically test my theoretical framework, I traced the inequality beliefs of ten cohorts of US college students between 1998 and 2010, totaling 141,597 college students across 436 residential four-year colleges in the US. To describe change in students’ beliefs, I compared student’s responses to a survey taken before they start college, typically at freshman orientation, and an exit survey taken by those same students in the spring semester of senior year, four years later. 

So, do students believe America is a meritocracy, and that racial discrimination is a thing of the past? I find that most freshmen believe in meritocracy, but they also acknowledge racial inequalities. By senior year, about half of students have held on to their beliefs, whereas some 20% have grown more convinced that theirs is a meritocratic society, and 30% now see their society as structurally unequal, meaning that inequalities reflect an unfair playing field.

To study why students change their beliefs in one or the other direction, I consider three features of the college context, being: (1) the ethnic and racial background of their roommates, and the degree of (2) racial and (3) socioeconomic diversity in the student body of their college.

My research reveals that having a roommate from a different racial or ethnic group is associated with students developing a less meritocratic understanding of America. Black and Hispanic students, especially, lose faith in meritocracy, and Asian students come to see more racial inequality.

Ironically, white students are less affected by their roommate than non-white students. This asymmetric impact of experiences with diversity may be illustrative of people’s higher attentiveness to personal disadvantages than those facing others. To the students involved, a particular experience may reveal both privilege and disadvantage, but another person’s privilege is easier to recognize than one’s own – especially, it would seem, for white students. Let’s also acknowledge that what may constitute an eye-opening experience for some, can be a draining and psychologically costly confrontation for another.

Another finding speaks to the broader college context: The effect of having a roommate from a different race or ethnicity is strongest at places that lack socioeconomic and racial diversity, such as colleges with a majority white student body or schools where the lion’s share of students have college-educated parents. That is, diversity experiences matter most where they are least likely to take place.

My findings suggest that the college context deeply shapes students’ view of inequality. Historically, colleges have had the mission to educate young citizens (‘tomorrow’s leaders’) about their country’s past and present, the democratic process, and their part in it. They have the potential, more generally, to broaden students’ perspectives and increase intergroup understanding. Currently, however, a majority of students receives only limited exposure to socioeconomic and racial heterogeneity, both directly and in the campus environment.

For many students, then, increasing diversity in the overall population is met with social isolation in the microcosm of higher education. With little exposure to diversity, adolescents grow up to develop a naïve understanding of American meritocracy in a country that is increasingly divided along racial and economic lines. For these students, the college experience undermines rather than serves the civic and integrative role of higher education.

College, then, reinforces inequality in two ways: (1) credentials increase the economic gap between graduates and the 70% of Americans without a degree, and (2) when colleges lack diversity, tomorrow’s educational elite learns to legitimize the growing gap as meritocratically deserved.

More exposure to diversity creates conditions under which students can develop an awareness of the structural processes shaping inequality. Be it through purposeful roommate pairing, inclusive admission policies, or affirmative recruitment efforts, a college environment that better reflects our diverse population would impact the perspective of 20+ million students currently in college and, with it, public opinion and national politics.

Jonathan J.B. Mijs (@JonathanMijs) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston University. You can learn more about his work at www.jonathanmijs.com [url: https://www.jonathanmijs.com].

In many countries across the globe, polygynous marriages—one man married to more than wife—exist outside the threshold of legality and tolerance. Reality television has brought the question of polygamy’s criminality into the homes of millions of viewers. The best-known is Sister Wives, which began airing in 2010 and documents the life of Kody Brown, his wives—Robyn, Meri, Janelle, and Christine, and their 18 children. Shortly after its debut, police in Lehi, Utah, announced opening an investigation into possible felony charges of bigamy, carrying at that time a possible penalty of twenty years in prison for Kody and up to five years for each wife. In a dramatic final episode of the second season the Brown family fled Utah, moving to Nevada for fear of being charged. People magazine quotes Meri, Kody’s first wife, stating that she views polygamy as “basic human rights, civil rights.”

While some see living in polygamy as a right, others argue that it is a harmful and violent patriarchal family structure that must be criminalized. Awa Ba began an organization—End Polygamy [En finir avec la polygamie]—in France after her sister was subjected to it. For her, forbidding polygamy is necessary to fight the extreme violence that it represents. These opposing ways of understanding polygamy have shaped how governments seek to regulate it. My book, Forbidden Intimacies: Polygamies at the Limits of Western Tolerance, takes a comparative deep dive into the mismatch between what I found to be the existence of polygamies and the ways that governments regulate them as a singular, harmful structure. From 2010 to 2016, I conducted ethnographic research, conducting 145 interviews with 165 participants, to understand how polygamies are lived and how regulation impacts these families in the United States, Canada, France, and Mayotte in the Indian Ocean.

Polygamy is a multidimensional phenomenon, and there is no single reason why it persists even in contexts of illegality. Being a deeply rooted sociocultural practice for some, and being permitted or required in some religions, certainly contributes to its persistence. Still, it is rare globally. According to a Pew Research Center report, roughly 2 percent of the global population lives in polygamous families. It is banned in every country in North and South America. In the United States and Canada, the most visible population is Mormon fundamentalists such as the Brown family, with an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 individuals, living mainly in Utah. In France, polygamy is tied to colonialism and migratory patterns from West Africa in which workers from former colonies brought over multiple wives in large numbers in the 1970s and onwards. An estimated 200,000 individuals live in polygynous households in France. Mayotte became France’s 101st department in 2011 making its inhabitants French citizens. Its traditional practice of polygamy among its Muslim African population has been progressively banned since 2005.

One reason polygamy is forbidden is the problematic way that it puts power into the hands of a patriarch who can exploit his wives. While this kind of power dynamic certainly exists, my research finds that the way that polygamies are lived depends on social context. For example, some polygamies are homegrown, emerging out of the cultures and societies in which they are rooted, and others migratory, being transported into a new national context. The ways that emotions are structured and experienced in polygynous relationships also shape how they are lived. My concept of labyrinthine love helps us understand how types of love, jealousy, and commitment blend together to making some families workable and others not. For some families, there is little love and jealousy leads to violence between wives and sometimes between wives and children. Abdou, the son of a second wife who grew up in the suburbs of Paris, expressed: “In Senegal, we call the other wife my mother’s rival, because for her, she was a rival. So, she took care of me because she had no choice. I was in the house, but she didn’t take care of me [like a mother would].” In other cases where the family works well together, women benefit from having sister wives where they can share working outside the home and household tasks. In Utah, Julie married as a second wife at age 18. She told me: “You come up with your insecure feelings, or your jealous feelings, or your . . . But, in the long run, when it is all said and done, I absolutely love living with Oliver and Ellie. I love sharing our lives together. Love sharing our children.” For families that work well together, jealousy is often dealt with head on.

While polygynous families flourish or self-destruct, governments struggle to regulate them, generally participating in racial projects that define a racialized other based on the specter of polygamy. As the title of the book suggests, governments ban polygamy because it exists at the limits of “western” tolerance. Regulation often pushes these families underground and makes women and children even more vulnerable. A good example is France, where most of the families living in polygynous households have migrated from former colonies. In 1993 the Pasqua law banned living in a polygynous household, and the French government sought to implement a policy where men must “decohabit”—live with only one wife—or lose their ten-year residence permit. One woman I interviewed who worked extensively with these families explained the serious consequences of this policy: “They are obliged to lie, they are obliged to hide, they are obliged to say this, to say that, but none of it is true!” If the goal is to aid women and children in these families, banning polygamy often has the opposite effect.

Forbidden Intimacies is about how intimacy, as a feature of all important relationships, is shaped by what is determined to be intolerable. The book takes the reader on a journey to understand the ways that polygyny becomes antithetical to intimacy itself.

Melanie Heath (@DrMelanieHeath) is Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor of Sociology at McMaster University, Ontario, Canada. Her research focuses on the politics of transformations in gender, sexuality, and family.

A healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby are the primary goals of most parents choosing to have a child. While parents may take many steps, such as using prenatal vitamins or quitting drinking alcohol or smoking, some factors influence pregnancy outcomes beyond their control.

I was awarded a large NIH grant to study how structural stigma, that is, the way that stigma and discrimination are codified into laws and policies, influence the maternal and infant health of sexual minority women (e.g., women who identify as bisexual/lesbian/queer or have same-sex attractions or relationships [SMW]). Sexual minority populations are more likely to experience discrimination at multiple levels compared to heterosexual populations, and several studies have linked stress to adverse maternal and fetal health. Little research, however, has examined how stress and the social environment may impact the obstetrical and perinatal health of SMW.

Much of the prior research focused on women in same-sex relationships accessing assisted reproductive technologies to conceive. While important, these studies systematically exclude SMW in romantic relationships with men (i.e. bisexual women partnered with men), SMW who are single, and SMW who become pregnant through sex with a male partner. In fact, my research has found that SMW, including lesbian-identified women, are more likely to describe their pregnancies as “unwanted” than heterosexual women.

In a first-of-its-kind study using nationally representative data, we documented that SMW were more likely to have preterm and low birthweight infants. We were unable, however, to identify the mechanisms that led to these worse outcomes among SMW. This finding led us to use the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, a longitudinal, probability-based US survey of middle and high school students that began in 1993 and 1994 and has followed the same students for over twenty years. Using this longitudinal data, we were able to document several disparities in perinatal and obstetrical risk factors by sexual orientation, including preconception health behaviors. These differences, however, did not explain why SMW were more likely to report preterm and lower birthweight infants.

 One factor, however, proved to be critical to pregnant SMW and their babies: the number of state policies that provide protections for lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) persons. The policies we examined included same-sex marriage or civil union protections, anti-LGB discrimination policies, legal same-sex adoption, and banned employment discrimination based on sexual orientation. Indeed, state policies were so powerful in shaping SMW’s birth outcomes that in states with three or more of these policies, SMW had even better birth outcomes than their heterosexual peers despite higher rates of reporting key risk factors for adverse birth outcomes. The policies we examined included same-sex marriage or civil union protections, anti-LGB discrimination policies, legal same-sex adoption, and banned employment discrimination based on sexual orientation. We found that these policies also were associated with a lower risk of maternal hypertension, particularly for Black SMW. This finding is in line with other research that has suggested that policies that ensure equal protection for persons based on their sexual orientation may disproportionately benefit sexual minorities of color.

The results from these studies come at a critical time when the rights of women and LGBTQ populations are under attack. A record number of laws have been introduced to undermine the progress made by LGBTQ activists and introduce new forms of discrimination that ban or reduce access to health care and multiple other forms of social and economic resources. Similarly, the bodily autonomy of pregnant persons is also under unprecedented attack; the 50-year precedent of Roe v Wade was repealed in June 2022, and many bills have been introduced to restrict access in states where abortion remains legal. With colleagues, I have argued that attacks on LGTBQ populations and reproductive rights are rooted in the same ideology that seeks to maintain a system that privileges men and heterosexuality and punishes those who challenge traditional gender and sexuality-based norms. We created a measure incorporating these two forms of discrimination (structural sexism and structural LGB stigma) into a single construct called “structural heteropatriarchy.” We showed that women who live in states and counties with higher levels of structural heteropatriarchy were more likely to have preterm and low birthweight infants, even if they identified as heterosexual.

In sum, this set of studies shows that the political and social environment in which an individual lives can undermine many of the efforts pregnant people may take to ensure a healthy pregnancy. However, the results also show that policy changes can dramatically improve maternal and infant health. Moreover, these policies do not necessarily need to target pregnant people per se, but increasing the number of civil rights and social resources individuals can access may improve maternal and infant health while also likely benefitting non-pregnant citizens. That is, living in environments that foster safety and inclusion, and support an individual’s right to choose if, when, and how they become a parent, can lead to improved population health, improved maternal and infant health, and ultimately healthier future generations.

Bethany Everett is Associate Professor of Sociology and Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Utah and an affiliate of the Center for Sexual and Gender Minority Health Research at Columbia University. She completed her PhD at the University of Colorado at Boulder and an NIH Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health (BIRCWH) Fellowship while she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago from 2012-2015. She has published over 75 peer-reviewed articles and is currently PI of an NICHD-funded R01 study on sexual orientation disparities in maternal, infant, and child health and her work focuses on the social determinants of health, particularly in the area of orientation and sexual and reproductive health. Follow her on Twitter @bethanygeverett

Sexual satisfaction proves important for individual well-being and the well-being of relationships. Relationships where one or both partners are sexually dissatisfied can face many problems and can lead to marital dissatisfaction. Research finds an association between relationship satisfaction and better quality of life and better parent-child relationships.

In our recent study, Dr. Walker interviewed adults over the phone and email to investigate what components people needed to consider sex great. She interviewed 78 adults of various ages and sexual orientations and asked about what makes sexual experiences great and good, and what separates great sexual experiences from good sexual experiences.

We found three primary themes for what makes sex great: orgasm, emotional connection, and chemistry or connection.

The majority of people said that they, their partners, or both needed to orgasm during sex for a sexual experience to be great. Whether folks said they or their partner needed to orgasm varied by gender. Some women placed importance on their own orgasm. This is most likely related to the orgasm gap (the phenomenon where women orgasm less than men in heterosexual sexual encounters, and when women have sex with men they orgasm less than when they have sex with women). Men tended to care more about their partner’s orgasm; this could be because men report their partner’s orgasm as sexually satisfying. Some men and women said that both parties need to orgasm during sex for it to be great. This reflects popular media depictions of orgasms and great sex, where both partners collapse in simultaneous pleasure.

Emotional connection proved an important component for great sex as well, but “emotion” was not always code for “love.” Most people specifically explained that an emotional component during sex did not have to be love, or even romantic. Emotional connection can mean trust, affection, or even comfort. Only a few participants said the emotion must be love for great sexual experiences. Unlike other research which found women more likely to place importance on love during sex, an equal number of men and women spoke of its importance. However, gender differences existed. Echoing previous studies, some women spoke of an emotional connection being more important than physical sensations, while other women wanted both emotion and orgasm. Some even told us that emotional intimacy increased their likelihood of orgasming.

Finally, people said that great sex required chemistry or connection. Respondents mentioned both physical and emotional aspects of sex when they spoke about chemistry and connection. Sexual chemistry often proves hard to define, and our participants struggled to define it as well. However, people agreed that people cannot manufacture chemistry; they said couples either have it or they don’t. Participants made clear that chemistry is out of your control, and you cannot choose with whom you do or don’t have chemistry. Chemistry often allowed for better emotional and physical intimacy between partners. People said chemistry helped them to build affection and trust in their partners, and that good sexual chemistry often led to orgasms.

Participants made clear the importance of orgasms, emotional connection, and chemistry for sexual encounters to transcend from a good experience to great. Learning the components of great sex helps us all improve our sex lives, which improves our happiness, well-being, and relationships. What does great sex mean to you?

Alicia M. Walker is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Missouri State University, and author of The Secret Life of the Cheating Wife: Power, Pragmatism, and Pleasure in Women’s Infidelity and Chasing Masculinity: Men, Validation and Infidelity. Her work focuses on intimate sexual relationships, sexual identity and behavior, and gender. She specializes in closeted sexual behavior. Follow her on Twitter @AliciaMWalker1.

Audrey Lutmer is a Sociology PhD student at Georgia State University. She studies gender, sexuality, sexual identity, and sexual behavior. She is most interested in how sexuality affects gender expression. Follow her on Twitter @AudreyLutmer

The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a toll on mental health for individuals and families across the country, with recent analysis finding more than four in ten U.S. adults have endured high levels of psychological distress at some point during the pandemic. Because of structural inequalities, some groups have been harder hit than others. One group that has experienced disproportionately large drops in emotional well-being during COVID is LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other sexual and gender minority) people. Even before the pandemic, LGBTQ+ adults—particularly Black, Latinx, and multiracial LGBTQ+ people—faced structural discrimination and day-to-day mistreatment that strained well-being at work and elsewhere. 

How have pandemic-related changes to paid work affected LGBTQ+ well-being outcomes? As the pandemic took hold, many people had to work in-person amid new risks to their health and finances, while others, typically more advantaged workers, found themselves working from home in a world of Zoom meetings. Past research suggests working from home could be protective for LGBTQ+ workers’ well-being, if working remotely from a supportive home environment means less exposure to stressors like workplace microaggressions. On the other hand, the blurred work/home border of remote work could also be harmful for well-being. For example, it could increase stress for those who try to guard against mistreatment by keeping a strict separation between work and home life, such as by not talking about a same-gender partner at work. 

With prior research pointing in inconclusive directions, we asked: how has work location mattered for the well-being of LGBTQ+ adults since the onset of the pandemic?

To investigate this question, we worked with a team of other researchers to analyze survey and time diary data (reports of how, where, and with whom respondents spent their time for a 24-hour day) from the Assessing the Social Consequences of COVID-19 Study, collected online between April 2020 and July 2021. We looked at respondents’ “experienced well-being”—in other words, how someone reports they are feeling minute-to-minute—while they were working. We compared whether experienced well-being while doing paid work was different for LGBTQ+ workers and cisgender heterosexual (i.e., non-LGBTQ+) workers, and whether well-being differed across work locations.

As described in our recent article published in the journal Social Science & Medicine, we found that work location did indeed make a difference for well-being, especially for LGBTQ+ respondents. LGBTQ+ adults felt more stressed and tired while working in a workplace compared to while working from home (Figure 1). While non-LGBTQ+ adults were also less stressed while working at home, work location had a smaller impact on their stress level and almost no impact on their tiredness level. Working in-person at a workplace during the pandemic appeared to be more harmful to LGBTQ+ individuals’ experienced well-being, compared to that of their non-LGBTQ+ counterparts.

Figure 1. Predicted means of LGBTQ workers’ and non-LGBTQ workers’ feelings of stress and tiredness by work location (N=7,650 work episodes across 3,515 respondents).

We also investigated what kinds of factors might help account for the gaps we observed in stress and tiredness between LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ adults across work locations. For example, does adjusting for work characteristics, socioeconomic factors, or family characteristics help explain the results?

We found that work characteristics—like total time working that day, duration of each work episode, and whether or not respondents found interactions with their co-workers to be exhausting—played an important role. Collectively, work characteristics explained about 35 percent of the stress gap and 24 percent of the tiredness gap. When working in-person at a workplace, the duration of work episodes (i.e., how many minutes someone is working at one time) tended to be longer for LGBTQ+ workers than non-LGBTQ+ workers, whereas the reverse was true among people working from home.

It could be that LGBTQ+ adults working in-person during COVID are more often in jobs with strict schedules and limited control over work pace, meaning they are not able to take a break when feeling stressed or tired. This would be consistent with other analyses showing that LGBTQ+ people are overrepresented in some face-to-face service positions like restaurant-based jobs.

Another factor that may be contributing to the stress and tiredness gaps across work location for LGBTQ+ adults is greater exposure to workplace microaggressions related to sexual and gender identity, race/ethnicity, and other statuses. In our survey data, LGBTQ+ respondents were more likely than their cisgender heterosexual counterparts to characterize interacting with co-workers as frequently exhausting. It is possible that working from home is helping to buffer some of the “minority stress” LGBTQ+ individuals too often face at work.

LGBTQ+ adults are, of course, far from a homogenous group. Strains on well-being while working may be compounded for multiply-marginalized LGBTQ+ adults who are also subject to racial discrimination, mistreatment based on disability status, or other forms of bias and exclusion at work. An important limitation of the study is the relatively small survey sample size. This restricted our ability to fully examine well-being experiences separately across sexual and gender minority groups (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other sexual and gender minority identities), and intersections with racial/ethnic identities. However, comparing descriptive well-being reports using four broad groups (LGBTQ+ respondents of color, LGBTQ+ white respondents, non-LGBTQ+ respondents of color, and non-LGBTQ+ white respondents) indicated that although working in-person was linked to higher stress for all LGBTQ+ adults, this was especially so for LGBTQ+ adults racialized as Black, Hispanic/Latinx, Asian, multiracial, or another race/ethnicity compared to LGBTQ+ adults racialized as white. In light of emerging research indicating there may be differences in working-from-home experiences across racialized groups, a deeper dive into how structural racism, heterosexism, cisnormativity, and other forms of inequality may jointly influence well-being experiences across work locations is warranted.

For many workers, remote work in some form is here to stay. A more complex understanding of how work location may impact well-being—particularly for individuals not traditionally centered in research on work, family, and health—will be critical to supporting the emotional well-being of marginalized workers both today and in the future.

Layne Amerikaner (@LayneAmerikaner) and Hope Xu Yan (@HopeYanxu) are doctoral candidates in the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. You can read more about Amerikaner’s research here and about Yan’s research here. The study described in this blog post was published in Social Science & Medicine in April 2023. The study was authored by Layne Amerikaner, Hope Xu Yan (equal first authorship), Liana C. Sayer, Long Doan, Jessica N. Fish, Kelsey J. Drotning, and R. Gordon Rinderknecht.  

Many of us can easily identify which child in our families has kept our parents up the most at night—for example, the one who experimented with drugs early in life, suffered a concerningly long “bad luck streak” at the casino, or has been in trouble with the law. Research shows that older parents often experience more disappointment, strain, or complicated emotions in their relationships to their adult children with these sorts of problems. However, there is also some evidence that adult children who reform their deviant behavior are more likely to become their mothers’ favored child.

To build on this research, my collaborators (Marissa Rurka, Jill Suitor, Megan Gilligan, Karl Pillemer, Liam Mohebbi, and Nicholas Mundell) and I examined the reasons why adult children’s behavioral reforms are associated with changes in older mothers’ favoritism. More simply, we wanted to know how and why former “problem children” become “prodigal children” in their mothers’ eyes. To answer this question, we used qualitative interview data from the Within-Family Differences Study (WFDS). The WFDS contains interviews with older mothers (ages 65-75 at the first interview) and their adult children (interviewed separately) at two different timepoints, seven years apart. This dataset was well suited to help answer our research question because it is the same data that originally produced evidence (mentioned above) of the link between adult children’s behavioral reforms and their mothers’ newfound favoritism.

The WFDS measured deviance by asking mothers whether any of their children had experienced trouble with drugs, alcohol, or the law in recent years. Favoritism was assessed by asking mothers to which child they felt most emotionally close. Mothers were encouraged to explain their answers to closed-ended questions like these throughout the interview, thus providing qualitative data for our investigation.

We focused our main analysis on the 20 families that contained a “prodigal child”—a child who was considered deviant and not favored at the first interview, but was no longer deviant, and was favored at the second interview (seven years later). Our analysis revealed two reasons why these children’s behavioral reforms were related to newfound favoritism by their mothers: perceptions of familism and perceptions of need.

First, as they reformed their behaviors, mothers grew to see these children as more dedicated to their families of origin, and often their mothers specifically. The same children described as having a “mind of [their] own” at the first interview grew to be seen by their mothers as “very family-oriented,” “always checking on me,” or “a little mother to me” by the later interview. This pattern was especially clear in families that also contained a deviant child who did not reform their behavior..

For example, Faye had two daughters who were both deviant at Faye’s first interview—both had experienced teen pregnancies, drug issues, and moved away with romantic partners whom Faye felt were poor choices. Describing Kristen, the younger of the two, Faye said, “I don’t think her life is going, well, the way a mother wants for her children.” However, by Faye’s later interview, Kristen recovered from her substance abuse issues and repaired her bond with her mother by moving back nearby and involving Faye in her granddaughter’s life. In contrast to the new warmth Faye felt from Kristen, Faye felt like her older daughter Mary had fully “alienated” her by her later interview and had abandoned her family commitments due to her still ongoing drinking problem. Describing her disapproval, Faye said, “[Mary] decided she wanted to…be on her own. She thought, ‘well, I’m going out drinking again,’ and disrupted her [family], and now she’s getting [divorced]…Nothing to be proud of.” Faye’s remarks about Mary highlight how deviant behavior can weaken family bonds and negatively impact older mothers’ impressions of a child. Meanwhile, Faye’s relationship to Kristen helps us see why an adult child who reforms their behavior and strengthens their family commitments in the process can bring mothers particularly great joy.

The second pattern that emerged from our analysis was these children’s need for their mothers’ support. Mothers often saw their prodigal children as both needing and appreciating their support in ways that their other children, who they saw as more “on their own,” had outgrown. Feeling like their help and support played a role in their children’s positive changes made them feel like good mothers and created an emotional bond.

For example, when describing the substance abuse issues her son Joey experienced in early adulthood, Dorothy acknowledged “Joey was straying back then,” but became upbeat as she explained the closeness that came as a result of his behavioral reform, saying “He had some problems in the past and he came out of them with our help. And he’s been great ever since. He just shows his gratitude a lot…He shows that he came out of it very well.” If children did not change their behaviors, their ongoing need for help could be depleting, rather than affirming to mothers. But, as Dorothy described, if children “came out of it well,” their changes could be viewed as gestures of gratitude for their mothers. This dynamic allowed mothers to feel that their guiding role in their children’s lives was necessary and valuable, which fostered feelings of favoritism, particularly during a life stage when some had begun to feel like their other children’s need for their guidance and advice was lessening.

Taken together, our findings suggest that even children who engaged in behaviors that their mothers found troubling can become Mom’s Favorite in adulthood. Simply stopping the troubling behaviors may not be a surefire path to favoritism, but if disengaging from these behaviors is coupled with strengthening your commitments to family and showing your mother that you need (and appreciate!) her support, then there is a good chance that you might just become a Prodigal Child.

The full text of our article, published in the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, can be found here.

Reilly Kincaid is a PhD Candidate at Purdue University. Her research focuses on parenting, gender, social psychology, family relationships across the life-course, and work-family issues. You can follow her on Twitter at @ReillyKincaid.  

When we think of older adults, we often conjure an image of a retiree with extra time on their hands. We think of an old married couple traveling together, spending time with grandchildren, volunteering, or maybe enjoying hobbies like gardening. Rarely do we think of older parents or grandparents as single adults, spending their free time seeking a romantic partner, dating, or beginning a new sexual relationship. But as people live longer and more older adults are experiencing “gray divorce,” nearly 20 million older adults are finding themselves single and interested in dating.

However, the common image of daters – young adults seeking a partner to start a family and share decades together – does not fit the single older adult, either. Studies have shown most single older women are not interested in (re)marrying and many older men and women would prefer to cohabit or live apart together (LAT) rather than marry. Further, most older men and women already have children, even grandchildren, to whom they frequently provide practical and financial support. In short, single older adults are quite dissimilar from married older adults but also from single young adults.

My recent research explored how relationships with adult children and grandchildren, particularly caregiving responsibilities and expectations, impact single older adults’ partner preferences. I interviewed 50 women and 50 men between the ages of 60-83, all of whom were single and heterosexual, about their experiences with singlehood and dating. We discussed a range of issues, including decisions to date, online dating, and physical intimacy, but one issue surfaced again and again – the impact of carework on dating. Participants connected the care older adults perform, such as living with and caring for an ailing parent, providing practical and financial support for an adult child, and looking after a grandchild, to desirability and opportunities in dating.

Men and women both recognized carework as a potential influence to partnering, but the impact of carework was overwhelmingly gendered. Women with carework responsibilities were seen as not having enough time or attention for a relationship and were frequently penalized on the dating market. Men, in contrast, were perceived by women as better candidates for partnering when they cared for their families.

Consistently, men discussed being cautious or disinterested when a woman cared for her children or grandchildren. Men wanted to date women who would have time for and would prioritize them and the relationship, rather than being secondary to helping an adult child or babysitting a grandchild. For example, men believed residential adult children would prohibit them from being allowed to sleep over and would make a woman less inclined to spend the night at his home. Essentially, men assumed women would be less available for sex if they shared a home with their adult children. Even if a woman would be open to spending the night together, she did not have the opportunity to meet or date the men who made these assumptions.

In contrast, women lauded men who were close to or cared for their families. Women perceived these men to be stable and committed partners and someone who was also family-oriented, all qualities they sought in a partner. Women were looking for a “family man,” someone who valued their family relationships and who would be open to incorporating a partner into his family life. When women came across a man who cared for or was involved in his family, they saw a man who prioritized his family, not a man who would prioritize a woman over his family. Women were only turned off by family-oriented men if those men had very young children, often defined as younger than high-school aged, as older women did not want to be pushed into the position of caring for these children.

Women’s dedication to caring for their family members and men’s disinterest in these women highlights the continued role of family in (re)partnering. Historically, parents played a role in their children’s partnering decisions, but this research shows that families still exert influence on one’s partnering, whether they intend to or not, even for older adults. Past research has shown having young, residential children can make it difficult for single mothers to find partners and (re)marry, but this research expands these findings by showing how providing care for non-residential adult children and grandchildren still impacts one’s dating opportunities.

Men judged a woman as a poor romantic partner due to her carework responsibilities, possibly because men perceive that they have plenty of dating options. In later adulthood, there are anywhere from 1.5 to 4 women for every man of the same age. Women live longer and men tend to date and remarry younger women, and so the gender ratio of single older adults puts disproportional power for partner selection in men’s hands.

Men also seemed to misunderstand women’s sense of responsibility to their families and the joy they received from their family relationships. A few men were incredulous that a woman would put looking after her grandchild ahead of her own happiness, defined by men as being in a romantic relationship. What men did not seem to understand, however, was that women felt great responsibility to their families and derived great pleasure from caring for them. Where men saw women needlessly spending time on adult children and grandchildren, women saw an opportunity to maintain close relationships with their children and be an important part of their family’s lives.

In this way, men’s preference for women without responsibilities means fewer women will meet men’s partnership requirements and women will lose out on romantic relationships. But in another way, men are losing out on the possibility of being with happy, fulfilled, caring women. In the end, assumptions and biases about caregiving women leaves women with rewarding and enriching relationships with their children and grandchildren, and leaves men in an ongoing pursuit of women without family attachments.

Lauren Harris is an Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of New Hampshire. Her research focuses on the meanings, processes, and transitions associated with developing romantic relationships, currently among older adults. You can learn more about her work here, here, and here, and on twitter @lauren_e_harris.

On a Tuesday afternoon, over a Zoom video call, Shannon – the mother of two sons (24 and 17) and one daughter (10) – begins to explain what being a mother means for her. Her smile widens as she discusses the happiness her children bring to her life, while also highlighting her role as their mother consisting of attending parent-teacher conferences, assistance with schoolwork, providing financially, and overall making sure that they feel loved and supported emotionally. While these aspects of mothering are consistent with dominant notions of motherhood, the tone of the conversation shifted when I followed up to ask: “how does being a mom differ by race?” With her once joyful smile no longer visible, Shannon looks at me and says: I think for African American mothers, I think it’s pressure and the worry. We always had to fight. We always had to advocate. We always have to be ready. Shannon continues discussing how there is a constant preparation and hyperawareness surrounding the realities of anti-Black racism and the mistreatment of Black children, specifically as a Black mother, is central to how she mothers her children.

Black mothers have long carried the burden of protecting their children from institutional and interpersonal racism in the United States. Because of the incessant threat of anti-Black racism and racialized violence, racism and motherhood intersect to create a racialized context for Black women, specifically the utilization of hyperawareness – acute alertness of what it means to be racialized as Black for their children. Black mothers have developed a number of strategies stemming from their hyperawareness around their children’s experiences, such having “the talk.”

Black women, knowing all too well how race and anti-Black racism are inseparable from their mothering, engage in what Patricia Hill Collins refers to as motherwork – efforts to protect and empower their children in the wake of multiple forms of racism. Because the lives of mothers are so intrinsically tied to their children’s, Black mothers prioritize the protection of their children in efforts to mitigate the consequences of these experiences of racism. However, while Black mothers are being held up as pillars of bravery and strength, there is little recognition of the toll that their children’s experiences are having on the mothers themselves. Specifically, what is the cost of the hyperawareness of black mothers?

My research explores this question through in-depth interviews with Black mothers across the United States with children in adolescence and emerging/young adulthood (ages 10-24). From 2019 to 2021, I interviewed thirty-five Black mothers to discuss their children’s experiences of anti-Black racism, and how they perceive these experiences shaping the mother’s own well-being. In a recently published paper, I argue that hyperawareness surrounding their children is a major source of stress for Black mothers in the study. Additionally, this hyperawareness is not solely in the presence of tangible experiences (actualized), but also surrounding experiences of racism that have not come to fruition (anticipated). The stress that mothers identified experiencing would manifest through either an actualized event and rumination – replaying an instance of racism over in one’s mind, or an anticipated event and hypervigiliance – preparation or defensive action taken to mitigate children’s experiences of racism. Mothers identified the stress of this hyperawareness shaping their emotional, mental, and physical well-being. For example, Shannon (discussed above) described how having to constantly be aware of the racism her children have/will face impacts her mental health due to feelings of anxiety. Shannon says, “I think it’s stress. I think it’s anxiety…. You’re not relaxed…. I think that’s things that other people don’t have to experience.” Other mothers in my study described having crying spells, sleeplessness, and sweaty palms surrounding their children’s experiences of racism.

What is key to take away from this study is that, regardless of whether the experience was actualized or anticipated, mothers identified hyperawareness as a source of stress that shapes their overall well-being. Additionally, because many of the mothers in the study had multiple children and discussed the role of hyperawareness at various life stages (childhood, adolescence, and adulthood), the stress experienced could be chronic. Where much of Black maternal health and well-being conversations have focused on pre- and post-natal outcomes, this project more broadly suggests that we expand our understanding of Black maternal health to recognize the role of children’s experiences of anti-Black racism in shaping the stress burden of Black mothers over their life course. The chronic and persistent nature of anti-Black racism in the lives of Black families reveals the burdens of motherhood for Black women.

The hyperawareness Black mothers possess is a double-edged sword, allowing them to protect their children, but at the cost of their own well-being. In highlighting the burdens of Black mothering that often go overlooked, I hope to reveal the insidiousness of racism in the lives of Black families, and the pervasiveness of racism on overall Black maternal well-being.

Mia Brantley (@_MiaBrantley) is currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Sociology at The Ohio State University, and an incoming (2023) Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University. Her scholarship lies at the intersection of race, gender, and family within the context of health. Using a Black feminist lens, she provides insight into the multiple ways racism affects the health and lived experiences of Black families.

Between 1989 and 2021, the National Registry of Exonerations recorded 2970 exonerations in the US, 161 of which occurred in 2021 alone. Wrongful convictions arguably represent the most egregious form of miscarriage of justice in the criminal legal system, and their consequences are far-reaching: Exonerees face immense difficulties in finding employment, reestablishing their sense of belonging, and even securing housing. Wrongfully-convicted persons’ psychological traumas often impede their post-prison reintegration, including in the family setting. In a recent paper, I studied the shifting social processes through which the experience of wrongful conviction harms family life over time. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 15 exonerated men, I explored what I called the “relational costs of wrongful convictions”: The harms that men’s familial relationships sustained at 1) the moment of wrongful conviction, 2) during the period of wrongful imprisonment, and 3) in the men’s post-prison lives. In examining how these costs shift and accrue over the course of participants’ wrongful conviction journeys, I reframed the familial disruption associated with wrongful convictions as a fluid social process, rather than primarily the product of exonerees’ psychological traumas.

I found that the moment of wrongful conviction represented an experience of shared trauma that was borne equally by participants and their family members. Benito (a 52-year-old, Hispanic exoneree who served 30 years of wrongful imprisonment), for example, described this moment as a “family affair of horror” that he and his family members “actually experienced together.” For socioeconomically-disadvantaged family members (most of whom were also people of color), the shock of witnessing a loved one get wrongfully convicted was exacerbated by the helplessness of being unable to offer much in the way of financial support. Steve (a 45-year-old, Black exoneree who served 26 years of wrongful imprisonment) captured this pain when he said, “See, your family can believe you, but they don’t know what to do and they only have so many resources.”

Despite the force of participants’ familial support when they were wrongfully convicted, the sense of solidarity that the men shared with their family members faded over time as many of them endured their prison sentences in relative isolation, sharpening the pain of their wrongful imprisonment terms. Even privileged participants like Tim (a 49-year-old, white exoneree who served 17 years of wrongful imprisonment) reported that “when an innocent person goes to prison, their family, their friends, their loved ones, strangers, go to prison with them.” Many of these more affluent participants nonetheless retained their ties with family members on the outside, who continued to advocate on their behalf and offer them both material and emotional support. For less privileged men, on the other hand, wrongful imprisonment represented a period of radically-diminished support as their family members grew weary of supporting them. For men like Alfred (a 46-year-old, Black exoneree who served 17 years of wrongful imprisonment), the hardest part of his wrongful imprisonment was “the absolute loneliness of being there” with no support on the outside.

When participants later reentered society after serving years in prison as innocent men, they found it very difficult to rebuild the few familial ties that had survived their prison terms. Although exonerees may comparatively be better off than individuals on parole in terms of the social support that they receive when they are released from prison, participants struggled to overcome the feelings of hostility they had toward family members who they felt had not adequately supported them when they were incarcerated. The men experienced the relational costs of wrongful convictions in reentry even more sharply because—unlike individuals released on parole—they felt entirely abandoned by the state when they were released, and they were moreover forced to confront familial challenges generated by the single unique pathway to state support that was available to them as exonerees: Financial compensation. Benito, for example, felt that people in his social circle began to show their “true colors” when he received compensation for his wrongful conviction, and he ultimately had to “cut the umbilical cord” and move to an entirely different state to get away from his family because of conflict over money. Familial tension over compensation underscored how conflict during reentry could be traced back to rifts that emerged during participants’ period of wrongful imprisonment. Highlighting the accruing and evolving nature of the relational costs of wrongful convictions, Samuel (a 38-year-old, Black exoneree who served 15 years of wrongful imprisonment) expressed frustration toward family members who he felt “gave up” on him while he was incarcerated but somehow now expected him to spend his money on them. In his words, “that drive a wedge between people.”

            Importantly, many men who felt abandoned by their family members during their wrongful imprisonment were still trying to rebuild their relationships with these relatives when they were released, despite their pessimism about ever being able to restore the relationships fully. Reconciliation can in fact be possible for exonerees under these circumstances, and restorative justice programs that support exonerees’ efforts to reestablish their familial ties following wrongful conviction and imprisonment may be particularly valuable. Although I focused on exonerees’ perceptions of their family members’ response to their wrongful imprisonment, we must learn more about the decisions that may motivate family members to distance themselves from (or remain supportive of) their loved ones during periods of wrongful imprisonment. Above all, therefore, my findings point to the need to explore the symbiotic harms of wrongful imprisonment more fully.

Janani Umamaheswar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society at George Mason University with research interests in punishment and social inequality. You can follow her on Twitter @jananiu.