Recent family-related news included four risk factors in marriage that can indicate divorce, a look at why many same sex couples pursue a second parent adoption even though they are legally married, research concerning the role of economics in relation to the rate of marriage, a possible connection between pre-marital sex and a decline in the marriage rate and finally one family’s story of love and support twenty years after marital separation.
This Marital Behavior Is Not Only Annoying, It’s A Sign You Might Divorce Brittany Wong, The Huffington Post, September 21, 2017 For 40 years, the psychology professor and his team at the Gottman Institute have studied couples’ interactions to determine the key predictors of divorce — or as Gottman calls them, “the four horsemen of the apocalypse.”
Same-Sex Spouses Turn to Adoption to Protect Parental Rights Ailsa Chang, Selena Simmons-Duffin, NPR, September 22, 2017 When a married man and a woman have a child, they’re automatically considered the parents of that child in the eyes of the law. But many same-sex married couples worry that’s not true for them… To make sure the spouse’s parental rights are protected by the law — same-sex couples are going through a months-long, invasive legal process known as second-parent adoption.
How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege? Claire Cain Miller, The New York Times, September 25, 2017 Fewer Americans are marrying over all, and whether they do so is more tied to socioeconomic status than ever before… Americans across the income spectrum still highly value marriage, sociologists have found. But while it used to be a marker of adulthood, now it is something more wait to do until the other pieces of adulthood are in place — especially financial stability. For people with less education and lower earnings, that might never happen.
Cheap Sex and the Decline of Marriage Mark Regnerus, The Wall Street Journal, September 29, 2017 Marriage in the U.S. is in open retreat. As recently as 2000, married 25- to 34-year-olds outnumbered their never-married peers by a margin of 55% to 34%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. By 2015, the most recent year for which data are available, those estimates had almost reversed, with never-marrieds outnumbering marrieds by 53% to 40%. Young Americans have quickly become wary of marriage.
Taking My Ex Back In (for His Own Good) Nancy Rommelmann, The New York Times, September 29, 2017 Tim and I shared a daughter, though we had not been romantically involved for 20 years… I left Tim before Tava turned 3… I loved Tim deeply when we were a couple, but our day-to-day lives had been a wreck… now Tava is 24… I am married… Tim has stage 4 cancer… and has moved back in.
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