Sliding vs Deciding: Scott Stanley's Blog: Isabel Sawhill on Single Parents, on NPR 6-12

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Isabel Sawhill on Single Parents, on NPR 6-12

In my last post, I wrote about the remarkable editorial by Isabel Sawhill a couple of weeks ago in the Washington Post. She was a guest on NPR's show today, Talk of the Nation, with Neal Conan. Also on the show was Phil Cohen, a sociologist who I've mentioned in prior blogs and who has included comments from me on a couple of his blogs.

I don't agree with every point made on the show (particularly about the nature of the Healthy Marriage Initiatives in the past 10 years) but the points discussed about families and the difficulties of single parents are outstanding. One of the points that comes through so strongly is how difficult it is for children, even with great single parents, when it comes to getting the time and attention they need. They discuss complex issues related to child care and dating and a number of other things.

Isabel Sawhill makes the most important point, in my view, by bringing the discussion back--several times--to how important it is to help the next generation delay having children until other things are settled, especially a clear, committed relationship between two people who want to raise children together. We usually call that marriage, as she points out, but she gets to the same point I made in my last post. The reason children have an edge when their parents are married before they have children is that commitment questions between these two parents-to-be got settled before the children were in the mix. No guarantees but it greatly ups the odds. Sawhill gets it that the battle here is for the next generation in terms of prevention.That means things happening to help people before they are in this spot (and also, hopefully, more thoughtful discussions about how to help people best who are already in this spot).

Before, Before, Before. Before.

Have a listen (or read) at NPR Talk of the Nation.

(Bill Coffin, thank you for the heads up!)

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Why Sliding vs. Deciding?

Sliding vs. Deciding is a theme that comes out of my study of commitment and my work with my major colleague in this area, Galena Rhoades, and the work of other scholars on how couples go through important relationship transitions. I believe “sliding vs. deciding” captures something important about how romantic relationships develop. The core idea is that people often slide through important transitions in relationships rather than deciding what they are doing and what it means, especially regarding commitment. An important paper by Wendy Manning and Pamela Smock (2005) was influential in our thinking about how couples transitioned into living together. They conducted a qualitative study of cohabiting couples and found that over one half of couples who are living together didn’t talk about it or make any decision, but simply slid into doing so. Another paper having a large influence on this thinking was written by Jo Lindsey (2000). She found that the cohabiting couples she interviewed could not articulate how they came to be living together. In fact, as she puts it, it seemed like they had no agency in how it happened. Lindsay concluded that the fundamental characteristic of cohabitation was ambiguity, a theme we often discuss. Manning and Smock, Lindsay, and other researchers have noted that, for most couples, moving in together was nothing like a clear decision about what the couple was doing. Thus, it very often is not anything like a how people form a clear commitment. In one of our quantitative studies of cohabitation, we have found that most cohabiters report a process more like sliding into cohabitation than talking about it and making a decision about it.

We believe this sliding vs. deciding dynamic which is quite obvious in how couples come to live together is common in many important relationship transitions, including pregnancy, having children, work, as well as in how couples drift into regular patterns of who does what. In contrast to sliding, commitments that we are most likely to follow through on are based in decisions. In fact, commitment is making a choice to give up other choices. A commitment is a decision. Do we always need to be making a decision about things? I hope not. But when something important in life is at stake, I believe that deciding will trump sliding in how things turn out.

One of the most important implications of the concept of sliding vs. deciding is when this theme is married to our work and thought on the depths of ambiguity in relationship formation these days and our ideas about inertia. What people are often now seeing is that they are sliding through relationship transitions that cause them to increase constraints and lose options before (or without) noticing that they have just entered a more constrained pathway. As a result, we believe that many people are too often giving up options before they have made a choice. That is far from making a choice to give up other choices. That's losing options because one is not noticing an important, or even potentially high cost slide, is not what solid commitment formation is about.

Three theory papers written by me and Galena Rhoades are accessible above at the links: "Sliding vs. Deciding: Inertia and the Premarital Cohabitation Effect", "Commitment: Functions, Formation, and the Securing of Romantic Attachment," and the link labeled "SvD Transition and Risk Model."

Sliding vs Deciding: Scott Stanley's Blog

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Isabel Sawhill on Single Parents, on NPR 6-12

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