Press Releases

April 20, 2015

News from CCF: Sexual Assault Rates—On Campus and Off

Credits to Jaybird via Flickr Creative Commons (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/legalcode))

For Immediate Release

Contact: Virginia Rutter / Framingham State University Sociology

CCF PRESS ADVISORY: Sexual Assault Rates—On Campus and Off

April 20, Miami FL–April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month: In a good news/bad news scenario, this year we have seen a marked increase in attention to rape and sexual assault, especially on college campuses, by the media, local authorities, and the White House, The new focus on this problem is beneficial, but its persistence is troubling.

History of rates of crime and intimate partner violence

The Council on Contemporary Families Online Symposium on Intimate Partner Violence, released today, reports a decline in IPV that parallels a decline in violent crime overall in the United States. Nevertheless, the series explains, while rapes and sexual assaults may be declining, they are still undercounted. Furthermore, while rates of IPV are unacceptably high on college campuses, those rates are even higher among women not enrolled in four-year colleges.

CCF director of research and education Stephanie Coontz writes in her introduction, “Violent crime has been falling in the United States for more than two decades, after rising sharply between the mid-1970s and 1993. In 2013 the murder rate was lower than any time since the records began in 1960, while violent crimes in general were at their lowest point since 1970.”

Is the decline in violent crime reflected in rates of IPV? Two reports answer yes. Samuel Walker (University of Nebraska) indicates in “Interpersonal Violence and the Great Crime Drop” that “Between 1993 and 2010 IPV fell by 64 percent.” CCF intern Jessica Wheeler’s examination of the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) in “A Review of National Crime Victim Victimization Findings on Rape and Sexual Assault” suggests that rates have been declining since 1973–with important caveats such as the NCVS’s neglect of military populations.

Undercounting on college campuses – and neglecting women who aren’t in school

In a detailed study of “Sexual Assault on Campus”, University of Michigan scholars Elizabeth Armstrong and Jamie Budnick explain that while rates of IPV are declining, these rates are systematically underestimated – and have been from the beginning of IPV data collection.

For example, Armstrong and Budnick report, a national panel of researchers unanimously concluded that the NCVS techniques “likely inhibit reporting of assaults. Studies have consistently shown that many women do not label as ‘rape’ or define as criminal many sexual incidents that are unwanted and meet standards of forcible rape.” In addition, the way the NCVS is collected does not ensure privacy. “The interviewer is required to question everyone 12 and older at designated households, which means that all residents know what others are being asked. These oral interviews may be overheard,” which can inhibit people’s responses about controversial issues, explain the authors. Their report includes a detailed overview of data sources on sexual assault so that readers can examine the strengths and weaknesses of available data directly.

How common is IPV? The authors cite surveys ranging from a low of 14 to a high of 25 percent, which suggests that “the 1 in 5 statistic so frequently quoted is reasonable, even though inexact. The two most comparable recent surveys—the CSA and OCSLS [see data sources] — converge on a figure of 25 to 26 percent of college women experiencing sexual assault while in college.”

Jennifer Barber and colleagues, also at the University of Michigan, report in “Women not Enrolled in Four-Year Universities and Colleges Have Higher Risk of Sexual Assault” about a detailed study of college-aged women first collected in 2008. The Relationship Dynamics and Social Life Study (RDSL) found that women who never attended or dropped out of 4-year colleges — a group that on average comes from lower-income backgrounds — reported slightly higher rates of IPV. What’s more, these women were more likely to have a history of IPV (21 percent of non-college women versus 13 percent of college women in their study) and less likely to report that their friends and family would be supportive if they reported instances of rape or domestic violence. “There appears to be a higher incidence of, and tolerance for, such violence among the disadvantaged than among the privileged,” Barber and colleagues conclude. Since IPV has serious long-range health consequences for women, they report, this makes it all the more important “that the care and consideration we are giving sexual assault on college campuses must be extended off campus.

Stephanie Coontz returns to the bigger picture when she argues in her overview that while progress toward gender equality and mutual respect continues, women’s rejection of the double standard has risen faster than men’s. Despite the decline in forcible assaults, there may be new ways in which women are vulnerable to predatory or exploitative young men. “Today’s young women feel safer than earlier generations in openly expressing their erotic interests, and many do so without incurring the stigma or shame that used to be heaped on women who expressed their sexuality. Women also feel a new entitlement to drink alcohol and to party hard without being assaulted or taken advantage of. And they should be so entitled. But not all men have caught up with the new values that give women the right to say yes and the right to say no. There are subgroups of men, especially in settings that encourage rowdy masculine bonding, who still feel a sense of sexual entitlement, including some who actively attempt to incapacitate women with drugs or alcohol.”

For Further Information

Elizabeth Armstrong, Professor of Sociology and Organizational Studies, University of Michigan, elarmstr@umich.edu

Jennifer Barber, Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan, jebarber@umich.edu, 723/764-8633,

Jamie Budnick, Sociology Doctoral Candidate, University of Michigan, jalobu@umich.edu.

Stephanie Coontz , Director of Research and Public Education, Council on Contemporary Families, and Faculty Member in History, The Evergreen State College; coontzs@msn.com

Samuel Walker, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Nebraska at Omaha, samwalker@unomaha.edu, 402-554-3590 (o); 402-556-4674 (cell).

Links to These Reports:

The Tricky Business of Sorting Out Sexual Assault: An Introduction to the CCCF Symposium on Intimate Violence (Coontz)

Sexual Assault on Campus (Armstrong and Budnick)

Women not Enrolled in Four-Year Universities and Colleges Have Higher Risk of Sexual Assault (Barber)

Interpersonal Violence and the Great Crime Drop (Walker)

A Review of National Crime Victim Victimization Findings on Rape and Sexual Assault (Wheeler)

About CCF

The Council on Contemporary Families, based at the University of Miami, 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.

Read our blog Families as They Really Are – www.thesocietypages.org/families

DATE: April 20, 2015

April 13, 2015

News From CCF: America’s Fragmented Child Care and Early Education System

For Immediate Release

Contact: Virginia Rutter / Framingham State University Sociology

vrutter@gmail.com / 206 375 4139

CCF PRESS ADVISORY: April 12-18, 2015 is the Week of the Young Child. This year’s theme is Celebrating Our Youngest Learners. A new report from CCF highlights just how fragmented our child-care and early education system is and points to models in the U.S. and abroad that can work.

AMERICA’S FRAGMENTED CHILD CARE AND EARLY EDUCATION SYSTEM (There are alternatives!)

April 13, MIAMI–At the opening of the week of the young child, Sara Gable, a nutrition professor at University of Missouri, reports to the Council on Contemporary Families, “Despite the continued increase in maternal employment and decades of research showing that quality child care benefits children, families, and employers, the US has made almost no progress since 1971, when President Nixon vetoed a universal child care bill passed by Congress, decrying it as “communal child-rearing.” Gable’s briefing report, “America’s Fragmented Child Care and Early Education System,” details the inconsistent, fragmented, expensive, and unreliable system through which today’s parents must navigate.

Parents must make a variety of inconsistent and expensive arrangements. Parents are working harder than ever. Among mothers with children under age 6, 64 percent are employed, with 72 percent working 35 or more hours per week. And even young children whose mothers are not employed spend an average of 21 hours per week outside of their mothers’ and fathers’ immediate care.

Gable reports that, “To support employment, parents need to make informal arrangements or enter the vast, private market of child care. Center-based care costs the most. Full-time infant care ranges from $5,496 in Mississippi to $16,549 in Massachusetts. For a 4-year-old, full-time care in the same states costs $4,800 and $12,320 a year respectively.”

Care providers are poorly paid. Despite the great expense to parents, the pay and working conditions for care providers and educators are not always optimal. Gable explains, “Employment in early education and child care pays poorly, even for teachers with a college degree. Among all center-based workers combined, median hourly wage is $10.60, ranging from a low of $9.00 for those with a high school diploma to $14.70 for those with a BA or higher. Median hourly wages are the lowest for people caring for the very youngest children ages birth to 3 years. These wages range from $8.60 (high school diploma or less) to $11.40 (BA or higher). College-educated workers across all parts of the child care and early education system earn far less than comparably educated members of the civilian workforce.” This results in high turnover rates. The report also details the fragmented standards for these caregivers.

Can we do better? Gable provides examples from abroad, as well as from the U.S. Military.

“Countries that best meet the needs of their youngest learners and families do so with notable investments in comprehensive, universal services. Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, Finland, France, and Norway all spend at least 1.0 percent of GDP on early childhood services. Five of these 6 countries provide a one-year parental leave at 50 percent of salary and have subsidized and accredited preschool services for at least 80 percent of 4-year-olds,” explains Gable.

At home, Gable reports, the U.S. Military Child Care Program is a model example that would serve all of our youngest children well. “The military subsidizes two-thirds of child care costs and parent fees are based on a sliding-fee scale. About 200,000 children attend the 800 centers and 3,500 home-based programs, which operate for up to 12 hours a day and are nationally accredited. And 40,000 specially-trained employees earn an average of $15.00 an hour and receive military benefits.”

Gable explains, “The Military’s program shows that it is possible to have government-sponsored quality, affordable child care that meets children’s developmental needs, supports working families, and gives parents peace of mind during the workday. Had a universal childcare bill not been vetoed in 1971, perhaps all Americans could have access to similar programs. Isn’t it about time?”

Additional facts about our youngest learners:

With an all-time low fertility rate, we have fewer young learners but they are highly diverse.
In 2009, of the 21.3 million children under age 5 years, 74.5 percent were white, 15.2 percent were Black, 4.7 percent were Asian, and 5.6 percent were Native American, Pacific Islanders, or mixed race. About 26 percent of them have Hispanic origins.
Young learners are more likely than any other age group to live in poverty. One in four children under the age of 6 lives in poverty and 14.3 percent are White, 42.3 percent are Black, and 36.8 percent are Hispanic.

BRIEFING REPORT: America’s Fragmented Child Care and Early Education System by Sara Gable.

(https://contemporaryfamilies.org/ccf-briefing-report-fragmented-child-care/)

For Further Information

Contact Sara Gable, Associate Professor in Nutrition, University of Missouri, Columbia, gables@missouri.edu; 573.882.4628.

About CCF

Read our blog Families as They Really Are – www.thesocietypages.org/families

DATE: April 13, 2015

March 5, 2015

Overview: Moynihan+50: Family Structure Still Not the Problem

For Immediate Release

Contact: Virginia Rutter / Framingham State University Sociology

vrutter@gmail.com / 206 375 4139

CCF PRESS ADVISORY: On 50th Anniversary of The Moynihan Report, Family Structure is *Still* Not the Problem. Economic and social changes since the 1965 dispute idea that family change has caused poverty and inequality or that getting people married would solve it.

March 5, MIAMI, FL—A half century ago, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously blamed single-parent families—especially those of African Americans—for poverty and other social ills. An online symposium, “Moynihan+50: Family Structure Still not the Problem,” prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families and published by CCF jointly with the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, demonstrates just how wrong Moynihan was in his still influential report.

In “Moynihan’s Half Century: Have We Gone to Hell in a Hand Basket?” Philip Cohen, Heidi Hartmann, Jeff Hayes, and Chandra Childers explain, “Yes, the changes in family structure that concerned Moynihan have continued. Single parent families have risen, becoming widespread among Whites as well other groups. But single parent families do not explain recent trends in poverty and inequality. In fact, a number of the social ills Moynihan assumed would accompany these changes have actually decreased.” Their paper includes ten graphs that show the continuing diversification of family life, the complicated changes in the relationship between poverty and family trends, and the declines of some social ills that Moynihan thought would get worse.

Why it matters. An accompanying paper, “The Moynihan Report, Then and Now,” by historian William Chafe, reviews the troubling impact of the claims about black families made a half-century ago. Chafe explains, “By framing the report as a description of the breakdown of the black family, Moynihan ended up fueling a bitter controversy about family forms and gender roles instead of contributing to a constructive discussion of how to address the need for more black jobs.”

To demonstrate just how off the dire predictions were, Cohen and colleagues showed:

* In 1967 more than 60 percent of single-mother families were poor. Today, that poverty rate has been almost halved, falling to 35 percent.

* Today, almost 90 percent of Black young adults are high school graduates, compared with only about 50 percent in the 1960s; Black college completion rates have doubled, from less than 10 to almost 20 percent.

* Since 1994 juvenile crime rates have fallen by more than 60 percent for Blacks and Whites alike, even though marriage rates have continued to decline and the proportion of children born out of wedlock has reached 40 percent.

* It is true that single-parent families are more likely to be poor than two-parent ones, but fluctuations in poverty rates since the 1990s cannot be explained by changes in family structure.

* Marriage is no protection against racial inequality. Black and Latino children in married-couple families are, respectively, three- and four-times more likely to be poor than White children in such families.

Taken together, the evidence suggests that economic deprivation and insecurity affect family structure more than the reverse. But it is absolutely clear that American families, especially single-parent ones, face daunting challenges. The report suggests that since marriage promotion has not worked as a solution to family instability, other social policies might have more effect.

This week isn’t the first time the Moynihan Report has been revisited: At the near midpoint of this half century since the Moynihan Report, both Senator Moynihan and CCF research director Stephanie Coontz testified (.pdf) before the House Select Committee on Children and Families on family trends and what was—at the time—the popular buzz phrase of “family values.” While Moynihan predicted social chaos as a result of the destruction of traditional families, Coontz claimed that no family form has ever been able to protect its members from economic stress and interpersonal dysfunction without active support from federal agencies and community organizations. Coontz pointed out that American families have always been diverse, and that the male breadwinner family was a very recent and short-lived historical aberration. Far from being a natural or traditional arrangement, she claimed, it was created by a strong union movement that pressed for higher wages, benefits, and job security and by a government that took a far more activist approach to creating jobs and fostering social mobility than we have seen in recent decades. Its decline over the past 50 years is more result than cause of our current economic insecurity and inequality.

For Further Information

Philip Cohen, Professor of Sociology, University of Maryland, pnc@umd.edu or 301-405-6414.

About CCF

Read our blog Families as They Really Are – www.thesocietypages.org/families

DATE: March 5, 2015

February 26, 2015

News From CCF: An Analysis of New Census Data on Family Structure, Education, and Income

For Immediate Release

Contact: Virginia Rutter

vrutter@gmail.com / 206 375 4139

CCF UPDATE: American family life continues to diversify. But children in two-parent and single-parent families alike face new economic and educational challenges.

February 26, MIAMI, FL– Rates of teenage childbearing – in or out of wedlock — have fallen sharply since the early 1990s, and the divorce rate has declined since the late 1970s and early 1980s. But the diversification of American family structures continues unabated, reports University of Texas sociologist Shannon Cavanagh in a review of new census data prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families.

Between 1960 and 2014, Cavanagh reveals, the percentage of children living in a mother-only household tripled, from 8 to 24 percent. There are now more children living in single-mother households than in male breadwinner-female homemaker families. Only 4 percent of children live with a single father, but this is a four-fold increase since 1960.

In 1960, 9 out of 10 children lived in two-parent households; today fewer than 7 out of 10 do so. And this figure, Cavanagh points out, understates the extent of change. Demographers estimate that half of all children will spend some part of their childhood outside a married-couple nuclear family.

Cavanagh discusses the complex relationship between education, family structure, and poverty. Children in married-couple families, she confirms, are less likely to be poor than children in single-parent families, especially when their parents have a college education. But people from low-income backgrounds are less likely to marry and much more likely to divorce than individuals from higher-income families. And access to education, as well as to marriage, has become increasingly unequal over the past 40 years. Between 1970 and 2013, the percentage of youths from high-income families who had earned a four-year college degree or higher by age 24 rose from 40 to 77 percent. But the percentage of young people from the lowest income bracket who had earned a degree rose much more modestly, from 6 to 9 percent, thanks to access to many a college career resource center to help them focus on getting a college education when they can.

Financial security helps children more than a particular family structure. While having two parents may help in keeping children out of poverty, writes Cavanagh, it is no guarantee: Witness the fact that that there are almost as many poor or near-poor children in two-parent families as in one-parent ones. She explains, “Financial security, even more than household composition, shapes children’s everyday experiences in ways that contribute to growing inequality.” For example, as Sandra Hofferth reported last month in another study for CCF, financial resources are a better predictor of participation in extracurricular activities than family structure. And access to such activities in turn predicts better academic achievement. “Although having a second parent in the household may be important, having financial resources may be even more important, and having a second parent by no means guarantees such resources,” concludes Cavanagh.

Stephanie Coontz, CCF’s Director of Research and Public Education, notes that this report confirms two trends that family researchers have been seeing for several years now. “First, there is no longer any such thing as ‘the typical’ American family – and most people will experience several different family or living arrangements over the course of their lives. Second, the marriage gap is more result than cause of increasing inequality. Claiming that we wouldn’t need anti-poverty programs if everyone got married and completed college is like saying we wouldn’t need bridges if everyone got a boat.” Coontz asks us to consider this: of the 25 fastest growing occupations, 20 do not require a college education nor do most pay a living family wage. “Most Americans, whatever their political ideology, are concerned about the widening gap between the haves and have-nots. We cannot have a reasoned discussion of possible solutions if we don’t understand the complex interactions between economic trends, educational opportunities, and family stability,” concludes Coontz.

Link here to read the full briefing report, An Analysis of New Census Data on Family Structure, Education, and Income.

For Further Information

Contact Shannon Cavanagh, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Sociology & Population Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, 512.471.8319, scavanagh@austin.utexas.edu.

About CCF

Read our blog Families as They Really Are – www.thesocietypages.org/families

DATE: February 26, 2015

January 28, 2015

News From CCF: Child-Rearing Norms and Practices in Contemporary American Families

For Immediate Release

Contact: Stephanie Coontz

Coontzs@msn.com; 360-352-8117; cell 360-556-9223

PRESS ADVISORY

Recent Census Data Shows Majority of American Parents Doing Well on Key Parenting Indicators, Despite Some Differences by Family Type, Reports Council on Contemporary Families.

But America has higher proportions of poor and low-income children than other developed nations, and poverty explains more differences in parenting practices than family structure.

MIAMI, FL, January 28: A briefing paper released by the Council on Contemporary Families today analyzes recent data on parenting practices compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau. Sandra Hofferth, Professor, Family Science, at University of Maryland’s School of Public Health, notes that although the Census Report found some differences by family type, most American parents — married, divorced, or single — read to their children, monitor their children’s media youth, and engage their children in extra-curricular activities.

Overall, reports Hofferth, more than 90 percent of American children were read to during the week. Married parents reported reading to children aged 3-5 an average of 6.8 times a week, compared to 6 times a week for single parents of children the same age. “About half of all 6-17 year olds ate breakfast with their family at least 5 days per week. Nine out of 10 parents of children under 12 had rules about television viewing. And one-fifth to two-fifths of all children participated in sports as an extracurricular activity.”

In general, differences between family types were significant but small. Almost 13 percent of 6-11 year-old children of married parents were enrolled in gifted classes, compared with almost 11 percent of children living with a single parent. Slightly more teenaged children living with a single parent ate dinner with a parent at least 5 days a week than did children living with two married parents. However, only 34 percent of teenagers in single-parent homes, vs. 44 percent of teens from married couple families, participated in sports activities. Children of cohabiting couples had the lowest rates of shared family dinners and extracurricular activities.

Hofferth explains that many of these differences are more closely related to income than to family structure. 42.5 percent of teenagers in families with incomes 200 percent or more of the poverty level participated in sports, compared to only 22.5 percent of teens in poor families. This is a difference of 20 percentage points, compared to only a 10-point difference by family structure.

Such income differences are especially worrisome, Hofferth writes, because more than one-fifth of children of all ages, and more than a quarter of children under age six, live in families with incomes below the poverty line. Another recent report finds that more than half of students in U.S. public schools now come from low-income families.

The negative impact of poverty on parents’ involvement in extracurricular activities may be especially strong in the United States, which has higher levels of extreme poverty than other developed nations, suggests Virginia Rutter, a sociologist at Framingham State University and a Senior Scholar at the Council on Contemporary Families. A recent study of the United Kingdom found that poor parents were equally engaged with their children as middle class parents, despite fewer material resources. The lower level of support systems for low-income families with children in the U.S. may help account for such differences, notes Rutter.

Read Hofferth’s complete commentary here. For more information, contact Sandra Hofferth, Professor, Department of Family Science, University of Maryland School of Public Health, hofferth@umd.edu, 301-405-8501.

This release is online here.

About CCF

Read our blog Families as They Really Are – www.thesocietypages.org/families

DATE: January 28, 2015

October 8, 2014

Overview: Family Trends You Might Not Have Expected

October 12 marks the fourth anniversary of when the United States became a “no-fault nation.” On that date in 2010, New York, the last holdout, finally joined the 49 other states in eliminating the need for divorcing couples to state that the dissolution of their marriage was the “fault” of one or the other. Today, every state offers the possibility of a no-fault divorce.

Three years later, the co-chair of The Coalition for Divorce Reform claims that “no-fault divorce has been a disaster,” leading to record numbers of divorces and plummeting rates of marriage. Sociologist Philip Cohen confirms that New York had a big spike in divorce in 2010, from 2.6 to 2.9, as measured by the crude divorce rate. But many researchers have found that although every state that adopted no-fault divorce saw a burst of pent-up divorces in the first few years after passage, divorce rates leveled off thereafter and have actually fallen since no-fault became the norm.

Figuring out divorce and marriage trends is further complicated by the recent foreclosure crisis and the ensuing deep recession. Many studies have shown that job loss and financial strain raise the risk of divorce. But divorce rates fell during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and some observers have claimed that “the silver lining” of this more recent economic crisis has been a similar dip in divorce.

To sort through these conflicting claims, the Council on Contemporary Families asked five researchers to explore recent trends in divorce and marriage for the CCF Symposium on New Inequalities.

Their findings paint a complex picture.

For children of educated parents, family life has actually become more stable in the past 30 years, law professors June Carbone and Naomi Cahn argue. For both white and African-American college graduates – but only for college graduates — the likelihood that a fourteen year-old-girl would still be living with both parents increased between the 1970s and the first decade of the twentieth century, they point out in their paper, “A Class Act? Stability and Instability in Children’s Family Lives.” Poorly-educated and low-income Americans, by contrast, have experienced an increase in family instability, with continued high divorce rates and growing rates of unwed childbearing.

Carbone and Cahn argue that the increased family instability of less-educated Americans stems primarily from growing economic inequality in the U.S. rather than from a reduction in their commitment to their children’s well-being. Between the mid-1970s and the second half of the 2000s, during the very years when divorce and unwed motherhood were becoming more acceptable, mothers with a high school diploma doubled the time they spent with their children. But affluent college graduate mothers were able to increase their time with children even more substantially — by a factor of four to five – and also to ratchet up their spending on enrichment programs, thereby contributing to a widening cycle of inequality in child outcomes.

Researchers Susan L. Brown and I-Fen Lin add another wrinkle to the story in their paper, “Gray Divorce: A Growing Risk Regardless of Class or Education.” Like Carbone and Cahn, they note that college educated Americans have dramatically lower divorce rates than their less-educated counterparts – but only up to a certain age.

Among couples aged 25-49, the divorce rate for college graduates is about 50 percent lower than the rate for those with a high school diploma. However, the protective effects of education do not seem to last once the children have left home.

Regardless of educational attainment, the divorce rate for couples aged 50 and older has doubled since 1990, and it has more than doubled for married individuals aged 65 and older. An older college graduate, even one in a first marriage, faces essentially the same risk of divorce as the older high school graduate. And, Brown and Lin point out, more than 55 percent of gray divorces involve couples who were married for more than 20 years.

The recent recession and (very modest) recovery complicate the picture even more. In “Divorce and the Recession,” sociologist Philip Cohen points out that although states with higher home foreclosure rates did see an uptick in divorce, overall, the recession inhibited many couples from divorcing, leading to about 150,000 fewer divorces between 2009 and 2011 than might have been expected in view of previous trends. However, the divorce rate has ticked up again since then.

Marriage rates also continued to fall during the recession, but it is possible, though far less certain, that some postponed marriages may be taking place during the recovery. American Community Survey figures show an increase in the absolute number of marriages in 2012, as well as n the marriage rate per 1,000 unmarried women.

The recession had a dramatic impact on the birth rate, which fell for both married and unmarried women and especially sharply for unmarried women under age 35. Black and Hispanic women experienced the largest declines in non-marital birth rates. Nevertheless, the non-marital birth rate of women aged 35 and older continued to increase during both the recession and the recent recovery.

Assessing the impact of these trends on the adults and children involved is also complicated. In earlier research, CCF members Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers found that states that adopted no-fault divorce experienced, on average, an 8–16 percent decline in female suicides and a 30 percent decline in domestic violence in the next five years. But Brown and Lin point out that late life divorce can have adverse financial and emotional effects on the individuals involved who often do not have time to recoup their social support networks or financial losses.

In fact, older divorced people have only 20 percent of the wealth as older married couples. And on average an individual who was divorced after age 50 has only half the net wealth as a person who was widowed after that age.

Divorce is disruptive and painful for children, who benefit from continuous residence with two collaborative parents. Yet children also benefit from being removed from high-conflict or cold, contemptuous marriages. Previous CCF research has pointed out the difficulty of making hard-and-fast statements about “the” impact of divorce on children, because many family problems predate the divorce, and may even be its cause rather than its consequence. And given the chronic stress in low-income communities, sociologist Kristi Williams has shown that trying to get impoverished single mothers to marry may not be an effective way to improve their children’s well-being.

Taken together, research is showing that “it depends” is often a more accurate answer to questions about trends, causes, and consequences of marriage and divorce rates than the sound bites favored in so much public discourse. But many CCF researchers have been exploring ways to improve people’s marital relationships and their parenting skills, in or out of marriage. Brown and Lin suggest that the next frontier in such research is to address the distinctive issues facing couples in later years, a field of research that has been relatively neglected until now.

About CCF

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, Co-Chair and Director of Research and Public Education, at coontzs@msn.com, cell 360-556-9223.

Read our blog Families as They Really Are with new updates twice per week: www.thesocietypages.org/families