Snippet from interview with sociologist David Popenoe.
Interviewer Carol Iannone:
In 1992 a startlingly direct op-ed appeared in the New York Times, “The Controversial Truth: Two-Parent Families Are Better,” the original title of which was “Two-Parent Families Are Best.”
The author was Professor David Popenoe of Rutgers University, who soon followed up that piece with an academic article, “American Family Decline, 1960–1990,” in the prestigious Journal of Marriage and Family.
Both were based on years of research into the weakening of family structure in modern society and its harmful effects on children, findings that set Popenoe deeply at odds with academic orthodoxy as well as with the reigning cultural attitudes of the time.
These articles brought to wider public attention the academic debates that had begun with Popenoe’s book, Disturbing the Nest: Family Change and Decline in Modern Societies (1988). Subsequent works include Life Without Father: Compelling New Evidence that Fatherhood and Marriage Are Indispensable for Children and Society (1996), which will be reissued in Spring 2009 by Transaction Publishers with a new title, Families Without Fathers: Fathers, Marriage and Children in American Society; and War Over the Family (2005).
He heads the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, where he taught sociology for forty-five years until his recent retirement. We met at his home in Princeton, where we discussed a range of questions, not all of them “academic.”
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Also see:
The National Marriage Project.
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Return to "Professor David Popenoe: Decline of the Family."
Thanks for these links. I hope some of Popenoe's books study the effect of having children by mulitple partners (ie, study half-siblings). They might all live in two parent families, but could still have problems, perhaps more than children being raised by one parent but without competition of half-siblings.
ReplyDeleteFrom here:
By distinguishing between children living with and without half-siblings as well as those living with mothers in a second or later marriage, we are able to identify how children living with both biological parents behave and perform differently in the presence of half-siblings. In fact, we find that the existence of half-siblings increases a child's risk of behavior problems, even for children living with both biological parents. The presence of half-siblings is negatively correlated with test scores in reading recognition, but is not significantly related to math test scores. Furthermore, the number of marriages a mother has entered into is positively related to behavior problems but is unrelated to math or reading recognition performance.
Our analysis suggests that children born into a second or higher-order marriage and living with both biological parents and a half-sibling are at risk for some of the same difficulties experienced by stepchildren. Our study also indicates that stepchildren brought into subsequent marriages only display significantly lowered well-being if half-siblings are present. These results illustrate the potential ramifications of the traditional method of classifying children into family structures based on their individual relationship with the householders, rather than based on the family types.