FAMILY FACT SHEET

The Revolution in the Sociology of the Family

I. FAMILY LIFE IN GENERAL

The Importance of the Intact, Two-Parent Family

- Boys raised outside of an intact nuclear family are more than twice as likely as other boys to end up in prison, even controlling for a range of social and economic factors (Harper and McLanahan 1998).

- Children raised in a single-parent family are twice as likely to drop out of high school, and girls raised in such a family are more than twice as likely to have a child out-of-wedlock as a teenager compared to children who grow up with their biological parents
(McLanahan and Sandefur 1994).

- Children who grew up in a single parent home are twice as likely to get divorced than children who grew up in a two-parent biological family (Bumpass and Sweet 1995).

- "[Young] people from single-parent families or step-families were 2 to 3 times more likely to have had emotional or behavioral problems than those who had both of their biological parents present in the home." (Zill and Schoenborn 1990: p. 9).

- "Children who grow up in a household with only one biological parent are worse off, on average, than children who grow up in a household with both of their biological parents, regardless of the parents' race or educational background, regardless of whether the parents are married when the child is born, and regardless of whether the resident parent remarries." (McLanahan and Sandefur 1994: p. 1, emphasis added).

- "If we were asked to design a system for making sure that children's basic needs were met, we would probably come up with something quite similar to the two-parent ideal. Such a design, in theory, would not only ensure that children had access to the time and money of two adults, it also would provide a system of checks and balances that promoted quality parenting. The fact that both parents have a biological connection to the child would increase the likelihood that the parents would identify with the child and be willing to sacrifice for that child, and it would reduce the likelihood that either parent would abuse the child." (McLanahan and Sandefur 1994: p. 38)

- The chances of a daughter being sexually abused by her stepfather are at least 7 times greater than by her biological father (Popenoe 1996).

- "[P]reschoolers in Hamilton [Ontario] living with one natural parent and one stepparent in 1993 were 40 times as likely to become child abuse statistics as like-aged children living with two natural parents" (Wilson and Daly 1987: p. 228).

- A child is between 10 and 100 times more likely to be assaulted or killed if he or she lives in a household that includes an unrelated male (Konner 1999).

Divorce

- More than half of the children born in 1994 will spend some or all of their childhood in a single-parent home (McLanahan 1994).

- Approximately half of all first marriages will end in divorce
(Census Bureau 1992).

- More than two-thirds of all parental divorces do not involve highly conflicted marriages. In other words, two-thirds of divorces do not happen because of spousal physical abuse and/or serious conflict; rather, they happen because spouses grow apart.
"Unfortunately, these are the very divorces that are most likely to be stressful for children." (Amato and Booth 1997: p. 220) The reason? Children value the love, support, and attention they receive from their parents even if their parents' marriage isn't particularly warm.

Marriage

- "Married people are healthier, live longer, earn more money, and accumulate more assets that the unmarried, even after adjusting for the tendency of those with better prospects to get and remain married." (Sawhill 1999: 99)

- Marriage socializes men. Once married, men earn more, work more, and attend church more often. They also frequent bars/taverns less
(Nock 1998).

- Couples who value marriage and disapprove of divorce are less likely to get divorced (Bumpass and Sweet 1995) and they are more likely to invest themselves in their marriages (Amato and Rogers 1999).

- A survey of 18,000 adults in 17 industrialized nations found that married persons have a significantly higher level of happiness than unmarried adults, even after controlling for health and financial status, which are also linked to marriage (Stack and Eshleman 1998).

- Akerlof (1996) ties the decline of marriage -- including "shotgun marriage" -- among working and lower class men to the rise in crime, drug use, and underemployment among teens and 20-something men since the 1960s. He also makes the point that these trends have a multiplier effect, such that increases in the percentage of unmarried young men tend to lead to greater peer acceptance of not marrying/hooliganism, which only accelerates the downward cycle of social pathology in many urban and rural environments dominated by under-socialized unmarried young men. To the degree that these statistics are persuasive, they imply that Charles Murray's welfare argument and William J. Wilson's jobs argument do not satisfactorily explain the rise in illegitimacy. The decline of shotgun marriage, as well as the cultural shift in sexual norms occasioned -- in part
-- by the rise of contraception and abortion in the late 1960s, however, accounts for the rise of illegitimacy much more successfully.

Cohabitation

- Individuals who cohabit before they marry face a significantly higher chance of getting divorced than those who do not cohabit. Married couples where both spouses have cohabited are between 33%
(Cherlin 1992) and 50% (Laumann, Gagnon, Michael, and Michaels 1994) more likely to divorce than married couples where neither spouse has cohabited.

- "Cohabiting couples are less satisfied than married spouses with their partnerships, are not as close to their parents, are less committed to each other, and, if they eventually marry, have higher chances of divorce" (Nock 1998: 4).

- Because cohabitation does not provide institutionalized norms or a long-term horizon of relationship commitment, cohabiting couples place a much greater stress on equality and freedom in their relationships. "This freedom, however, comes with the loss of incentives to invest jointly in the relationship and of clear cultural guidelines for how partners might conduct themselves once they set up a household. Equality is a costly principle to maintain, in part because it requires frequent monitoring of each partner's holdings." (Brines and Joyner 1999: 351) As a consequence, long-term cohabiting couples are much more likely to break up than married couples (Brines and Joyner 1999).

- Women in cohabiting relationships are more likely to suffer physical and sexual abuse (Stets 1991).

- About half of the population under age 40 has lived with an unmarried partner, with the highest rates of cohabitation found among the least educated Americans (Bumpass and Sweet 1995).

Premarital Sex

- Men and women who marry as virgins are significantly less likely to divorce. Men who marry as virgins are 37% less likely to divorce and women who marry as virgins are 24% less likely to divorce
(Laumann, Gagnon, Michael, and Michaels 1994).

- Teenage girls tend to seek relationship commitment and teenage boys tend to be more interested in sexual conquest. For instance, one study of teenagers found that 8 percent of girls wanted sexual intercourse when they were "going steady," but 45 percent of boys wanted sex at this stage of intimacy. Thus, teenage sexual activity tends to favor the interests of boys but not girls (Maccoby 1998).

Contraception and Fertility

- Fertility is linked to a declining risk of divorce. In fact, each child a couple has reduces their risk of divorce by 20 percent
(Kaplan, Lancaster, and Anderson 1998).

- Couples who say good-bye to their youngest child at an early age are significantly more likely to divorce than other couples. The 20- year marriage is more vulnerable to the disruptive effects of the empty nest syndrome than the 30-year marriage (Hiedemann, Suhomlinova, and O'Rand 1998).

- The increased availability of abortion and contraception in the late 60s and early 70s constituted a "technology shock" that
"immiserated" women who sought to avoid premarital sex, according to Akerlof et al (1996). They point to the dramatic increase in illegitimacy and premarital sex in this period, as well as the marked decline in shotgun marriages, and ask why it happened at this particular historical period. Akerlof et al. argue that the best social evidence suggests that Charles Murray's welfare thesis and William Julius Wilson's jobs argument do not account for the lion share of this rise. They argue that the increased availability of contraception and abortion meant that women could no longer hold the threat of pregnancy over their male partners, either to avoid sex or to elicit a promise of marriage in the event that pregnancy resulted from sexual intercourse. Accordingly, more and more women gave in to their boyfriends' entreaties for sex. This left traditional women who wanted to avoid abortion/contraception/sex "immiserated" because they could not compete with women who had no serious objection to premarital sex. Thus, more of the traditional women ended up having sex and having children out of wedlock, while more of the permissive women ended up having sex and contracepting or aborting. This explains why the contraceptive/abortive revolution was associated with both an increase in abortions and illegitimacy. Moreover, "the norm of the premarital sexual abstinence all but vanished in the wake of the technology shock." (Akerlof et al. 1996)

- Primate studies indicate that hormonal contraception has dramatic effects on the sexual practices of primates. For instance, one study of stumptail macaque monkeys found that the alpha male in a troop ceased to engage in sexual intercourse with any females that were given Depo-Provera. When all the females in his troop were given contraception, he "began to attempt rape, masturbate, and behave in a turbulent and confused manner. But no matter what he did, there was never the usual episode of intercourse" (Tiger 1999: p. 39).

Gender Roles and Parents at Home

- The greater the share of couple income that comes from the wife, the more likely the husband is to physically abuse his wife
(Ellison, Bartkowski, and Anderson 1999).

- Contrary to the expectations of feminists and family scholars, couples where men are more likely to share household tasks with their wives are also significantly more likely to get divorced
(Bumpass and Sweet 1995).

- Couples where men earn the lion's share of the family income -- i.e., more than 50% of couple income -- are significantly less likely to get divorced (Bumpass and Sweet 1995).

- Teenagers who come home to an empty home -- i.e., latchkey children -- are more likely to experience emotional distress and drug/alcohol abuse (Resnick et al. 1997).

- Mothers of school-age children who work full-time are significantly less likely to report praising and hugging their children than mothers who do not work (Wilcox 1998).

- Couples with traditional gender role practices are significantly more likely to have children. In fact, each percentage decrease in wife's income contribution increases the odds of childbirth by 3%
(Myers 1997).

II. THE FAMILY'S INFLUENCE ON RELIGIOUS PRACTICE

Childbearing

- Andrew Greeley, Michael Hout, and Melissa Wilde recently report that the almost century-long increase in conservative Protestant membership and decline in mainline Protestant membership is closely tied to two factors: fertility and intergenerational fidelity. Specifically, they note that mainline Protestantism went from 57 to 47 percent of the U.S. Protestant population from 1972-1998, while conservative Protestantism rose from 43 percent to 53 percent of the Protestant population. They argue that higher rates of conservative Protestant fertility account for more than 60 percent of their newfound dominance in the American religious scene. Higher rates of religious retention among youth raised in conservative Protestant families accounts for much of the rest of the conservative Protestant rise. They conclude by saying, "The changing shape of American Protestantism reflects the interaction of differential demography and strong socialization. There are more fundamentalists today because their parents had larger families than Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, and Congregationalists had"
(Hout, Greeley, and Wilde 1999: 25).

- Robert Wuthnow writes in After Heaven (1998, p. 67), "During the 1950s, the average time between confirmation class and birth of first child for U.S. young people had been only seven years; by the end of the 1960s, in large measure because of the new contraceptive technologies, this period had more than doubled to fifteen years. Since the time between confirmation and parenthood has always been one in which young people could drop out of established religion and turn their attention to other things, the doubling of this period was of enormous religious significance." Wuthnow goes on to connect the increase in this window of childlessness to increasing spiritual experimentation and secularization.

- Children, particularly children under the age of 13, increase parental church attendance. "For 32-year-olds. . . the addition of two children, one age 5 and the other age 7, increases the probability of church membership to about 72 percent." (Stolzenberg, Blair-Loy, and Waite 1995: 95).

- "With each additional child, men increase their attendance at services by 2.5 times per year." Men also increase their attendance at church social events with additional children. In fact, men with four children -- on average -- attend church socials about 7 times more a year than men with no children (Nock 1998: 100).

- Individuals, especially married persons, with young children are significantly more likely to attend church (Argue, Johnson, and White 1999; Chaves 1991). In fact, Mark Chaves (1991: 512) concluded, "As the fortunes of that family/household type [two parents with children] rise and fall, so will the fortunes of mainstream organized Protestantism."

- "The presence of young, school-age children and feelings of parental responsibility for them drives boomers back to church and to enroll their children in religious education classes. Having had parents with a religious background who took them to church is obviously a crucial factor in the thinking of boomers who must now make decisions about their own children." (Roof 1993: 157)

- The larger the number of nuclear families (two parents with children) in an area, the greater a congregation's chances for growth (Ammerman 1997).

Parenting

- "Those [boomers] brought up in a permissive child-rearing environment dropped out in far greater numbers and are also less likely to return to church or synagogue. . . A disciplined approach to bringing up children appears to instill religious values and the habits of religious observance." (Roof 1993: 163).

- "Close relations with parents growing up are also a factor of some importance. A close relationship to mother and father, like more rigid childrearing practices, results in fewer dropouts, and greater return among those who have fallen away." (Roof 1993: 163).

- Children who have mothers who stay at home are more likely to be religious -- pray, attend church, and the like -- than children whose mothers work outside the home. "The results demonstrate that the fewer the weekly hours worked by the mother and the more weekly hours worked by the father, the higher the religiosity among adult offspring" (Myers 1996: 864). Moreover, the "religiosity of the offspring is higher if the father is the main decision-maker in the family" (Myers 1996: 864).

Marriage/Cohabitation

- "[The] chances of belonging to a religious organization are 4 to 8 percentage points higher for married men and women than for those who are not married." (Stolzenberg, Blair-Loy, and Waite 1995: 94).

- "[C]ohabitation has a strong, negative effect on the probability of religious activity in all three survey years." Specifically, cohabitation reduces church membership by about 20 percent
(Stolzenberg, Blair-Loy, and Waite 1995: 94).

- Men who marry increase their church attendance by six times per year. Accordingly, "[t]he institution of the church, it appears, is very closely allied with the institution of marriage" (Nock 1998: 100-1).

- For men, divorce reduces religious participation but, for women, divorce increases such participation. This pattern probably reflects men's distance from the family after divorce and women's search for social support with parenting in the aftermath of divorce
(Stolzenberg, Blair-Loy, and Waite 1995: 95).

- Respondents who report valuing marriage and living near their family very highly are more than 10 percent more likely to attend church than respondents who do not value marriage/living near their family (Stolzenberg, Blair-Loy, and Waite 1995: 97).

III. THE INFLUENCE OF RELIGIOUS PRACTICE ON THE FAMILY

Divorce/Marital Happiness

- The "rate of marital dissolution [divorce] is 2.4 times higher among couples where neither spouse attends than among couples where each spouse attends religious services every week" (Call and Heaton 1997: 386-7). The positive effects of attendance are largely mediated through higher marital satisfaction and negative attitudes to extramarital sex (Call and Heaton 1997). Likewise, Laumann, Gagnon, Michael, and Michaels (1994) found that those who
"frequently attend religious services are only about half as likely to separate." (P. 501)

- "[R]espondents who, in 1982, did not attend religious services, were also 2.5 times more likely to have been divorced than respondents who attended religious services regularly." (Clydesdale 1997: 625)

- Couples who do not share the same religious denomination or who have no religious affiliation are significantly more likely to divorce (Call and Heaton 1997). In fact, one study found that couples with different religious backgrounds are more than 120% more likely to divorce (Laumann, Gagnon, Michael, and Michaels 1994).

- Couples who share the same denomination are 42% more likely to be very happy than couples who do not. Moreover, higher rates of attendance and theological conservatism are also associated with greater marital happiness -- especially when spouses have similar beliefs and attendance patterns (Heaton and Pratt 1990).

- "[E]vangelical men and women are more likely to report higher levels of marital satisfaction than other Americans" (Wilcox and Bartkowski 1999: 36).

Sexual Practice/Cohabitation

- From 1982 to 1988, the percentage of white female adolescent virgins fell from 51 to 42 percent. But the virginity rate among white female adolescents in conservative Protestant churches rose from 45 to 61 percent (Brewster et al. 1998).

- Single women under the age of 35 who never attend church are almost twice as likely to cohabit as those who attend church
(Protestant or Catholic) on a weekly basis (Bumpass and Sweet 1995).

Domestic Violence

- Men who attend church once a week or more are significantly less likely to physically abuse their wives. "The odds of committing partner violence are lower by more than half among men who attend services regularly -- at least once a week -- than among those who attend once a year or less" (Ellison, Bartkowski, and Anderson 1999: 98).

Inter-generational Relations

- Parents who attend church are significantly more likely to praise and hug their children; parents who hold theologically conservative beliefs are also more likely to praise and hug their children
(Wilcox 1998).

- Grandparents who pray, attend church, or have a strong religious identity are more involved with their grandchildren; they also report greater intimacy with their grandchildren (King and Elder 1999).

NOTE: Because of the length of this story I deleted and saved the Bibliography. If you would like a copy of it write to me at dvirtue236@aol.com and I will send it to you.