Stephanie Coontz

In the 1970s, family history wasn't yet thought of a serious field for study. I was terrified of being laughed at by other historians. I called my book 'The Social Origins of Private Life.' It should have been 'As Pompous as You Want to Be.' Every sentence was academic jargon, and if I said X, I qualified it with Y.

Social changes always involve trade-offs.

Social and economic policies constructed around the male breadwinner model have always disadvantaged women.

Putting women first would mean strengthening America's social safety net, because a higher proportion of single-mother families live in poverty here than in any other wealthy country.

People feel better when their spouses have good friendships, over and above the effects of their own friendships.

Cohabitation itself doesn't cause ineffective parenting.

In 1992, I critiqued the panic over growing family diversity. My skepticism about the doomsayers has since been proven correct.

In personal life, the warm glow of nostalgia amplifies good memories and minimizes bad ones about experiences and relationships, encouraging us to revisit and renew our ties with friends and family. It always involves a little harmless self-deception, like forgetting the pain of childbirth.

When I speak on work-family issues to audiences around the country, some of the biggest complaints I hear come from individuals who are described by the census as living in 'non-family households.' They resent the fact that their family responsibilities literally don't 'count,' either for society or for their employers.

Too often, tributes to the home-cooked meal assume every family has a schedule that gets everyone home by 5:30 P.M. And too many recipes treat cooking as a solitary pursuit that requires the cook - still most often Mom - to take time away from other family interactions and chores.

Unemployment, low wages, and poverty discourage family formation and erode family stability, making it less likely that individuals will marry in the first place and more likely that their marriages will dissolve.

Labeling people single parents, for example, when they may in fact be co-parenting - either with an unmarried other parent in the home or with an ex-spouse in a joint custody situation - stigmatizes their children as the products of 'single parenthood' and makes the uncounted parent invisible to society.