Three of life’s major milestones became a little scarcer last year.

The United States birthrate fell again in 2009, according to a report released Friday by the National Center for Health Statistics (PDF).

There were 13.5 births per 1,000 people last year, compared to a rate of 13.9 births per 1,000 people in 2008. In 2007, the rate was 14.3 births. ...

The marriage and divorce rates also fell in 2009. The center estimates that there were 6.8 marriages per 1,000 people in 2009, after a rate of 7.1 and 7.3 marriages per 1,000 people in 2008 and 2007, respectively.

Labels: culture, demographics, divorce, Marriage

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For years, I fought in court to stop him from ending our marriage. Now that NY has become the 50th state to enact no-fault divorce, women no longer have that option. ...

I’m not sure my attorney thought I’d actually try and exercise my right to keep my family together. But that’s what I did. In any other state it would have been impossible. But in 2003, New York was the last state in America that still didn't have no-fault divorce on the books. After California passed America's first no-fault law in 1970, divorce frenzy swept the nation, and by 1985, every state in the country had followed suit–every state except for New York, where my husband and I happened to live.

When I refused a quickie divorce on his terms, he served me with divorce papers filled with baseless complaints.

“The whole thing is a pack of lies,” I said to my attorney, sobbing. “He’s the one committing adultery.”

“Then deny it, and sue him for divorce,” Saul said.

“But I don’t want a divorce,” I cried. “I love my husband.” Twenty years wasn’t something I wanted to chuck overnight. Made of strong Southern female stock, I grew up believing the words “until death do us part” were non-negotiable. Family was paramount, and divorce virtually unheard of. “I don’t think there’s anything in life that can’t be forgiven,” my aunt said when I asked for her advice. To me, that pretty much covered the whole territory.

One night when I was up reluctantly working on the divorce papers, my eldest daughter appeared by my side. “I don’t want you to get a divorce,” she said. I didn’t either. Yet until this moment, it hadn't occurred to me that I had the power to stop this from happening. I realized perhaps the break-up of my marriage wasn't inevitable and that by standing up, maybe I could also help others.

Labels: culture, divorce, divorce reform, New York

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Economists may assert that we’re in the early stages of a recovery, but surveys continue to show that the impact of the Great Recession on American families is deep, widespread and grim. A Pew Research poll published last month indicated that more than half of all adults in the U.S. labor force had experienced some “work-related hardship” — a period of unemployment, a pay cut, a reduction in work hours or an involuntary move to part-time employment — since the recession began in December 2007. A report in March from the Population Reference Bureau showed that more than 70 percent of Americans age 40 and over felt they had been affected by the economic crisis. Government data indicate that the net worth of the average American household has shrunk by about 20 percent — the greatest such decline since the end of World War II. Long-term unemployment — joblessness lasting six months or more — is also at its highest level since the mid-1940s. According to recent data from the Rockefeller Institute, 20 percent of Americans have seen their available household income decline by 25 percent or more. ...

That the Great Recession could then bring hope for a major recalibration — a resetting of all the clocks — is not surprising. Unfortunately, though, it’s not happening in any meaningful way. The poor are getting poorer, and the rich, despite stock-market setbacks, are still comparatively rich. The most devastating losses in household wealth over the past two years have been suffered by the middle class. And families are fraying at the seams. The Pew poll showed nearly half of people who had been unemployed for more than six months saying their family relationships had become strained, and a New York Times/CBS poll of unemployed adults last winter found about 40 percent saying they believed their joblessness was causing behavioral change in their children.

Parents who have jobs are working longer hours than ever. Mothers are taking shorter maternity leaves. The birth rate is on the decline. The divorce rate is declining, too — it’s too expensive for people to break up their households — but that’s not necessarily a family-friendly thing, as a report from the Council on Contemporary Families noted in April: “We know from the experience of the Great Depression of the 1930s that divorce rates can fall while family conflict and domestic violence rates rise.”

Labels: children, culture, demographics, divorce, economics

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Romance isn't dead, it just needs a little cash injection - according to those old romantics known as the Australian Family Association. Late last week, the AFA announced that couples deserved to receive a federally funded ''reward'' for staying married. As AFA vice-president Mary-Louise Fowler put it: ''One innovative idea is the idea of a marriage bonus - if you become married and you remain married for five, 10, 15, 25 years." ...

As those of us bound up in holy matrimony well know, wedded bliss sure can feel like bloody hard work sometimes. But don't just take our word for it. A day after the AFA's suggestion, the Coalition announced that, should it win office, it would provide $200 vouchers for couples to use in marriage or parenting education.

The proposal is billed as a critical response to the "enormous" financial and emotional cost of the "many" marriages dissolving like fairy floss inside a Swedish sauna.

It's true that more than 47,900 divorces were granted in 2007, but what the AFA and the Coalition conveniently leave out is the fact that divorces in this country have been steadily decreasing since 2001, while marriages are actually on the rise. ...

Contrary to what the AFA says on its Facebook page, the "stability, morale, security and prosperity of the Australian nation" is not built solely on the bedrock of marriage. Society also needs justice, understanding and inclusion.

As "Casey" wrote in response to the report last week: "What if I don't want to get married because I am not religious and don't see the point, yet I stay with my partner for 50 years because I am committed to them? Does that mean I contribute less to society and therefore shouldn't be rewarded?"

She makes some good points, but Casey might well have added that until a person's sexual preference no longer dictates whether he or she can legally take the plunge, incentives such as the AFA's marriage bonus must be seen for what they are: disingenuous and discriminatory.

Labels: Australia, committed relationships, divorce, Marriage

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No-fault divorce is now legal in every state, making filing for divorce in America — whether both parties agree or not — simply a matter of getting the proper paperwork.

New York just became the last state to adopt the legislation, passing a bill in early July that was signed into law this week by Governor David Paterson. ...

Robin Fretwell Wilson, an alumni professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law, also noted that no-fault laws erroneously overlook the fact that sometimes, one spouse is at fault:

By bypassing mutual agreement, S3890 would treat nearly all divorces alike. Under current New York law, fault matters in property distribution and alimony only in rare instances, when “so egregious” as to be “a blatant disregard” of the marriage. Beating one’s wife with a barbell until she is unrecognizable would count, but verbally abusing and striking one’s wife and child while intoxicated would not, even if the abuse required a physician’s care. Not all reasons for divorcing are equal. Often someone is at fault and that should matter if the law is to do justice.

...
McManus advocates reforming divorce laws on a state-by-state basis, recommending that states lengthen mandatory separation periods prior to granting divorce and replace no-fault divorce (which he calls “unilateral divorce”) with mutual consent divorce in cases involving children. His goal is reconciliation between spouses whenever possible.

Marriage Savers is one of several groups expressing a surge of concern for the state of marriage in the U.S. Marriage Savers works through “Community Marriage Policies” that establish standards requiring premarital counseling and ongoing marriage-enrichment courses, including conflict resolution and step-family support. According to the Maryland-based nonprofit, once a community gets a significant number of people to sign this type of agreement, the divorce rate drops.

Labels: culture, divorce, divorce reform, Marriage, no-fault divorce

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My childhood home broke in half during the autumn of 1973, when my twin sister and I were 10 years old. Our parents called us together one evening to announce that they were splitting up, and just like that we became “products of a broken home.” The scene still flickers in my mind: my sister and I sat between our two parents on a monstrous neo-Victorian couch upholstered in a weird, synthetic shade of pink. Everybody cried.

Our father ended up keeping the row house where we lived, but a few years later our mother bought the place next door. This kid-friendly arrangement softened the bite of the breakup, allowing my sister and me to jump over the porch rail whenever we felt like switching parents. ...

Although most real stepfamilies do better than that, competitive rifts are common. Disturbances float to the surface as children grow up and inheritances get parceled out. Do the older kids from Dad’s first marriage deserve to get more, less or the same as the younger kids from his second marriage? The answers aren’t obvious. (For advice on how to work out such difficulties, see Paul Sullivan’s recent piece in The Times, “Blended Families Face a Thicket of Financial and Emotional Issues.”)

Children are resilient. For my sister and me, the painful news delivered that night in 1973 eventually coalesced with everyday reality. The terrible became normal, and the kids were all right. The pink couch still occupies a dark, poorly decorated corner of my mind, but its toxic glow has dimmed. I myself have been peacefully married for 20 years, and I enjoy warm relationships with my parents, stepparents and stepsiblings. My extended family is a creaky, leaky contraption whose inner workings often trip and jam around ex-marital fault lines. This home has been broken, but don’t try to fix it. The cracks and gashes have made it what it is.

Labels: children, culture, divorce, stepparents

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It takes a marriage to keep a father investing in his biological children. A mother will keep investing in her biological children no matter what. Of course, there are exceptions to this sociological rule. But, on average, men are much more likely to invest–financially, emotionally, and otherwise–in their biological children when they are married to the mother of their children, whereas women tend to invest in their biological children no matter what their marital status.

A new study in Social Forces, which explores the financial implications of the divorce revolution on parental financial support of adult children, provides more evidence in support of this rule. Sociologists Shelley Clark and Catherine Kenney point out (a) that the divorce revolution has dramatically reshaped the character of intergenerational family ties and (b) that women now have a lot more income and assets of their own to share with their adult children.

You put these two facts together and you find that, in the wake of a divorce, fathers who remarry are much less likely to support their adult children than divorced mothers who remarry or remain single. (Interestingly, divorced fathers who remain single [and few do] support their children at a slightly higher rate than divorced mothers who remain single or remarry.) So, the bottom line here seems to be that the flow of the father’s money is influenced much more by his marital status, whereas the flow of the mother’s money is influenced much more by her biological relatedness to the child. Note: children are most likely to receive financial support from their parents when they remain married to one another.

Labels: divorce, Fathers, gender differences, Marriage, motherhood, stepparents

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...Contrary to what some of my friends in the gay-marriage movement believe, however, homophobia is far from the only reason for opposition. Another group, which I think is at least equally large, feels threatened—less by the normalization of homosexuality than by the abnormalization, so to speak, of the conventionally defined family. “Nothing personal, do what you want,” they tell us, “but leave the definition of family—of marriage—alone!”

One way to see that more is going on than homophobia is to reflect, for a moment, on a peculiar fact: gay marriage is far more controversial in America than either same-sex adoption or same-sex child custody.

Think about that. Isn’t it odd? The care of children, by definition, involves third parties who often have little or no choice about their situation. If there is a case for harm, one would think it would be strongest here—not in the union of two mutually consenting adults. In fact, the other side has a very hard time articulating any concrete harm at all that gay marriage would do. Yet efforts to make a political issue of gay adoption have consistently failed, while, wherever it appears, gay marriage finds it cannot not be a political issue.

What is behind the alarm raised by gay marriage?

To answer this question, I think one must widen the aperture and look at same-sex marriage in the context of a much larger cultural battle over the nature of family, of marriage, and even of adulthood: a debate over what it is that constitutes, and should constitute, the template for “normal” in all of those areas.

Labels: contraception, culture, divorce, economics, gay marriage, Jonathan Rauch, June Carbone, Marriage, men, Naomi Cahn, out-of-wedlock births, poverty, Red Families v. Blue Families

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For more than three decades, Dan Trimble thought he had a picture-perfect marriage. He and his wife, Grada, had two daughters and what he considered a life of adventure.

But he said everything changed two years ago when Trimble's oldest daughter got divorced and the idea spread -- like a "disease" according to Trimble -- to his wife, who dissolved their own marriage.

While it may sound like hyperbole, experts say divorce can become "contagious" in close social groups.

"Think of this 'idea' of getting divorced, this 'option' of getting divorced like a virus, because it spreads more or less the same way," University of California, San Diego professor James Fowler told "Good Morning America."

"When one person experiences divorce, it gives the people around them information about what that's like," he said.

According to new research done by Fowler, along with professors Nicholas Christakis and Rose McDermott, being friends with someone who gets divorced makes someone 147 percent more likely to get divorced themselves. A person who has a sibling who gets divorced is 22 percent more likely to also split from his spouse, the researchers say.

Fowler said someone does not necessarily have to get divorced himself to change the way divorce is viewed in a social group.

"You might have a friend, for example, who gets divorced, and that changes your mind about whether or not this is an appropriate option. And then you go and talk to a different friend about whether or not they should get divorced. And so one person's divorce can travel through the network even though the person in the middle isn't really affected," Fowler said.

Labels: culture, divorce

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Can you spot a good marriage? I was pretty sure I could, starting with my own.

My husband and I rarely argued, we had similar careers, we shared common interests. Things weren't perfect, but we seemed to be humming along in harmony better than most other couples we knew.

In fact, nobody was more surprised than we were when our 17-year marriage ended in a New Jersey divorce court.

It turns out, though, that the signs of trouble had been there all along, if only I'd known what to look for. Instead, I was judging my marriage by the wrong standards -- which, I've since learned, most of us do. In one now-famous study, researchers asked therapists, married couples, and others to watch videotaped conversations of ten couples and try to identify the relationships that had ultimately ended in divorce. The results were abysmal -- even the therapists guessed wrong half the time.

So how can you diagnose the health of your relationship? Armed with huge volumes of data on married couples, scientists have identified some simple but powerful indicators that can help couples recognize marital strife long before their relationship hits the skids.

The way you were

Imagine a couple that go hiking on their first date. In a happy marriage, the wife might tell the story this way: "We got terribly lost that day. It took us hours to find our way back, but we laughed about how neither of us had a good sense of direction. After that, we knew better than to plan another hiking trip!"

But if the relationship was stressed, she might tell the story this way: "He lost the map, and it took hours to find our way back. After that, I never wanted to go hiking again." Same story, but instead of reflecting a sense of togetherness -- using pronouns like "we" and "us" -- it's laced with negativity.

Research has shown that analyzing what's known as the marital narrative -- the way you talk about the good and bad times of your early years together -- is about 90 percent accurate in predicting which marriages will succeed or fail.

Labels: divorce, Marriage

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CAIRO — Egypt's highest judiciary body on Wednesday overturned a ruling ordering the Coptic church to allow its faithful to remarry, the official MENA news agency said, in a move welcomed by the church.

The Supreme Constitutional Court overturned a May decision by the High Administrative Court that obliged the head of the church, Pope Shenuda III, to issue a second marriage permit to divorced Copts requesting one.

That ruling sparked demonstrations in Cairo, with angry protesters, saying it went against the Bible, charging state interference in religious affairs.

Copts forbid divorce except in proven cases of adultery, or if a spouse converts to another religion or branch of Christianity.

Civil marriage alone is not recognised in Egypt.

Wednesday's ruling "has relieved Coptic church leaders who trust and respect the Egyptian judiciary and believe in its justness and its ability to correct any contradictions in rulings," Hani Aziz Amin, a church representative, told MENA.

Labels: Christianity, divorce, Egypt, Marriage, religion, remarriage

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EVER since I figured out in high school that my parents had married at 21 not for love, although there had been that, but because of an unplanned pregnancy, I have wondered about the implications of this truth. It forced me not only to reimagine who my parents were — that they’d been impulsive once, capable of making the mistakes they had so often warned their children about — but also to question what their relationship meant.

Once my siblings also put the pieces together, and my parents acknowledged (if a bit sheepishly) that my mother was indeed pregnant with my older brother at their wedding, the story lost much of its intrigue. But for me there continued to be a serious concern, and it was this: If my mother hadn’t gotten pregnant, would my parents ever have married at all? Would our family exist?

I never felt brave enough to ask them this question, even as I grew into adulthood. By then it didn’t seem to matter why we had become a family, only that we were one, and the unplanned pregnancy became relegated to a mere footnote, not the whole story.

And yet it seemed that something imperceptible had shifted in our family, like when the shoreline is reshaped by a steady undertow. Then, 10 years ago, came the event that threatened to swallow us whole: My older brother — the same child whose conception led to my parents’ decision to marry — returned home one night to their Queens apartment and said he needed to talk to them.

He was on the verge of turning 30, a grown-up, to be sure. But I imagine there was something about sitting on the sofa of our youth that made him feel like a child.

“The girl I’ve been seeing,” he said. “She’s pregnant.”

It was my father who responded first. “You know, you don’t have to marry her,” he said. ...

It was as if, in responding that way, he was giving voice to the advice he’d wished someone had given him all those years ago. And I finally believed I had the answer to the question I had long been afraid to ask: “Would you have married if you hadn’t been pregnant?”

And that answer was “No.”

Labels: culture, divorce, heterosexual couples, Marriage, pregnancy

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If your best friends' marriage is falling apart then beware, yours could also be heading for the rocks.

Researchers have discovered that divorce is catching and spreads like a disease through families, work places and groups of friends.

The domino effect means that if an immediate friend or colleague splits up, your own chance of divorce increases by 75 per cent.

Even the break-up of a friend-ofafriend's marriage boosts your chances of divorce by a third, scientists say.

The researchers describe the effect as 'divorce clustering' - and believe that break-ups within friendship groups force couples to start questioning their own relationships.

They say that a friend's divorce can also reduce the social stigma of splitting up, even when children are involved. ...

Divorce among family members and work mates also increased the chances of someone's own marriage ending, the study found.

It also suggests that knowing lots of divorced people can be bad for your marriage. The more divorced people that you know, the riskier your own marriage.

And while many couples cling to the belief that children reduce their risk of divorce, the scientists found it made no difference.

Labels: culture, divorce

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New Yorkers Laura Jackson and Gary Zaremba met on a dating website in 2005. Two years later, Mr. Zaremba, a 52-year-old real-estate developer, popped the question. Ms. Jackson accepted.

Then he popped another: "Will you sign a prenuptial agreement?"

He had been through a divorce, had a college-age son and several real-estate investments. She, a publicist and also 52, had never married.

"When he first mentioned it," Ms. Jackson, now Ms. Jackson-Zaremba, says, "I thought, 'Oh, my God.' It definitely took a little bit of the romance out."

Baby boomers looking to protect their assets are increasingly turning to prenuptial agreements—legal contracts drawn up before a marriage that dictate what happens to assets in the event a couple should part ways, either by divorce or death.

"They used to be for the rich and famous," says Marlene Eskind Moses, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers and a lawyer in Nashville, Tenn. "It's become more commonplace in the market as an estate-planning opportunity for boomers."

Even before the financial crisis hit, prenuptial agreements were on the rise: Some 80% of matrimonial lawyers said they had seen an increase in couples signing them in recent years, according to a 2006 survey sponsored by the matrimonial lawyers group.

The financial crisis—which hit boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964, especially hard—accelerated the trend. Many of them, just on the cusp of retirement, saw their investment portfolios pounded, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 53% from Oct. 9, 2007, to March 6, 2009. Home values, which represented significant chunks of boomer net worth, were down almost 31% as of March 31 from their peak in mid-2006, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller national index.

As a result, boomers have become more anxious to hold on to whatever they have left, says Gabriel Cheong, a divorce attorney with Infinity Law Group LLC in Quincy, Mass. Today, the majority of inquiries come from boomers "concerned about protecting their assets," he says. "Not just with the markets, but with protecting their spouses and children." And they often enter a marriage with substantial assets—and children from an earlier union.

Labels: culture, divorce, economics, Marriage, remarriage

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As a punishing rain lashed across the narrow peninsula of Ocean City, Heidi and Kirk Noll stood facing each other in a windowless conference room of the aging Carousel Resort Hotel.

Amid stackable chairs and retractable walls, they and a half-dozen other bleary-eyed couples clasped hands and pledged their lives to each other. Heidi's hair was still damp for the 9 a.m. ceremony, which took only 15 minutes, despite multiple interruptions from hotel staffers opening heavy doors that led to an atrium where the hum of a Zamboni on an indoor ice rink mingled with the smell of maple syrup from breakfast.

Vows successfully exchanged, and blessed by an Army chaplain, the couples clambered back onto the chartered bus that had brought them here, and made the wearing slog home to Washington.

It was an experience, the Nolls insist, that saved their marriage.

What's more: Had they gone through something similar years before, both say they might still be married to their first spouses.

The Nolls were on a marriage education retreat -- in this case, a free, two-day event that was part of an Army-wide initiative called Strong Bonds.

What it meant for Kirk and Heidi was 36 hours away from their daily routine, time they spent thinking critically about their relationship. Together with their group -- all military families -- the Nolls watched videos of spouses fighting, did a bit of arguing themselves and listened as the round-faced chaplain told stories about his home life. They filled out questionnaires to determine their personality types, discussed gender differences in communication styles and took notes on the factors that can increase a couple's chances for divorce.

Courses such as the one taken by the Nolls mark a sea change in the way some marriage experts view an institution that remains the fundamental unit of our society but is so shaky that it crumbles about half the time.

The marriage education movement has already spawned a cottage industry of trademarked seminars and self-help manuals. It has popped up, in varying forms, at community centers and churches across the nation. And it has successfully persuaded leaders of the federal government and the U.S. military to spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars a year attempting to disseminate its teachings to the masses.

At its core, it's a movement that would ask of every divorcee: What if the truth was that you didn't marry the wrong person?

What if you just didn't know how to be married? ...

If every couple has about the same number of disagreements, people who leave a marriage because of irreconcilable differences are likely to find themselves arguing just as much in their next marriage. The wallpaper might be different and the specifics may vary, but the frustrations will feel awfully familiar.

What Markman, Gottman and the others were finding undermined the basic principle driving romantic relationships in America: "That it's about finding the right person. That if you find your soulmate, everything will be fine," Sollee says. "That's the big myth."

It's important to choose a spouse wisely, these scientists would say, but it's equally important to be skilled in the convoluted art of conducting a marriage.

Labels: culture, divorce, Marriage, marriage counseling

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Divorce is the dissolution of a social tie, but it is also possible that attitudes about divorce flow across social ties. To explore how social networks influence divorce and vice versa, we utilize a longitudinal data set from the long-running Framingham Heart Study. We find that divorce can spread between friends, siblings, and coworkers, and there are clusters of divorcees that extend two degrees of separation in the network. We also find that popular people are less likely to get divorced, divorcees have denser social networks, and they are much more likely to remarry other divorcees. Interestingly, we do not find that the presence of children influences the likelihood of divorce, but we do find that each child reduces the susceptibility to being influenced by peers who get divorced. Overall, the results suggest that attending to the health of one’s friends’ marriages serves to support and enhance the durability of one’s own relationship, and that, from a policy perspective, divorce should be understood as a collective phenomenon that extends far beyond those directly affected.

Labels: culture, divorce, Marriage

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Saori Teshima had long dreamt of the moment. Standing nervously next to her smartly-suited partner in front of friends and loved ones, a sparkling ring appeared before her.

But contrary to conventional wedding rules, the man at Saori's side did not slip the ring lovingly onto her left hand before sealing their union with a kiss.

Instead, the pair were handed a hammer - which they held together as they proceeded to smash the ring to symbolise the end of their five-year marriage.

So goes another divorce ceremony - a bizarre, but increasingly popular ritual among Japanese couples, who choose to end their marriages with the same pomp and ceremony with which they began them.

From drinking toasts to never seeing each other again, through to symbolic rides in separate rickshaws to reflect the start of a new journey, the ceremonies consist of a string of symbolic acts to mark the definitive end of a marriage.

Their introduction is timely: more than 251,000 divorces took place in Japan in 2008, a figure blamed partly on the poor economic climate and the end of the salaryman-led family units which used to be the bedrock of much of Japanese life.

Yet with divorce still something of a taboo in Japanese society, the ceremonies have caught on as a way to publicly formalise the separation in a way that is socially acceptable to friends and family.

Pioneering the trend for divorce ceremonies is Hiroki Terai, 29, an entrepreneurial former sales man from Japan's Chiba district, who dreamt up the idea after friends of his decided to separate last year.

Since setting up a company devoted to divorce ceremonies in March, he has been contacted by more than 700 people and conducted 21 divorce ceremonies – costing from £44 to £700 - with a further nine booked.

"A ceremony at the end of a marriage gives the couple and their friends and family the opportunity to gain emotional closure," he said.

Labels: divorce, Japan

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Half of all U.S. children won't live with their father for part of their childhood. But just because "non-resident" dads don't live with their kids doesn't mean they're not involved with them.

"There are fathers that are very involved. There are some that are not. We have this image of the non-resident dad, and for some, that's the deadbeat dad," says Valarie King, a sociologist and demographer at Pennsylvania State University who just completed work on a five-year grant studying non-resident fathers.

Decades ago, non-resident fathers were largely divorced, but King and other researchers say many non-resident dads today were in a non-marital relationship that didn't last. Divorced fathers have been shown to be more involved, on average, than those who were never married to the child's mother, King says.

Such research findings (some yet unpublished) — along with changing attitudes and custody laws — are creating a new picture of today's non-resident dads.

"People don't realize how much things have changed, but if we look at the numbers, we see big increases in fathers' contact with children and big increases in fathers' payment of child support," says Paul Amato, also a Penn State sociologist and demographer.

And, just as fathers in two-parent families are more involved than a generation ago, "we're seeing a parallel trend among non-resident fathers," he says. ...

Cowan says the "best predictor of whether a father is going to be involved with his kids is his relationship with the mom. "They don't have to love each other or like each other, but they do need to co-parent and collaborate."

Others agree; the more time non-resident fathers spend with their kids, the better the relationship between the parents, finds a study co-authored by Marcia Carlson, associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It was presented to the Population Association of America in April.

Labels: child support, culture, divorce, Fathers, men, parenting

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...Of the recession's job losses, 75 percent have been among men -- the majority among working-class men. Some economists now call it the "mancession."

How is the family life of these unemployed fathers? Are they spending more time with their children, overseeing more of the household chores and preparing dinner for the family when Mom comes home? Sociologist Christine Whelan, in the essay "A Feminist-Friendly Recession" published in the 2009 State of Our Unions report, predicts that current unemployment trends will foster more gender egalitarianism and greater marital happiness on the home front, as unemployed or underemployed men take up more child care and housework.

It's possible. But it would be unwise to discount the deep sense of meaning and purpose that men have traditionally drawn from providing for their families. ...

High rates of joblessness among working-class and poor men are likely to harm married life among lower-income couples. Job loss and instability can be a big blow to a man's sense of self-worth, can undercut his wife's faith in him and can cause considerable financial stress for the couple. Men's unemployment can lead to a vicious cycle of conflict, recrimination and withdrawal that ends in divorce.

Labels: culture, divorce, economics, Marriage, men, poverty

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It used to be all business for divorce lawyer Regina DeMeo.

Her approach was always the same: "This is a partnership and the partnership is dissolving. What are the assets? What is the time-sharing arrangement you think is going to work best? Okay, come on," she would think. "Get yourself together and let's move on."

Then, after seven years of marriage, DeMeo went through her own divorce.

"It was a very humbling experience," she says. "All your dreams are shattered . . . your whole world is rocked."

DeMeo began reading everything she could about what makes and breaks marriages, and she changed the way she practices law. Soon after the divorce, the George Washington University Law School graduate became trained in a growing practice called collaborative divorce.

Now when a potential client lands in her office, she asks to hear the story of the marriage and the reasons for divorce. When there's even a hint of ambivalence she'll nudge the client toward a counselor. "If you can save this marriage, that's what you should try to do," says DeMeo, 37. "Because I can tell you personally, I've been down this dark path, and it's not fun."

But if clients are sure that ending the marriage is the only solution, she'll encourage them to consider collaborative divorce, a process that requires both spouses to agree not to go to court. Instead, they and their individual lawyers, along with mental health professionals and a neutral financial adviser, meet to openly hash out the terms of the divorce. The process requires that all relevant information be shared willingly -- "so I don't have to issue subpoenas to 50 different banks and waste time and money," says DeMeo, a lawyer with Joseph, Greenwald & Laake in Rockville.

Labels: culture, divorce, divorce reform, Marriage, marriage counseling

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