Many of the young aspire to happy marriages and dot-com fortunes but end up in guarded love and okay-for-now jobs.

The influx of women into paid work and her increased power raise a woman's aspirations and hopes for equal treatment at home. Her lower wage and status at work and the threat of divorce reduce what she presses for and actually expects.

Children born of married parents in America face a higher risk of seeing them break up than children born of unmarried parents in Sweden.

Three factors--the belief that child care is female work, the failure of ex-husbands to support their children, and higher male wages at work--have taken the economic rug from under that half of married women who divorce.

Even when couples share more equitably in the work at home, women do two-thirds of the daily jobs at home, like cooking and cleaning up--jobs that fix them into a rigid routine. Most women cook dinner and most men change the oil in the family car. But dinner needs to be prepared every evening around six o'clock, whereas the car oil needs to be changed every six months, any day around that time, any time that day.... Men thus have more control over when they make their contributions than women do.

Just as the archetype of the supermom--the woman who can do it all--minimizes the real needs of women, so too the archetype of the"superkid" minimizes the real needs of children. It makes it all right to treat a young child as if he or she were older.

Many of the young aspire to happy marriages and dot-com fortunes but end up in guarded love and okay-for-now jobs.