Word: sociologist
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...past 40 years, the face of the American family has changed profoundly. As sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin observes in a landmark new book called The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today, what is significant about contemporary American families, compared with those of other nations, is their combination of "frequent marriage, frequent divorce" and the high number of "short-term co-habiting relationships." Taken together, these forces "create a great turbulence in American family life, a family flux, a coming and going of partners on a scale seen nowhere else. There are more partners...
...simple: on every single significant outcome related to short-term well-being and long-term success, children from intact, two-parent families outperform those from single-parent households. Longevity, drug abuse, school performance and dropout rates, teen pregnancy, criminal behavior and incarceration - if you can measure it, a sociologist has; and in all cases, the kids living with both parents drastically outperform the others...
...things hamper a child as much as not having a father at home. "As a feminist, I didn't want to believe it," says Maria Kefalas, a sociologist who studies marriage and family issues and co-authored a seminal book on low-income mothers called Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage. "Women always tell me, 'I can be a mother and a father to a child,' but it's not true." Growing up without a father has a deep psychological effect on a child. "The mom may not need that man," Kefalas says...
...This turns out to be true across the economic spectrum. The groundbreaking research on the effects of divorce on children from middle- and upper-income households comes from a surprising source: a Princeton sociologist and single mother named Sara McLanahan, who decided to study the fates of these children with the tacit assumption that once you control for income, being part of a single-parent household does not adversely affect kids. The results - which she published in the 1994 book Growing Up with a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps - were surprising. "Children who grow up in a household with...
...marriage on its way to becoming the relationship equivalent of our appendix (in that it's no longer needed but can cause a lot of pain)? "You're looking at the vanguard," sociologist Andrew Cherlin says of CUs like McCauley and Hathaway. A Johns Hopkins professor and author of The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today, he notes that unmarried parents in Europe stay together longer than married parents in the U.S. "Marriage is a more powerful symbol here," he says. "It's the ultimate merit badge of personal life...