Ifstudies.org

In the interviews my husband David and I did with over 100 young adults in southwestern Ohio, stories like Megan’s were unfortunately common. The pipeline from high school to college to career is not working for the majority of young adults who,...

The middle-class family is no longer economically viable. It wasn’t so long ago that my parents were able to raise 9 kids on a policeman’s salary. We didn’t take vacations in Hawaii or shop at Nordstrom, but we were well fed growing up in an old...

The first signs of a problem started to emerge around 2014: More young people said they felt overwhelmed and depressed. College counseling centers reported sharp increases in the number of students seeking treatment for mental health issues. Even as...

This week, we are dedicating the Friday Five to IFS founding editor Anna Sutherland, who tragically passed away on March 6. In addition to editing hundreds of articles from the very beginning of the Family Studies blog in 2013 until she left in 2016...

Has the rise of screen culture—smartphones, gaming, and tablets—hurt relationships? It’s an important question as research shows that the current cohort of young adults (i.e., Millenials and iGen) are dating less, marrying less, and having sex...

A majority of Democrats in the U.S. House and Senate have signed on to support a new piece of legislation called the “American Family Act.” As Dylan Matthews explains at Vox, it is nearly certain to be passed the next time Democrats have a majority...

We were stunned and heartbroken last week to learn that our beloved colleague, Anna Sutherland passed away suddenly on March 6 from a cardiac condition. Anna was not yet 30 years old, married only six years to her college sweetheart, Ed, and the...

Raising Kayla, or trying to do so, was the hardest thing we’ve ever done. She was three months short of her sixth birthday when she first came to live with us. My wife had met her at the very moment of birth. Diane was the executive director of a...

Five articles that Bill Coffin shares from around the web.

When a childless couple divorces, how much should we care? If they are friends, we might feel sad for the individuals involved. The end of a romantic relationship almost always means some pain and some loss imposed on others. Equally, we might be...

Tucker Carlson’s recent monologue on the “Market and the Family,” in which he argued that the contemporary economy has undercut the strength and stability of working-class families, has sparked a major debate among conservatives. Some...

A new report from the National Academies evaluating strategies to fight child poverty should have been a highly useful and truly bipartisan affair. On topics ranging from gun control to immigration, the organization has done a decent job of...

It is a well-recognized fact that delayed childbearing is a societal good. There’s no constituency bemoaning the fact that teen births in the United States are at an all-time low. The continuous decline since 1991 is widely acclaimed and attributed...