Casual Sex Not So Casual

As UCLA psychiatrist Miriam Grossman reveals in Unprotected, the sexual environment of today’s college campuses is anything but chaste. What might alarm parents is if their college-age children boast of having “friends with benefits,” a phrase describing male-female relationships involving sexual intercourse but allegedly no romance. According to a study conducted at the University of Tennessee in 2001 and 2003, what the researchers call “casual sex” is anything but occasional or random, and confirming Grossman, yields higher levels of anxiety among coeds than young boys.

In this study of 382 unmarried students enrolled in introductory psychology classes—and who were overwhelmingly freshman or sophomores, white, and Protestant—only 24 percent reported being virgins. Among those who had lost their virginity, more than half (53 percent) reported having engaged in sexual relations with someone with whom they were not romantically involved. That represents more than 40 percent of the sample.

As might be expected, students who engaged in “casual sex” reported greater levels of promiscuity (having more sex partners in the previous year) than those who did not engage in casual sex (p < .001). In addition, 65 percent of students who engaged in casual sex did so in the context of illegal drug or alcohol use (and presumably underage or illegal drinking, given the sample). Perhaps most disturbing, the study found teen girls who reported having “friends with benefits” were at a distinct disadvantage. Relative to young boys, they were more likely to hope that their most recent casual sexual encounter was “the beginning of a romance.” And like their non-virgin peers who did not report engaging in casual sex, these coeds also experienced higher symptoms of depressive pathology the more boys with whom they reported being intimate within the previous year (p <.05).

While these findings lead the researchers’ to conclude that “college may be a context where casual sex is promoted,” fathers of young daughters may lament that this is the case even, as the researchers concede, at a state university “in the Southern Bible Belt with a fairly conservative student population.”

(Source: Catherine M. Grello, Deborah P. Welsh, and Melinda S. Harper, “No Strings Attached: The Nature of Casual Sex in College Students,” The Journal of Sex Research 43 [August 2006]: 255-267.)

The Necessary Life Script  

Ever since Michael Harrington wrote The Other America in 1962, politicians seeking to feed the welfare state have exploited differences between the rich and poor. Yet according to Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute, the fundamental division in America today is driven less by income inequality and more by family structure.

In Marriage and Caste in America, Hymowitz warns of a growing “Marriage Gap” separating the college educated from those without a high school diploma, who lack the “middle-class life script” that would otherwise empower them to plan for the future and become responsible adults and parents. If this “yawning social divide” is not addressed, she fears the U.S. will become more separate and unequal, with “a self-perpetuating single-mother proletariat on the one hand, and a self-perpetuating, comfortable middle class on the other.”

While the researcher may see more of a marriage orientation among college graduates than what’s really there, the strength of her book is its indictment of the civil rights establishment, the engineers of the Great Society, the social services industry, the legal establishment, and feminists for fomenting what she calls an “unmarriage revolution” that has separated childrearing from marriage and promoted wide-spread divorce. She notes how in 1960, rates of out-of-wedlock childbearing among women of all educational levels “was so low that you’d need a magnifying glass to find it on a graph.” Divorce was equally rare. All this changed within twenty years as rates of divorce and illegitimacy soared among all segments of the population. Beginning in 1980, however, patterns of “unmarriage” became especially prevalent among African-Americans in the inner city, where today large majorities of women and children lack husbands and fathers, vulnerable to all sorts of misfortune as television accounts of Hurricane Katrina illustrated.

Exposing the “elaborate edifice of denial and rationalization whose ruins spoil the political landscape to this day,” Hymowitz offers numerous examples of how elites have been wrong in their diagnoses and prescriptions. Her account of how Planned Parenthood and its Alan Guttmacher Institute deluded Congress into thinking sex education and contraceptive services could combat poverty would be humorous if not so tragic. She explores how in the late-1970s the sex ed lobby created a frenzy over “teen pregnancy” when the crisis was really out-of-wedlock births, as teen pregnancy and birth rates had been declining for twenty years. Not only Congress, but also prestigious foundations began to flood millions of dollars on nonprofits to open school-based clinics and deliver adolescent “family planning” services. Yet in the next twelve years, teen pregnancy rates jumped back to their 1950s levels, but this time “about 80 percent of the young girls who became mothers were single, and the vast majority would be poor.” By the early 1990s, rates of child poverty and welfare dependency would reach all-time highs.

Hymowitz claims that a renewed appreciation of “what American marriage does” is a sine qua non to untangle what Daniel Patrick Moynihan quantified as “the tangle of pathologies” that continue to roil the inner city. “Marriage gives young people a map of life that takes them step by step from childhood to adolescence to college or other work training to the workplace, to marriage, and only then to childbearing.” In short, “a marriage orientation—not just marriage itself” offers hope for all Americans, rich or poor, for a better life. Let’s hope the gatekeepers are listening.

(Source: Kay S. Hymowitz, Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age [Chicago: Evan R. Dee, 2006].)

Smart Babies  

A growing fraction of babies born in the United States are the offspring of Latina mothers.  But within this growing cohort of Latino infants, not all babies enjoy the social advantages that foster healthy mental development. And a study recently published in Child Development indicates that being born to a mother wearing a wedding band clearly confers such a social advantage.

Conducted by researchers at Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland, and Columbia University, this new study analyzes data collected from a nationally representative sample of 2,193 Latino children tracked from birth to school.  Preliminary parsing of these data establishes that mothers in two-biological parent homes had higher incomes, had received more education, suffered from fewer depressive symptoms, received more family support, and reported more personal happiness than did peers who did not live with the biological fathers of their children.  All of these statistically significant differences would, of course, translate into benefits for Latino children living with two biological parents. 

Moreover, when the authors of the new study look with particular interest at the 1,711 Latino children in their study who lived with two biological parents, they discover a social dynamic that depends not merely on biology.  It turns out that Latino children whose biological parents are married are mentally ahead of Latino children whose biological parents are cohabiting.  Statistical tests establish that “higher cognitive scores” are linked to “having married parents, as opposed to cohabiting parents” (p = 0.006). 

Those who care about the well-being and progress of Latino children can only hope that Latino barrios often echo with the joyous sound of wedding bells.

(Source: Natasha J. Cabrera et al., “Parental Interactions With Latino Infants: Variation by Country of Origin and English Proficiency,” Child Development 77 [2006]: 1190-1207.)

Long-Lasting Harm  

Advocates of permissive divorce worry very little about what parental breakups do to children.  Such children, they blithely assume, are so resilient that they quickly recover from any divorce-related distress.  A new Belgian study, however, indicates that the harm that parental divorce visits upon children lasts a very long time.

Conducted by sociologists at the University of Ghent, this new study measures the long-term effects of parental divorce by parsing data collected from a nationally representative sample of 4,727 Belgian men and women ages 16 and over.  Those long-term effects turn out to be troublingly pervasive.  When the Belgian scholars look at data for adults who as children had experienced a parental divorce, they find that parental divorce adversely affects “their highest diploma, net household income, and subjective assessment of that income.” 

However, perhaps the most striking effect of parental divorce shows up in statistical analyses of adult children’s psychological well-being.  These analyses establish, first, that “men and women who lived through a parental divorce when they were children are decidedly more depressive than people who have not gone through such an experience.”  The authors of the new study consider this finding especially “noteworthy,” because “the average time since the event [of parental divorce] in this sample is twenty-one years.”

Through further statistical analysis, the researchers demonstrate that part of the reason that parental divorce casts such a long-lasting shadow of depression is that children who have experienced it often fail in their own marriages.  The Belgian scholars calculate that “the chance that an individual will divorce is twice as high for men and women who experienced a parental divorce as children” as it was for men and women whose parents remained married.  The statistical model consequently shows decisively that a parental divorce and one’s own divorce each manifests “an independent effect on depression.”  “The mental health of men and women suffers from the experience of a parental divorce,” the researchers explain, “but is also strongly influenced, in a negative way, by one’s own divorce.”

Sadly, parental divorce often denies children both the security of an intact family during their childhood and the joys of a successful marriage during their adulthood.  The two-fold evil of parental divorce is no mere short-lived episode in children’s lives.

(Source: Naomi Wauterickx, Anneleen Gouwy, and Piet Bracke, “Parental Divorce and Depression: Long-Term Effects on Adult Children,” Journal of Divorce & Remarriage 45.3/4 [2006]: 43-66.)

Better than Rehab  

Every day’s newspaper brings a headline announcing that yet another celebrity has entered a treatment program for alcohol or drug abuse.  But a study recently completed by researchers at Stanford and Northwestern Universities suggests that one of the best rehab programs is actually the one that begins with wedding vows.

Analyzing national health data collected between 1979 and 2000, the authors of the new study establish that neither the distiller nor the drug pusher has reason to celebrate when wedding bells ring.  In truth, the researchers find that “both marriage and cohabitation are accompanied by decreases in some risk behaviors,” including binge drinking and marijuana use.  But further statistical analysis shows that “[risk] reductions surrounding marriage are larger and more consistent, particularly for men,” than those surrounding cohabitation.

The researchers acknowledge that, at least among women, cohabitation does appear to cause some decline in substance abuse.  In particular, the data indicate that women (but not men) reduce their binge drinking upon entering a cohabitational union.  But they emphasize that “the clearest finding [of this study] is of reductions of risky behavior surrounding marriage.”  More specifically, the Stanford and Northwestern scholars calculate that marriage results in “statistically significant” and “roughly similar decreases in the odds of binge drinking for men and women.”  Among men, the researchers observe a wedlock-related reduction in binge-drinking of 10%; among women, the wedlock-related reduction in binge-drinking is 20%.

Further analysis reveals “substantial reductions in marijuana use surrounding marriage for men.”  Although wedlock appeared linked to a reduction of marijuana use for women, that reduction did not reach the threshold for statistical significance. No reduction whatever was evident in marijuana use among cohabiting men or women.

When the researchers analyze the health-risk behaviors of men and women who first cohabit and later marry, they conclude with yet more evidence favoring wedlock over cohabitation.  “Years following onset of cohabitation in which the individual was married are associated with a much lower degree of risk behavior,” the researchers point out, adding that “this [pattern] suggests either that cohabitation does not produce the reductions in risk behavior [after] marriage or that cohabitation prior to marriage is the chosen path for individuals who are more likely to engage in risky behavior.”

In their conclusion, the authors stress that their findings cannot be explained merely as  artifacts of the “selection bias” resulting from “the ‘well-behaved’ crowd...select[ing] disproportionately into marriage.”  The before-and-after statistical methods used for this study clearly indicate that it is marriage per se that is reducing alcohol and drug abuse.  Further statistical sophistication ensures that the measured reductions in substance abuse are consequent to marriage, not to “an aging process.” 

It would appear that public health officials will start seeing substantially less substance abuse when the nation finally ends its disastrous retreat from marriage.

(Source: Greg J. Duncan, Bessie Wilkerson, and Paula England, “Cleaning Up Their Act: The Effects of Marriage and Cohabitation on Licit and Illicit Drug Use,” Demography 43 [2006]: 691-710.)

Single Parenthood and Urban Poverty  

Do children who grow up in large cities, relative to their peers who grow up in the suburbs, stand at greater risk of poverty? A study by the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., suggests they do, not because cities are dangerous, but because they have a large concentration of single-parent households.

Analyzing data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2004 American Community Survey (ACS), the Brookings researchers examined the relationship between child poverty in the fifty largest cities of the U.S. and parental marital status, parental labor force participation, and parental education level. They found that “certain factors are more important in some cities than others,” in that among the 17 cities with highest levels of child poverty, 14 of them also “rank among the highest on the percentage of children living with one parent.” High proportions of parents not in the labor force also overlapped with child poverty in these 17 cities, although not as strongly as did single parenthood.

Perhaps hesitant to blame too much on single parenthood, the researchers add that “the proportion of children living in families without a working parent seems to explain child poverty rates more consistently across the full spectrum of cities.” But what is the makeup of these “families without a working parent?”

The study summarizes prior research showing that “parents in poor families” work only half as much as their “nonpoor” peers, because “many poor families lack second earners.” Had they run cross tabulations with the ACS data, the researchers might have demonstrated that such “families without a working parent” are essentially single mothers, confirming that such households are significantly less likely to have even a single breadwinner relative to intact, married-parent families. So making the number of wage earners the issue rather than parental marital status, the researchers settle for a tautology when a clear affirmation of a robust link between child poverty and single parenthood would have been warranted. It also would have challenged policy makers with the idea that marriage—not government programs—is necessary for increasing levels of child well-being.

At least the study concedes that among the three variables, parental education did not relate as closely to child poverty as the other two. Many cities with either a medium or high level of parents without a high school diploma—such as Austin, Denver, Phoenix, and Sacramento—have experienced inflows of immigrants with less education, but these cities do not exhibit high child poverty rates overall.

(Source: “Kids in the City: Indicators of Child Well-Being in Large Cities from the 2004 American Community Survey,” The Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program and Population Reference Bureau, August 2006.)

Giving Care to a Parent, Receiving Support from a Husband  

Taking on the task of caring for an aging parent can push a woman into poverty.  But according to a study recently published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, it is the care-giving women who are divorced or single who are most likely to end up impoverished.

Conducted by sociologists at Vanderbilt University, this new study investigates the financial status of women who care for elderly parents by analyzing data collected in 1992 and 2000 from a national sample of 685 women who were at least 65 years old in 2000 and had at least one living parent in 1992.  Much as the researchers anticipated, the statistics do indicate that “caregiving [for an elderly parent] significantly increases women’s risks of poverty in later life.”  But the statistics also indicate that not all women are equally exposed to the increased risks of poverty incident to the caring for an elderly parent.  The researchers indeed report that “being widowed, separated, divorced, or never married raised the likelihood of being poor” (p < 0.01 for all unmarried categories compared to the married reference group in both bivariate and multivariate statistical models).  Thus the Vanderbilt scholars find that “substantially more of [the women in the study] living in poverty or receiving public assistance or Medicaid were not married, as compared to nonpoor women.” 

The authors of the new study fear that at a time when many Americans are “living longer with disabilities and chronic illness,” older women with elderly parents “are certain to face a high risk of living in poverty.”  This fear seems particularly well warranted given the way divorce rates have soared and marriage rates have plummeted since the Sixties. 

(Source: Chizuko Wakabayashi and Katherine M. Donato, “Does Caregiving Increase Poverty among Women in Later Life? Evidence from the Health and Retirement Survey,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 47 [2006]: 258-274.)