Press Releases

New from CCF! What Recent College Grads Say About the Impact of their Student Loans

For Immediate Release

CONTACT: Arielle Kuperberg / UNC Greensboro / atkuperb@uncg.edu

March 24, 2021, Austin Texas

In the past 30 years, the percentage of students at 4-year colleges who take out loans to finance their education has grown from less than half to a full two-thirds, and their average debt load – in constant dollars – has nearly doubled. In 2017, researchers asked students what they expected to get from college and how they thought college debt would affect them. In 2020, the researchers asked a subset of those who had graduated how their expectations had matched reality and how their lives would change if their loans were forgiven.

Their findings are summarized in a report, “The Difference Debt Makes: College Students and Grads on How Student Debt Affects Their Life Choices — and What They Would Do Differently if it Were Forgiven,” authored by Arielle Kuperberg of UNC Greensboro and Joan Maya Mazelis of Rutgers University-Camden. The report combines survey results published in Sociological Inquiry with follow-up surveys prepared especially for the Council on Contemporary Families

In some ways, the undergraduates surveyed in 2017 over-estimated the extent to which their college debts would burden them. But in other ways they gained less from the loans they took out than they had expected. Fewer reported being forced to work at jobs they did not like or having to live with parents or roommates to pay off their debts than had anticipated these outcomes back in 2017. But only 21 percent of graduates in the 2020 follow-up reported they had been able to get a better job because of their degree. Nearly one-fifth (18 percent) of graduates reported they could not buy a house because of their loans, while 22 percent said they had foregone or delayed graduate school because of their loan debt.

The combination of college debt and Covid-19 also affected the family decisions of graduates the authors surveyed. Almost one-fifth said they were delaying marriage until their loans were paid off, and 20 percent were delaying children.

Asked what they would do if their loans were forgiven, both the students surveyed in 2017 and the graduates surveyed in 2020 gave similar answers: Almost three-fourths said they would put the money in savings, and more than half said they would save up to buy a house. Among graduates, two-thirds said they would use that money to pay off other debt, and almost 53 percent would save for retirement. About 20 percent said they would get married or have children sooner.

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For Further Information

Arielle Kuperberg, Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
atkuperb@uncg.edu 201-681-2382

Joan Maya Mazelis, Associate Professor of Sociology, Rutgers University–Camden
mazelis@camden.rutgers.edu 856-225-6468

Links

Brief report: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/college-student-debt-brief-report/
Press release: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/college-student-debt-release/
Full study: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/soin.12416/

About CCF

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

The Council helps keep journalists informed of notable work on family-related issues via the CCF Network. To join the CCF Network, or for further media assistance, please contact Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education, at coontzs@msn.com, cell 360-556-9223.

March 24, 2021

New from CCF! Do the Media’s “Sexy Girl” Messages Trump Their “Girl Power” Ones?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Kristi Williams / The Ohio State University / ccf@osu.edu

Do the Media’s “Sexy Girl” Messages Trump Their “Girl Power” Ones?

On average, children in elementary school watch four and a half hours of television a day: At that rate they see almost 80,000 examples of “sexy girl” role models, in children’s programming alone, every year. A new report details why we should we be concerned about how much more they will watch during school closures due to the pandemic.

September 3, 2020, Austin TX: A new briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families examines the mixed signals the mass media sends to girls when they say “Girls Rule” but continue to present “Sexy Girls” as role models. “The media want kids to do what they say, not what they show,” notes Stephanie Coontz, CCF Director of Research, “but as every parent knows, kids pay more attention to what we practice than what we preach. This research shows that ‘The Talk’ may be equality, but ‘The Walk’ is something else entirely.”

The report, “Media Messages to Young Girls,” authored by Christia Spears Brown, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of Kentucky, spells out how children learn the desirability of “looking sexy” from the mass media– and the ways this undercuts their own self-confidence and the respect they get from others. For example, girl characters continue to be under-represented in the most popular tv shows for elementary school children, but when they are shown, they are mostly portrayed in a sexualized way. Girls learn the rules quickly, telling Brown and her team that “the way to achieve high status and popularity is to be sexy,” even as they also tell them that sexy girls are not very nice, smart, or athletic.

Even when school is in session, Brown calculates, elementary school children watch four and a half hours of television a day, and see more than 75,000 examples of “sexy girl” role models a year. With 21 of the 25 largest school districts in the country choosing remote learning instead of in-person classes, such exposure to sexualized images of females is likely to balloon this fall as children spend more time with media than in classrooms, playgrounds, and sports.

And that is a big problem, Brown’s research shows, because when girls prioritize sexualized attractiveness, they minimize traits they think are “incompatible with sexiness, such as intelligence….When researchers gave some elementary-aged girls a sexualized doll (“Fashion” Barbie) to play with for just five minutes, the career aspirations they reported afterwards were more limited than those of girls who played with the non-sexualized Mr. Potato Head.” Even more disturbing, children in elementary school exposed to pictures of sexualized women rate those women as less worthy of being helped when in danger than non-sexualized women.

Brown notes that the girls who buy into these media-fueled “sexy girl” aspirations are not responding to pressure from boys their own age. “When we ask children to tell us about the sexualized girls, it is girls who recount elaborate stories about why sexualized girls are more popular and attractive. Boys in elementary school are still pretty clueless about the different implications of a girl wearing a belly shirt or a hoodie.” In other words, says Virginia Rutter, author of The Gender of Sexuality, who was not involved in the research, “this is not so much a kids’ problem as a grown-up problem. Girls are trying to live up to what the media tells them is valued in grown-up women by grown-up men.”

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For Further Information

Christia Spears Brown, Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Kentucky; christia.brown@uky.edu

Links

Brief report: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/girls-media-messaging-brief-report/
Press release: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/girls-media-messaging-release/

About CCF

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

September 3, 2020

New From CCF! What’s the Role of Child Protective Services? New Study Points to Parallels with Policing

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Virginia Rutter / Framingham State Sociology

vrutter@gmail.com

What’s the Role of Child Protective Services? New Study Points to Parallels with Policing

Each year, U.S. child protection authorities, tasked with responding to child abuse and neglect, investigate the families of over three million children, disproportionately poor, Black, and Native American children. A staggering one in three children can expect a CPS investigation at some point during childhood. In a new study, sociologist Kelley Fong finds that professionals frequently refer families to Child Protective Services to get them help. But because CPS is a coercive institution, not a social service one, this often undermines families in marginalized communities.

August 11, 2020, Austin TX—Despite its goal of protecting children, Child Protective Services (CPS) has some troubling features in common with policing in the United States. That’s the conclusion of “The Tool We Have”: Why Child Protective Services Investigates So Many Families and How Even Good Intentions Backfire, released today by the Council on Contemporary Families. Kelley Fong, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of History and Sociology, explains “how, with the fraying of the social safety net in recent decades, efforts to help families take the form of summoning an agency that can forcibly separate them.” Dr. Fong notes, “As with the police, this expansive reliance on authorities with coercive power fosters fear and mistrust” — even when CPS finds parents are not maltreating.

The data: Interviews with people who refer families to the CPS, CPS investigators, and the moms who were investigated. To understand why CPS encounters are so commonplace, especially for marginalized families, Dr. Fong observed CPS investigations in Connecticut and interviewed approximately 100 key participants on these cases: professionals reporting suspected child maltreatment or neglect, frontline investigators, and investigated mothers. Many reporting professionals understand that CPS may not be appropriate but feel it is the only “tool we have.” As a result, referring to CPS —like calling the police — becomes a kind of catch-all reaction to non-criminal problems, in this case to get support services for families in need:

Reporting professionals almost always want CPS to provide supportive services, reasoning that CPS has more information about available and appropriate services. But CPS investigators, like reporting professionals, are often unable to address families’ persistent needs, and the fact that they come in with the power to remove children puts marginalized families in a legal but also a psychological vise.

Embracing CPS reporting as a means of rehabilitating families disproportionately exposes marginalized families to CPS’s coercive authority, and, paradoxically, that leads to less help and more mistrust.

Moms: “I was so scared.” Fong’s interviews with investigated mothers reveal the heart of the drama that can unfold with CPS.

CPS investigations foster substantial anxiety among investigated families. In these investigations the threat of removal is ever-present–even if unstated. “I couldn’t speak. The only thing that crossed my mind was that they were going to take them away,” recalled one mother. “I always thought that their job is to come in and take a child from their family,” another reflected. “Oh my God. You don’t understand. I was so scared.”

CPS reports can also lead parents to distance themselves from reporting systems. One mother, reported to CPS for using marijuana during pregnancy, hesitated to speak openly with healthcare providers afterwards. After giving birth, she worried she was experiencing postpartum depression. But, she explained, “I don’t tell them any of that because I don’t need them to say, oh, she’s going through postpartum. She’s gonna hurt the baby.”

Where this leads: “In asking CPS—like the police, armed with tools of surveillance and coercion—to take on all manner of social problems, we further traumatize and marginalize families,” Fong explains. She argues that changes in training and development of support-oriented crisis response teams would be better aligned with many of the family needs that are often handed off to CPS.

When you see the fist, you panic. Stephanie Coontz, CCF’s Director of Research, observes: “Fong’s CPS findings parallel what happens when we ask police to respond to problems that social workers should be dealing with. In both cases, people who’ve been trained to coerce and punish bad actors are asked to get needy people out of bad situations. We tell people wearing a gauntleted fist to extend a helping hand. They aren’t trained to do that, and even when they try, many people only see the fist and they panic.”

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FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:
Kelley Fong, Assistant Professor, School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology; ktfong@gatech.edu.

LINKS AND ABOUT:
Brief report: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/cps-brief-report/
Press release: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/cps-release/
Preprint of underlying new study: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/kfong/files/fong_asr.pdf

August 11, 2020

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New From CCF! Before and during COVID-19: Telecommuting, Work-Family Conflict, and Gender Equality

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Virginia Rutter / Framingham State Sociology
vrutter@gmail.com

Telecommuting Gets Mixed Results for Gender Equity at Home, and Women Are More Depressed
Even before the pandemic, telecommuting had mixed results on gender equity. And mothers telecommuting during the pandemic report more stress and depression than mothers working outside the home.

August 4, 2020, Austin TX–As of April/May 2020, 55 percent of currently employed parents were working from home, and many experts predict that telecommuting will become more widespread even if schools do reopen next month. Is telecommuting the new normal? And if so, what does that mean for women’s well-being at home and at work?

A unique new study, Before and During COVID-19: Telecommuting, Work-Family Conflict, and Gender Equality, released today by the Council on Contemporary Families, compares parents who were telecommuting before the pandemic and after. The good news? Telecommuting fathers do a lot more childcare than other fathers – enough more to actually even out their time with moms. The bad news? They don’t increase their daily housework at all, while telecommuting women increase theirs by almost 50 minutes. The really bad news? Telecommuting during the pandemic increases mothers’ depression and anxiety significantly more than working from a separate location. One conclusion the authors draw is that women benefit from the boundaries created by work away from home.

Investigators Thomas Lyttelton (Yale Sociology, Emma Zang (Yale Sociology), and Kelly Musick (Cornell Policy Analysis and Management) examined time use data from parents who were telecommuting from before COVID-10 and after. Using data from the 2003-2018 American Time Use Survey (ATUS, N = 19,179) and the April and May 2020 COVID Impact Survey (N = 784), they found two distinct patterns of adjustment telecommuting, pre COVID-19:

Telecommuting dads closed the gender gap on childcare. Pre COVID-19, dads spent 67 more minutes caring for children on the days they worked exclusively from home. This was 47 minutes larger than the moms’ increases on work-from-home days.

For housework, the gender gap got worse. Pre COVID-19, when mothers worked from home, they increased their housework by 49 minutes, while fathers did no more housework on work-from-home days than on days they worked away from home.

Work-family spillover hits telecommuting moms hard. Aside from actual child care, telecommuting fathers, pre-COVID-19, reported that children were present while they were working for 21 minutes per day, on average, on days they worked from home. But mothers reported children present when they were working for 54 minutes per day, a gender gap of 27 minutes.

And in the pandemic, telecommuting moms report especially elevated stress. Telecommuting moms are more depressed and stressed than moms who work outside the home — and more depressed and stressed than dads working in either location. Telecommuting dads are actually less anxious when working from home than when at a separate workplace; the opposite is true for moms.

The authors note: “The closure of schools and childcare facilities greatly increases childcare burdens on parents, with telecommuters now expected to educate their children alongside doing their day jobs, a job that has so far fallen most heavily on women…. Mothers telecommuting in April – May 2020 reported feeling anxious, depressed, and lonely at higher rates than telecommuting fathers. The same was not true for mothers in the workplace, where we found no gender differences in stress and depression.”

What are those rates of stress now? In the pandemic, 20 percent of mothers working from home report feeling depressed, while 11 percent of fathers working from home do. For anxiety, six percent of fathers working from home report it, while three times as many mothers — 18 percent — working from home report it. (See Figure 2 in the brief for additional details.)

Where does this leave us?
“Telecommuting seems to work better for gender equity when men do it rather than when women do it. As a historian, my take is that men need to be reintegrated into the household just as women have been reintegrated into the work world. Telecommuting seems to help dads pay attention to childcare requirements they can ignore when at work,” notes Stephanie Coontz, CCF Director of Research.

“By contrast, most telecommuting women find it hard to ignore the internalized pressure to take care of every pile of dirty laundry, sweep up every pile of dirt, and jump to attention every time a child wanders into the room. This is a form of work-family conflict people often ignore when they tout the advantages of working from home, and as this report shows, it’s a source of gender inequality at home and at work,” Coontz concludes.

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FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:
Thomas Lyttelton / PhD candidate / Yale Sociology / thomas.lyttelton@yale.edu / (203) 606-8047.
Emma Zang / Assistant Professor / Yale Sociology / emma.zang@yale.edu / (919) 536-9621.
Kelly Musick / Professor and Chair / Cornell Policy Analysis and Management / musick@cornell.edu.

LINKS AND ABOUT:
Brief report: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/covid-19-telecommuting-work-family-conflict-and-gender-equality/
Press release: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/covid-19-telecommuting-work-family-conflict-and-gender-equality-advisory/

August 4, 2020

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New from CCF! Men pick up (some) of the slack at home: New national survey on the pandemic at home

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Virginia Rutter / Framingham State Sociology
vrutter@gmail.com

Men pick up (some) of the slack at home: New national survey on the pandemic at home

For many couples, family work at home has increased, but for most of those couples, even when women are still doing more than their partners, women’s relative share of the burden is less lopsided than before the pandemic. On the whole, men have increased the percentage of the housework and childcare that they do since the pandemic. Two big exceptions: Women are doing 70 percent of homeschooling. And among couples where the division of labor was most unequal before the pandemic, women’s absolute AND relative share of family work has increased.

May 20, 2020, Austin TX—No survey or snapshot captures the diversity of experiences families are having managing the pandemic at home. An unprecedented number of families in the U.S. and other rich countries around the world are at home right now. The rest are caring for family while working away from home, and many are serving on the frontlines as essential workers.

Still, sociologists have detected important patterns that tell us where we could be heading beyond the pandemic—and remind us of where we were before it started. In a briefing report prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families, “Men and Women Agree: During the COVID-19 Pandemic Men Are Doing More at Home,” Daniel Carlson (University of Utah), Richard Petts (Ball State University), and Joanna Pepin (University of Texas-Austin) share results from a survey of 1,060 parents in different-sex couples. In response to fears that the pandemic has dealt a major blow to hopes for gender equality, they conclude: “Our results suggest a more hopeful scenario than those implied by some of the headlines: According to both men and women, men are doing more housework and childcare during the pandemic than before it began, leading to more equal sharing of domestic labor.

Glass half full? Some results yielded a glass half-full perspective:

While for many families the burdens have grown, about 60 percent of respondents reported that their “time in domestic labor has not changed since the beginning of the pandemic, even accounting for helping children with homework.” This may be due to reductions in things like chauffeuring children, scheduling their activities, and attending their events – a reminder of how much time parents normally spend on domestic labor outside the household.
“Among most couples where the division of tasks did change, it did so in an egalitarian direction.”
“A little more than a month after the start of the pandemic, 41 percent of parents reported sharing housework with their partners”—a 15-percentage-point rise over pre-pandemic levels.
Shared childcare grew by 11 percentage points, from around 45 percent to around 56 percent, with small variations depending on the ages of the children.
“In no situation — and in no type of family, whether dual-earner where both are working full-time, dual-earner where someone is working part-time, single earner, or both unemployed — did we find that the division of tasks became less likely to be shared.”

…or is the glass half empty? Men who already participated in housework and childcare before the pandemic tended to increase their share of these tasks after. But little progress occurred among couples where men started out less involved. And even the more egalitarian couples did not make the same progress when it came to dividing the novel tasks of homeschooling that the pandemic added to many families’ daily schedules.

“We find that most women (70 percent) report being primarily responsible for homeschooling during the pandemic.”
Most of the increased sharing of housework and childcare occurred among couples who had made strides towards dividing these tasks in a less traditional manner before the pandemic. Among couples who had not made such strides, both the absolute amount of women’s work and their relative share of family labor increased substantially. “Of the mothers who continued to be primarily responsible for domestic work during the COVID-19 pandemic, roughly one-third increased their time spent in housework and care of children during the pandemic.”

The bottom line: This new research gives us some hope for greater realization of the promise of shared parenting and housework, while it reminds us of the legacy of inequality that domestic work carries with it. CCF Research Director Stephanie Coontz sums it up: “The bad news is that dads still expect moms to figure out what the kids need, so when a new responsibility comes up, like having to take over home schooling, women end up doing the heavy lifting.” She continues, “The good news, when you combine these findings with other studies on the long-term effect of paternity leave, split shifts, and work from home, is that once men begin to see and participate in the invisible labor they used to be able to ignore, most of them step up their game.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:

Daniel L. Carlson / Associate Professor / Department of Family and Consumer Studies / University of Utah / daniel.carlson@fcs.utah.edu.

Richard J. Petts / Professor / Department of Sociology / Ball State University / rjpetts@bsu.edu.

Joanna Pepin / Postdoctoral Fellow / Population Research Center / University of Texas – Austin / jpepin@prc.utexas.edu.

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LINKS AND ABOUT:
Report: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/covid-couples-division-of-labor/
Press Advisory: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/covid-couples-division-of-labor-advisory/

Read our blog CCF @ The Society Pages – https://thesocietypages.org/ccf/

May 20, 2020

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New From CCF! Cohabiting in the Time of Covid19: The good, the bad, and the need for support

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Virginia Rutter / Framingham State Sociology
vrutter@gmail.com

Cohabiting in the Time of Covid19: The good, the bad, and the need for support
Eighteen million people in the U.S. are cohabiting, and half are under age 35. Cohabiting couples are more egalitarian; but they are younger, poorer, and more vulnerable at work and at home. These families’ needs are neglected in many plans for how to help in a time of pandemic.

May 5, 2020, Austin TX—Newspapers and websites are full of advice for married couples who are working from home while trying to manage child care. But most of that advice is aimed at married couples, whose challenges are often very different than those facing the millions of cohabiting couples in America. In a briefing report, The Challenges Facing Cohabiting Couples in this Crisis, to the Council on Contemporary Families, Amanda Miller (University of Indianapolis) and Sharon Sassler (Cornell University) show how crucial it is to understand cohabiting families and respond to their—until now—neglected needs and concerns. Consider:

Cohabitors have less money. Fifty-three percent earn less than $30,000 per year.
An estimated 5.8 million American children were living in cohabiting households in 2018. Almost twice as many cohabiting parents as married ones (46 percent 26 percent) are low-income, earning 150 percent or less of the supplemental poverty measure.
Cohabitors are concentrated in low-wage jobs, making them more likely to have been impacted by the 30 million job losses we experienced in the past month, but also more likely to be labeled essential workers, required to report to high-stress front-line jobs with inadequate protections in place.
As some states relax shelter-in-place orders, cohabitors who have jobs to go back to are less likely to have paid sick leave, increasing the likelihood of exposure on the job.

Egalitarianism helps, but…. Heterosexual cohabitors have one advantage in this crisis compared to their married counterparts, Miller and Sassler report. On average, they are less locked in to traditional gender roles and less likely to assume that women should do more care work at home. Such equality is now one of the strongest predictors of relationship satisfaction, suggesting that heterosexual married couples have some things to learn from cohabitors, as well as from same-sex married couples. However, many cohabitors do not intend to marry, and the report outlines the different risks that can arise when relationships are intensified by shelter-in-place orders.

The bottom line: Shelter-in-place and the attendant global economic crisis compound the hardships and risks facing cohabitors. Miller and Sassler argue for specific social policies tailored to address their unique financial and demographic characteristics.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:

Amanda J. Miller, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology, and Director of Faculty Development, University of Indianapolis. 317-788-3547 (w) 812-480-9708 (c), milleraj@uindy.edu.

Sharon Sassler, Professor, Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department of Policy Analysis & Management, Cornell University, 607-254-6551 (w), 607-351-4870 (c ), sharon.sassler@cornell.edu.

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LINKS AND ABOUT:
Report: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/cohabiting-during-covid/
Advisory: https://contemporaryfamilies.org/cohabiting-during-covid-press-advisory/

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Read our blog CCF @ The Society Pages – https://thesocietypages.org/ccf/

May 5, 2020

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