They are Watching: Child Wellbeing and Parent Interaction

Our lab has a new paper out on how interaction between parents is related to their children’s emotional wellbeing. The official abstract is here. The lead author is Kayla Knopp. She wrote a very clear lay summary of what is a pretty complex paper, so I asked her if I could post it, here.

Kayla Knopp’s Summary

We found that when couples change their specific interaction behaviors (communication and conflict management skills), their children’s wellbeing also tends to change in corresponding ways. On the other hand, we found no evidence that changes in more general marital satisfaction are linked to changes in children’s wellbeing; our findings suggest that children might respond most to the ways that parents interact with each other.

Breaking this down further, we found that improvements in parents’ communication skills were linked to improvements in their children’s emotional wellbeing (what we and others have called internalizing problems), whereas improvements in both communication and conflict management were linked to improvements in children’s behavioral problems (what we and others have called externalizing problems). That is, children seem to respond emotionally to parents’ communication, overall, but respond behaviorally to parents’ conflict. The overarching conclusion is that parents who improve their interactions with their spouse are likely to see similar improvements in their children’s emotional wellbeing and behavior.

A lot of theories suggest that children may be quite sensitive to the way their parents behave toward one another, and our research provides data that support that idea. The take-home from this study is that if we want to improve children’s wellbeing, teaching their parents how to better communicate and manage conflict is probably a great place to start. Now, we can’t say for sure that these changes in parents’ interactions will cause changes in children’s wellbeing; we did not do the kind of study that can establish a causal link. But what we can say is that our research supports efforts to help parents reduce their conflict and improve their communication.

Scott’s Additional Comments

I want to highlight a couple of points Kayla Knopp makes about our new paper. First, children may not be all that sensitive to how happy their parents are together; they are sensitive to how parents treat each other in ways that can be seen. Second, parents help their children by treating each other with respect—by communicating well and managing conflict constructively. For some couples, this is easier said than done. 

Knopp, K., Rhoades, G. K., Allen, E. S., Parsons, A., Ritchie, L. L., Markman, H. J., & Stanley, S. M. (2017). Within-and between-family associations of marital functioning and child wellbeing. Journal of Marriage and Family, 79(2), 451 – 461. DOI: 10.1111/jomf.12373

Are Parents Less Happy? Are Couples with Children Less Happy?

You probably were not waiting to decide if you want to have children in life based on the latest answers from social science. But if you are wanting to know the answer, like the old status on FaceBook, it's complicated. If you want a good sense how and why, I have two pieces to recommend to you.

First, there is a brand new post over at Science of Relationships (www.scienceofrelationships.com) for you to read: “Parents Are Less Happy”: Fact or Fiction? It's an excellent piece by Andrew Willis Garcés that focuses on overall life happiness.

Want more? My favorite blog post ever was on this very subject, 6 years ago. I find that it holds up quite well. Here you go. Cleanup on Aisle 9 (at 35,000 Feet) This piecefocuses on what research suggests happens in terms of marital or couple happiness when people have a child.

The point that will come out strongly in both pieces is how complex the nature of contentment and happiness really is in life. I also make the point in my piece that we (those who study the effects on the couple) don't really measure something I'd call family happiness in social science. Rather, we have pretty thin measures of personal and couple-level happiness that likely don't capture something many people experience when it comes to fulfillment and meaning in life that I'd call happiness as a family.

Sure, some people are more miserable in life because they had children. Some couples have more strain that seems--and sometimes is--unending. Some children are challenging and/or difficult--and this can be unrelated to the quality of the parenting and upbringing they received. And some people are pretty lousy parents, and the whole world might have been better off if they had been better parents or not parents at all.

Children. They are not for everyone. But some of you will be great parents, even if it sometimes harshes your buzz in life to take it on.

Understanding Why Marriage is Associated with Positive Child Outcomes: Commitment, Signaling, and Sequence

by Scott Stanley

Why is marriage associated with positive child outcomes when compared to non-marriage? In The Marriage Effect: Money or Parenting?, Kimberly Howard and Richard Reeves argued that the primary mechanisms through which marriage benefits children are based on income and parenting quality. Emily Badger wrote a piece on their work with a title that captured what the take-away was for many: Children with married parents are better off— but marriage isn’t the reason why. While I agree with a number of their points, I believe something substantial is missing in Howard and Reeves’ overall argument. Brad Wilcox outlined one set of concerns. My focus here is in a different direction—on the development and timing of commitment.

Howard and Reeves unflinchingly declare that there are substantial advantages for children raised by married parents compared to others. While I think the notion of “settled science” is conceptually dangerous, this fact seems broadly recognized.[i] Howard and Reeves are particularly interested in two questions: (1) “is it the marriage itself that matters?” and (2) if not, what do we do to help? Their findings show that the association between marriage and positive child outcomes may be substantially accounted for by greater income and more engaged parenting among marrieds. Based on this, they argue that intervention efforts should focus on parenting and not on marriage, per se.

I respect this logic. My colleagues and I have long argued that relationship oriented interventions should focus on variables that are dynamic (i.e., putatively changeable) rather than those that are relatively static.[ii] That may seem obvious, but people sometimes misunderstand why prevention-focused experts will put more emphasis on variables of lessor predictive power that are arguably dynamic (e.g., the number of sexual partners) than on variables that account for more variance but are immutable (e.g., race). Knowledge of static risk factors is nonetheless also important because it points to where to concentrate efforts to help people. For example, while there has been a lot of press on the meager outcomes from recent federal studies on relationship education provided to couples at lower incomes, there is some good news about who may benefit the most related to relatively static risk factors.[iii]

Marriage: a Mere Commitment Device?

Emily Badger quotes Reeves on the income and parenting engagement points: 

"Those two factors taken together explain most of the better outcomes for the children of married couples," Reeves says. "Not all. But most. And I think the takeaway here is not to mistake a commitment device – which marriage is – for an explanatory device."

The argument is further clarified in this quote from Howard and Reeves in their original piece: “Is it marriage itself that matters, or is marriage the visible expression of other factors, that are the true cause of different outcomes? And if so, which ones?”

I think this argument shows a serious under-appreciation for the importance of “visible expressions” of commitment. Signals of commitment are important across a wide swath of societal life because people will often make better decisions with clearer information about the level of motivation in others,[iv] and signals about commitment are, arguably, of great importance in the development and maintenance of romantic and family relationships.[v] Reeves seems to be arguing that the signal value of marriage is not as consequential as behaviors such as parenting, but what that view fails to account for is how marriage has most typically been a potent signal of commitment with a distinct placement regarding the sequence and timing of childbearing. At the root of it, what is signaled by marriage is a commitment comprised of “us with a future.”[vi] Sure, reality has very often been messier than the tidy ordering of love, marriage, and a baby carriage; and many marriages do not go the distance. But marriage is likely, in some large respect, explanatory regarding child outcomes because marriage most often is a strong and credible signal of commitment prior to childbirth.

Put another way, Howard and Reeves seem to focus on childrearing (parenting) with little emphasis for the role marriage often plays in sequencing of commitment and childbearing. I believe that the quality of the parenting a child will receive is situated in the context of the level of commitment his or her two parents have to parenting together. Danielle Kurtzleben at Vox.com highlighted one key part of this puzzle related to that idea of “together”:

There is a common-sense reason to why this bump is so great. A pair of mediocre married parents will have way more time to spend with their kids than even an exceptionally devoted single dad . . .

Even here, there may be an under-appreciation for how (and if) the partnership to parent formed in the first place. The fact is that marriage is associated with a far greater likelihood that a child’s parents will continue to parent together than other contexts.[vii] At one end of a spectrum are parents who married before the child arrived, where those children have a relatively high likelihood of receiving extensive co-parenting. At the other end of this spectrum would be children born to parents who had not developed much, if any, commitment to each other beforehand, much less a commitment to parent a child together before having one. Those children, on average, have more of an uphill climb in life, and, as Howard and Reeves note, economic and social mobility are impacted. Such children are not disadvantaged because they don’t have a parent who cares, but because they are going to land, on average, the furthest from having the economic and social capital of two people pulling together to start them off in life. One can argue that the benefits of having two committed parents can exist apart from marriage. I agree. So why would I argue that marriage has special explanatory value regarding child outcomes?

Back to signals and sequence.

While not always, and perhaps less so now than before, marriage serves as a strong signal that two people are tacitly committed to raising a family together. Further, and for more complex reasons than I want to develop here, signals are the most informative when they are fully under the control of those sending them—by which I mean, when the behavior has fewer prior constraints so that it reflects something true about the individual. That means that signals about commitment are more informative before a child arrives than after because having a child increases life constraints. When marriage precedes two people having a child, the question of intention about a shared long-term time horizon was settled before things got messy with baby drool and poop. For couples with this foundation already in place, even unplanned and mistimed children are still landing in a relatively rich context regarding bi-parental commitment. One can (and should) believe that various socio-economic disadvantages govern a lot in this big lottery of life, but we should not lose sight of how sequence plays a consequential and causal role in child outcomes.

I am far from alone believing this. I think the greatest change in families impacting children in this era is that so many are born into low commitment contexts. This seems to be exactly the point that Isabel Sawhill argues in her forthcoming book, Generation Unbound: Drifting Into Sex and Parenthood Without Marriage. In her New York Times piece on 9-14-2014, she wrote:

We’ve been worrying about these trends for years, and wondering: Can marriage be restored as the standard way to raise children? As much as we might welcome a revival, I doubt that it will happen. The genie is out of the bottle.

I would love for Sawhill to be wrong about marriage, but I share her pessimism. Further, by arguing for what is needed, Sawhill draws attention to what is increasingly missing.

What we need instead is a new ethic of responsible parenthood. If we combine an updated social norm with greater reliance on the most effective forms of birth control, we can transform drifters into planners and improve children’s life prospects.

In her book and article, Sawhill focuses a lot of attention on complex issues related to birth control. I will sidestep that issue for now to focus on drifting versus planning. This is familiar territory for me and my colleagues. Whether you think about drifting versus planning or sliding versus deciding,[viii] the underlying point is that it matters how and when (and if) intention forms when it comes to the consequences of life altering transitions such as having a child. Commitments are decisions, and decisions support the strongest follow-through.

What about Howard and Reeves’ finding about engaged parenting? They note that “It is plausible that parents who commit to each other through marriage may also have a stronger joint commitment to raising their children.” That’s exactly what I believe is being given short shrift in the current discussion. In fact, I suspect that their parenting variable is partly a proxy for the mutual commitment to parent that is implicit in marriage.

While I can see plenty of value in efforts to provide more education about parenting to both couples and single parents, I also believe we need to work to increase the odds that children are born into high commitment contexts. Such efforts might include helping people better understand how sliding into having a child together, in a relationship with an unclear future, leads to worse outcomes for adults and children. Emphasizing this reality may be unpalatable to some who worry that such messages can be retroactively stigmatizing for those who are already downstream from consequential drifting. If so, the importance of emphasizing this may be as controversial to some as Isabel Sawhill’s suggestions about birth control are to others. Either way, it does not reflect how life really works to ignore sequence as we all grapple with solutions.

Marriage is, indeed, fading in front of our eyes, and with it goes a lot of signal clarity about commitment in the context of sequence. Maybe those elements can be constructed behaviorally on a broad scale, but we should recognize the difficulty we face in trying to make up for the loss of something with real explanatory power.

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[i] Sawhill, I. V. (2014). Generation unbound: Drifting into sex and parenthood without marriage. Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press. 
[ii] e.g., Stanley, S. M. (2001). Making a case for premarital education. Family Relations, 50(3), 272-280.;  Markman, H. J., Stanley, S. M., & Blumberg, S. L. (2010). Fighting for your marriage. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. NOTE: It is a separate and challenging matter in social interventions to demonstrate that the variables targeted are the mechanisms of change. 
[iii] Who Benefits Most from Family-Strengthening Efforts?
[iv] The seminal paper by Nobel Prize winner Michael Spence is: Spence, A. Michael. (1973). Job Market Signaling. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 87(3), 355-374. In his Nobel award speech, Spence noted that that “the information carried by the signal can be productive itself. This will occur if there is a decision that is made better or with greater efficiency, with better information.” I believe this is relevant to the points I make here (though I make no claim to understanding all of the nuances of Spence’s work).
[v] Rowthorn, R. (2002).  Marriage as a signal.  In A. W. Dnes and R. Rowthorn (Eds.), The Law and Economics of Marriage and Divorce (pp. 132 - 156).  New York: Cambridge University Press.; Nock, S.L.  (2009). The Growing Importance of Marriage in America.  In H. E. Peters and C. M. Kamp Dush (Eds.), Marriage and Family: Perspectives and Complexities (pp. 302-324). New York: Columbia University Press.; Stanley, S. M., Rhoades, G. K., & Whitton, S. W. (2010). Commitment: Functions,formation, and the securing of romantic attachment. Journal of Family Theory and Review, 2, 243-257.
[vi] Jones, W. H., & Adams, J. M. (1999).  Handbook of interpersonal commitment and relationship stability.  New York: Plenum.;  Stanley, S. M., Rhoades, G. K., & Whitton, S. W. (2010). Commitment: Functions, formation, and the securing of romantic attachment. Journal of Family Theory and Review, 2, 243-257.
[vii] Sawhill, I. V. (2014). Generation unbound: Drifting into sex and parenthood without marriage. Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press. 
[viii] Stanley,S. M., Rhoades, G. K., & Markman, H. J. (2006). Sliding vs. Deciding:Inertia and the premarital cohabitation effect. Family Relations, 55, 499-509.

In Honor of Mother's Day--A link to my favorite post from the past related to parenting

Parenting can be hard and challenging. Being new parents can lead to declines in marital connection. Many couples do not experience this decline as they have children but a significant percentage does. In this piece from years ago, I argue that parenting can lead a couple to a deeper, wider sense of satisfaction that comes from building something great together. Parenting also can provide a kind of weird joy as you get through stuff together. I like to think this story is an example of that (click here).

Parenting: Enduring is admirable. Enjoying is wonderful.

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Play Gone Cold

I felt sad to hear about the impending divorce of Chris Martin (of the group Cold Play) and Gwyneth Paltrow of Hollywood fame. This is a typical reaction for me when I hear of celebrity couples splitting up, especially if I have found anything I personally like about them in their history. There seem to be so few high profile, media-star couples who go the distance. When such a couple who has made it 10 years decides to end their marriage, it is news. It is, of course, also news when a celebrity couple divorces after a few months but those divorces seem like something different—reflecting relationships that were not well founded in the first place. But I do root for the long-time marriages of celebrity couples.

            Why would I care? Part of it is that I have some empathy for the fact that there is a real couple involved in something very public who is going through some immense pain. But I also care because a very public divorce must reinforce the overall image that many people have of marriages being unstable. People are already quite skittish about marriage as an institution even though when people make good choices for mates and strong commitments in marriage, there are vast benefits in life for both the adults and their children.

            As I heard the news this week about Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin, I was reminded of a study I had wanted to write about last year. To my point just above, there is some evidence that divorce is contagious. Researchers (headed up by Rose McDermott of Brown University) recently analyzed the social networks of participants in the long-term, near legend, Framingham Heart Study. As summarized in a really clear write-up by Rich Morin of the Pew Research Center, “Overall, they found that the divorce of a friend or close relative significantly increased the probability of divorce.”

            Thus, the famous Framingham Study sheds light on problems of the heart in more than the originally intended manner. Divorce is catching and, while Paltrow and Martin are not likely in the social networks of most people, people will be affected because they are so well known. They do not ask for this to be so, especially when they are going through their own private and public pain, but there simply must be some ripple effect when celebrity couples divorce. Well known married couples must necessarily have well known divorces—and this likely has effects similar to what Rose McDermott and colleagues found in their study.  

            There is one other thing that caught my attention about all this is the terminology used to announce the divorce. Gwyneth Paltrow wrote of the divorce on her website by using a phrase that has gotten considerable media attention this week: “Conscious Uncoupling.” I believe this refers to a specific program for helping divorcing couples. I know nothing of this particular phrase or the program that may be associated with it, and I certainly have no opinion of the associated services. However, the phrase reminded me of a growing movement around the U.S. wherein people of various backgrounds (liberal and conservative) are working to help couples with children, cohabiting or married, who are splitting up to end their romantic relationships in ways that cause the least amount of negative consequences for their children. In fact, the various efforts go beyond this simple goal to parenting after break-up.

            The term I hear frequently by those working in this area is co-parenting: they are emphasizing ongoing, effective “co-parenting” among partners who have broken apart.  So, I took some added notice that Gwyneth Paltrow emphasized the phrase “uncouple and coparent” in her message on her website. She is showing her awareness of exactly this transition and the importance to their children.

            Whatever this growing effort around the U.S. becomes, there is an emphasis on helping couples who are no longer going to be romantically joined together to work on the fact that they will be joined as parents indefinitely. It seems to me that these efforts are not so much embracing divorce as they are accepting the reality that children need their parents to work together as co-parents, whether or not they remain together as partners. Such efforts may grow to importance well beyond the obvious need for married couples who are divorcing. There is an increasing number of couples with children who will break up absent of having developed any prior, strong commitment to raise a child together. Many of these couples are going to need help co-parenting together, and that work will be hard for a lot of them. I think this is why I hear and see so much evidence of a growing movement. There is a lot of work to be done. Conscious or not, we’ve got a lot of uncoupling to cope with as a society.

[For those more interested, Daily Beast has an article where they try to get into a little more where the term conscious uncoupling comes from.]

Does Parental Divorce Not Matter for the Children of Middle Class and Wealthy Couples?

In a piece at the Institute for Family Studies, Brad Wilcox takes on the notion that divorce is no big deal--when it comes to life consequences--for relatively richer children.  It is an excellent piece, which you can read here:  Even for Rich Kids, Marriage Matters. 

“I'll take anyone.”

You might have seen this story. If you have not, take a look here or here.

Davion Navar Henry Only is a 16 year-old young man, without mother or father or family. What he does have is guts and a deep desire to be loved. Last Sunday, with the encouragement of his case-worker, Connie Going, Davion went to church and made a request. It’s not so unusual to go to church and make a request. In my experience, however, those requests most often are sent God’s way, not expressed with such pathos directly to the congregants. Davion made a direct request to those he stood before. He asked for a family. Imagine what it might be like to do such a thing. The terror in asking, as a child, to be loved.

As the stories note, Davion said, “I'll take anyone. Old or young, dad or mom, black, white, purple. I don't care. And I would be really appreciative. The best I could be.”

You don’t hear every day of a 16 year-year old asking for a family. Yet the power of this story lies in the fact that it is very much an every-day story. There are scores of children who would love nothing more than to have a family to belong to and to love them.

I almost didn’t read this article because I knew it would be painful to absorb. Like so many others, Davion has a lot going against him in life. His mother gave birth to him in prison; nothing is said in the news stories of his father. In fact, as reported, he never knew his mother or father, and has been raised in various temporary homes for his whole life. He just discovered this year that his mother had passed on, which one of the stories suggests motivated him to wait no longer for what could not come from those quarters.

Not surprisingly, Davion has had some difficulties with anger and managing his behavior. But as the stories make clear, he’s attempting to turn that all around. If the stories are accurate, his motive is not only to be a better person but to earn what many children can take for granted. The poignant part is the obvious part. A young man pleads for what he’s never had, which is something too many children never will have: stability and love.

I usually write about statistics and trends and policies and personal behaviors that impact one’s odds of lasting love. I usually write without putting a face on the pain that is behind the ever-increasing numbers of children who have the hard luck to be born in what I clinically call “low-commitment contexts.” That’s a tidy and descriptive term for the increased odds of pain that come when children do not have adults committed to raising them. When I use this term, I do not mean to judge the parents of such children harshly. What would be the point? Many people who have children in low commitment contexts are hardly adults themselves (and I merely mean, age-wise), and many of any age grew up in contexts filled with family instability. While one can easily understand—hopefully with actual compassion—the difficulties that lead so many children to be exposed to unstable or even dangerous homes, that understanding does not lesson the consequences to individuals, society, and the hearts of children.

I wanted to draw attention to the story of Davion because he says so clearly what is rarely put into words. He wants a family, and he knows he’s running out of time to experience one as a child.

For those of you who work to help others better understand relationships, love, and commitment, Davion is the face of why your work matters. You are doing something important. And for those of you who have adopted and taken in children like Davion, you are heroes.  I cannot think of a more apt word for the love you dare to send into the world.

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A Distinguished Family Researcher Notes: “20 years later, it turns out Dan Quayle was right about Murphy Brown and unmarried moms”

This post continues on the theme I’ve been recently focused on regarding signals of commitment.

Isabel Sawhill, an economist and senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, is one of the most distinguished family scientists of our era.  Because of her stature, people will take serious note of her editorial in the Washington Post that appeared on May 25th, 2012. As she noted, it is the 20th anniversary of one of the greatest outbreaks ever of the cultural debate about single parenthood. In her piece, she stated that Dan Quayle was, in fact, right in the assertion that there are enormous societal consequences to the dramatic increase in the number of children who are not born to married parents.

To quote from her write-up:  Twenty years later, Quayle’s words seem less controversial than prophetic. The number of single parents in America has increased dramatically: The proportion of children born outside marriage has risen from roughly 30 percent in 1992 to 41 percent in 2009. For women under age 30, more than half of babies are born out of wedlock. A lifestyle once associated with poverty has become mainstream. The only group of parents for whom marriage continues to be the norm is the college-educated.

Sawhill listed three main causes for concern, all of which I’d remind my readers can be qualified by stating, “on average”: (1) marriage is a commitment that cohabitation is not; (2) marriage is good for children; and (3) marriage brings economic benefits.

I encourage you to read her entire piece. I suspect her main motivation in putting forth her thoughts on this, right at this time, is reflected in the final line of her op-ed, where she commented that we may be approaching the point where the current trend becomes irreversible.

Before going further, I’ll say what so many people often do in this context--and this is important. No one that I know well who is seriously involved, concerned, and paying attention to these issues is saying that single parents—and/or less committed parents—are bad or inherently poor parents. In fact, many single parents are amazing if not heroic. It’s not some cheap cliché to make this point. Furthermore, many who parent alone did not plan on doing so. And some I know who did, in fact, plan exactly on that path are great parents. But Sawhill is getting at the nub of the larger, societal question, which is about the fact that we are heading toward a future where massive numbers of children are not going to have the benefit of being raised by their own two, committed parents.

I understand the motivations and data from which people will take issue with Sawhill’s arguments as well as those of many others who dare to suggest that marriage is the best context, on average, for raising children. But the real heart of this whole issue is about commitment and signals. Why does marriage matter for child-welfare? Married couples that have children together have the commitment-sequencing thing working in their favor. More the point, so do their children. These couples have a decided, clarified, and publicly given evidence  of commitment to the future prior to becoming parents together. That does not make them perfect parents but it does make them pre-qualified on commitment in some substantial degree. It’s sort of like people who are shopping for a house who have already secured their mortgage--they are pre-qualified to buy a house within a certain economic range.  Their commitment to the process is already vetted; once they find the right house, they are ready to follow-through. This type of process matters even more for homes than it does for houses--and it matters more for families than for dwellings.

What really increases the chances of children being raised by two parents who are committed to them is that, for some children, those two parents were strongly committed to each other beforehand. And that is another example of how signals about commitment can make a difference with important life outcomes.

(If you want to go down memory lane, here’s a link to my blog about our finding that having a baby together does not predict remaining together [at least up to a year later, in our national sample of unmarrieds]. Yet, things like having a shared gym membership, or shared cell plan, or vacation plans together, do predict remaining together.  Find it here.)

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Cleanup on Aisle 9 (at 35,000 Feet)

Warning: “Parental Discretion Advised”
Second warning: Long post. Settle in.

I flew the other day from Denver to Washington DC for a research meeting. The flight I was on took off 2 hours later than scheduled. Given my flight experiences of late, that’s not all that unusual. What is unusual is the reason why the flight was 2 hours late. Was the previous flight late into Denver? Nope. Was there 24 inches of snow on the ground in Denver? Not this time.

Like all flights there was a flight prior to mine for this plane. On the prior flight, there was an unfortunate incident. Apparently, a certain emetic experience (in “plane” language, means baby ejected the contents of his/her little tummy in flight) occurred to such a degree that it took the airline 2 hours to clean it up. I didn’t witness this. If you are a visual learner and wish to come close to seeing this, here is a video link sent to me by Nancy Gonzalez of the National Council on Family Relations: click here

Like I said, I didn’t see the baby and I was not on that flight. I just waited the 2 hours for the airline to recover from that flight. Why 2 hours? The little rascal was so thorough in his projecting that the airline techs could not merely replace the seat cushions. They had to dismantle the whole row of seats, disassembling them so that they could remove every speck of fabric. This apparently takes a good while because of things like needing to take apart the electronic panel, etc. That’s serious work to accomplish the clean up on aisle 9. By the way, I think the people doing this work deserve and extra helping of stimulus funds.

If your flight is going to be late, this reason sure beats the heck out of something like the flight crew not showing up or the toilets being broken or a passenger seeing the pilot having a drink preflight (I can imagine the flight crew needing a drink post flight, here). An odd thing: While everyone was duly frustrated and didn’t like waiting, there was a kind of resigned acceptance by most of the people who were waiting for the flight. In fact, the passengers were so good natured that the pilot thanked us all, several times, as we got on the plane for the fact that so many of us were not only patient but were smiling as we boarded. (Besides, how quickly, exactly, do you want to get on this plane? You want them to take their time and do a good job. There was also this odd dynamic of playing a group form of Russian roulette. Who knew which row? Was it mine? I am only using aisle 9 as an example but maybe it really was aisle 9!)

My initial, personal, reaction was one of total empathy for the unfortunate parent(s) in charge of said baby. It took me a few minutes longer to shift to empathy for the passengers around the baby on the plane. Sorry, but parental empathy trumped frequent flyer empathy.

There’s a point here somewhere and I’m getting to it now. In the week prior to all this, a colleague published a journal article on the effects of the first child on married couples. This colleague and the lead author on the paper is Brian Doss at Texas A & M, who, using one of our lab’s data sets, did an impeccable job of analyzing and writing up these findings. This is an area of specialty in his research and it’s a particularly fine work that he did. [Brian is now at the University of Miami University.] The paper was co-authored by my colleagues Galena Rhoades, Howard Markman, and me. The paper got A LOT of media attention. Google around a bit and you’ll find some of that.

The major finding of the study is that that there was a rather sudden drop in marital quality (happiness, communication, management of conflict, etc.) around the time of the first birth for the couples having children. That may not be too shocking to those of you who are parents. Interestingly, in the analyses that Brian Doss conducted, we also saw that those couples who did not have children also showed similar declines in marriage quality, but much more gradually over time and not on quite as many variables. But in essence, both groups of couples were taking a journey to a similar place but the couples having a child took a shortcut.

By the way, in case you are wondering, studies do show that most married couples experience some declines in happiness over their years together. The bad news is that this is normal. The good news is that this is normal. Realistic expectations can do a lot to improve one’s life.

Not surprisingly, the headlines around the study that came out varied from things like “Want to Have a Happy Marriage, Don’t Have Kids” to “Study Shows Transition to Parenthood Puts Strain on Marriages.” I’ll give it to journalists that the first type of headline sounds cool and sells more hits on the web but the second headline is a lot more accurate and does not editorialize.

Back to that little baby. Babies do things like this and it’s most inconvenient. In fact, having children means an endless stream of challenges and surprises and projectile experiences. Many parents wonder if the plane will ever land. If you have children, and you are typical, you may have had some declines in marital happiness that were concentrated around the time of the birth of the first child. But is that all that happened to you?

Maybe there is something more going on. While I like research and data, and really like thinking about how things work, it’s important to realize that researchers are pretty much limited to analyzing things that they measure. As a field, I think social science has missed something when it comes to measuring things that are important about families. Marital happiness is, to be sure, important. It’s measured a lot and in many different ways. But I think there is something else that’s different from marital happiness that could be called family happiness. David Brooks, the New York Times editorialist, wrote about this a few years ago in an a piece featuring some comments about a Leo Tolstoy novella on family happiness. Here is one of the lines from his work, commenting on Tolstoy’s story.

“Tolstoy's story captures the difference between romantic happiness, which is filled with exhilaration and self-fulfillment, and family happiness, built on self-abnegation and sacrifice.” (Brooks, 3-1-2005)

Brooks nailed something that researchers have not really gone after. There is a different, maybe deeper, kind of happiness that some people experience in life; deeper than romantic or marital happiness. Certainly different. It’s something like a contentment that a couple can experience (but might not experience) from building a family together. I know marriage does not work out well for many couples and I also know that marriage or a life together does not even happen now for many people who have a child together. So, not everyone gets in this line or experiences what I’m trying to describe. Yet, I know a lot of couples can relate to this: there can be some loss in one type of happiness that is readily replaced by another.

One can argue that a couple can and should be able to have it all, and should give up nothing in life for any reason. That does not seem too realistic to me. I do not know any of the people on the plane flight prior to mine. However, I like to imagine that both parents were on that flight with their little bundle of expressive joy. Once they complete their treatment for PTSD, I suspect that they will not ever recall that flight as one of the romantic highlights of their life together. On the other hand, even many years from now, I bet you they will smile and feel some weird kind of joy as they remember getting through it.

Posted from seat 9C, at 35,000 feet

Fear and Humiliation

I recently was able to hear a talk by Robert Brooks. He is a researcher and psychologist specializing in the resilience of children. He has a book called “Raising Resilient Children.” The book is excellent. In the talk I heard him give, he said something I found interesting. (Actually, he said a number of interesting things, but I’ll focus.) He said that people fear humiliation more than failure. Since he focuses on children, his point was that to help a child be resilient we need to overcome his or her fear of humiliation.

To me, one thing this means is that parents and other caregivers need to help children have experiences where failure is an option but humiliation is not. Success and failure can teach one how to grow. Humiliation teaches a person he’s defective.

How might this apply to adults and romantic relationships? In all our books and materials for couples, my colleagues and I stress the power of emotional safety. It’s what people seem to want most and it’s something relationships cannot do (well) without. It’s also not easy to hang onto it when times are tough. Most everyone can do a bit better—or a lot better—than they often do in order to make it safe for loved ones to connect. If more families were humiliation free zones, a lot of things would go a lot better in life.