By Ellen Galinsky

This preview of Ellen Galinsky's Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs provides an overview of her findings about what researchers now know about the life skills children need and ways that parents can teach them.

For the past two decades, parents have felt ever-increasing pressure to buy expensive, high-tech learning toys and enroll their children in special activities that will give them an edge in getting into a good college and embarking on a rewarding career. Yet employers overwhelmingly report that young employees are not prepared for the demands of the 21^st-century workplace. Specifically, they complain that the kind of skills successful workers need are typically not taught in school nor tested for - skills such as communicating effectively, working well with diverse groups of people, thinking outside the box, and being ongoing learners.

August 2, 2009
A fact sheet prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families

By Isabelle Cherney, Michael W. Barry Professor and Director of the Honors Program and Professor of Psychology, Creighton University; 402.280.1228; cherneyi@creighton.edu

It is the time of summer when plenty of parents of small children are all "played out" and ready for the kids to be back in school. But for the kids, playing -- and how they play -- is extremely important for growing up healthy and smart.

May 11, 2008

By Valerie Adrian, Research Intern, Council on Contemporary Families; valadrian@gmail.com; and Stephanie Coontz, Professor of History and Family Studies, The Evergreen State College; coontzs@msn.com; 360.556.9223

Here's a thought for a Mother's Day gift that would go beyond the complimentary flowers passed out by restaurants and the complementary speeches churned out by politicians every May: Affordable child care that is operated in accord with high-quality national standards.

May 10, 2009

By Judy Osborne, Psychotherapist and Director of Stepfamily Associates, Brookline, Massachusettes; judyosborne16@gmail.com; 617.731.5767

CHICAGO, IL, April 24 - In a discussion paper prepared for a panel to be held at the 11th annual conference of the Council On Contemporary Families, on April 25 and 26, 2008, University of Illinois, Chicago, Allen Li presents a new approach to researching the impact of divorce on children. Li argues that it is methodologically unsound to compare the outcomes of children of divorced parents with those of continuously-married parents. Instead, the proper comparison is between the behavior of children years before a divorce occurs and their behavior after the divorce. Only this can tell us whether children's problems after a divorce were a result of the divorce or were a continuation of prior problems attributable to pre-existing conditions of the child's environment. Arguing that previous studies have over-stated the impact of divorce by failing to control for both "observable" and "unobservable" differences in families prior to divorce, Li used longitudinal research and novel statistical methods to revisit the question. He found that the average effect of divorce was neither to increase nor decrease children's behavior problems. "It is possible that the dissolution of some marriages decreases some children's behavior problems and the dissolution of others increases children's behavior problems," Li writes, "so that they cancel each other out, creating the zero effect that I found when I totaled the average effect of divorce. However, for this to be true, one must admit that while certain divorces harm children, others benefit them. My findings contradict the widely-accepted claim that MOST divorces increase children's behavior problems and that only a tiny minority of divorces do NOT."

This discussion paper summarizes the findings of a more technical, unpublished paper that won the 2007 Graduate Student Paper Award in Social Demography from the Section on Population of the American Sociological Association. Li describes his methods and findings below. Following the appendix, several other scholars offer differing perspectives on his work and on the debate over the impact of divorce.

Read The Impact of Divorce on Children's Behavior Problems here.

May 13, 2008

By Shelley MacDermid, Director, Military Family Research Institute at Purdue University; shelley@purdue.edu; 765.496.3402

When politicians make speeches celebrating Armed Forces Day, they seldom discuss the military child care system. But this is an area in which the military has a lot to teach the civilian world. Indeed, the transformation of child care in the military is one of the government success stories of the past 20 years.

February 11, 2008

By Steven Martin, Professor of Sociology, University of Maryland; smartin@socy.umd.edu; 301.405.3464

Just in time for Valentine's Day, demographer Steven Martin analyzes the latest data on childbearing trends among American women.

January 23, 2008

By Frank F. Furstenberg, Zellerback Family Professor of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania; fff@sas.upenn.edu; 415.291.4486

A new longitudinal study reveals that teen childbearing is NOT the reason that many Americans have been trapped in poverty over the past three decades.

Media Contact:
Stephanie Coontz, coontzs@msn.com; 360 352-8117; cell: 360 556-9223

Chicago, September 24, 2007

Council on Contemporary Families Study:
New findings on low-income couples and unmarried women with children

Why do so many low-income couples postpone marriage but fail to postpone childbearing? Which couples eventually do marry? Why do the rest of the couples break up? How would knowing the answers to these questions affect public policy?

A new briefing report by the Council on Contemporary Families offers an advance look at the answers to these questions, based on research to be published in a forthcoming book (October, 2007) by Stanford sociologist Paula England and Harvard sociologist Kathryn Edin.

The report, "Unmarried Couples with Children," follows below. Among the questions to which it provides surprising answers:

* Why low-income unmarried couples with children believe they will have a longer-lasting relationship if they postpone marriage, even after they have a child, and even though most say they expect to marry each other;

* Which couples are most likely to use contraception; and why some couples do not;

* How the issues that eventually break most of these couples up differ from the issues that initially cause them to postpone marriage;

* Why liberal and conservative policy proposals for these couples each fail to address half the problem.

Other topics covered in the study:

Couples who do not use birth control consistently are NOT the uncommitted couples we often hear about, who have a short fling, leaving the woman pregnant and the man long gone. It is the committed couples who do not regularly use birth control, and the report explains why;

What issues create conflict for low-income couples with children, and why it is women who usually initiate the breakup;

What predicts good fathering in a relationship when a man has a child from a previous relationship, as so many of the men (and women) in these couples do.

This briefing paper summarizes findings from a new book, entitled Unmarried Couples with Children, edited by Stanford sociologist Paula England and Harvard sociologist Kathryn Edin, published in 2007 by Russell Sage Foundation.  England and Edin conducted in-depth interviews with unmarried couples right after their baby was born, and followed and reinterviewed them until their baby turned 4, whether they married, stayed together unmarried, or broke up.  Parents were interviewed together and apart.