In Brief

NO KIDS According to sociologists at Rutgers University's National Marriage Project, modern marriage is becoming more about romance and the search for a soul mate than about child rearing and family. At the end of the 19th century, 75% of American households included children under the age of 18. By the 1960s only 48.7% of families had kids living at home, and by 1998 that number had dropped to 33.9%.

EQUAL WORK Married couples who live together before the wedding share household chores more evenly than couples who don't cohabit before tying the knot--at least in Australia. A study at the University of Queensland found that married couples use a more traditional division of labor, with the woman doing the housework and the man taking on the more manly outdoor tasks. Cohabiting couples, however, tend to have a more egalitarian and liberal arrangement, and many of those patterns carry over into the marriage.

CHILDHOOD TRAUMAS New research from the University of California, San Francisco, and Children's Hospital Oakland has found that post-traumatic stress syndrome affects children as young as age 7 more often than previously believed and for longer than parents think, even after minor accidents like bike crashes and falls. Postaccident, parents should be on the lookout for a change in grades, loss of concentration and increased tearfulness or jumpiness.