Monday, January 27, 2014

The M.Guy Tweet, Week of January 19, 2014

1. Does Marriage Make Sense For Millennials?, Forbes
A scant 30% claim that a successful marriage is an important achievement for them, well behind priorities such as having a high-earning career or being a good parent.

2. Millennials Talk Marriage: For Richer And For Poorer, The Guardian
To find out how millennials really feel about marriage, we turned to Guardian readers and asked: is marriage dead, or is this all about money? Sifting through responses from all over the world, we discovered that marriage isn’t as unpopular among millennials as one would think. 

3. Love and Work on a Timetable, The Wall Street Journal
Some couples respond by making career tradeoffs right away. Others avoid committing to a relationship at all. Ms. Fayal and Mr. Blake chose a third way.

4. Three Policies to Close the Class Divide in Family Formation, The Brookings Institution 
For unmarried women under 30, 70% of pregnancies are unintended. And unintended pregnancy is most common among those with the least advantage.

5. Study: Conservative Protestants’ Divorce Rates Spread To Their Red State Neighbors, The Washington Post
“What I can see in this study is the obvious shortcomings of a culture of ‘romantic individualism,’ one that’s toxic to marriage, rather than a warning to wait until you’re ‘older’ to marry.”

6. Daddy Track: The Case for Paternity Leave, The Atlantic
Paternity leave is a chance to intervene at what one study called “a crucial time of renegotiation”: those early, sleep-deprived weeks of diaper changes and midnight feedings, during which couples fall into patterns that turn out to be surprisingly permanent.

7. Colorado Initiative Would Mandate Pre-wedding Education, The Washington Post
A proposed initiative that could land a spot on the Colorado ballot would require couples who want to get married to go through 10 hours of pre-wedding marriage education.

For more, see Can You Learn To Wed? Law Proposed For Pre-marriage Classes (VIDEO), Today Show [Note: Start at 9:10]

For more, see here

Sunday, January 19, 2014

The M.Guy Tweet, January 12, 2014

1. How to Fight Income Inequality: Get Married, The Wall Street Journal
A better and more compassionate policy to fight income inequality would be helping the poor realize that the most important decision they can make is to stay in school, get married and have children—in that order.

2. Why Marriage Won’t Solve Poverty, The Nation
The right fails to see that what’s changed isn’t just the moral status of marriage, but the institution’s economic underpinnings, particularly the collapse of decent jobs for working-class men. 

3. Wealthy Women Can Afford to Reject Marriage, but Poor Women Can't, The Atlantic 
There's a cognitive dissonance in Ehrenreich's straight-up dismissal of the economic benefits of marriage, because the statistics tell an awkward truth: Financially, married women tend to fare much better than unmarried women.

4. Why the Government Should Promote Relationship Skills, Family Studies
As Ruby Payne outlines in her book A Framework for Understanding Poverty, poverty is not just financial. These days, it often also entails growing up without a father and later lacking stable and satisfying romantic relationships. Surely those problems are worth addressing along with financial deprivation.

5. Can Uncle Sam Sell Americans on Marriage?, The Atlantic
"I don’t know anyone who sees these programs as making a big dent in poverty," he said. "What I hear about is this is another tool that addresses a crucial factor in poverty. It makes a more complete toolbox."

6. To Defeat Poverty, Look to Marriage, The Washington Post
More to the point, we know that being unmarried is one of the highest risk factors for poverty. And no, splitting expenses between unmarried people isn’t the same.

7. W. Bradford Wilcox: Marriage for Single Mothers is Not a Panacea in War on Poverty, The Deseret News
Ironically, the CCF report just confirms wisdom recently articulated in the report Knot Yet: The Benefits and Costs of Delayed Marriage in America: namely, men, women and children are much more likely to enjoy a stable and supportive family life when they sequence marriage before parenthood.

For more, see here

Monday, January 13, 2014

Sunday, January 5, 2014

The M.Guy Tweet, December 29, 2013

1. More Moms In Arizona Skip Marriage, AZ Central
In Arizona in 2012, 70 percent of the unmarried women who had babies had a high-school diploma or less.

2. Reclaiming Fatherhood After Afghanistan, The New York Times
I must have thrown away 20 rough drafts with tears in my eyes as I tried to describe to our unborn daughter how much I loved her, quietly fearing that she would never know me beyond those few words.

3. Healthily Ever After: Study Finds Happily Married Couples Enjoy Better Health, PennLive
The study followed 1,681 married individual over two decades – the longest study on the topic to date – and measured marital quality in terms of happiness and satisfaction as well as marital problems such as how often couples argued and over what.

4. Lowry: The Rich Aren’t Holding Back The Poor, The Salt Lake Tribune
"Census data show that if all Americans finished high school, worked full time at whatever job they then qualified for with their education, and married at the same rate as Americans had married in 1970, the poverty rate would be cut by around 70 percent — without additional government spending."

5. Single Fathers Seek Equal Opportunity, Battle Creek Enquirer
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 4 percent of children live with single fathers compared to 23.7 percent of children who live with single mothers.

6. Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program (PREP), NREPP
The Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program (PREP) is a marriage and relationship education intervention that teaches couples (premarital and marital) how to communicate effectively, work as a team to solve problems, manage conflicts without damaging closeness, and preserve and enhance commitment and friendship.

7. Legacies of the War on Poverty, Lessons for the Future (EVENT), The National Poverty Center at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, the Russell Sage Foundation, and Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity
Info: Wednesday, January 8, 2014 from 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM (EST), Washington, DC

For more, see here.