Skip to main content

Research Archive

Welcome to Our Research Archive

Search and filter by content type, issue area, author, and keyword

August 22, 2024

Active Fathers Are Exacerbating the Two-Parent Privilege

Fathers today are doing more than ever. Not only are they taking on more housework—doing laundry, cooking, and cleaning—but they are more involved with child care as well. They help with homework and serve as chauffeurs, coaches and role models. Fathers with young kids spend, on average, nearly two hours a day caring for their kids.  The division…

August 15, 2024

Women Want More Children Than They’re Having. America Can Do More to Help

In the wake of the media storm generated by Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s comment about “childless cat ladies,” fertility in America has vaulted to the top of the national conversation, with good reason. The fertility rate has hit a record low in the United States, with the average American woman now expected to have just…

July 29, 2024

The Rise of ‘Marriage Deserts’ and What We Can Do About Them

What makes a marriage succeed or fail? To answer this question, psychologist John Gottman set up what came to be known as the “Love Lab” at the University of Washington in Seattle. Couples were invited to spend a weekend in a plush apartment with scenic views as Gottman and his team monitored their body language,…

June 18, 2024

Donald Trump is an Outlier on the Right: When It Comes to Fidelity and Marriage, Democrats Face Bigger Problems

The political and legal fallout of Donald Trump’s affair with Stormy Daniels has not only complicated his run for the presidency, but it has also raised a deeper concern: Has the Republican standard bearer’s marital misbehavior eroded our collective commitment to the values and virtues that sustain the institution of marriage? On the left, journalist…

June 13, 2024

Why Married Fathers Matter

The eighth grade girls cleaned up at the middle school graduation I attended last week. Of the four major awards, three went to girls, and just one to a boy. This pattern is all too typical in American life today. Two-thirds of high school students in the top 10% are girls, while boys dominate the…

May 13, 2024

Do Mothers Have “Societal Support”? Does It Count if It Comes from Neighbors?

It is an annual tradition, for some reason, for folks on social media to dump all over Mother’s Day. Some on the fringe decide it’s sexist or cisnormative or something to believe only women can be mothers or that mothers are special. The abortion lobby hates the idea that womanhood is associated with motherhood. But last year, I stumbled across an anti-Mother’s…

May 1, 2024

The closing of the American heart

In the late 1990s, I began my study of marriage and family as a graduate student at Princeton University “for the sake of the children.” Then, I was concerned that our nation’s retreat from this core institution since the 1960s was harming children. And at that point, the share of children residing with their married,…

April 23, 2024

Awkward Truth: Subsidizing Women’s Work Drives Down Birthrates

Birthrates are low and falling in the United States, and commentators and policymakers are starting to realize this is a problem. It’s tempting to assume that this is about affordability: People aren’t getting married and having children because they can’t afford it! This is partly true, and so it’s partly true that we can drive up birthrates by giving money…

March 8, 2024

Jason Kelce, Family Man

In his tear-filled farewell speech, Jason Kelce brought his 13-year NFL career to a close by underlining what really mattered in life: marriage and family. The longtime Philadelphia Eagles player, who made the NFL Pro Bowl in each of the last five seasons after getting married to his wife, Kylie, in 2018, said in his retirement speech:  It’s…

March 4, 2024

Teen Suicide and the Limits of Sociology

“No one, it appears, was free to just parent as they wanted to parent—free of the web of social ties that both gave their lives meaning and set firm constraints around expected behaviors.” This observation from a new book about the town of Poplar Grove—the fictional name for a real, wealthy community where there have…