children

The Wall Street Journal reports on a new study about children and housework out of the University of Maryland, and the surprising trend that they are doing very little of it. 

WSJ quips: 

Quiz for the day: How much time each day, on average, does a 6- to 12-year-old child spend on household chores?

If you guessed more than a half-hour, you’re wrong. Children are spending a mere 24 minutes a day doing cleaning, laundry and other housework — a 12% decline since 1997 and a 25% drop from 1981 levels, says Sandra Hofferth, director of the Maryland Population Research Center at the University of Maryland, based on a forthcoming study of 1,343 children. In the glacial realm of sociological change, that amounts to a free fall.

And another sociologist’s findings are considered…

Pitching in at home has become a crucial marriage-preservation skill for young men. Studies show parents still assign more housework to girls than boys. Yet these same young women hope as adults to find men who will help out; 90% of 60 women ages 18 to 32 studied by Kathleen Gerson, a New York University sociology professor, said they hoped to share housework and child care with spouses “in a committed, mutually supportive and egalitarian way.” After controlling for other factors, U.S. marriages tend to be more stable when men participate more in domestic tasks, says a study of 506 U.S. couples published in 2006 in the American Journal of Sociology.

And another’s…

Housework has unique value in instilling a habit of serving others. Analyzing data on more than 3,000 adults, Alice Rossi, a proessor emerita of sociology at University of Massachusetts Amherst, found doing household chores as a child was a major, independent predictor of whether a person chose to do volunteer or other community work as an adult. Thus for parents who value service, housework is an important teaching tool.

Read the full story.

A posting from Judith Warner on the New York Times blog ‘Domestic Disturbances‘ titled, ‘The Other Home Equity Crisis,’ takes a look at how women are increasingly affected by job loss in times of economic downturn. As further evidence that the opt-out revolution is a myth, beyond Warner’s book, the article cites a report from Congress that was just recently released.

This week, Congress issued a report, titled “Equality in Job Loss: Women are Increasingly Vulnerable to Layoffs During Recessions,” that may — if read in its entirety — finally, officially and definitively sound a death knell for the story of the Opt-Out Revolution. The report, commissioned by Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, states categorically that mothers are not leaving the workforce to stay home with their kids. They’re being forced out.

Women — all women, mothers or not — were hit “especially hard” hard by the recession of 2001 and the recovery-that-never-really-was, the report states. “Unlike in the recessions of the early 1980s and 1990s, during the 2001 recession, the percent of jobs lost by women often exceeded that of men in the industries hardest hit by the downturn. The lackluster recovery of the 2000s made it difficult for women to regain their jobs — women’s employment rates never returned to their pre-recession peak.”

While prior recessions tended to spare women’s jobs relative to men’s, that trend has been reversed in the current downturn, thanks in part to women’s progress in entering formerly male industries and occupations, and in part to the fact that job sectors like service and retail, which still employ disproportionate numbers of women, have suffered disproportionate losses. And this — not a calling to motherhood — accounts for the fall, starting in 2000, of women’s labor force participation rates.

Read the full post. 

Check out this past Sunday’s episode of ‘Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me,’ on National Public Radio where one of the quiz questions references the work of Contexts Magazine contributor, sociologist Robin Simon.

Listen online.

The Times Online (UK) recently published an article entitled, ‘Paranoia has taken over child protection,’ marking yet another alarming reflection on the fear that grips so many parents in the 21st century.

Times writer India Knight writes,

We don’t even trust ourselves to raise our own children: we need books written by childcare “professionals” and television programmes featuring advice from child-less “experts”. In actual fact we know a great deal more than these charlatans, but since we don’t any longer trust instinct we genuinely believe that our vast repository of knowledge (and that of our mothers, sisters, aunts, grannies, friends) is worthless and that a newborn baby is better off with a strict routine dreamt up by someone with a financial motive.

In a report co-authored with Jennie Bristow a few weeks ago, the sociologist Frank Furedi, lamenting the demise of trust, mentioned as an example a mother whose child was invited over to play at a new friend’s house. The parents reassured the mother that they were “cool” – they’d passed a CRB check. I find this chilling.

Visit Furedi’s website and learn more about this sociologist’s new book.

A recent broadcast from Minnesota Public Radio‘s Midmorning program, titled “Women, Earning Power, and the Economy,” took an in-depth look at the complex factors that determine how women are faring in today’s economy. In an attempt to discern the what has the greatest impact on women’s earning potential, this piece discusses a number of possible reasons beyond conventional explanations such as marital status and number of children.

This broadcast includes commentary from two sociologists: Leslie McCall, professor of sociology at Northwestern University and Maria Kefalas, professor of sociology and director of the Institute for Violence Research and Prevention at St. Joseph’s University.

Listen online.

MSNBC reports on the recent trend towards more mothers undergoing dramatic cosmetic surgery to alter their bodies post-birth.

The trend…

Among women in their 30s, there was a 9 percent to 12 percent rise in tummy tucks and breast surgery between 2005 and 2006. In 2007, 59 percent of American Society of Plastic Surgeons members surveyed said they saw an increase in patients seeking post-childbirth cosmetic surgery procedures in the previous three years. “Many of my patients are young moms who are doing their best to take care of themselves, but their bodies have gone through some irreversible changes that they find discouraging,” says David Stoker, M.D., of Marina Plastic Surgery Associates in Marina del Rey, Calif.

The sociologist’s commentary…

Others point out that many mothers today are not “just” mothers — they have professional and personal lives outside of the home and don’t want to look like the stereotypical mom. They want to feel better about their bodies, and that desire shouldn’t be dismissed or criticized, says sociologist Victoria Pitts-Taylor, Ph.D., author of “Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture” (Rutgers University Press). “I don’t think we should judge women for wanting to look like they did before they got pregnant,” Pitts-Taylor adds. “Social approval is empowering in our society.”

Read on…

Contexts contributor Robin Simon graced the pages of Newsweek recently to offer some comments on the debate as to whether or not having children contributes to or detracts from overall happiness. While Simon’s perspective has garnered some negative attention, her numerous publications on the subject of parenting have brought her significant media attention.

Newsweek’s Lorraine Ali writes,

The most recent comprehensive study on the emotional state of those with kids shows us that the term “bundle of joy” may not be the most accurate way to describe our offspring. “Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers,” says Florida State University’s Robin Simon, a sociology professor who’s conducted several recent parenting studies, the most thorough of which came out in 2005 and looked at data gathered from 13,000 Americans by the National Survey of Families and Households. “In fact, no group of parents—married, single, step or even empty nest—reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It’s such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they’re not.”

Simon’s findings have not always been well-received…

Simon received plenty of hate mail in response to her research (“Obviously Professor Simon hates her kids,” read one), which isn’t surprising. Her findings shake the very foundation of what we’ve been raised to believe is true. In a recent NEWSWEEK Poll, 50 percent of Americans said that adding new children to the family tends to increase happiness levels. Only one in six (16 percent) said that adding new children had a negative effect on the parents’ happiness. But which parent is willing to admit that the greatest gift life has to offer has in fact made his or her life less enjoyable?

Read more.

The latest issue of the New York Times Magazine has a cover story titled “When Mom and Dad Share It All” about the division of labor in American families and how childcare and housework are balanced by working mothers and fathers.

This article notes recent findings from Wisconsin’s National Survey of Families and features commentary from University of Buffalo sociologist, Sampson Lee Blair.

Social scientists know in remarkable detail what goes on in the average American home. And they have calculated with great precision how little has changed in the roles of men and women. Any way you measure it, they say, women do about twice as much around the house as men.

The most recent figures from the University of Wisconsin’s National Survey of Families and Households show that the average wife does 31 hours of housework a week while the average husband does 14 — a ratio of slightly more than two to one. If you break out couples in which wives stay home and husbands are the sole earners, the number of hours goes up for women, to 38 hours of housework a week, and down a bit for men, to 12, a ratio of more than three to one. That makes sense, because the couple have defined home as one partner’s work.

But then break out the couples in which both husband and wife have full-time paying jobs. There, the wife does 28 hours of housework and the husband, 16. Just shy of two to one, which makes no sense at all.

The lopsided ratio holds true however you construct and deconstruct a family. “Working class, middle class, upper class, it stays at two to one,” says Sampson Lee Blair, an associate professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo who studies the division of labor in families.

“And the most sadly comic data is from my own research,” he adds, which show that in married couples “where she has a job and he doesn’t, and where you would anticipate a complete reversal, even then you find the wife doing the majority of the housework.” — New York Times Magazine

A press release this morning reports on new research published in the June issue of the American Sociological Review, which conclude that steep employment gains for women disprove the idea that more women are ‘opting out’ of full-time employment in favor of staying home.

Sociologist Christine Percheski studied employment trends among college-educated women, born between 1906 and 1975. She found that women’s employment levels had sharply increased and has especially changed for mothers with young children and women employed in traditionally male fields. She also concludes that the gap between childless women and mothers has diminished over time.

And debunking the ‘opting out’ myth…

“Despite anecdotal reports of successful working women returning to the home to assume child care responsibilities, less than 8 percent of professional women born since 1956 leave the workforce for a year or more during their prime childbearing years, according to the study.”

Full summary.

The Wall Street Journal reports on a new series of studies about the trend towards young adults moving back home to live with their parents.

WSJ discusses findings highlighted by sociologist Katherine Newman…

“More upper- and middle-income parents, including many who felt pressed for time when their children were growing up, aren’t ready to be ‘finished with them’ by their 20s, says Katherine Newman, a Princeton University sociology professor and one of the project’s 20 researchers. Also, as more students attend college at older ages, parents are coming to regard the 20s as a time of self-discovery.”

And co-investigators…

“Researchers on the project set out to document economic factors driving the trend, but found it’s bigger than the financial causes usually blamed for it. To be sure, rising housing and commuting costs play a role, Dr. Yelowitz found. But neither those factors nor job-market changes fully explain the 25-year trend. The biggest increase in young adults living with parents came in the 1980s, when the labor market generally improved, he found. And rising real housing costs explain only about 15% of the drop in independent living among young adults, which started years before the sharpest run-up in housing.”

Full story.