1. Splitting? 79% of Marital Separations End in Divorce, USA Today

“Separation is very common and is more common than immediate divorce. . . Most separations last one year or less, but a few drag on a decade or more before ending in divorce. . . The decision to separate is driven by time spent in the first marriage, and for women, by the presence of young children.”

2. Should We Call It Quits? A New Kind of Couples Counseling, Today Health

“Around 30 percent of the couples coming into marriage counseling are mixed agenda couples,” he says. “Divorce is on the table for one of the parties. Traditional marriage counseling has no way to deal with those people. It’s been area of frustration for a lot of marriage counselors.”

3.  A National Trust, In the True Sense, The Marriage Foundation

“Our biggest problem when promoting  marriage in general and this Foundation in particular is one of presentation. Let me say, for the umpteenth time: This is not going to be a cosy club for the smug and self satisfied of middle England but, we hope, the start of a national movement with the aim of changing attitudes across the board from the very top to the bottom of society, and thus improve the lives of us all, especially children.”

4. Octomom: Her Children, Her Choice and Our Responsibility, Huffington Post

The problem is that Ms. Suleman, like many others, has chosen to view fatherhood as merely a biological transaction. In a culture where choice trumps all, who can “cast the first stone” at a woman who undervalues the need for children to have a physically and emotionally present father in their lives?

5. Who Says “I Love You” First in a Relationship?, Science of Relationships

But recent research demonstrates that in fact, it’s the men who are more likely to say “I love you” first in relationships. Not only that, but hearing “I love you” from a romantic partner for the first time makes men even happier than it makes women. And although this may not jive with gender stereotypes, it makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary perspective.

6. Fathers Who Fail Costly for Families, Economies, but Dads Can Bounce Back, Deseret News

When fathers are involved in the lives of their children,” [The National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse] notes, “especially their education, their children learn more, perform better in school and exhibit healthier behavior. Even when fathers do not share a home with their children, their active involvement can have a lasting and positive impact.”

7. New Research Finds College Grads More Likely To Get Married, Sociology Degree Programs

Generally, the results revealed that educated women did not marry as early in life as their lesser-educated counterparts, but soon caught up and surpassed their numbers following pursuits in higher education. Reasons for this vary, but one primary theory is that educated women in the past were not viewed as “marriageable” by men who were threatened by a partner as smart – or smarter than – themselves.

For more, see here.

In which case, they should prepare themselves to lose a generation. And when that happens, they can blame the cruel god they choose to worship for that too.

The best advice anyone could give a dad preparing for a custody battle is to become as active as possible in the lives of your children and to document everything.

or

Feuding Couples Use Spy Gadgets to Snoop

And it’s just another day.

The Australian Study of Child Health in Same-Sex Families aims to investigate the physical, mental and social wellbeing of 750 children belonging to about 500 parents. It will involve surveys and interviews to score the children on a large range of measures.

Lead researcher from Melbourne University, Dr Simon Crouch, said although there were likely to be thousands of children with same-sex attracted parents in Australia, very few local studies had ever looked at whether their family circumstances affected their wellbeing and when they had, they were small. Furthermore, he said most studies of such children had been done in northern European countries and the US and they tended to focus on children of lesbian mothers at the expense of those belonging to gay men, bisexuals and transgender people.

They’re asking people to volunteer for the study.

Sperm donors are no more likely to carry genetic diseases than anybody else, but they can father a far greater number of children: 50, 100 or even 150, each a potential inheritor of flawed genes, and each a vector for making those genes more pervasive in the general population.

Even as men have made great strides as fathers, however, they can find themselves rudderless as spouses. “We’re getting a new cultural script for a ‘new dad’ but not for a ‘new husband,’ ” says W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project. “That married people with children now often refer to themselves as a ‘stay-at-home mom’ or ‘stay-at-home dad’ instead of as ‘wife’ or ‘husband’ signals that we now prioritize parenthood over marriage itself.”

For more, see State of Our Unions 2011, When Baby Makes Three: How Parenthood Makes Life Meaningful and Marriage Makes Parenthood Bearable.