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 Families as They Really Are
Second Edition

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 viii | Contents

18 First Comes Love, Then Comes Herpes: Sexual Health

and Relationships
Adina Nack 264
� CCF Facts: Valentine’s Day Fact Sheet on Healthy Sex
Adina Nack 274
In Other Words: Can We Have the HPV ­Vaccine ­without
the ­Sexism and the Homophobia?
Ms. blog 277

19Orgasm in College Hookups and Relationships

Elizabeth A. Armstrong, Paula England, and ­Alison C. K. Fogarty 280

In Other Words: Hooking Up as a College ­Culture

Gender & Society blog 297

In Other Words: Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex

and Housework but Were Too Busy to Ask
The Washington Post 299

Part Five: Marriage and Divorce:

Does Policy Matter?
20The Marriage Movement
Orit Avishai, Melanie Heath, and Jennifer Randles 304

In the News: How to Stay Married

The Times of London 321

� CCF Brief: Promoting Marriage among Single Mothers:

An ­Ineffective Weapon in the War on Poverty?
Kristi Williams 324

In the News: No, Marriage Is Not a Good Way to Fight Poverty

ThinkProgress 327

21 The Case for Divorce

Virginia E. Rutter 329

In Other Words: Silver Linings Divorce Trend

­Family Inequality 341

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 Contents | ix

22Stepfamilies as They Really Are: Neither Cinderella nor

the Brady Bunch
Marilyn Coleman and Lawrence Ganong 343
23 Beyond Family ­Structure: Family Process Studies Help to Reframe
Debates about What’s Good for Children
Philip A. Cowan and Carolyn Pape Cowan 358
� CCF Brief: Was the War on Poverty a Failure? Or Are
­Antipoverty Efforts Swimming Simply against a Stronger Tide?
Philip N. Cohen 380

Part Six: A Generational Dance:

How ­Parents and Kids Relate
24 Parenting Adult Children in the ­Twenty-​­First ­Century
Joshua Coleman 390
In the News: Lean Times Force Many Bay Area “Boomerang Kids”
to Return Home as Adults
San Jose Mercury News 402
� CCF Facts: Myths of Later Motherhood
Elizabeth Gregory 405
In the News: Number of “Older” Women Having Babies Continues
to Grow
Deseret News 407
25 “This Is Your Job Now”: Latina Mothers and Daughters and
Family Work
Lorena Garcia 411
26 Adoptive Parents Raising Neoethnics
Pamela Anne Quiroz 426
27 Parents as Pawns: Intersex, Medical Experts, and
Questionable Consent
Georgiann Davis 441
In the News: Op-​­Ed: Hey, Fox News, Intersex Is Not
a Punchline
The Advocate 456

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 x | Contents

28The Power of Queer: How “Guy Moms” Challenge

­Heteronormative Assumptions about Mothering and Family
Raine Dozier 458

In Other Words: Dress Shopping and Gender Bending:

Why I’m Wearing a Suit and a Veil
Offbeat Bride 475
In Other Words: The Class and Race Demographics of
LGBT Families
Sociological Images 476

Part Seven: Unequal Lives: Families across ­Economic

and Citizenship Divides
29The Immigration ­Kaleidoscope: Knowing the Immigrant Family
Next Door
Etiony Aldarondo and Edward Ameen 480
In the News: The ­Picture-​­Perfect American Family?
These Days, It Doesn’t Exist
The Washington Post 497
30 When Men Stay Home: Household Labor in ­Female-​­Led
Indian Migrant Families
Pallavi Banerjee 500
In the News: An Immigrant Wife’s Place? In the Home,
According to Visa Policy
Ms. blog 516
31 Diverging Development: The ­Not-​­So-​­Invisible Hand of
Social Class in the United States
Frank F. Furstenberg Jr. 518
� CCF Brief: Unequal Childhoods: Inequalities in the Rhythms
of Daily Life
Annette Lareau 539
32 Not Just Provide and Reside: Engaged Fathers in
­Low-​­Income Families
Kevin Roy and Natasha Cabrera 542

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 Contents | xi

In Other Words: More Similarities than Differences in

Study of Race and Fatherhood
Sociological Images 550
33Mass Incarceration and Family Life
Bryan L. Sykes and Becky Pettit 551
In Other Words: Doing Time = Doing Gender
Girl w/ Pen! 567

Part Eight: Unfinished Gender Revolution

34Betwixt and Be Tween: Gender Contradictions among
Middle Schoolers
Barbara J. Risman and Elizabeth Seale 570
35 Falling Back on Plan B: The Children of the Gender Revolution
Face Uncharted Territory
Kathleen Gerson 593
� CCF Facts: Women’s ­Education and Their Likelihood of Marriage:
A Historic Reversal
Jonathan Bearak and Paula England 609
In the News: Women Say “I Do” to Education, Then Marriage
Chicago Tribune 615
36 Men’s Changing Contribution to Family Work
Oriel Sullivan 617
In the News: It’s Not Just Us: Women around the World Do
More Housework and Have Less Free Time
ThinkProgress 629
37 Being “The Man” without ­Having a Job and/or Providing Care
Instead of “Bread”
Kristen Myers and Ilana Demantas 632
� CCF Symposium: Equal Pay Symposium: 50 Years since the
Equal Pay Act of 1963
Stephanie Coontz and Virginia E. Rutter 648
In the News: Yes, I’ve Folded Up My Masculine Mystique, Honey
The Sunday Times of London 662

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 xii | Contents

In Other Words: Still a Man’s World: The Myth of

Women’s Ascendance
Boston Review 666

Conclusion
38. Families: A Great American Institution
Barbara J. Risman 676

Contributors 684
References 696
Credits 767
Index 769

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 P A R T O N E

How We Know
What We Know
about Families

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 1
Springing Forward from the Past
An Introduction

Barbara J. Risman and Virginia E. Rutter

his anthology is written primarily by members of the Council on Contempo-

rary Families (CCF), an interdisciplinary community of experts who study
and work with families. Our organizational mission is to provide accurate infor-
mation about how families really are to the public at large. Most but not all of us
are university faculty. What we all share is a commitment to using research and
clinical expertise to enhance the national conversation about what contemporary
families need and how these needs can best be met. The Council is nonpartisan
and our members support a wide variety of social policies, but we all strongly
believe that social science should be used for the public good and that research
should be used to support the diversity of families, since families of all kinds
provide people with their most intimate relationships.
One of the Council’s unique contributions is to provide journalists with accu-
rate information about today’s families. We act as a referral system to find the
best experts for journalists when they research a story. We also publish Briefing
Papers and Symposiums to highlight what should be getting coverage, what you
should be learning about in the newspapers but are not. In some of these briefs
and symposiums, we identify the most important new studies just coming out.
In others, we integrate findings that have begun to accumulate to provide strong
empirical evidence about important issues facing families today. We provide this
same information to policy makers at the local and national level. Our members
write ­op-​­ed for news outlets. With this anthology, we bring our contributions to
students as well.

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 Springing Forward from the Past | 3

Every chapter in this book is a new contribution to the research and theory
about families. We have included most of the chapters from the earlier edition,
but added new and exciting research on diverse American families. The chap-
ters aren’t reprints; you won’t find them anywhere else. As a unique feature of
this book, we incorporate CCF Briefing Papers (including briefs, fact sheets, and
symposiums) along with the news coverage that was based on them. These spe-
cial studies were released by CCF for the public. They concisely summarize the
latest research findings for a general audience, to help people make informed
decisions about issues that matter to them. Most were widely covered by news
media. We show you not only the newest work of the leading scholars in the
field, but also how their work contributes to the coverage and understanding of
families that you, your friends, and your family read about in newspapers and
magazines.
This is a perfect example of how academic and clinical experts make a dif-
ference outside the ivory tower. It shows you why intellectual work, studying
and writing about people, matters. Our goal is to bring ­cutting-​­edge research
and clinical expertise to all Americans so that people understand their own
lives and the lives of those around them more fully. We provide information that
could lead to better social policy, built more on a clear and fair reading of the
evidence than on passion and stereotypes.
The book is divided into thematic parts that include original chapters, reports
from CCF, and news coverage of the work you are studying. We’ve also created
a teaching guide where instructors can find questions for discussion and other
materials to accompany the book.
Part One includes this overview of our book and chapters about how we know
what we know about families. These essays are designed to challenge you to
be skeptical of all research, including the studies provided in this book. These
essays were originally presented at the CCF Tenth Anniversary Symposium in a
­session on how to assess contemporary knowledge about families. Andrew Cher-
lin tackles the paradox of ­t wenty-​­first-​­century science, articulating both the real-
ity that all science is a cultural product (as the categories scientists choose reflect
their worldviews, including values), while at the same time noting that empirical
research does indeed help explain what’s happening around us and in our own
lives. Cherlin concludes that all readers must critically assess scientific claims in
light of the biases a researcher might bring to the table. Philip Cowan clarifies
an error often made when interpreting social ­science—​­the confusion of correla-
tion with causation. He cautions all readers to question why something happens
and not simply to presume that because two social trends begin simultaneously,
one has caused the other. Linda Burton discusses the kind of information we can
only learn from longitudinal ethnography, explaining how we need to go beyond

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 4 | B ar b a ra J. Ri s m a n a n d Vi rg i n i a E . Ru tter

survey data to uncover the full story of people’s lives and relationships. Burton
shows how research based on interviews and observations provides essential evi-
dence for social policy. Part One ends with a CCF Brief by Anthony Mancini and
George A. Bonanno on “The Trouble with Averages,” which is further discussed
in Stephanie Coontz’s New York Times article “When Numbers Mislead.” The
CCF Brief and Coontz’s article give you examples of how to be cautious, skepti-
cal, smart readers of research.
In Part Two, “How We Got Here,” several leading historians and social scien-
tists provide compelling evidence that what we think of as the traditional family
has changed over the course of history. Stephanie Coontz provides a sweeping
overview of the dramatic changes in how families operate, and she discusses
who is even considered kin from the earliest moments of history. Steven Mintz
follows a similar strategy, but he focuses specifically on the fate of American
children in the last three centuries. Mintz provides convincing evidence that
while some parts of childhood might be harder today, many of America’s chil-
dren are better off now than ever before. Mintz’s chapter on childhood is fol-
lowed by his short essay that appeared in the national press; his focus is on the
relevance today for lessons from history. This part of the book includes a CCF
Brief by historian Susan Matt. She looks to the past to illustrate common myths
about homesickness among young p ­ eople—​­especially as they go to college today.
Donna Franklin’s research suggests that p ­ rofessional-​­class African American
couples pioneered modern marriage. African Americans were the first in the
United States to accept that women could have both serious intellectual lives
and careers while also being wives and mothers. Franklin argues that while white
women were forced to choose between marriage and career into the twentieth
century, ­college-​­educated African American women and their husbands were
inventing the contemporary marriage of equals. Brian Powell and his colleagues
provide a historical perspective on how quickly Americans’ definitions of family
have changed, from excluding ­same-​­sex couples to including them. We then
provide a clip of how this research was covered in the news. We end Part Two
with a chapter by Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Loren Henderson, who take us
on a historical ride from the days when interracial marriage was illegal up to the
civil rights era. They conclude with information about today’s interracial couples
and their children. Interracial couples are also highlighted in a CCF Brief by
Kimberlyn Fong, who gives us an overview of trends in interracial marriage upon
the fiftieth anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Part Three of the book is the longest, because when we talk about the “Diver-
sity of American Families Today,” there is quite a lot to say. We begin with a chap-
ter that addresses the t­ ime-​­honored question for students and scholars of families:
“What is family?” Here, Karen Struening shows how the legal system often lags

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 Springing Forward from the Past | 5

behind the reality of how people live their lives. She provides concrete examples
about ­same-​­sex marriage and ­technology-​­assisted reproduction showing how
the law seems to be in flux, with state decisions at odds with each other and
often with the federal courts as well. Following Struening is a chapter by Amy
Blackstone and Amy Greenleaf that highlights how childfree couples make their
relationships into families, including an interesting account of how they incorpo-
rate their pets as family members. A CCF Fact Sheet and a blog highlight how
single people fit into our mostly coupled world. In their chapter, Pamela J. Smock
and Wendy D. Manning write about the “cohabitation revolution” in the United
States. The authors trace the change from cohabitation being seen as “living in
sin” to being seen as simply a stage of courtship. They show how quickly change
can happen: one generation’s sin is the next one’s transition to marriage. On this
same topic, Arielle Kuperberg offers more new research in a CCF Brief. Kuper-
berg tells us that in the past, people thought that cohabitation made divorce more
likely. But her research demonstrates that cohabitation doesn’t cause divorce and
probably never did. The expert commentaries in the brief show that issues like
the age a romance begins and a person’s level of education play a bigger role in
the vulnerability of relationships than does cohabitation itself.
From cohabitation, we turn to sibling relationships with Amy Brainer’s chap-
ter about relationships between straight young people and their lesbian, gay,
or bisexual brothers and sisters. From siblings, we go to the issue of interracial
marriage with a CCF Symposium on interracial marriage. Stanford law profes-
sor Ralph Richard Banks introduces a provocative proposal regarding interra-
cial marriage among African American women. Numerous black, feminist, and
­sexuality scholars then rebut Banks’s arguments. In this symposium, you can see
how Banks’s proposal for African American women was covered in the news,
too. In another take on interracial relationships, Jennifer Lee reviews data on
interracial marriage and the meaning of multiraciality for Sociological Images.
Jenny Davis’s column for Cyborgology analyzes racist patterns of behavior among
online daters. In a series of chapters on diverse families, we cover common types
of families as well as newer variations. One very common family type in today’s
world is one in which both parents work for pay. Shannon N. Davis and Brit-
tany Owen offer a look at how couples organized their families before, during,
and after the Great Recession. They show us how, without public policies like
a funded family and medical leave act, ­middle-​­and w ­ orking-​­class families face
daily challenges in keeping life together. We next provide several articles address-
ing research on gay men and lesbians. R ­ obert-​­Jay Green’s chapter traces how gay
couples have changed from outlaws (not too long ago gay sex was outlawed in
some states) to i­n-​­laws as gay marriage becomes ever more accepted, and now
legitimate by federal law, if not yet in all states. Mignon R. Moore writes about

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 6 | B arb a ra J. Ri s m a n a n d Vi rg i n i a E . Ru tter

African American lesbian relationships and how these women negotiate equality
with one another.
In Part Four, we focus on physical ­intimacy—​­that is, sex. We begin with a
chapter by Pepper Schwartz in which she writes that, despite all the sexual imag-
ery in our society, we are still deeply afraid of sex. Schwartz identifies several
social policies that result from this fear. For example, the federal government
has supported abstinence education, even when more than half of all teenagers
in high school are having sex. Schwartz concludes by examining why we are so
afraid of something so natural. Adina Nack’s chapter provides one answer. Nack
suggests it is because of the STD epidemic among youth today. Nack explains
the high rates of those with a variety of STDs and how people in ­relationships—​
­including new ­relationships—​­navigate discussions of sexually transmitted dis-
ease status. A CCF Fact Sheet that she wrote provides key information on sexual
health. Finally, Nack focuses on a contested ­realm—​­HPV ­vaccinations—​­in a col-
umn for Ms. magazine where she discusses how boys get left out through sexist
and homophobic attitudes toward the HPV vaccine. The last chapter in Part Four
is an article by Elizabeth A. Armstrong, Paula ­England, and Alison C.K. Fogarty.
Armstrong and her colleagues suggest that college students are not afraid of sex,
because hooking up (or casual sex outside of relationships) appears to be com-
mon on today’s campuses. These authors look at the kinds of sexual pleasure
older adolescents and young adults experience before marriage. In a world where
college students are more likely to hook up than to date, what does that mean for
sexuality? Does this new form of sex indicate gender equality? Are orgasm rates
equal for men and women in hookups? Armstrong and her colleagues show us
that for women, orgasm rates seem to increase when there is greater familiarity
with sexual partners, but this result is less true for men. The authors suggest that
the gender revolution has yet to reach its full flowering in the distribution of sex-
ual pleasure, at least in casual heterosexual sex. Following Armstrong’s chapter,
Rachel Allison tells the story of her research with Barbara Risman on commuter
students, those mostly from working-class backgrounds, who do not tend to par-
ticipate in the college hookup scene. We also include a debate, covered in news
media, about research on whether really egalitarian marriages are less erotically
charged than more m ­ ale-​­dominated ones.
In Part Five, we focus on marriage and divorce, and whether social policies
or therapeutic interventions can, or should, try to influence people to marry or
to stay married. Orit Avishai, Melanie Heath, and Jennifer Randles’s chapter
on political efforts to promote marriage, known as “the marriage movement,”
describes how marriage promotion has been i­mplemented—​­and the limits of
that implementation for achieving goals such as economic or family stability. A
CCF Brief by Kristi Williams zeroes in on how limited marriage promotion has

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 Springing Forward from the Past | 7

been for poverty reduction. You can read how Williams’s work was covered as a
journalist asks and answers the question of why marriage might not be the answer
for ­low-​­income moms. The topic of single moms leads directly to a concern
with divorce, because ­some—​­though certainly not a­ ll—​­women become single
mothers after divorce. Virginia Rutter provides a methodological critique of the
studies purporting to show that divorce hurts e­ veryone, sharing her personal life
history to illus­trate the argument. Philip Cohen’s Family Inequality column on
his research concerning the impact of the Great Recession on divorce rates notes,
as Rutter did, how media can be misleading when reporting on divorce rates. It
is clearly the case that children growing up in divorced and remarried house-
holds face some unique challenges. Marilyn Coleman and Lawrence Ganong
debunk the many myths surrounding stepfamilies. What helps stepfamilies suc-
ceed? Being realistic and recognizing the diversity of stepfamilies. What harms
stepfamilies? The myths that propose one size fits all or that assume the worst.
The last chapter in Part Five, by Philip A. Cowan and Carolyn Pape Cowan, tries
to reframe the debate about what’s good for children. The authors go from focus-
ing on whether the children’s parents are married to how well those parents work
together to care for their kids. Wrapping up Part Five, Philip Cohen’s CCF Brief
on antipoverty programs in the United States over the past fifty years identifies
what has h ­ elped—​­and what has failed.
In Part Six we focus on intergenerational issues between parents and chil-
dren. We begin with a chapter on parenting adult children. In it, Joshua Cole-
man offers another view of parenting, one that we often ignore. He reminds us
that parenting doesn’t end when children graduate high school, college, or even
marry. Intergenerational relationships and parenting are lifetime concerns. Fol-
lowing Joshua Coleman’s chapter is a news article that includes an interview with
him and offers advice about what parents should know before their college grads
move back home. Next is a CCF Brief by Elizabeth Gregory on older mothers.
She demonstrates yet another way that family timing isn’t the same for everyone.
Her finding that older mothers having babies is a trend made the news, as you
can see in the story that follows her chapter. In another chapter on p­ arent-​­child
relationships, Lorena Garcia writes about how Latina mothers tell their daugh-
ters about their family responsibilities. But families are not always all from the
same racial or ethnic group, and Pamela Anne Quiroz’s chapter addresses the
complicated lives of those who adopt transnationally. Quiroz’s chapter focuses
on those she labels as neoethnics, “people whose identities have literally been
recreated through the act of adoption.” How parents attempt to raise children
from other cultures is at the core of this chapter. The next chapter also focuses
on how parents raise children who are different from themselves, in this case,
children born intersex. Georgiann Davis’s interviews with people active in the

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 8 | B ar b a ra J. Ri s m a n a n d Vi rg i n i a E . Ru tter

intersex community draw attention to how the medical world leads new parents
to transform children with intersex traits into the sexual ­binary—​­you are either
male or ­female—​­instead of treating intersex traits as normal and part of the natu-
ral variation of bodies. In a column for the Advocate, Davis zeroes in on another
group that fails to normalize intersex traits when she calls out Fox News for treat-
ing intersex as a punch line. From families with intersex children, we move to
a passionately written chapter based both on research and personal experience.
In the chapter titled “The Power of Queer: How ‘Guy Moms’ Challenge Hetero-
normative Assumptions about Mothering and Family,” Raine Dozier examines
the ­challenges—​­from institutions as well as other ­people—​­faced by parents who
do not fit into familiar sexual binaries. Along the way, Dozier, like Davis, shows
readers how beliefs about what is natural are just another social construction. A
column by Ashir Leah KaneRisman for Offbeat Bride gives a ­first-​­person account
of gender bending in the face of planning a wedding. The issue of diversity of
families is made plain in the final piece in Part Six, where Lisa Wade updates
Sociological Images with class and race demographics of LGBT families.
In Part Seven, we focus on how families must navigate inequality across
­economic classes and because of their immigration status. Two chapters help us
answer the question, what do we know about immigrant families as they really
are? Etiony Aldarondo and Edward Ameen review the research on contempo-
rary immigrants and show how immigrant families struggle to become part of
the American mosaic without losing their own cultural heritage. Andrew Cher-
lin’s Washington Post editorial reminds readers that no matter who marries or
why, gay or straight, from the middle of the country or some other country, one
thing is for s­ ure—​­there is no p
­ icture-​­perfect, typical American family anymore.
Next is a chapter on gender and immigration. Pallavi Banerjee focuses on the
effect of immigrant visas that are designated for “dependent” spouses, presum-
ing they are women who do not want or need to work. In this chapter, Banerjee
looks at what happens when men hold those visas and their wives are the migrant
labor breadwinners. In a column for Ms. magazine, Banerjee shows that our visa
policy requires the wives (and sometimes husbands) of immigrants to remain eco-
nomic dependents, which weakens rather than strengthens the families involved.
We move from a focus on immigrants to the problems faced by those who
struggle economically. These chapters on economic inequality suggest that per-
haps the most important issues to consider when we worry about tomorrow’s
families are poverty and the impact of unequal beginnings on future possibili-
ties. These chapters include a focus on how children growing up in households
with few economic resources struggle to even imagine their place in the Ameri-
can dream. Frank Furstenberg shows how social class sets the parameters for the
daily life experience of today’s children. Annette Lareau describes how parents

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 Springing Forward from the Past | 9

from different social classes hold different c­ hild-​­rearing philosophies, with the
consequence that children from the middle class are brought up with strate-
gies that enable them to develop the skills and attitudes valued for good jobs in
­twenty-​­first-​­century America. Kevin Roy and Natasha Cabrera focus attention
on l­ow-​­income families by tracing the kinds of involvement of fathers in such
families. They offer a model of father involvement that moves far beyond the
notion of fathers simply as income providers. A Sociological Images blog post
from Lisa Wade affirms Roy and Cabrera’s observations, highlighting the simi-
larities among fathers from different races. We end Part Seven with a chapter on
how mass incarceration has severely affected the opportunities for a great num-
ber of families. In their chapter, Bryan L. Sykes and Becky Pettit explain how
imprisoning so many parents hurts not only them, but their spouses, children,
and neighbors. In a Girl w/ Pen! column about mass incarceration, Virginia Rut-
ter writes about the extent to which ­men ​­in the United States are ever incarcer-
ated (one in ­eight).
Part Eight is devoted to understanding how the changes in women’s and
men’s lives have changed families. Only a few generations ago, a child born with
a penis would have had an entirely different future than one born with a vagina.
The ­penis-​­holder would have been expected to learn a trade or get an education,
earn a living, and spend most of his time supporting his family. His contributions
to child rearing primarily would have been his paycheck. The v­agina-​­holder
would have been expected to find a husband (who would support her economi-
cally, if possible) and spend most of her time and attention on kin keeping, rais-
ing children, caring for aging parents, and supporting her man. Although space
limits do not allow us to fully discuss why we have seen a gender revolution,
we offer just a few possibilities. Surely women’s ability to control if and when to
have a baby, by effective birth control and access to abortion, has allowed us to
think about and plan for roles beyond the family. And the feminist movement
helped to point out the inequity of limiting women’s lives to the family when
they were educated and capable of challenges beyond the domestic. The simple
assumption that a p ­ enis-​­holder and a v­ agina-​­holder should necessarily have dif-
ferent life opportunities seems vaguely quaint now, but it was taken for granted as
the natural order of things not very long ago. Clearly, the gender revolution has
had an impact on families. If women are not primarily focused on creating and
managing the domestic sphere, what will happen to the children, ­home-​­cooked
meals, and the warmth of the hearth? If women are expecting men to treat them
as equals and not as helpmates, will marriage thrive, or wither away? And what
about sex? Has equality come to that part of men and women’s lives? The chap-
ters in this section address these important issues.

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 10 | B a r b a ra J. Ri s m a n a n d Vi rg i n i a E . Ru tter

The first chapter addresses what has ­changed—​­and what has ­not—​­among
today’s ­t ween-​­agers. Barbara J. Risman and Elizabeth Seale’s chapter asks how far
the gender revolution has come for today’s children. They report that girls have
benefited much from the ­feminist-​­inspired changes of the twentieth century, but
that boys seem sadly stuck with gender expectations that keep them tightly con-
strained within narrow stereotypes of masculinity. Girls still worry very much
about how they look, but not too much about acting feminine. Boys who don’t
act very much like all the other boys live in fear of being viciously teased. Kath-
leen Gerson’s research focuses on ­twenty-​­and ­thirty-​­somethings as they talk
about their goals for balancing work and family. Young adults today are chil-
dren of the gender revolution. Their ­baby ​­boom parents were the first to move
into uncharted territory, with feminist mothers, frequent parental divorces, and
blended families. Gerson finds that today’s young adults, both women and men,
want to balance work that matters with time left for investing in their relation-
ships and often in parenting. But she also finds that if they have trouble with such
a balancing act, men and women have starkly different fallback plans. A CCF
Fact Sheet by Jonathan Bearak and Paula England demonstrates a historic rever-
sal that highlights the changing context of women’s options: Higher education,
unlike in the past, makes marriage more likely for women. News coverage, which
follows the Fact Sheet, highlights the new t­iming—​­women seek education now
before they marry. From young adults’ views of marriage, we move to whether
marriage has or has not changed. Oriel Sullivan provides quantitative evidence
that men’s contribution to the household, or what used to be called “women’s
work,” has increased over the last few decades. Kristen Myers and Ilana Dem-
antas look inside couples where men’s traditional breadwinning doesn’t occur
and describes how couples navigate men’s caregiving. These chapters suggest
that trends are in the right d ­ irection—​­but the pace of change is slow. The CCF
Symposium on equal pay documents the combination of positive changes and
some of the remaining inequality in pay gaps between men and women. It speci-
fies how the size of the gender pay gap varies by race and ethnicity. Stephanie
Coontz’s Sunday Times of London column “Yes, I’ve Folded Up My Masculine
Mystique, Honey” puts the symposium’s research in context. Finally, Philip N.
Cohen’s assessment of concerns about a gender revolution gone too far is answered
in “Still a Man’s World.”
This anthology owes much to all the members of the Council on Contempo-
rary Families who have contributed to it. This second edition has changed signif-
icantly, as the research on families has moved forward, and concern for an ever
more diverse set of American families grows. The c­ o-​­authors want to thank Amy
Brainer, who was lead editorial assistant on this edition and is also a contributor.
We owe a huge debt to Stephanie Coontz for her extremely helpful editorial work

206228_P1_01-04_001-034_r3_ga.indd 10 29/01/15 10:16 AM

 Springing Forward from the Past | 11

on many of the original chapters and unending support for this project. Thanks
also go to our original editor at Norton, Karl Bakeman, who conceived the idea
for this anthology to begin with, and encouraged us to move forward with a
second edition. We also want to thank Sasha Levitt, our current editor, who has
been exceedingly supportive, encouraging, and r­esponsive—​­and has helped us
through a challenging year of editing. Barbara would like to dedicate this book
to her husband, Randall Liss, who is living proof that statistical regularities do
not explain individual lives. His nurturing and homemaking have made this
­project—​­and the rest of Barbara’s complicated professional ­life—​­possible. Bar-
bara also dedicates this book to her daughter, Ashir Leah KaneRisman and her
daughter’s wife, Caitlin Cotter, with the hope that wherever they decide to make
their home, their family will be accepted and valued. Virginia dedicates this
book to her mother, Joanna Pittman Fox, who died while the book was being
edited. To the end, she taught Virginia about family diversity by her example.
The Council on Contemporary Families was created over a decade ago
because our founding members saw the press misinterpreting good ­science—​
sometimes naively, and sometimes because they had been misinformed by
­
ideological ­right-​­wing think tanks. The Council is dedicated to providing good
scientific research and clinical expertise to the public and policy makers alike.
We invite you to read the chapters, briefs, and articles in this anthology with
the critical lenses provided by Cherlin, Cowan, and Burton in their chapters on
evaluating research. Science is always in the act of becoming, and this book is
offered in the spirit of contributing the best information we have now to the body
of knowledge available to us all. All the authors have contributed their time and
effort to this volume, and all proceeds will help CCF in its mission to diffuse the
best new knowledge we have on families, with the firm belief that knowledge is
power.

206228_P1_01-04_001-034_r3_ga.indd 11 29/01/15 10:16 AM

 2
One Thousand and F ­ orty-​­Nine Reasons Why
It’s Hard to Know When a Fact Is a Fact

Andrew J. Cherlin

hen is a fact a fact? If you are a postmodernist, the answer is clear: never.
Postmodern critics of standard social science argue that the conclusions
we draw are not, and cannot be, genuinely objective. Rather, they say, our find-
ings are contaminated in several ways. First, the questions we ask and the point
of view we take often reflect our values, whether those are an enthusiasm for
feminist or ­civil-​­rights-​­inspired activism or a belief in the importance of mar-
riage and premarital chastity. Even the categories and labels we use often reflect
­values-​­based assumptions.
Here is an example from my field, family demography: In 1941, Paul Glick,
the Bureau of the Census demographer who virtually created the field, wrote
a pioneering article entitled “Types of Families: An Analysis of Census Data.1
Glick divided American families into three groups: (1) normal families, a cat-
egory that consisted of all ­two-​­parent families; (2) other ­male-​­headed families;
and (3) other ­female-​­headed families. The implication, of course, was that all
­single-​­parent families were abnormal.
Or consider contemporary debates over immigration, which may be shaped
by whether one uses the term illegal alien or undocumented immigrant. The first
conjures up an image of a ­law-​­breaking invader from outer space; the second
conveys an image of a striving newcomer who merely lacks the right papers.
Recognizing that most researchers draw upon particular values when they
choose what categories to use and what questions to ask does not mean that all
data are suspect or that all interpretations of data are equally valid. But it does
drive home the importance of treating ­so-​­called facts critically and of questioning

12

206228_P1_01-04_001-034_r3_ga.indd 12 29/01/15 10:16 AM

 Why It’s Hard to Know When a Fact Is a Fact | 13

their origins and purposes. When we read facts, we should ask ourselves a few
key questions: Who produced this fact? Was it a person or an organization that
promotes a particular point of view? What was the purpose of making this fact
known? What do we know about the relationship of this fact to other facts or
trends?
Consider familyfacts.org, a website operated by the Heritage Foundation. It
publicizes findings from social scientific research on family life. On its home
page, familyfacts.org presents itself as a neutral clearinghouse for family research:
“The Heritage Foundation’s familyfacts.org catalogs social science findings on
the family, society and religion gleaned from ­peer-​­reviewed journals, books and
government surveys. Serving policy makers, journalists, scholars and the gen-
eral public, familyfacts.org makes social science research easily accessible to the
­non-​­specialist.”
In 2008, this site featured a “top ten” list of findings about how children in
different kinds of families fare in school. According to each finding, children
living with two parents were doing better than children living with one parent
or with stepparents. Here are two of the findings: “Kindergartners in intact fami-
lies have higher average reading scores than peers in stepfamilies or cohabiting
families” and “­First-​­graders whose mothers were married when they were born
are less likely to engage in disruptive behavior with peers and teachers than those
whose mothers were single or cohabiting.” In fact, virtually all of the thousands
of findings on the site support the view that marriage is best for children and that
religion improves family outcomes.
These findings are not falsified. They are taken from reputable studies pub-
lished in ­well-​­regarded journals such as the Journal of Marriage and Family and,
by and large, are described accurately. A naive user might think that this is all
social scientists know. But the facts reported on this site have been selected to
support a particular conclusion, while facts that modify, complicate, or challenge
that conclusion are not reported.
For example, the site quotes a 1998 article that I c­ o-​­wrote about a study show-
ing that children whose parents had divorced had a higher risk of emotional
problems in adulthood.2 Yet that same article also showed that some of the emo-
tional problems had been visible in childhood before the parents even divorced,
but this additional finding was not mentioned. Nor does the site mention a 1991
article that I ­co-​­wrote that also suggested that some of the problems experienced
by children from divorced families might have occurred even had the parents
stayed together.3 This is not a fact that familyfacts.org thinks you need to know.
Which findings are included and which are excluded make sense if one knows
that the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, promotes the values of
institutions such as “traditional” marriage and religion. This is not to say that

206228_P1_01-04_001-034_r3_ga.indd 13 29/01/15 10:16 AM

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