Welcome to the Family Science 5, helping you catch up on some of the Family Science research and researchers featured in the media during October 2024.

NCFR member journal subscribers can access full text of journal articles through the NCFR website; you may be prompted to log in.

1. NCFR member Stephanie Coontz, M.A., was interviewed on Vox's "Explain It to Me" podcast to respond to the question "Is the millennial generation less likely to get a divorce compared to our parents?"
   
   An excerpt of Coontz's response: "Divorce rates have been falling for the past 20, 25 years, so your chance of divorce is lower than your parents. ... What we’ve found is that people’s standards for marriage have risen since the ’80s and the ’90s. We expect more of marriage than we did in the past, and we expect more equality. We come together, we fall in love, and we have to learn to appreciate each other in a totally new way than in the past."
    
2. NCFR member Kevin M. Roy, Ph.D., was featured in a Minnesota Public Radio News segment about why some young men today feel like they lack a sense of purpose or feel isolated — looking at social-class issues, family and relationship issues, factors exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and more.
   
   An excerpt of Dr. Roy's comments: "I do think that there are real issues, particularly around social class, that we haven't really paid attention to. I think it's been decades where working-class men, particularly men who don't have anything beyond a high school education, their wages have been flat since the 1970s. We've seen marriage rates among these men plummet since the 1980s. Poor and working-class men are very unlikely to be married unless they've got some kind of more stable employment. Those are trends that we've seen for a long time ... and there hasn't been this urgency or concern about what do we do about these issues, right? I think that we're at a point now where those experiences now are creeping into more middle-class families ... and I think we're finding white middle-class men feeling this hit, and that's suddenly raising a lot of red flags for us."
    
3. NCFR Fellow Lawrence H. Ganong, Ph.D., was a guest on WAMU national radio show 1A to discuss navigating life with a blended family. Dr. Ganong responded to listener stories about their blended families and offered that being intentional, being attentive to their children's needs, and "not assuming that they're going to recreate a first married family" can help create success for blended families.
    
4. Two articles from NCFR's Journal of Marriage and Family (JMF) were referenced in a Forbes article highlighting research about how men's shrinking social networks have created increased dependence on women for emotional support.
   
   The 1985 JMF article "Kinkeeping in the Familial Division of Labor," suggests that the position of "kinkeeper" — "someone who works at keeping family members in touch with one another" — is primarily occupied by women and is often passed from mother to daughter.
   
   The 2005 JMF article "Why Emotion Work Matters: Sex, Gender, and the Division of Household Labor," suggests that gender construction "predicts the performance of emotion work and that this performance reflects a key difference in men's and women's gendered constructions of self."
    
5. NCFR Fellow Pauline Boss, Ph.D., was interviewed for a piece in the October issue of Monitor on Psychology about ambiguous loss, the concept Dr. Boss pioneered. The article specifically addresses feelings of loss for children who have a parent with dementia — the type of ambiguous loss when a person is "still physically present but cognitively absent."
   
   From the article: "Therapists can work with patients to name and better understand the underlying stressor, the essential ambiguity of ambiguous loss, Boss said. Together they can think through ways to process the duality of what’s happening—to strive to hold two opposing thoughts in mind."