All posts filed under: Family

Is Foster Care Racist?

Published by Naomi Schaefer Riley

“We need to abolish the foster care system,” Charity Chandler-Cole, a member of the Los Angeles County Commission for Children and Families told her colleagues earlier this month. Chandler-Cole, a former foster youth herself, explained: “I don’t care how big your Office of Equity is, I don’t care how many black people and brown people you hire.” Meanwhile, in a recent op-ed entitled “Now Is the Time for Abolition,” Alan Dettlaff, dean of the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work, and Kristen Weber, director of equity, inclusion, and justice for the Center for the Study of Social Policy, announced that their “respective organizations have formed upEND, a collaborative movement… [that] works to create a society in which the forcible separation of children from their parents is no longer an acceptable intervention for families in need.” The complaints of structural racism and a desire to abolish foster care will sound familiar to anyone who has been listening to the recent debate about policing. But the claim that the foster care system suffers from systemic bias and …

Long-Distance Love during Lockdown

Published by Marilyn Simon

I was going to start this essay by writing that, even at the best of times, long-distance relationships are difficult. But that’s not true at all. At the best of times, a long-distance relationship is wonderful, even ideal. After all, my boyfriend and I are both grown-ups. We have our own incomes, our own homes, and our own children. We have our lives figured out, and I am quite content to manage my affairs on my own, and to have my own space to breathe in. Spending time with him is always something to look forward to, and it is always exciting. He travels a fair amount for work, and that is usually when we see each other. What could be better for a hard-working single parent than romantic getaways to exciting cities, luxury hotels, and fine restaurants? Harried mom by day, Bond girl by night. That is how our relationship makes me feel. I’m happy with the distance, most of the time—even longing for someone who is far away has its own romance. Yet …

The Decline of the Great American Family Saga

Published by Kevin Mims

In February, the Atlantic published a much discussed essay by David Brooks entitled “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake.” Brooks noted that the conditions that once made nuclear families viable—strong unions, plenty of jobs that paid living wages, inexpensive housing and transportation and education costs, stay-at-home mothers, high numbers of churchgoers—were products of a very brief window of time that only lasted from about 1950 until about 1965. For centuries prior to that, Americans tended to divide themselves into extended families, vast networks of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other relatives, all of whom remained connected to one another by some sort of family enterprise. Here’s how Brooks sums up the extended American family: In 1800, three-quarters of American workers were farmers. Most of the other quarter worked in small family businesses, like dry-goods stores. People needed a lot of labor to run these enterprises. It was not uncommon for married couples to have seven or eight children. In addition, there might be stray aunts, uncles, and cousins, as well as unrelated servants, apprentices, and farmhands…Extended …

Scandinavia: Can The New “Parental Team” Replace Marriage?

Published by Mikael Jalving

We all know the statistics: Children of divorced or separated parents underperform in school, are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, and have lower social mobility. A full list of the negative effects would require a lot of space. But the takeaway is that unless your partner is abusive or your home has become seriously dysfunctional, there are good reasons to stick it out for the children. But what if there were a way around these negative outcomes? Imagine some new, postmodern “parental team” that can take the place of a married couple when it comes to raising children. That is the new concept emerging from Sweden, where divorce has become common and socially accepted, with children moving frequently between two parental homes. According to the new book Divorcing With Children: Parents in Two Homes (Att skiljas med barn: föräldrar i två hem) by Swedish child psychologist, researcher and university lecturer Malin Bergström, research suggests that kids who move between two homes do almost as well as their peers with parents who live together. Her …

Polyamory Is Growing—And We Need To Get Serious About It

Published by Geoffrey Miller

We need to talk about polyamory. It’s the biggest sexual revolution since the 1960s. It’s surprisingly common among Millennials and Gen Z. It’s often misunderstood and stigmatized by mainstream monogamist culture. Some people think polyamory is the best way to integrate sexual freedom, honesty, openness, and commitment. Others think it’s an existential threat to Western Civilization. We should take existential risks seriously. Global thermonuclear war, genetically engineered bioweapons, and artificial general intelligence could exterminate our species. But whenever I tweet about polyamory, my conservative followers react as if polyamory is a fourth existential threat. They view monogamy as the foundation of Western Civilization. Any threat to monogamy is, they think, a threat to love, marriage, family, culture, reason, nation, and gene pool. Are they right?   The Polyamory Revolution More people than ever are pursuing polyamorous, open, or swinging relationships. With the growing number of polyamorous relationships, we need to get serious about analyzing the costs and benefits of polyamory—not just for individuals, but for families, cultures, and nations.  Sex-positive activists often argue that sexual relationships …

William Peter Blatty’s Counter-Countercultural Parable

Published by Kevin Mims

In her new book Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics (excerpted in Quillette on August 27), essayist and cultural critic Mary Eberstadt documents just how damaging the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and its normalization of divorce in particular, has been to America’s children. She mentions many publications that comment on “the correlations between crumbling family structure and various adverse results,” particularly for the children of divorce. The authors she cites include former U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, social scientist James Q. Wilson, and Elizabeth Marquardt, author of Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce. A writer she doesn’t mention, however, is William Peter Blatty, author of the blockbuster 1971 horror novel The Exorcist. Those who have never read the novel, or are familiar only with its 1973 cinematic incarnation, probably believe the book to be a potboiler about demonic possession. But it is also an allegorical warning about the importance of the traditional family unit and the devastation wrought when it breaks down. Curiously, this aspect of the …

The Feminist Case for Andrew Yang’s Freedom Dividend 

Published by Louise Perry

Andrew Yang may well be the most feminist candidate running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, although it might not be obvious at first glance. He looks, to all intents and purposes, like a Silicon Valley bro. He’s smart, he’s from the East Coast, he went to an Ivy League school, and he likes to use statistics—lots of them. Before he began his campaign, he worked as (to use his term) a “serial entrepreneur” and he promises that, if elected, he will be the first President to use PowerPoint in his State of the Union address. In short, he is a nerd, and proud of it. His supporters—the “Yang Gang”—wear baseball hats emblazoned with the acronym “MATH: Make America Think Harder.” Yang is an underdog in the Democratic primaries, having only just scraped through to the third debate on September 12. He knows it, too. “If you’re here today,” he said in a New Hampshire stump speech, “it’s because you’ve heard something like this: there’s an Asian man running for President who wants to give …

The New Inequality: The Decline of the Working Class Family

Published by Maria Kouloglou

The family has been called “the cornerstone of society” and for good reason. According to studies, children born to married parents are more likely to go to university and less likely to receive government benefits. Children raised in fatherless homes, however, appear more likely to face worse outcomes when it comes to well-being, education and mental health. Married people also appear to be healthier and happier. According to a report, before the 1970s there were no large class divides in American family life. Most people got married and stayed married and the children were raised in two-parent families. This trend eventually changed, with poorer and less educated people becoming less likely to get married and stay married. The decline of marriage is also correlated with the rise of single-mother households. A similar decline of the working class family appears to exist in the UK, with men from poor backgrounds being significantly more likely to be single in their forties than richer men. The Problem with Single Men Marriage is correlated with several positive outcomes for …