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New York Times article notes that raising children has become a more time-consuming and expensive task.

CNN Op-Ed suggests taxes on super-rich and stronger social safety net could help ameliorate financial impact divorce has for many

Children seem to present a barrier to the gender revolution in that parents are more likely to divide paid and domestic work along traditional gender lines than childless couples are. However, the extent to which this is so varies between countries and over time. We used data on 35 countries from the 2012 International Social Survey Programme to identify the contexts in which parents and non-parents differ the most in their division of labour. In Central/South America, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Asia, and South Africa, labour sharing configurations did not vary as much with the presence of children as in Australia, Western Europe, North America, and Northern Europe. Our multilevel models helped explain this pattern by showing that children seem to present a greater barrier to the gender revolution in richer and, surprisingly, more gender equal countries. However, the relationship between children and couples’ division of labour can be thought of as curvilinear, first increasing as societies progress, but then weakening if societies respond with policies that promote men’s involvement at home. In particular, having a portion of parental leave reserved for fathers reduces the extent to which children are associated with traditional labour sharing in the domestic sphere.

Jessica Fish and her colleagues published a study presenting sexual minority youth as an overrepresented population in foster care, child welfare and out-of-home placement

One survey is not enough to make a social truth

Notes weak work-family policies in WAMU interview

Qualitative research helps to document stories of "stigma and survival"

PURPOSE: We aimed to estimate latent classes of concurrent polysubstance use and test for sexual orientation differences in latent class memberships with representative data from adolescents living in 19 U.S. states. We also tested whether sex, race/ethnicity, and age moderated the sexual identity differences in polysubstance use class memberships. METHODS: We analyzed data from 119,437 adolescents from 19 states who participated in the 2015 Youth Risk Behavior Survey. Latent class analysis characterized polysubstance use patterns based on self-reported frequency of lifetime and past-month use of alcohol (including heavy episodic drinking), tobacco (cigarettes, cigars, and smokeless tobacco), and marijuana. Multinomial logistic regression models tested differences in latent class memberships by sexual identity. Interaction terms tested whether sex, race/ethnicity, and age moderated the sexual identity differences in polysubstance use class memberships. RESULTS: A six-class model of polysubstance use fit the data best and included nonusers (61.5%), experimental users (12.2%), marijuana-alcohol users (14.8%), tobacco-alcohol users (3.8%), medium-frequency three-substance users (3.6%), and high-frequency three-substance users (4.1%). Gay/lesbian- and bisexual-identified adolescents had significantly higher odds than heterosexual-identified adolescents of being in all of the user classes compared with the nonuser class. These sexual identity differences in latent polysubstance use class memberships were generally larger for females than for males, varied occasionally by race/ethnicity, and were sometimes larger for younger ages. CONCLUSION: Compared with their heterosexual peers, gay/lesbian and bisexual adolescents-especially females-are at heightened risk of engaging in multiple types of polysubstance use. Designing, implementing, and evaluating interventions will likely reduce these sexual orientation disparities.

Moms with husbands, live-in male partners are sleeping less and doing more housework than single mothers.

We examined differences in family structure change in an urban sample of mothers (N = 1,314) from their child’s birth to age 5 and whether ecological risk moderated this association. We found that compared with U.S.-born Latino mothers, foreign-born Latino mothers were 62% less likely to break up and 75% less likely to repartner than remain stably resident. Across nativity status, Latina mothers with fewer children, more economic stress, less income, and less frequently reported father involvement were more likely to break up and repartner than remain stably resident. We found no moderation effects of ecological risk.