"One-third of Americans are living with extreme stress and nearly half of Americans (48 percent) believe that their stress has increased over the past five years. Stress is taking a toll on people - contributing to health problems, poor relationships and lost productivity at work, according to a new national survey released today by the American Psychological Association (APA).

Money and work continue as the leading causes of stress for three quarters of Americans, a dramatic increase over the 59 percent reporting the same sources of stress in 2006. The survey also found that the housing crisis is having an effect on many, with half of Americans (51 percent) citing rent or mortgage costs as sources of stress this year.

Nearly half of all Americans report that stress has a negative impact on both their personal and professional lives. About one-third (31 percent) of employed adults have difficulty managing work and family responsibilities and 35 percent cite jobs interfering with their family or personal time as a significant source of stress. Stress causes more than half of Americans (54 percent) to fight with people close to them. One in four people report that they have been alienated from a friend or family member because of stress, with 8 percent connecting stress to divorce or separation."

"Stress is such a common term that we might tend to trivialize it, assuming it's a convenient fiction for the weak who do not wish to do their best. Such an attitude would be a mistake. Stress is real, it is increasing and it can be highly pathogenic. While a life of no-stress is fatal and a life of low-stress is boring, a life of hyperstress is toxic to health, relationships and faith. God has created us enormously adaptable. Once we exceed our limits, however, the adaptability mechanism breaks down. Dysfunction results. The modern stress epidemic is not a single-point source problem, meaning we need to be vigilant in many directions."

Divorced Mom, Depressed Teen 

Adolescents often pay a high price for their parents' marital failures.  They typically pay an even higher price for their parents' nonmarital experiments with cohabitation.  The high emotional cost of dubious parental unions is all too evident in a study recently published in Demography by sociologist Susan L. Brown of Bowling Green State University.

To assess just how adolescents fare in various family circumstances, Brown looks at data collected from 11,201 adolescents attending 80 American high schools and middle schools.  These data enable Brown to evaluate the effects on adolescents of a family-structure transition (typically a parental divorce or remarriage).  "Adolescents who experience a family transition," Brown writes, "tend to report higher levels of delinquency and depressive symptoms and lower levels of school engagement relative to those residing with two biological parents."

Further statistical analysis establishes that the negative effect upon adolescents of having experienced a family transition "does not differ significantly from [that of] residing in a stable single-mother family for all three outcomes [i.e., delinquency, depression, and school engagement] nor does it differ from [that of residing in] a stable married stepfamily or stable cohabiting stepfamily for delinquency and depression."    

In other words, stability in non-traditional households produces no better results for teens than does a family transition.

Not all family transitions, however, yield the same adolescent results. 

Brown's statistics reveal, for instance, that moving from a single-mother family into a married-couple stepfamily is "not significantly associated with [changes in] adolescent well-being."   However, these statistics clearly establish that "moving from a single-mother family into a cohabiting stepfamily is associated with increased delinquent behavior and decreased school engagement." 

The distress and confusion teens experience when living in a non-traditional household or when living through a shifting household make it all the more tragic that "the share of children residing with two biological parents has been steadily declining [in recent years], and the proportion of children residing in stepfamilies or families formed outside of marriage, including single-parent and cohabiting families, are at all-time highs."