family

National surveys and other studies continuously tell us that work is a major source of stress for Americans. A 2005 Work and Families Institute study found that almost 90 percent of workers felt they either never had enough time in the day to do their job or that their job required them to work very hard. A Pew Report from 2013 found that more than half of all working moms and working dads experience work-family conflict. One-third of working moms and dads feel rushed on work-days, and almost 50 percent of working dads (and 25 percent of working moms) say they don’t have enough time with their children. And in a recently completed research project I helped conduct, we found that people report feeling less stressed out on non-work days than on work-days. Home, most of us believe, is where we recover from the stress of the work day. more...

Update on Research from Jennifer Glass

Why are divorce rates higher in religiously conservative “red” states and lower in less religiously conservative “blue” states? After all, most conservatives frown upon divorce, and religious commitment is believed to strengthen marriage, not erode it. Even so, religiously conservative states Alabama and Arkansas have the second and third highest divorce rates in the U.S., at 13 per 1000 people per year while New Jersey and Massachusetts, more liberal states, are two of the lowest at 6 and 7 per 1000 people per year.

Evangelicals and divorce. For a study earlier this year in the American Journal of Sociology (abstract only), Demographers Jennifer Glass at the University of Texas and Philip Levchak at the University of Iowa looked at the entire map of the United States, going county by county, to examine where divorces occurred in 2000 and what the characteristics of those counties were. Their work confirms that one of the strongest factors predicting divorce rates (per 1000 married couples) is the concentration of conservative or evangelical Protestants in that county.

Previous discussions of this puzzling paradox have focused on three alternative explanations.

Is it poverty? Some scholars argue that it has nothing to do with religious beliefs and practices, but reflects the fact that conservative religious groups are most concentrated in rural and Southern counties, which tend to have lower wages than the national average and higher rates of poverty. And research does show that such conditions do raise the risk of divorce. Yet even controlling for income and region, divorce rates tend to be especially high in areas where conservative religious groups are prominent. more...

“It’s my home,” Sylvia, 85, offers as a simple but profound explanation for why she’s not ready to give up her Manhattan apartment and move in with relatives. Though she lived with her own parents as they aged, Sylvia has lived alone for almost twenty years, since her husband passed away, as does her 92-year-old sister-in-law and many of her contemporaries in old age.

The advent of Social Security gave older people—and more often than not, older women—the financial resources to live on their own. Economists Kathleen McGarry and Robert Schoeni found that 59 percent of widows over the age of 65 lived with adult children in 1940, compared with 20 percent fifty years later. Today nearly a third of all older adults live alone. These rates rise with age and follow distinct gendered patterns, with women much more likely to live alone than men at all ages. By age 85, 47 percent of women and 27 percent of men lived alone in 2010.

Many older people struggle to make ends meet on Social Security as their sole source of income, or in combination with modest savings and pensions. For immigrant elders in cities like New York, living alone is often not an option due to a lack of affordable housing, linguistic hurdles, and cultural traditions of multi-generational living arrangements. While poverty rates rise with age and hit women hardest in late life, as my analysis of Census data has found, those who can afford to live alone usually do. Researchers expect that these trends will only increase with the aging of baby boomers, who have experienced higher rates of divorce, cohabitation, lifelong singlehood, and childlessness during their lifetimes. more...