The January 27 Washington Post featured a 3-part series on aging. (Free registration is required to view the WP articles.)

In No Country for Old People? Marc Freedman discusses “encore careers” for baby boomers. Freedman has also written a book, Encore: Work that Matters in the Second Half of Life.

In The New Alone, Elizabeth Marquardt discusses how family configurations (divorce, remarriage, “re-divorce”, single-parent childbearing) affect care in old age. Also see Divorce Foretells Child’s Future Care For Elderly Parent (a news story about Adam Davey’s work) and Marquardt’s book about her work with sociologist Norval Glenn, Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce.

In A Hidden Crime, Marie Therese-Connelly sheds light on elder abuse and our lengthening life spans.

Good marriages help women recover from work stress, according to a study conducted at UCLA. The researchers followed 60 working couples, taking daily surveys and collecting saliva samples to test for cortisol, a hormone released by the body under stress. (Washington Post)

The research will be published in the January issue of Health Psychology.

NPR’s “Your Health” this morning focused on emerging adulthood. Read a transcript of the segment or listen at npr.org.

The story highlights the work of Larry Nelson at Brigham Young University, who surveyed college students and their parents and found that most of the parents did not consider their 18- to 26-year-old children adults.  His work is forthcoming in the Journal of Family Psychology.

After 14 years of decline, the teen birth rate increased significantly between 2005 and 2006, according to the National Center for Health Statistics (Washington Post).  The statistics are included in a new NCHS report, Births: Preliminary Data for 2006.

Parents are taking a more active role in the lives of their children than they did 10 years ago, according to data released today by the US Census Bureau. The data are from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, and detailed tables are available in A Child’s Day: 2004.

Vietnamese families prefer boys over girls, and the sex ratio at birth is 110 boys for every 100 girls, according to a new UN report (AP). This imbalance could lead to increased violence against women, trafficking, and a “marriage squeeze” in a region where brides are already scarce, the report says.

Citation: Sex-Ratio Imbalance in Asia: Trends, Consequences and Policy Responses (2007). UNFPA.

Using Census and Survey Data to Estimate Poverty and Inequality for Small Areas (PDF) by Alessandro Tarozzi and Angus Deaton (June 2007, Princeton University Research Program in Development Studies)

Mothers’ Residential Mobility Following the Birth of a Child (PDF; Fragile Families Research Brief, Princeton Center for Research on Child Wellbeing)

The Effects of Work-Conditioned Transfers on Marriage and Child Well-Being: A Review by Jeffrey Grogger & Lynn Karoly (NBER Working Paper No. 13485, October 2007)

The stereotype may be that women are the ones who want children, but a new study suggests that US women are more open to remaining childless than men are. Using data from two national surveys (National Survey of Families and Households and General Social Survey), researchers at the University of Florida in Gainesville found that women had more positive views of childlessness than men did. (Reuters Health)

Citation: Tanya Koropeckyj-Cox & Gretchen Pendell (2007). The gender gap in attitudes about childlessness in the United States. Journal of Marriage and Family 69(4): 899–915. (Available online to the Penn State community)

A study of Ariaal men in Kenya is the first outside North America to observe that single men have higher levels of testosterone than married men (Science Blog).

Citation: Peter B. Gray, Peter T. Ellison, and Benjamin C. Campbell (2007). Testosterone and marriage among Ariaal Men of Northern Kenya. Current Anthropology 48(5): 750-755. (Available online to the Penn State community)

In May 2007 the Urban Institute sponsored Public and Private Roles in the Workplace: What are the Next Steps in Supporting Working Families?, a roundtable involving business leaders, practitioners, national policy experts, researchers, and advocates. Papers from the roundtable are available online.