Societal Trends and the Family

This week in class we talked a lot about social trends and the family. The first day of class was super interesting because we all came to class having read the article "Same-sex parenting and children’s outcomes: A closer examination of the American psychological association’s brief on lesbian and gay parenting" this was so cool because all of this research was used in the Supreme court case that basically made gay and lesbian marriage legal. What was so interesting about this article was the fact that a lot of the studies that were used were completely misrepresented. Let me backup and explain for a second. The reason this case made it to the supreme court was because 2 men wanted their marriage that was legal in a different state to be recognized by the state of California. The supreme court knew that if they made it so that the state of California made to recognize their marriage this would have a nationwide ripple effect for so many different things. One of those things being children. People wanted to know if children would be okay being raised by two mom’s or two dads in the same way they would in a regular one mom one dad situation. That is what the article above is talking about. This article was used to prove that the children's outcomes would be the same. As we dig in further into the study we find that there is a lot more going on under the surface. A lot of the studies were compared against single mom’s which you already know is going to skew the results. Having just a mom in the household is very different than having a mom and a dad in the home. Another thing was that a lot of the studies were done with lesbian moms that volunteered for the study rather than people just selected at random. I get that it is probably hard to get someone to agree to have a study done on their home life but I feel like that would have made these results more accurate because anyone can make their life seem perfect and seem like everything is great for a couple day study. There were also a lot of other problems with the study including sample size and not very gay dads participated.

This last Thursday we started talking about one man who wrote a book about how if people kept having big families that eventually our world would run out of resources. Lots of people believed this guy which led to lots of people having really small families but our world population has almost doubled since his book and yet we still have plenty of resources. It's crazy how just one thing or one trend can affect so many other things in our society. The following things are all things that are trending with our society. Pre Marital sex, Living alone, Cohabitation, Age at marriage (27 for girls: 29.8 for men), Employed mom’s, and birth rates are dropping at a 1.8 kids per family. This all has such a huge impact on our society and resources. One thing that I found connects is how much older we are waiting to get married. This is a big deal because by the time women get married they already have a job of their own and they already are making a life for themselves so a lot of times women don’t want to have kids right away because they don’t want kids to mess that up. This in turn leads to women waiting even longer to have kids and by the time they realize they want to be a mom it is already too late for them and not an option. This brings in the low birth rates and the employed moms. It’s so shocking to me how just the trends of our society affects so many other things.