family

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

June 16, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the full reports here:

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

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

A new study of Quebec’s recent non-transferable parental leave for fathers demonstrates just how effective this generous benefit is in getting fathers more involved at home. With new benefits, fathers increased their participation in parental leave by 250 percent. In households where men were given the opportunity to use this benefit, fathers’ daily time in household work was 23 percent higher, long after the leave period ended. Background and details of economist Ankita Patnaik’s innovative study are provided in this briefing report, prepared for CCF.

This briefing is based on a study by Dr. Ankita Patnaik. The original paper is available here and is forthcoming in the Journal of Labor Economics. This research was funded by Cornell University.

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One of the consistent findings of sociological research in recent decades has been that couples who had a child before getting married had substantially higher odds of divorcing than couples who married first. This held true even when researchers controlled for other factors that tend to distinguish such couples from those who marry directly—education, family background, race and ethnicity. But considering the tremendous increase in premarital cohabitation and childbearing over the past quarter century, and in light of new evidence that many other longstanding “laws” of marriage and divorce have been overturned (e.g., see “It’s Not Just Attitudes: Marriage Is Also Becoming More Egalitarian”; Are Individuals Who Marry at an Older Age Too Set in Their Ways to Make Their Marriages Work?), we set out to investigate whether this particular sociological “rule” still applies. more...

Last month, the Council on Contemporary Families (CCF) released a brief report, “The way we still never were,” to coincide with the new, revised, and updated 2016 version of Stephanie Coontz’s classic book, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. As a result, journalists identified many trends they saw as positive:

• All mothers—single, married, and working—are spending more time with their kids than stay-at-home mothers did in 1965. Even fathers are doing three times the amount of childcare that they used to.
• Since the 1990s, juvenile crime, sexual assaults, and intimate partner violence have declined by over 60 percent. And in the 1990s, domestic violence and child abuse rates were still lower than in the 1950s.
• Americans are becoming more accepting of cohabitation.
• Teenage pregnancy rates are lower than they have ever been.
• Close to 60 percent of Americans support same-sex marriage.
• Divorce rates are decreasing.
• Couples who have egalitarian relationships have better sex and happier marriages than those who have a more “traditionally” gendered division of labor, which was not the case in the past.

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Another Quarter Century of Family Change and Diversity

Editor’s note: In 1992—the year the U.S. presidential campaign erupted into a culture war over family values—Stephanie Coontz published The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. The title itself offered the pithy concept, and the book demonstrated that diversity and change have always been hallmarks of American family life: “Leave It to Beaver” was not a documentary. This week (March 29, 2016) Coontz released a substantially revised and updated edition of The Way We Never Were. Below, she provides a brief review of ten things that have changed for the better in the past quarter century, three that have stayed the same, and two that have gotten worse.

In 1992, political leaders and pundits were predicting that changes in family forms and gender roles were leading America into disaster. Were they right? 

1. Whatever happened to the Super Predators? In the early 1990s criminologists were predicting “a blood bath of violence” unleashed by “tens of thousands of severely morally impoverished juvenile super-predators” – all supposedly a result of rising rates of unwed births. But between 1993 and 2010, sexual assaults and intimate partner violence reported dropped by more than 60 percent. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics, the murder rate in 2013 was lower than at any time since the records began in 1960. Since 1994, juvenile crime rates have plummeted by more than 60 percent, even though the proportion of children born out of wedlock has risen to 40 percent.

2. How about crack babies? In the 1980s and 1990s, newspapers headlined an epidemic of “crack babies” in the inner city, with kids permanently damaged by their mothers’ use of crack cocaine during pregnancy. This led to a wave of punitive legal actions against such women. But follow-up studies have since revealed that children from the same high-poverty areas who had not been exposed to cocaine in utero were equally likely to have developmental and intellectual delays as babies born with cocaine in their systems. As I documented in The Way We Never Were, the big risk to these children was the pollution, violence, and chronic stress of deeply impoverished and neglected communities – including lead poisoning damage that was going on for years before it hit the headlines in 2016 because of the disaster in Flint.

3. Did career women start “out-sourcing” their children’s developmental care? As women gained more high prestige jobs in the late 1990s, that’s what many experts feared. In fact, however, even as mothers’ work hours increased, their child-care hours increased too, while fathers’ child-care time tripled. Today, both single and working moms spend more time with their children than married homemaker mothers did back in 1965.

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TSP readers likely appreciate Philip Cohen for his provocative blog, Family Inequality, which—based on a look at who retweets him—regularly has material valued by undergraduates, senior scholars, data nerds, policy wonks, and journalists alike. Cohen is a Council on Contemporary Families senior scholar and a professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. His research focuses on the sociology of families, social demography, and social inequality. His family textbook, The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change, was published in 2014. Cohen gave me these useful answers to my “3q”:

Q: First, a challenge: What’s one single thing you “know” with certainty, after years of research into modern families?

PC: Family inequality is remarkably resilient, but when it changes it does so under the influence of external forces. When women’s opportunities increase (or men’s decrease), when public investment in education increases, when the legal environment changes when technology permits reductions in household labor, when policies lighten (or compensate) the load of caring labor — that’s when inequality within families shifts. There is a dialectic here, and micro-level interactions within families matter, but these external forces are in the historical driver’s seat.

Q: Give us the “Twitter” version of your current research—in 140 characters (give or take), what are you working on now?

PC: This is what I’m working on today, in 140 characters: The culture wars over family politics always return to gender difference itself; it’s what’s at stake when left & right fight over families.

Q: How would you encourage a scholar of family life to work to get their research into public life, affecting policy and challenging assumptions about “average families”?

PC: The public loves to argue about families. There are lots of opportunities to get your work out there and make it relevant. Unlike some areas of sociological research, if you’re working on families, almost everything has a potential angle — in fact, one of the challenges is to not oversell the implications of our research. There is also a lot of translational work to do — interpreting and explaining new data and research as it comes out, helping people figure out what to make of the latest findings in the context of what we already know rather than participating in the whipsaw advice machine that thrives on contradicting conventional wisdom. I recommend that junior scholars get involved with the Council on Contemporary Families, which helps organize and transmit new research responsibly and effectively, and to look for opportunities to publish popular pieces in online venues that encourage well-reasoned and empirically-grounding discussion and debate.

Linda Nielsen is a Council on Contemporary Families Expert, as well as a professor of Educational and Adolescent Psychology at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Most of Nielsen’s research centers around the relationship between fathers and daughters. Nielsen’s research gained national attention when Pantene—the shampoo brand—reached out to her in hopes of creating a Super Bowl ad that was inspired by her research and centered around the importance of father-daughter relationships. Nielsen answered a few questions for us about her research, her own family, and any advice that she has:

Q: First, a challenge: what’s one single thing you “know” with certainty, after years of research into modern families?

LN: After writing books and articles about fathers and daughters for nearly three decades, the one single thing I know about father-daughter relationships is that most fathers and daughters would both like to have a more communicative, more comfortable, more personal relationship with one another. Both would like to spend more one on one time together without other family members involved – especially during the daughter’s teenage years when society generally discourages anything more than dad being involved in his daughters’ athletic or academic life – or being her banking machine.

Q: What does your family–both family-of-origin and family-of-choice–look like, and how does that fit with what you know about American families today? Are there points of dissonance? more...

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...

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/).