Tuesday, April 22, 2014

The M.Guy Tweet, Week of April 13, 2014

1. Why Your Spouse May Be ‘Hangry’ for a Fight, ABCNews
“Self-control, impulse control uses energy, both mental and physical. . . When we deplete that energy, we have a higher tendency of doing things we regret, such as hurting our loved ones.”

2. More Women Staying Home With Young Kids, USA Today
Nearly three in 10 American mothers are now stay-at-home moms who don't hold a job outside the home, reversing a long-term decline that hit its low point in 1999, a new survey finds.

3. ‘Marriage Penalty’ Takes A Bite Out Of Working Families, The Washington Post
Despite all the morality rhetoric spewed by some policymakers and pundits, Congress has expressed peculiarly little interest in removing disincentives for married moms to work or for working parents to marry.

4. Women’s Wages Are Up, But Many Families’ Incomes Are Down: Why? A Q&A with Brad Wilcox, AEIdeas
[D]eclines in men’s income and marriage appear to have offset increases in women’s income for a large minority of American families.

5. Ignoring an Inequality Culprit: Single-Parent Families, Wall Street Journal
Abuse, behavioral problems and psychological issues of all kinds, such as developmental behavior problems or concentration issues, are less common for children of married couples than for cohabiting or single parents, according to a 2003 Centers for Disease Control study of children's health. The causal pathways are about as clear as those from smoking to cancer.

6. Why Is The Teen Birth Rate Falling?, Pew Research Center
Furthermore, among never-married teens who have had sex, 78% used a contraceptive method the first time they had sex, 86% used contraception during their most recent sex and 20% used dual methods (e.g., a hormonal method and a condom) during their most recent sex, all significant increases since 1988.

7. Marriage and Happiness: David Blankenhorn Interviews Charles Murray, The Huffington Post
He stresses that "cultural changes are the only effective ones," especially when you want to communicate that "bringing a child into the world when you are not emotionally, intellectually, [or] financially prepared to care for one, is profoundly wrong." 

For more, see here.

Monday, April 7, 2014

The M.Guy Tweet, Week of March 30, 2014

1. Work, School And Marriage: Americans At Age 27, National Public Radio
By a substantial margin, women are more likely than men to be married at age 27 and generally, people with more education are more likely to be married than those with less.

2. Marriage Healthy for the Heart? Study Tracks Millions in U.S., NBC News
A study of more than 3.5 million Americans finds that married people are less likely than singles, divorced or widowed folks to suffer any type of heart or blood vessel problem.

3. Don't Worry, America: Millennials Still Want To Marry, Forbes
The latest Monitoring the Future report found that 78% of female high school seniors and 70% of males say that having a good marriage and family life is “extremely important” to them—numbers that are virtually unchanged since the 1970s.

4. Can We Strengthen Marriages? Results of the Supporting Healthy Marriage Evaluation, Family Studies
And they reported a little less psychological abuse, substance abuse, and infidelity, each of which is a strong predictor of subsequent divorce. SHM couples reported more marital happiness, greater warmth and support, and more positive and less negative communication, as well.

5. Divorce: It’s Way Bigger Than We Thought, Family Studies
Worse, when you control for the change in the age of the population between 1980 and today—the population of married men and women is considerably older now—the divorce rate has actually risen 40%. 

6. What If Everything You Knew About Poverty Was Wrong?, Mother Jones
He says Edin's work has helped inform his effort in Maryland to pass legislation overhauling the welfare system to focus not just on women and children, but on couples and joint parenting.

7. Advice for a Happy Life by Charles Murray, The Wall Street Journal
Many merger marriages are happy, but a certain kind of symbiosis, where two people become more than the sum of the individuals, is perhaps more common in startups.

For more, see here.