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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Marriage Has Changed, but Is That Good for Children?

by Kay S. Hymowitz

January 27th, 2008

Alas, Norval Glenn is correct that our debate thus far has contained some gratuitous “slams.” Still, I’m not as sanguine as he is that our disagreements are illusory. True, we all agree that marriage has become a locus for self-fulfillment. We also all agree that women are no longer of necessity tied down [...]

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The Possibility for Fruitful Collaboration

by Stephanie Coontz

January 26th, 2008

Sharp debates over questions such as the potential impact of marriage promotion in reducing poverty or the effect of single parenthood on child outcomes are sometimes necessary, because our political climate is filled with simplistic claims that ignore complex family interactions, confuse correlations with cause and effect, promise one-step solutions for social ills, and ignore [...]

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Toward More Rational Discourse about Marriage

by Norval D. Glenn

January 25th, 2008

This exchange has been useful, in my opinion, because it illustrates that much of the public discourse about marriage is based on the illusion that there is more disagreement about marriage-related issues than there really is, or at least than there really is among some of the major participants. This illusory disagreement makes for some [...]

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Minding the Marriage Gap

by Stephanie Coontz

January 23rd, 2008

Some of the responses to my article contribute to clarifying the areas of agreement and disagreement surrounding contemporary family trends, and some of them really don’t. On the positive side, Stevenson’s and Wolfers’ piece shows how researchers working with very different data and methodologies can produce similar analyses. Their description of the nature of modern [...]

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Best of the Blogs: Steven Horwitz on Economic Forces and the Family

Writing at the Austrian Economists blog, Steven G. Horwitz, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics at St. Lawrence University and a scholar of the economics of the family, takes off from this month’s Cato Unbound discussion, but pushes even deeper into the question of the historical and economic forces changing the shape of marriage and family.

Read: Best of the Blogs: Steven Horwitz on Economic Forces and the Family

Against Family Fatalism

by Norval D. Glenn

January 21st, 2008

In his reply, University of Texas sociologist Norval D. Glenn, identifies Stephanie Coontz as a member of the “family-change-is-irreversible school of thought,” which he says “includes the view that attempts to retard, stop, or reverse any major aspect of recent family change are futile and thus are at best a waste of effort and at worst downright harmful…” But, Glenn asks, don’t liberals generally think policy can mitigate the consequences of economic change? Moreover, is anyone really asking to return to some Golden Age of marriage? There is evidence, Glenn submits, that marriage trends will further improve and that policy interventions, like marriage education, can help.

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Marriage and the Market

by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers

January 18th, 2008

Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, economists at the Univesity of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, “re-frame Coontz’s careful history of the family in the language of economics,” exploring the economic forces underlying changes in marriage. Modern marriage, Stevenson and Wolfers argue, is marked by “a shift from the family as a forum for shared production, to shared consumption.” Modern marriage, which they call “hedonic marriage,” is more centered on love and companionship. Marriage as such isn’t doomed, they claim, but “marriage in which one person specializes in the home while the other person specializes in the market is indeed doomed,” especially as women’s educational levels begin to surpass men’s. Attempts to “re-regulate” the family to fit a classic ideal, they argue “may actually be a force undermining the dynamic institution that is the modern U.S. family.”

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The Marriage Gap

by Kay S. Hymowitz

January 16th, 2008

Kay S. Hymowitz, the William E. Simon fellow at the Manhattan Institute, argues that Stephanie Coontz’s sketch of the state of marriage is badly incomplete, failing to acknowledge the class divide in marriage and childrearing. “This marriage gap,” she writes, “has profound implications for our political, social and economic prospects for one simple reason: overall, children do better in life if they are raised by their own married parents.” According to Hymowitz, “The de-linking of marriage and childrearing is a particular dilemma in the Unites States … [W]hat you have is a recipe for entrenched, trans-generational poverty, inequality, racial disparities …, reduced social and economic mobility, and — libertarians take note! — demands for government taxes to fund programs to correct the mess.”

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The Future of Marriage

by Stephanie Coontz

January 14th, 2008

In this month’s lead essay, historian Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage, briefly lays out the history of marriage to understand its present and future. “Today, when a marriage works,” Coontz argues, “it delivers more benefits to its members — adults and children — than ever before.” However, “the same things that have made so many modern marriages more intimate, fair, and protective have simultaneously made marriage itself more optional and more contingent on successful negotiation.” Instead of trying to resurrect a bygone ideal of marriage, those of us interested in encouraging healthy families now need to focus on what makes unmarried co-parents, single parents, cohabiting couples, as well as contemporary marriages successful on their own terms.

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