Lost in the dark, I feel like a shadow of myself
According to a post at the Institute for Family Studies, One of the most common critiques of the supposed advantages of marriage is that married adults and their children only do better because of their education and money. The argument goes something like this: “It’s not marriage that conveys the advantages of life. It’s just … Read more
This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey. You know the old saying: life’s a journey, not a destination. Journeys are cool. Quests are cooler. So I really liked Elder Faust’s quintessentially Mormon teachings on marriage in the opening Saturday Morning session of the October 1977 General Conference: The Enriching of Marriage. His exact … Read more
Sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox testified before a committee put together by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on child poverty in the United States. The following comes from his testimony: Research by Robert Lerman of the Urban Institute and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution, among others, suggests the growth of child poverty from the 1970s … Read more
What age is just right for marriage if you want the lowest chance of divorce? Turns out it’s late 20s to early 30s. Sociologist Nicholas Wolfinger explains, I analyzed data collected between 2006 and 2010 from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG). The trick is to use statistical methods that permit nonlinear relationships to … Read more
A recent post at the IFS’s Family Studies blog has a nice summary of the individual and social benefits of healthy marriages. For those who have kept up with me over the years, this is a subject I spend quite a bit of time researching. Nonetheless, it’s nice to have it all in one spot. Here’s … Read more
I’m currently reading through the Oxford-published volume The Bible and the Pursuit of Happiness and the second chapter “Is There Happiness in the Torah?” discusses how family life is a major aspect of “the good life” in the pre-Israel, patriarchal narratives of Genesis. This reading combined with a browsing of older saved, but never published blog posts … Read more
This is part of the General Conference Odyssey. A couple years ago, I highlighted President Henry B. Eyring presentation at The Complementarity of Man and Woman: An International Interreligious Colloquium at Vatican City. Julie Smith at Times & Seasons had an excellent insight about the following quote from President Eyring: [My wife’s] capacity to nurture others grew in me as … Read more
According to sociologist Nicholas Wolfinger, By the 2010s, only 5 percent of new brides were virgins. At the other end of the distribution, the number of future wives who had ten or more sex partners increased from 2 percent in the 1970s to 14 percent in the 2000s, and then to 18 percent in the … Read more
“In a word,” writes sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox and Anna Sutherland, the increasingly “separate and unequal” character of family life in the United States is fueling economic, racial, and gender inequality. How is family life “separate and unequal”? First, Americans exhibit a growing class divide in marriage where the college-educated are more likely to enjoy … Read more
The Don Drapers of the world used to marry their secretaries. Now they marry fellow executives, who could very well earn more than they do. With more marriages of equals, reflecting deep changes in American families and society at large, the country is becoming more segregated by class. This is how The New York Times … Read more