Hot topics in Family Studies
Judi Casey May 5th, 2008
I recently attended the annual meeting of the Council on Contemporary Families, which is “committed to promoting a balanced understanding of what contemporary families need and how these needs can best be met.“ As I typically participate in conferences that focus on the intersection of work and family, I was particularly interested to learn about issues of importance to the “family” folks.
So, what is on their plate? At the conference, the sessions focused on the following hot topics:
1) identity issues for children of transracial and transnational adoption,
2) whether divorce or sticking it out is better for kids,
3) if cohabitation is good for marriage and,
4) should we be worried about young people hooking up?
That last one was certainly interesting to me as the parent of a college freshman.
One of the most interesting presentations was by Jui-Chung Allen Li called, The Kids Are OK: Divorce and Children’s Behavior. Basically Li examined whether divorce has a negative impact on children and questioned if some of the negative behavioral outcomes were a result of divorce or other factors. “…The author …found that parental divorce is associated with a higher level of behavior problems in children. However, after controlling for unobserved factors that are either constant over time or change at a constant rate over time, the effect of parents’ divorce substantially declines and its influence on their children’s emotional well-being is not statistically significant.“
What issues do you think are important to today’s families?
