January, 2008

The Next Question: How Can We Improve the Lives of America’s Children?

by Stephanie Coontz

January 31st, 2008

As I have argued in this forum and in my recent book, good marriages today are fairer, more intimate, and more likely to improve the well-being of their members (husbands, wives and children) than ever before — indeed, part of today’s gap between child outcomes in one and two-parent families may [...]

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Reply to Stevenson and Wolfers

by Norval D. Glenn

January 30th, 2008

I appreciate the fact that Stevenson and Wolfers get down to specifics in their latest post. That is constructive. However, I don’t appreciate their saying that I am an advocate of changes in divorce law. I am not and never have been. In my second set of comments in this exchange, I said that [...]

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(De-)Regulating the Family

by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers

January 30th, 2008

We have previously noted the deregulation of family life that began in the middle of the last century, and thought it worth thought that it would be useful to summarize what happened and what social scientists have learned about the effects of these changes. To be clear about terminology, by “deregulation,” we are referring [...]

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Divorce and Children: What Do We Know?

by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers

January 27th, 2008

Our job as social scientists is to help disentangle causation from correlation. This can be a very difficult, and sometimes impossible, job. Sometimes it is a matter of the chicken and the egg. For instance, we know that divorced people are more likely to drink, use drugs, have lower income, and be [...]

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