Twenty-eight percent of incoming college freshmen in 1999 did "agree or strongly agree" with the following statement: "Activities of married women are best confined to home and family."  This represents a twenty percent drop from 1970 (48% agreed), but a three percent increase from 1990's survey (25%).

(Source: The Higher Education Research Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, The American Freshman: National Norms, annual, in the U. S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2000 [120th edition] Washington, DC, 1999, p. 187.)

"Fun and prayer aside, there's no getting around the metaphoric elephant in the middle of this alt-rock fair: the values of Christianity and anti-values of rock seem morally incompatible.  Yet there's something about the ethos of alternative rock-staying true to your beliefs, never bowing to mainstream pressure-that is oddly simpatico with conservative Christian culture....  For better or worse-OK, worse-kids with solid family values have become an oddball minority, living outside the mainstream."

(Source: Loriann Ali, "The Glorious Rise of Christian Pop," Newsweek, July 16, 2001, p. 36-46.)

Education, prominent commentators constantly intone, is the key to preparing young people for future employment.  Maybe.  According to a study recently published in Adolescence by researchers from the University of Utrecht, however, family life eclipses formal education as a predictor of whether young adults can find and hold jobs.  In parsing data collected from two waves of a national sample of 955 non-school-attending young adults between 18 and 27 years old, the Utrecht scholars uncovered clear evidence that "family factors are more important of youth unemployment than are the classic variables," which focus on such things as education. 

Specifically, the researchers establish that "parental divorce [was] positively related to youth unemployment" (p < .01).   In explaining this finding, the authors of the new study conjecture that "parental divorce . . . may increase the likelihood that children will not learn adaptive interpersonal skills, such as how to reach a compromise and communicate effectively.  This, in turn, handicaps their job prospects."  Though they concede the possibility of "alternative explanations," the researchers see their "family socialization" interpretation of the data as "consistent with several qualitative descriptions of the problems that adult children of divorce experience."

The importance of parental divorce as a predictor of unemployment contrasted sharply in this study with the unanticipated unimportance of education.  The Utrecht team reports that, contrary to their own expectations, educational career "did not seem to play a significant role in youth unemployment."  "There were," the researchers report, "no significant [statistical findings] for any of the indicators of education."   Likewise unexpected was the discovery that higher levels of  "work commitment" did not correlate with lower levels of unemployment.   "Clearly," the puzzled scholars remark, "youths have to have some education and a commitment to get and keep a job, but these basic conditions do not guarantee employment." 

The authors of the new study point out that in the past "family factors, such as parental divorce . . . have attracted little attention in the literature on youth unemployment."   This literature has attended almost exclusively to "the classic individual (personal) variables," such as those for education.  Perhaps that is about to change.

(Source:  Martijn de Goede, et al., "Family Problems and Youth Unemployment," Adolescence 35 [2000]: 595-600.)