Four experts explain why Americans are turning against single mothers, after years of growing acceptance — What do you think of single women raising children on their own — is it a good thing for society, a bad thing, or do you think it doesn’t make much difference? In 2018 and again in 2021, a representative national sample of close to 10,000 adults in the U.S…

Would anything change for this single mom or her son if she just started wearing a wedding ring? — [Bella’s intro: This is the second of a 2-part guest post by Amy Andrada. The first part is here. As you may recall, Amy, a single parent, is trying to figure out why the other kids don’t play with her son and why the other parents are not so friendly…

She was the only single mom. Her son was excluded from sleepovers and birthday parties. Were the two connected? — [Bella’s intro: In 2017, Amy Andrada, a single mom, wrote an intriguing story about a question her son asked her. Over the years, I’ve wanted to share it with other people many times. The site where I originally published it as a guest post has mostly been dismantled, so I’m…

Other people should stop calling singles selfish, too. Until we share a deeper understanding of what self-ish can mean. — Selfish. That’s the insult that has been hurled at single people for all the decades I’ve been studying single people, and surely a whole lot longer than that. It is bad enough when other people call single people selfish. That’s infuriating. But too many single people are fully complicit. They…

Single people are more generous with their time, money, and caring, but they shouldn’t have to prove anything — I’m tired of single people getting labeled as selfish, and I’m even more exasperated when single people do that to themselves — or when they do it in a way that is meant to be derogatory. …

Who are the happily isolated and the miserably connected? — One of the biggest misconceptions about loneliness is that people who are “isolated” according to some objective measure (for example, they live alone) must also be lonely. …

Is your partner your everything? Is that romantic? Maybe it’s risky — Who are the people who are important to you now? That was the key question that motivated a study of the personal communities of people in contemporary Britain. Think about the question as it applies to your life. The people can be from any categories — family, friends, spouse/partner, coworkers…

A ban on co-living in Kansas sparked outrage; it is not just happening there. — When I was researching my book How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century, I asked many people how they would like to live if they could choose any way at all. One popular fantasy was the Golden Girls model — a group of people would…

Introversion is not just the opposite of extroversion; there are 5 varieties — There is so much more to introversion than I ever imagined — and I even published research on introversion many years ago. …