A recent New York Times article about the growing marriage and class divide in America featured two middle-class families in Ann Arbor, Michigan. At the heart of the story are the disparate lives of their children. Jeremy, 12, and his brother, Justin, 10, are raised by married, college-educated parents. Kirsten, …
The best anti-poverty program is a job. That was the mantra of the 1996 welfare reform, which changed the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program into the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, for the first time requiring able-bodied welfare recipients to work or prepare for work in …
Fact: According to the latest National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 53 percent of high school students have remained sexually abstinent. Indeed, in the last two decades, the share of abstinent teens has increased by nearly 15 percent. Moreover, two in three teens are currently abstinent. For teens, delaying sexual activity …
Summertime often means more family time, and that’s good news. Research consistently shows a strong association between spending time as a family and adolescent well-being. In particular, frequent family meals have been linked to a host of positive teen outcomes, including physical and psychological health, school performance, and reduced risk …
Marriage, these days, is getting bad press. For example, a string of recent headlines claim that living together is healthier than marriage, citing a study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family. Though provocative, headlines can be misleading, focusing only on a non-representative subset of findings. A more nuanced …
Last week, Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute spoke to an audience at The Heritage Foundation about his latest book, Coming Apart. Murray warned of a gap in culture and values that has steadily increased throughout the last 50 years between upper-class (defined as those having at least a …
High-quality social science research shows that marriage is associated with a number of health benefits. Studies indicate a strong link between marriage and mental health, in particular depressive symptoms. Marriage can both affect and be affected by psychological well-being, through, for example, greater emotional and social support as well as …
