Marriage is on the decline, and a growing proportion of children are born to unmarried parents, many of them in unstable cohabiting unions. Research increasingly shows that family instability affects children’s cognitive and social-emotional development in ways that constrain their life chances. With an eye on these trends, the Future of Children first examined marriage […]
This is a book about taking a fact-based and spirit-guided integrated approach to responding as a patient and as a caregiver to a diagnosis of a serious disease such as cancer. Includes character and marriage-strengthening encouragement. Susanne M. Alexander facilitates workshops on the topic of Empowered Healing for patients, caregivers, and medical personnel. For more […]
Developed and researched by Mark Feinberg, Ph.D., Family Foundations is the result of years of his work as a clinical psychologist, family therapist, and prevention scientist at Penn State University. Many colleagues, professionals, and families contributed to the development and testing of Family Foundations. We appreciate all of their support. NIH provided funding for the […]
There is a spectrum of choices people make from being single to living together to being married, and there are varying reasons behind each living arrangement decision. The decision to live together often seems to be a gradual decision as opposed to a deliberate choice (“sliding” vs. “deciding”).
This Collection focuses on three policy areas in which there has been extensive examination of their effects on family formation: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (welfare) programs; federal tax policies; and child support enforcement/responsible fatherhood programs. For purposes of this Collection, child support enforcement and responsible fatherhood programs are combined. This is not intended to […]
This brief reviews trends in family structure in the United States and implications for children, adults, and society. Data is shared on rates of divorce, nonmarital births, and nonmarital cohabitation. Statistics are cited that indicate the probability of marriages ending in divorce increased more or less continuously until 1990 and then stabilized; between 43% and […]
This research project was conducted as part of the evaluation for the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative. In 1999 Governor Frank Keating announced the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative, with the objective of reducing the divorce rate in Oklahoma by 1/3 by the year 2010. One aim of the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative is to change the culture of support […]
Presented by the National Healthy Marriage Resource Center on April 23, 2008, this webinar discusses key findings from recent research on the outcomes of unmarried cohabitation, implications of cohabitation research for marriage education programming, and the relationship between cohabitation and marital and child well-being. The first presentation is offered by Dr. Wendy Manning, Professor of […]
Evolving patterns of marriage and divorce are at the core of studying changes in family composition and living arrangements. The timing of the age at entry into first marriage often reflects the period when people enter adulthood, such as the Great Depression of the 1930s or the economic prosperity of the post-World War II era. […]
The Bush Administration has proposed to include new goals and funding in the federal welfare law for states to promote marriage among welfare recipients. The proposal is based on the assertion that the absence of marriage causes poverty and that marriage, per se, is good for children and for the country. But the proposal raises […]