As long as same-sex couples can't get married, research can't tell us much about what same-sex marriage will be like -- especially how legal recognition might affect their social legitimacy in the eyes of others, as well as their commitments and investments as partners and parents. The main...

Who needs marriage? When it comes to suicide, at least, the answer is: "men."

Jessie Bernard famously argued that every marriage is really two marriages, his and hers - and his was more beneficial than hers. We know, for example, that both men and women have more family income...

The principle of equality for children is fundamentally at odds with the American interpretation of the principle of equality for adults. We defer parenting to parents at the cost of equality for their children. This happens in myriad ways, lots of which involve education. Just as adults are free to...

Another year, another round of stranger-assault hype around Halloween. (Spoiler alert: Halloween is safe. Unless you're the civil rights of a sex offender.)

Last year, sex offenders on parole or probation in some states were required to post signs shooing off potential trick-or-treaters, although some more draconian rules were...

Sometimes demography is the boring gray lining under the shimmering silver cloud of social change. The people who fill out surveys want demographic data to reflect themselves as individuals -- celebrating their hard-fought identities -- but demography wants to understand them as groups. Social scientists would rather have an accurate...

In addition to their other beliefs, most Christian Evangelicals hold two unyielding moral positions: vehement opposition to pre-marital sex, and vehement opposition to real sex education (as opposed to preaching against premarital sex). In recent years, they have been much more successful at realizing their goals with regard to the...

UPDATE: News of the "gender testing" is leaking out, supposedly showing that she has internal testes and much higher than average levels of testosterone for a woman. This is not supposed to lead to her retroactive disqualification, because it is considered a medical condition of which she was not...

Early sexual activity is risky for adolescents. Without proper sex education the health risks are large, and even with sex education there may be negative social and emotional consequences. But, despite what you might have read in today's headlines, sex at age 12 is not the norm for poor children....

Because individual well-being is so dependent on family connections and shared resources, the question of who gets a family, and what kind of family they get, is an important one for inequality in our society. Both children and adults may be denied the opportunity to form or live in the...

I love driving. But it's also a great source of ill will in society. I don't just mean driving is a stage where bad character is performed. It is an experience that inevitably creates bad emotions. If driving makes you angry, bitter or fearful, don't blame yourself (or those driving...

At the big-box home center today I strolled out of the garden section pushing a cart with $10 worth of supplies, right past three employees who wished me a good day without any verification that I had paid for my goods (I had, at a register inside, out of their...

Devon Avenue was nearly silent at dawn on the morning after her funeral, a memorial to the growing silence of her generation. Sylvia Cohen - born Tzivya (צִבְיָה) Patinkin in 1913, in the Polish town of Brańsk - who walked into the hospital under her own power a few months...

Here is the text I gave to graduates in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Management and Society program. After some opening pleasantries . . .

For this year's commencement I think we need to talk a little about myth and reality, and about a...

The news is out that Emily has been displaced as the #1 American girl's name. The new top name is Emma, according to the Social Security Administration's database of names for newborn children. Parents interested in the happening names consult this list, along with many others available in...

Is the American house made of glass?

Maybe the United States should require all the countries we occupy to implement an equal rights law for women, something like the one we never passed: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States...

In the Iowa court case that legalized same-sex marriage in that state, some "experts" offered testimony that same-sex marriage is bad for children. A group of social science organizations and scholars, myself included, signed an amicus brief arguing that evidence should be excluded because it lacked scientific merit. In...

Over the 10 years up to 2007, the U.S. deported 108,434 adults whose children were U.S. citizens, according to a Department of Homeland Security report. The exact number of citizen children left behind in these deportations is unknown, because no one in the government cared to count them. The...

UPDATE: Under the erroneous headline, "Welfare Aid Isn't Growing As Economy Drops Off," the New York Times now reports on these numbers. They focus on the annual trend, which is still flat, rather than the third-quarter spike. The point is well taken, though -- the main accomplishment of the...

By ending the welfare entitlement in 1996, the Democratic party shed the burden of representing the stigmatized poor. It's hard to remember how much this issue influenced politics in the 1980s and 1990s -- but it did. In fact, that accomplishment must be pretty high up the list of...

New data show an unmistakable trend: American women are having more kids. The total fertility rate (TFR) is the number of children a woman will bear over her lifetime if current rates persist. Roughly speaking, averaging about 2.1 children or more is necessary for a population to grow...