Monday, March 30, 2015

The M.Guy Tweet, Week of March 22, 2015

1. Minding the Nurture Gap, The Economist
The most important divide in America today is class, not race, and the place where it matters most is in the home. Conservatives have been banging on about family breakdown for decades. Now one of the nation’s most prominent liberal scholars has joined the chorus.

2. A Mission to Save Marriages, The Guardian
Nicky and Sila Lee help couples to stay together by running marriage courses. There's no counselling, no airing of dirty linen in public, no group therapy – and it seems to work.

3. For Richer or Poorer: The Challenges of Marrying Outside Your Class, The Washington Post
Though it shaped these couples’ lives, most people I spoke with swore they never thought about the class differences in their relationships, afraid that doing so made them, in the words of one source, “snotty.”

4. To Help Couples Get Married, Focus on Something Else, Family Studies
All of these examples suggest that change sometimes happens through indirection: in order to encourage a behavior, focus less on the desired behavior and more on the things that put a person on the path to that behavior.

5. Life Events That Can Lead to Divorce, ABC News
“If you stop prioritizing your marriage and allow it to play second fiddle to work, your partner will probably start to feel isolated and angry,” says Ochoa.

6. eHarmony Founder Talks Matchmaking in the Age of Tinder, The Wall Street Journal
I think under CEO Greg Waldorf, users started seeing us more like the other dating sites Match and Zoosk, when we’re really a social science site. We were never meant to be a dating site. We were meant to be a matchmaking site. 

7. Substance Abuse, Mental Illness, and Crime More Common in Disrupted Families, Family Studies
In the 2011-2012 National Survey of Children’s Health, 21 percent of children cared for by a divorced or separated mother had lived with someone—usually a parent or sibling—who “had a problem with alcohol or drugs.” This was five times higher than the rate for children cared for by married birth parents.

For more, see here.  

Monday, March 16, 2015

The M.Guy Tweet, Week of March 8, 2015

1. Daylight-Saving Time Is Bad for Your Relationships, Wall Street Journal
After a bad night’s sleep, studies show, we act more selfishly, become more volatile and impulsive and have a harder time dialing back our feelings.

2. Are LARCs the Solution to Nonmarital Childbearing?, Family Studies
In short, there is more to separating sex from children than preventing children—even when, like Sawhill, policy experts are seeking to prevent children as a humanitarian goal.

3. The State of Marriage in America Today, in 6 Charts and Maps, The Washington Post
The median age of first marriage today — 29 for men and 27 for women — is higher than it has been in more than a century.

4. A Report on the Instability and Economic Challenges of Black Families is Still Debated 50 Years Later, Deseret News
Wilcox said that Moynihan's agenda was quite progressive for its time and stressed not only bolstering family structure, but also strengthening employment opportunities for African-Americans, especially the men.

5. The Terrible Loneliness of Growing Up Poor in Robert Putnam’s America, The Washington Post
Putnam doesn’t dispute that we need to fix families to fix poverty. But he pairs that with the economic argument more often advanced on the left: that declining real wages and the disappearance of blue-collar jobs have undermined families. 

6. You Won't Believe How Much an Average Wedding in America Now Costs, Fortune
The price of weddings has jumped to a new all-time high, reaching an average $31,213 in 2014, new research says.

7. Getting Married Before Having Children ‘Boosts Chances of Staying Together’ – Study, The Telegraph
“The message of this research is clear. For any couple thinking of having children, their best chance of staying together in the long run is by getting married first.”  

For more, see here.  

Monday, March 2, 2015

The M.Guy Tweet, Week of February 22, 2015

1. Why Living Alone Is Dangerous to Your Health, Wall Street Journal 
Research shows that living life alone is as dangerous as smoking or obesity. And when it comes to the five most common cancers affecting men and women, being married provided a greater survival benefit than chemotherapy (the benefit was greater for men than women).

2. Knot Now: The Benefits of Marrying in Your Mid-to-Late 20s (Including More Sex!), The Washington Post
[I]f you’d like to maximize your marital happiness, your odds of having a couple of kids, and of forging common memories and family traditions, you might not want to delay marriage if the right person presents his or herself in your mid-to-late 20s.

3. How to Find Lifetime Love: 10 Secrets From Couples Married for Decades, Today
“Their view is that couples get into these grey periods after they’re married, where nothing interesting or exciting is going on and shaking it up with something adventurous is a good idea,” Pillemer said.

4. Young Adults Putting Off Marriage, Treating It As Capstone to Other Achievements, Deseret News
"What we found when we made them (assign values) was marriage was still the most important thing they anticipated being in their future," said Willoughby.

5. Family Income - Not Married Parents - More Apt to Impact Kids' Well-Being, NBC News
"Where we see the biggest changes in marriage rates and non-marital fertility isn't happening to everyone, it's mainly the disadvantaged."

6. Are All Divorces Necessary?, Family Studies
It is not a stretch to state that at least one of the partners in each of these couples would have said at the outset of our work together that they had irreconcilable differences. Yet two years after entering our project, 38 percent of couples were still married, most of them having successfully finished treatment.

7. Exploring The Metaphysics Of Love, National Public Radio
The first part says that romantic love can be characterized by its place in a social structure or framework. The second part says that biological states of human animals play out the roles currently defined by that social framework. 

For more, see here.