Fostering Successful Families

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

A March 1 breakfast seminar, Fostering Successful Families, brought three leading social scientists to Capitol Hill to discuss their research findings before an audience of 55 congressional and federal agency staff and others.

Andrew Cherlin, Professor of Public Policy at Johns Hopkins University, discussed the effects of divorce of children. He began by noting the recent movement to repeal no-fault divorce laws, commenting that previous attempts to strengthen families through restrictive divorce laws were unsuccessful. “Family law . . . follows rather than precedes social change,” he said. Under previous fault-based laws, people often fabricated incidents to obtain a divorce, Cherlin said. He cited statistical trends in divorce that showed it rising in the 1970s, peaking in 1981, and declining slightly since then.

Cherlin said that discussions of the effects of divorce on children are frequently pulled in two extremes, with one camp seeing dire consequences, the other lauding the resiliency of children. The truth, Cherlin told the audience, is somewhere in the middle: “divorce is not harmless to children, but most kids are not seriously harmed by divorce in the long-term.” He said that the first few years are the most difficult, and that this is exacerbated if children are involved in continuing conflicts between the parents. He said that research on joint custody has shown that, “when kids feel caught in the middle, they do worse.” He urged laws and policies to try to insulate children. After citing several studies that show increased likelihood of alcohol and mental health problems and school dropout of children of divorce, Cherlin said that his research found that many of these problems existed before the divorce occurred. Many of these effects, he stated, are products of families not working well. Cherlin concluded by saying that divorce increases the risk of problems for kids. He urged policies that balance cultural messages of what we think families ought to be with both compassion for children and consideration of economic realities faced by many families, particularly single-parent, in this country.

Frank Furstenberg, Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, discussed research on the role of fathers. The director of a thirty-year follow-up on a group of teenage mothers in Baltimore, Furstenberg stated that marriage is becoming a “luxury item” in a time of fewer and later marriages. The reasons for this, he said, are skepticism about the success of such unions, economic insecurities, and increasing gender mistrust “that is pulling apart men and women.”

Furstenberg noted two simultaneous trends in fatherhood: disengagement and the rise of the nurturing father. The former was shown by surveys he has conducted showing nearly half of men who were not living with their children had not seen them in the past year. The other trend is found in men, not exclusively upper-middle class, but those who have the time and resources to invest in their children. Many of these men are married to women who have demanding careers. Furstenberg said that this engagement in child-rearing is “not just fashion,” but a lasting change in the emotional and cultural investment in children. He noted that this bifurcation leads “to a division of haves and have nots” that does not follow, but rather is intertwined, with largereconomic stratification. Echoing Cherlin, Furstenberg said he was supportive of “the new rhetoric of responsibility,” but said that it must be combined with real economic opportunity for all Americans.

Susan Hanson, Director of the Clark University School of Geography, discussed the role of gender in shaping labor markets and division of household work. She began by arguing that “traversing distance involves real time and real effort and has implications for fostering successful families.” Hanson conducted a survey of households and employers in Worcester, MA regarding women’s labor market decisions and household work responsibilities. She found that men whose wives are in high status occupations do more household work than men whose wives are lower status occupations. Not coincidentally, she argued, the survey showed that those who take on responsibility tend to have shorter work trips. Hanson said that women generally work closer to home in lower-paying jobs, particularly those jobs that are part-time. She argued that space is part of a strategy families use to combine paid work and household work.

Hanson said that employers play a role in people’s attempts to combine family and wage work through several ways: they are “very savvy geographers” who locate their enterprises to tap into a particular labor market; they hold stereotypical assumptions about women as workers particularly as it relates to household roles; they incorporate travel time into their hiring decisions; they pay different wages for the same work in different parts of a metropolitan area; and they vary in their flexibility to accommodating workers’ family needs. The community, Hanson said, also plays a key role, as communities differ substantially in the resources they offer to residents, such as housing, child care, public transportation, and health and social service agencies. Long-term Worcester residents, she found in her research, were better able to tap into available resources to help balance work and family needs.

A lively question and answer period followed, discussing issues such as the role of grandparents, remarriage, gender mistrust, and welfare reform.

 

Copies of transcripts are available. For copies contact COSSA.