Recent family-related news included a look at the current divorce rate, research out of UCLA on the effect of divorce on children’s educational success, shorts from the Modern Love column, a change of course from the Church of LDS regarding gay parents, and an update on the divorce of Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos.
Divorce Rates Are Down, But There’s a Catch Kevin Drum, Mother Jones, March 28, 2019 The annual divorce rate is down by about a third since 1981, but so is the rate of marriage. The bigger picture shows that it’s been roughly flat since 1975.
Divorce’s Effect on Children’s Educational Achievement is Not a Constant UCLA College of Social Sciences, April 2, 2019 Researchers divided the families into three groups: those whose parents were more likely to get divorced, based on the demographic and socioeconomic factors; those whose parents were less likely to get divorced; and those in the middle. For children in the “likely to divorce” group, there was virtually no impact on their likelihood to graduate from high school or college if their parents’ marriage ended. The paper noted that children in that group already have lower levels of academic achievement — so a divorce generally didn’t make things better or worse for them.
Tiny Love Stories: ‘I Kept Falling in Love With Other People’ Modern Love, The New York Times, April 2, 2019 This article is the Modern Love column in miniature, featuring reader-submitted stories of no more than 100 words.
LDS Church Rolls Back Policy That Restricted Baptizing Children of Gay Parents Lee Hale, NPR, April 4, 2019 The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints rolled back its 2015 policy that restricted baptizing children of gay couples and was criticized as penalizing kids. It no longer will refer to gay couples as apostates.
Jeff Bezos: World’s Richest Man Agrees to $35B Divorce BBC, April 5, 2019 The world’s richest man, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and his wife MacKenzie have agreed to a record-breaking divorce settlement of at least $35 billion. Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos in Seattle in 1994, a year after the couple married, and MacKenzie Bezos was one of its first employees.
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