 Hello, I am Joanna Peppen, and I work at the University of Buffalo, and I am here today with Professor Phillip Cohen from the University of Maryland. And he wrote the textbook, The Family Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change, and we thought it would be fun for us to hear a little bit about his profession and the textbook. So I will be happy to speak with you today. Great. Thanks. Happy to be here. Our first question is, we're just curious if you could tell us a little bit about what led you to becoming a family sociologist. Yes, good question. I think it was, I was interested in inequality, and a lot of the inequality questions I was thinking about kept leading me back to families, especially things having to do with sort of intersections of race, class, and gender. And so if you ask questions like, why do women do more housework and childcare, and part of that is because they're single parents and so that's a family question why are more parents single now than they used to be and who decides who's married and why people are married and what are the consequences of that for health and well-being and income. I just kept coming back to family topics. You know, things related to like, what is the government going to do? Is it going to, is it going to give people money if they're poor? Is that going to be based on their family structure? Is it going to penalize people for their family choices? Is it going to let people get married if they're gay? Is it going to, you know, all these things that have to do with people's well-being and social inequality go through families? So that's how I got led into it. Interesting. Your textbook takes a very life course approach to studying families and looking at trends over time. What would you say is one of the biggest transformations of American families? If you look at the long run, I think that the dual change of fewer children and women working outside the home, those two things sort of happened together over the last couple of hundred years. And I think that's the biggest transformation overall. So fewer children means less work to be done at home because a lot of work is care work and housework related to children. And that's partly because women had other opportunities to do things outside their homes and partly the other way around because women were doing other things. They had fewer children. But the reason that's so foundational is because it totally transforms family relationships. You know, having fewer children changes the relationship between parents and children. It means we're investing more in each child than we used to. So kids spend more years in school with more resources. It also means our relationships are longer. People are living longer. So you have fewer children and, you know, now you have like a 70 or 80 year relationship with your children. And there's only one or two of them instead of having a 40 year relationship with, you know, eight or 10 kids. It's a whole different relationship. So it's that transformation of opportunity and the way people spend their time and energy that's very foundational, I guess. Sure. We all come to, you know, studying families with our own personal beliefs and experiences with families. Is there a common misperception about families that you find yourself talking about a lot? There's a common sense that like families are going down the drain in general that, you know, in the good old days, things used to be better. Some things used to be better for some people, some things used to be worse for some people. So it's hard to really, you know, it's hard to generalize that way. But one thing that I think a common misperception is that divorce is just more common than it used to be. It is more common than it used to be. But more common than it used to be a long time ago, like 100 years ago or 50 years ago. In the last 10 or 20 years, divorce is actually becoming less common. And so that's surprising to people and it kind of clues us into some important changes that are happening like people are getting married later, people are getting married after they have more education. There's more selectivity in marriage. So some people are just either choosing not to get married or they don't have anybody that they want to marry, which is good if what you want is marriages that last a long time. You know, so you have fewer people getting married just because that's what you do. Fewer people getting married because they're stuck with somebody. They're all stuck in marriages because they're, they can't support themselves on their own so they can't leave an abusive marriage. So all of those things are happening but when you put them together now, the fewer marriages, the marrying later has turned into a decline in divorce. So we know we have more choice with more divorce is more available than it used to be, which is great. And it's happening less but partly because marriage is actually available to less people so it's, it's a mixed bag but definitely this idea of like divorce going up and up and up, which is a very common misperception is no longer the case. Right. Right. Our families are, you know, in some ways very stable and not changing and otherwise changing a lot. I know you're working on the third edition of your textbook. What's something that you've had to update since the last a lot the current version. Yeah, so the second edition. When the second edition we had same sex marriage just coming out. And we didn't really have any a lot of good data about what was going on with same sex marriage. And so that's improved I worked really hard to try to get better information. It's still pretty hard. States don't really record the gender of the people getting married, which is seems odd but they just have sort of spouse one and spouse two on their marriage certificates. So, you know that the data still blotchy, but we're starting to learn more. And in a lot of ways we're learning that same sex married couples look pretty the same as different sex married couples. And so but I tried to put that kind of through the book. This time, you know the rapid change that's happening is also on sex and gender and language and culture and attitudes, transgender identities, non binary identities so like the language had to get revamped even though the last version of the book was only a couple of years ago. I used to have a whole section on the androgyny and now I don't even talk about androgyny anymore now we have non binary identities. So some of the medical stuff and some of the research on conflict and identity and well being in these different groups has all evolved quickly so there's a lot of new stuff in there. Right. Along similar lines we know that COVID-19 is having a big impact on families but you know data collection is really hard right now and we don't really know what the lasting impact is but I was curious and you could speculate a little bit about what you think the impact of the pandemic might be on family. Yeah. That's huge. You know nothing will be the same at least for a long time and by then nothing will be the same. I think one way that I think about it is that things that are happening now kind of will tend to continue happening. That's just sort of a way that society works. So like working at home is going to be more common now forever, you know, and certain things about the way certain things we do at home will be that way. Other things are extremely disrupted right now and we don't know what will happen. We know a lot, a lot of people canceled their weddings or didn't get married that we're going to get married. We are pretty sure that a lot of people are not having children that we're going to have children this year. Either they just put it off and then when people put it off, you know, some people never get around to it. So the drop in marriage and childbearing is probably going to be really big this year and next year and we'll see if that continues and what effect that has. In terms of, you know, the subjects I pay most attention to, I think inequality is going to be exacerbated. I mean, I sound a little like a broken record on inequality because I think everything's related to inequality. But, but when you look at, you know, I'm interested in the things that we don't see about families like who gets to have a family. I talk a lot as if everybody's in a family, but not everybody's in a family and some people aren't in families because they don't have access to the resources or the people. Like when gay marriage was illegal, it was like, well, okay, there's there's a bunch of people can't have the kind of family they want. But now we have people who are stuck with their families that they don't want to be stuck with. We have speaking of trans issues we have trans young people who are living with their families that don't accept them. We have people living in abusive situations. We have kids trying to go to school at home where the inequalities will be magnified between those kids who have, you know, parents have tons of education and resources and extra rooms and computers and and can work at home with the kids and parents that don't have all those things. And all the gaps and inequalities we have, whether class and race or between happy and abusive, all those things, they just feel like the gaps are opening up right now. And it's going to get more unequal before we get out of this. So I think that's this mostly downside. Obviously, it's a terrible crisis and a pandemic. But one of the things that I think we're going to see a lot of is the gap grow between people who have great family situations and people who don't. There's going to be a lot. There's going to be a lot of work to do, you know, for not just to study these things, but also to fix them. So the good thing about the good thing about what we're doing is we're going to spend some time teaching and learning this fall and see if we can figure out ways to address some of these problems. Yeah, interesting time to be a family sociologist. Definitely. Yeah, well, thank you so much for speaking with us today and really appreciate it very interesting. Thank you.