SEATING IS LIMITED. To reserve a seat, please RSVP to info@americanvalues.org OR 212-246-3942. Program will begin promptly at 6:00 p.m. RESERVATIONS REQUIRED.

Copies of State of Our Unions will be available.

About the Report:

Married parents are more likely than their childless peers to feel their lives have a sense of meaning and purpose. And parents who are married generally experience more happiness and less depression than parents who are unmarried. At the same time, studies show that parenthood is typically associated with lower levels of marital happiness. But there is a substantial minority of husbands and wives who do not experience parenthood as an obstacle to marital happiness. These women and men navigate the shoals of parenthood without succumbing to comparatively low levels of marital happiness or high levels of marital instability. What is their secret?

About the Panelists:

W. Bradford Wilcox is director of the National Marriage Project and associate professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. He has published articles on marriage, cohabitation, parenting, and fatherhood in The American Sociological Review, Social Forces, The Journal of Marriage and Family and The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, and is now researching the effect that gender norms, children, commitment, and religion have on the quality of contemporary American marriages.

Elizabeth Marquardt is editor of FamilyScholars.org, where she also blogs. She is vice president for family studies and director of the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values. Marquardt is author of Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce. Based on the first nationally representative study of grown children of divorce in the U.S., she argues that while an amicable divorce is better than a bitter one, even amicable divorces profoundly shape the inner lives of children.

David and Amber Lapp are the co-investigators of the Love and Marriage in Middle America project at the Institute for American Values, an ethnographic inquiry into how working class young adults in one Ohio town form families. David and Amber are now writing a book based on those interviews, tentatively titled Love Like Crazy: How America's Forgotten Middle Form Families. Their writing on marriage and families has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, National Review Online, and First Things. They are a young married couple and, as of October 2011, the parents of Daniel.

About the Host:

David Blankenhorn is the founder and president of the Institute for American Values, a nonpartisan organization devoted to strengthening families and civil society in the U.S. and the world. Blankenhorn is the author of Fatherless America (1995), The Future of Marriage (2007), and Thrift: A Cyclopedia (2008) and the co-editor of eight volumes, including Franklin's Thrift: The Lost History of an American Virtue (2009). A frequent lecturer, Blankenhorn's articles have appeared in scores of publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The Public Interest, First Things, and Christianity Today. He has been profiled by the New York Times, USA Today, CBS Evening News and other news organizations, and has been featured on numerous national television programs, including Oprah, 20/20, CBS This Morning, The Today Show, Charlie Rose, ABC Evening News, and C-SPAN's Washington Perspectives.