I want to begin by talking about the conventional wisdom. From Hollywood to the halls of academia, we often hear the message that marriage doesn’t matter. Kids and families, we are told, need not enjoy the shelter and security of a married home to thrive. Take, for instance, Jennifer Anniston, who said, “Women are realizing it […]
Read MoreThe Economic Consequences of Delayed Marriage It has been well documented that over the last few decades we have seen a substantial increase in the median age of marriage in the United States. In fact, we are currently at all-time historic highs in these trends. According to the Current Population Survey from the U.S. Census, […]
Read MoreReflections on African American Family Dynamics in the Twentieth Century “How does it feel to be a problem?” asked sociologist W.E.B. Dubois in the opening chapter of The Souls of Black Folk (1903). African Americans have faced a perennial struggle with “double consciousness,” he explained, seeing themselves simultaneously from the perspective of their own black […]
Read MoreIn its last term, the U.S. Supreme Court decided two cases that implicated, in some way, privacy claims. One of these cases, Rodriguez v. United States, involved a claim that using a drug-sniffing dog at a traffic stop was unconstitutional. The other and far better known case involved the claim that the U.S. Constitution requires […]
Read MoreBeginning about 1830, a remarkable effort emerged to construct a rich and comprehensive ideology of the family. Its components included the concept of “separate spheres” for men and women, the primacy of “the domestic church,” and an elaboration of “true womanhood.” In a curious departure from American republicanism, the human archetype of this philosophy was […]
Read MoreA History of Academic Inquiry and Its Major Findings The dramatic connection between thriving, intact families being a woman’s and child’s strongest protection against poverty has been well-established for decades. Considering the significant detriment poverty brings to the lives of mothers and their children and all the other personal life issues it negatively affects—physical and […]
Read MoreEnsuring Health through Family-Friendly Reform of Medical Insurance When the Obama Administration and its Democratic supporters pushed through the radical 2010 reform of medical insurance known officially as the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” and unofficially as “Obamacare,” they justified their one-party revolution in insurance as a way to rein in runaway health-care costs. […]
Read MoreThe Debate We Are Not Having Of all the pressures that have built on the American family since the 1960s, few have been as consequential as the relentlessly rising yet still largely hidden cost of health care. If it seems like families a generation ago had a much easier time affording the cost of children […]
Read MoreHow to Make Health Care Pro-Marriage, Pro-Life, and Affordable The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act no doubt has lowered out-of-pocket financial costs for some Americans, but at the moral cost of requiring many Americans to participate in the funding of contraception against the dictates of their conscience and at the social cost of diluting […]
Read MoreThe Ground of Freedom The role of private property is a necessary component of home economics. To begin, I would like to consider briefly what some writers from our Founding Era had to say about private property and then quickly trace the idea into the twentieth century. We will see that the idea of private […]
Read More