Citings and Sightings

The birth rate in the United States hasn’t been this low in 100 years, leading social scientists to speculate on the role the Great Recession might be playing in family planning. The Associated Press reports:

The birth rate dropped for the second year in a row since the recession began in 2007. Births fell 2.6 percent last year even as the population grew, numbers released Friday by the National Center for Health Statistics show.

“It’s a good-sized decline for one year. Every month is showing a decline from the year before,” said Stephanie Ventura, the demographer who oversaw the report.

The birth rate, which takes into account changes in the population, fell to 13.5 births for every 1,000 people last year. That’s down from 14.3 in 2007 and way down from 30 in 1909, when it was common for people to have big families.

A sociologist explains how the falling Dow might relate to declining birth rates:

“When the economy is bad and people are uncomfortable about their financial future, they tend to postpone having children. We saw that in the Great Depression the 1930s and we’re seeing that in the Great Recession today,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University.

“It could take a few years to turn this around,” he added.

The birth rate dipped below 20 per 1,000 people in 1932 and did not rise above that level until the early 1940s. Recent recessions, in 1981-82, 1990-91 and 2001, all were followed by small dips in the birth rate, according to CDC figures.

Despite this trend, there is no need to panic.

Cherlin said the U.S. birth rate “is still higher than the birth rate in many wealthy countries and we also have many immigrants entering the country. So we do not need to be worried yet about a birth dearth” that would crimp the nation’s ability to take care of its growing elderly population.

A media shout out for some of the great work being presented at the American Sociological Association’s Annual Meeting right now in Atlanta…

The Chicago Tribune reports on a recent study that contradicts the common perception that kids without siblings have worse social skills than their peers from larger families.

The new study questioned students in grades 7 through 12 at more than 100 schools. This time researchers found that only children were selected as friends by schoolmates just as often as peers with brothers and sisters.

“Anyone who didn’t have that peer interaction at home with siblings gets a lot of opportunities to develop social skills as they go through school,” a co-author of the study, Donna Bobbitt-Zeher, said in a news release.

As Dora the Explorer celebrates 10 years on the air, the LA Times comments on her broader social significance. The children’s show features a young Latina heroine who travels through the jungle with her friends, speaking some Spanish, and solving simple math and word problems.

The idea was to foster pride among Latino children and familiarity with Latino culture among English speakers, but only indirectly as part of an entertainment show.

“It was just about creating a show we thought kids would love,” said Chris Gifford, who created the series along with Valerie Walsh Valdes and Eric Weiner. “We didn’t begin to think how long it might go for.”

Dora, however, has grown much larger than these seemingly modest origins:

Amid these warm-hearted adventures, Dora became a pop-culture superstar, a lucrative franchise and a force that helped shift the globalized juvenile television landscape that has become increasingly multicultural and bilingual. Dora, in some eyes, also became a poster child for immigration and the target of anti-immigrant sentiment.

The animated series is now broadcast in more than 100 countries — it’s the No. 1-rated preschool show in many of them, including France — and dubbed in 30 languages, such as Russian, Mandarin and German, with Dora mostly teaching English (in some cases Spanish).

“What’s been innovative about the show is it wasn’t conceptualized or presented as a Latino-themed show,” said Chon Noriega, director of UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center. “It was an educational series for kids that happened to have a Latino girl as the lead character. And it didn’t shy away from having a character that spoke Spanish. That allowed it to do something that was very unique.”

Dora has gone on to enjoy considerable success, culturally and economically (generating more than $11 billion in retail sales alone).

“Dora isn’t just a show; she’s DVDs, clothes, lunchboxes,” said Karen Sternheimer, an associate professor of sociology at USC and author of “It’s Not the Media: The Truth About Pop Culture’s Influence on Children.” “Nickelodeon has been very savvy about getting their characters into kids’ lives through a number of different platforms. They’ve taken branding to another level.”

The main character wasn’t originally going to be Latina, but:

The idea for an ethnic rebirth sprang after Johnson [a Nickelodeon exec responsible for the program] attended an industry conference during which the underrepresentation of Latinos in media was discussed.

The 2000 census showed that Latino communities were the nation’s fastest growing — and the biggest five-year Latino age group is infants to preschoolers. Yet data have long shown that Latinos are underrepresented in prime-time TV: UCLA research found that 4% of prime-time’s regular characters in 2004 were Latino, while Latinos make up about 15% of the U.S. population.

For years, the main source for children’s multicultural TV was PBS’ “Sesame Street.” …Dora’s “success really reflects a change in the media environment for children over the years,” Sternheimer said. “It’s a great reflection of the shifting multicultural nature of our society.”

Since “Dora,” the children’s TV landscape has embraced diversity. PBS Kids revamped “Dragon Tales” in 2005 to include Enrique, who is Colombian. “Jay Jay the Jet Plane” has added a bilingual plane named Lina. “Dora” also launched a spinoff, “Go Diego Go,” starring Dora’s 8-year-old cousin, in 2005.

Sociologists are among the experts who consult for the show:

Schoolteachers, sociologists and historians are all brought in to advise on “Dora” episodes. More than 20 cultural consultants have worked on the show to make Dora’s world reflect a pan-Latino culture that’s not just tortillas and mariachi music, Johnson said. “It was important for us that Dora represented the idea that being multicultural was super cool,” she said.

Cortés, who’s serves as a cultural consultant on the show, said not giving Dora a specific heritage made that idea a reality. “Not knowing where she was from allowed her to be a source of pride for anyone of Latino background,” he said. “She’s more relatable if you don’t peg her down.”

So, is it all a rosy animated multicultural picture? A sociologist, per usual, complicates the story:

“The show definitely homogenizes the many different origin groups that are comprised within the Latino ethnicity,” said Jody Vallejo, an assistant professor of sociology at USC. “So Latino children are getting a very broad view of who they are. At the same time, it does allow people from those different origins to make her their own character, to take ownership. For non-Latinos who watch the show, it makes Latinos more relatable. It demonstrates that bilingualism is not that bad. But it makes it seem like Latinos come from a monolithic culture.”

The Washington Post recently ran a column written by Middlebury sociologist Margaret K. Nelson. Nelson reports on potential implications of “helicopter parenting” (the constantly hovering style of super-involved middle class parents) in the lives of the parents themselves, especially mothers.

Helicopter parenting is, to put it mildly, more time-consuming and more emotionally demanding than other parenting styles. And much of its work falls (as the work of parenting always has) on women. Since 1965, the amount of time mothers spend on all child-care activities has risen, even though the majority of mothers are now in the labor force; the increase has been particularly sharp among highly educated mothers.

So it’s not just that today’s professional mothers are holding down what would, in the 1960s, have been two separate jobs — one inside the home, the other outside it. It’s that the first of those jobs is a lot more taxing than it used to be. Mothers who try to live up to the new parenting standards of the professional middle class seem to have few options: They can overwork themselves, or they can leave the workforce.

While some mothers do leave the workforce, many do not. Their intense devotion to building a relationship with their kids and working outside the home can be understandably taxing on their other relationships, such as friendships, marriages, and community involvement.

For those helicopter mothers who don’t leave the workplace, personal relationships seem to be the first thing to go. Working a demanding job while paying painstaking attention to one’s children leaves little time for maintaining a marriage…

[A]ccording to sociologists Suzanne Bianchi, John Robinson and Melissa Milkie, adults in 2000 spent less time with their spouses than adults did in 1975, as they spent more time at work and more time with their children. The higher divorce rate among women with high-pressure careers could therefore be both a cause and a consequence of intense devotion to one’s children: These mothers may find that the only reliable, and persistent, relationships are those with their kids.

When people turn inward to their families, their communities also pay a high price. In a series of studies, sociologists Naomi Gerstel, Sally Gallagher and Natalia Sarkisian have shown that, parenting practices notwithstanding, marriage is a greedy institution. Compared with singles, married people are less likely to visit relatives, less likely to take care of elderly parents and less involved with neighbors and friends.

I suspect that the tendency to turn inward must be even more intense among hyper-vigilant parents. And this withdrawal may extend to parents’ broader social and civic engagement…

And to friendship. The time married parents spend visiting with friends and relatives outside the nuclear family has declined dramatically: Married fathers spent almost 40 percent less time and married mothers spent almost a third less time socializing in 2000 than they did in 1965, according to Bianchi, Robinson and Milkie. I can’t help but think that the new intensity of daily life is part of the problem. Parents seem to have few opportunities to pursue friendships unless they are friendships that take little extra time (as with co-workers or other parents on the sideline of a child’s sporting event).

Many of the helicopter mothers I’ve spoken to have told me, often with pride in their voices, that their daughters are their best friends. At first, I wondered why these women — some of them in their late 40s or 50s — wouldn’t prefer to spend their free time with people their own age. But as I looked more closely at the way they are tackling parenthood, I understood: They have no free time.

The New York Times explores social science research about a new stage of life: emerging adulthood.

[A] growing body of research shows that the real Peter Pans are not the boomers, but the generations that have followed. For many, by choice or circumstance, independence no longer begins at 21.

Young people in the U.S., it seems, are taking their time reaching the traditional milestones of adulthood:

People between 20 and 34 are taking longer to finish their educations, establish themselves in careers, marry, have children and become financially independent, said Frank F. Furstenberg, who leads the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood, a team of scholars who have been studying this transformation.

“A new period of life is emerging in which young people are no longer adolescents but not yet adults,” Mr. Furstenberg said.

National surveys reveal that an overwhelming majority of Americans, including younger adults, agree that between 20 and 22, people should be finished with school, working and living on their own. But in practice many people in their 20s and early 30s have not yet reached these traditional milestones.

Marriage and parenthood — once seen as prerequisites for adulthood — are now viewed more as lifestyle choices, according to a new report released by Princeton University and the Brookings Institution.

One component of this shift is that young people are relying on their parents longer than previous generations. While parents used to invest most in their kids during the teen years, parental support now continues into the 20s.

In the late 1990s, however, parents’ spending patterns began to shift so that the flow of money was greatest when their children were either very young or in their mid-20s.”

More people in their 20s are also living with their parents. About one-fourth of 25-year-old white men lived at home in 2007 — before the latest recession — compared with one-fifth in 2000 and less than one-eighth in 1970.

The sizable contribution from parents not only strains already stressed middle-class and poor families, researchers argue, but could also affect institutions that have traditionally supported young adults in this period, like nonresidential and community colleges and national service programs.

Some young people are not just delaying milestones, but are redefining what it means to be an adult:

For many, marriage has disappeared as a definition of traditional adulthood, as more and more younger people live together. Today 40 percent of births are to unmarried mothers, an increase from 28 percent in 1990.

At the same time, more women are remaining childless, either by choice or circumstance. Twenty percent of women in their 40s do not have children, Mr. Furstenberg said, pointing out that “not having children would have been considered bizarre or tragic in the ’50s; now it’s a lifestyle choice.”

Sociologists have found good news just in time for Fathers Day: nonresident fathers are spending more time with their kids in recent years. According to the New York Daily News:

Deadbeat dads are scarcer than ever these days, which is good news for the 50% of American kids who won’t live with their father for part of their childhood.

“There are fathers that are very involved,” Pennsylvania State University sociologist and demographer Valarie King told USA Today. “There are some that are not. We have this image of the nonresident dad, and for some, that’s the deadbeat dad.”

The amount of time nonresident dads spend with their children has increased over the past several decades.

When Penn State sociologist and demographer Paul Amato researched changes in nonresident father-child contact over the past 30 years, he found substantial increases in the amount of contact. The percentage of fathers who reported no contact with their children went from 37% in 1976 to 29% in 2002.

Amato, whose work was published in the journal Demography, learned that nonresident dads’ involvement in their kids’ lives varied. Some 38% were highly involved, but 32% were rarely involved. The highly involved dads tended to have kids who were older at the time of the breakup. They were likely to have been married at one time and to have paid child support.

How well fathers and mothers get along can be a significant factor in the level of nonresident father involvement.

Perhaps the best predictor of whether a dad will stay involved, according to Philip Cowan, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California Berkeley, is if he gets along with the mother.

“They don’t have to love each other or like each other,” Cowan told USA Today. “But they do need to co-parent and collaborate.”

The New York Times features an in-depth look at paternity leave in Sweden:

From trendy central Stockholm to this village in the rugged forest south of the Arctic Circle, 85 percent of Swedish fathers take parental leave. Those who don’t face questions from family, friends and colleagues. As other countries still tinker with maternity leave and women’s rights, Sweden may be a glimpse of the future.

…

Companies have come to expect employees to take leave irrespective of gender, and not to penalize fathers at promotion time. Women’s paychecks are benefiting and the shift in fathers’ roles is perceived as playing a part in lower divorce rates and increasing joint custody of children.

In perhaps the most striking example of social engineering, a new definition of masculinity is emerging.

“Many men no longer want to be identified just by their jobs,” said Bengt Westerberg, who long opposed quotas but as deputy prime minister phased in a first month of paternity leave in 1995. “Many women now expect their husbands to take at least some time off with the children.”

Birgitta Ohlsson, European affairs minister, put it this way: “Machos with dinosaur values don’t make the top-10 lists of attractive men in women’s magazines anymore.” …“Now men can have it all — a successful career and being a responsible daddy,” she added. “It’s a new kind of manly. It’s more wholesome.”

Of course, these policies are not without controversy and do come at a price. Sociologists, along with several other social scientists, weigh in:

The least enthusiastic [about paternity leave], in fact, are often mothers. In a 2003 survey by the Social Insurance Agency, the most commonly cited reason for not taking more paternity leave, after finances, was mother’s preference, said Ann-Zofie Duvander, a sociologist at Stockholm University who worked at the agency at the time.

…

Taxes account for 47 percent of gross domestic product, compared with 27 percent in the United States and 40 percent in the European Union overall. The public sector, famous for family-friendly perks, employs one in three workers, including half of all working women. Family benefits cost 3.3 percent of G.D.P., the highest in the world along with Denmark and France, said Willem Adema, senior economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Yet Sweden looks well balanced: at 2.1 percent and 40 percent of G.D.P., respectively, public deficit and debt levels are a fraction of those in most developed economies these days, testimony perhaps to fiscal management born of a banking crisis and recession in the 1990s. High productivity and political consensus keep the system going.

“There are remarkably few complaints,” said Linda Haas, a professor of sociology at Indiana University currently at the University of Goteborg. With full-time preschool guaranteed at a maximum of about $150 a month and leave paid at 80 percent of salary up to $3,330 a month, “people feel that they are getting their money’s worth.”

Despite the challenges that Sweden’s extended parental leave may present for some employers, the trend doesn’t shows signs of slowing:

But in a sign that the broader cultural shift has acquired a dynamic of its own, a survey by Ms. Haas and Philip Hwang, a psychology professor at Goteborg University, shows that 41 percent of companies reported in 2006 that they had made a formal decision to encourage fathers to take parental leave, up from only 2 percent in 1993.

Check out the rest of the article.

Women who have kids tend to earn less than women who don’t, a phenomenon known as the “motherhood penalty.” But USA Today reports that  that when a woman has children makes a difference.

Researchers at the University of Maryland in College Park and the University of California at Los Angeles reviewed 35 years of data from some 2,200 women born between 1944 and 1954, and found that women who had kids in the early- to mid-20s or even younger didn’t fare as well economically as those who delayed.

Sociologist Joan Kahn, one of the study’s authors, comments:

“Women who delay childbearing end up as successful economically as women who didn’t have children, and we look at it basically throughout their adult years — well into their 50s,” she says.

The point, she says, is that women who are younger when they have kids and attempt to get back into the workforce later may not have that up-front investment in education and training, which those who have kids later benefit from. They earned equivalent wages and had higher status occupations just like women who were childless.

This week, the New York Times explores the increasing number of 20- and 30-somethings living with their parents:

In 1980, 11 percent of 25-to-34-year-olds were living in multi-generational households. By 2008, 20 percent were.These sons and daughters of baby boomers living with their parents again have been labeled boomerangers.

The biggest increases were registered in these categories: nonwhite, foreign-born young men who had never been married, and college graduates. …

Last year, 37 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds were unemployed or no longer looking for work. Ten percent of young adults, ages 18 to 34, said in the Pew survey they had moved back with their parents because of the recession. Two in 10 are full-time students, a quarter are unemployed, and about a third said they had lived on their own before returning home.

Commentary from CUNY sociologist:

“As the great recession has deepened and the job market has become tighter and tighter for young people, most especially those from minority backgrounds, more and more return or never leave the parental nest,” said Prof. Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College of the City University of New York. “If such a trend continues or deepens, the economic crisis may be creating a true ‘Failure to Launch’ generation.”

Read more.