family

Earlier this week an article in the New York Times reported on new findings that New York City is becoming increasingly diverse… according to recent Census data. The Times reports that “since 2000, the number of young children living in parts of Lower Manhattan has nearly doubled. The poverty rate declined in all but one New York City neighborhood… A majority of Bronx residents are Hispanic. And the number of white people living in Harlem more than tripled, helping to drive up median household income there by nearly 20 percent — the fourth-highest jump in the city.”

These latest findings are the result of new detailed demographic data for smaller areas (district) and the combination of three years of surveys. This work on trends related to race, ethnicity, and education constitutes some of the clearest statistical evidence available. 

The sociologist weighs in…

The latest results [on housing costs, discussed in the article] represent a three-year rolling count by the American Community Survey, a continuing profile of the country compiled by the Census Bureau, from 2005 to 2007.

“It was taken on the eve of a downturn,” said Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College, who analyzed the results for The New York Times. “There’s been a shift in the cities, but can it sustain itself? The increase in children in Manhattan, for example, is fueled by the fact that the parents have a lot of money. But that is tied to the financial industry, directly or indirectly.”

Read more.

See the changes mapped by the Times.

KCBS, a California-based radio station, ran a story this past weekend that featured the work of sociologist Shila Katz, who has worked with the Obama transition team on issues surrounding families on welfare.

The station reports:

When Shila Katz sits down with President Elect Obama’s transition team, she has a message to get across: “Higher education can really be the key to higher wages that will support a family.”

Katz, an assistant professor of sociology at Sonoma State University, has done research about education as a way to get from welfare to work. “Mothers on welfare who are pursuing higher education here in the Bay Area, [who] earn associate degrees and bachelors degrees, find jobs at wages that they never need welfare again.”…“We need to provide welfare services that are actually supportive and will help people get into jobs that will earn wages so that they can support their families and higher education is the key to that.”

Katz worked on the Obama campaign and says that now is the time to enact policies that show what his values are.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE.

A new study suggests that link between obesity in parents and children is the result of both social and genetic factors. This important study, first reported by Reuters, gives equal weight to family lifestyle and genes in determining teenagers’ weight.

“What we do as a family — our family lifestyles — matters for weight. Lifestyles aren’t just about individual behaviors,” study author Dr. Molly A. Martin, Pennsylvania State University in University Park told Reuters Health. The study is the first to demonstrate that the connection between parents and children’s weight is social as well as genetic.

“We had a gut sense that this was known or true, but in the research literature it actually had not been proven,” added Martin, a sociologist who studies families, social inequalities, and adolescent health. Instead, she said, scientists studying behavior and genetics have focused solely on the roles of genes and environment, without trying to separate out the effects of a family’s behavior.

The study was also picked up by US News & World Report, which reported:

Adolescents tended to be heavier in families that frequently missed meals or spent several hours a day in front of the TV or video games, researchers report in a special issue of the American Journal of Sociology.

“My study finds that weight runs in families, but it’s not just because of genetics. What we do together, how we spend our time together, what we eat and how we organize ourselves as family matters,” said study author Molly Martin, an assistant professor of sociology and demography at Pennsylvania State University in University Park.

The methods…

For the new study, Martin included data from more than 2,500 pairs of twins, siblings or half-siblings. She examined numerous factors that could contribute to a teen’s weight status, such as parental obesity, socioeconomic status, parental education levels, birth weight, activity levels and more.

Two factors that emerged as separate from a family’s genetic influence were whether or not families missed meals, and the amount of time they spent watching TV or playing video games.

Read more from Reuters.
Read more from US News & World Report.

The Los Angeles Times reported this weekend on how some multiracial families see Barack Obama as ‘Other’ like them — meaning that Obama’s multiracial identity, not fitting into a single “racial category,” is sometimes best described by the term ‘Other.’ The article tells the stories of several multiracial families who provide commentary on the difficulty of assigning themselves to a single racial category on forms like college applications. The LA Times reports:

Race, however, continues to be a stubborn puzzle. It wasn’t until 2000 that Americans were allowed to check more than one box for race on U.S. census forms. At that time, about 6.83 million people, or 2.4%, checked two or more races on census forms out of a population of about 281 million.

Additional commentary from a sociologist and a demographer helps to clarify this new trend…

Carolyn Liebler, a sociology professor specializing in family, race and ethnicity at the University of Minnesota, said she expected that the numbers of people identifying as multiracial would be higher in 2010 than they were in 2000 “because the number of mixed-raced marriages are going up” and because of Obama.

Tom W. Smith, an expert on race and demographics at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, calls it the “Obama effect.” “He’s made being multiracial salient,” Smith said.

Read more.

USA Today reports on statistics from the Census that indicate “the age at first marriage has been climbing steadily for all racial, ethnic and socioeconomic groups. The median age is now the oldest since the U.S. Census started keeping track in the 1890s: almost 26 for women and almost 28 for men.”

There are general pros and cons for marrying at different times, but there seems to be little agreement…

And as young people wait longer to marry, there is growing debate over whether waiting is a good idea, and if so, how long is best. Those who advocate marriage in the early to mid-20s say that’s the age when the pool of possible mates is larger, it’s when couples can “grow up” together and it’s prime for childbearing. But others favor the late 20s or early 30s, saying maturity makes for happier unions and greater economic security — both of which make divorce less likely.

Sociologist Andrew Cherlin weighs in…

“It’s better not to get married as a teenager,” says sociologist Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University. “Beyond that, I don’t think there’s an ideal age.”

There does seems to be sociological evidence that earlier is better…

A study being drafted by sociologist Norval Glenn of the University of Texas-Austin finds that those who marry in the early to mid-20s are slightly happier and less likely to break up than those who marry in the later 20s, but are significantly more satisfied with their relationships than those who marry at 30 or older.

But marrying later might be best, according to Paul Amato…

But research by sociologist Paul Amato of Pennsylvania State University for a 2007 book he co-wrote suggests quite the opposite. The studies for Alone Together: How Marriage in America Is Changing used different data and different criteria and found distinct benefits to marrying older.

“We found that the delay in marriage was actually a good thing and it actually improved the average marital quality by a fair amount,” he says.

“Older marriages (30s vs. 20s) were more cohesive in the sense they did things more often together as a couple. And couples who married at older ages were less likely to report thinking about divorce or that their marriage was in trouble.”

But ultimately whether or not you are ‘ready’ does seem to matter…

“People are more concerned with their own self-development than they used to be,” [sociologist Andrew] Cherlin says. “People are postponing marriage until everything in their lives is working in order. The order means after you’ve finished your education, perhaps after beginning your career, and increasingly after you’ve lived with your partner. They’re postponing marriage until they think they’re ready for it.”

Read the full story.

USA Today reports on new research which suggests a link between children with ADHD and the likelihood of their parents’ divorce. Researchers William Pelham Jr. and Brian Wymbs of the State University of New York-Buffalo find that a child’s disruptive behavior ‘probably pours fuel on other stresses that spark marital conflict.’

Marilyn Elias reports:

Because ADHD can be inherited, parents often have it too, and that may hinder marriage, says Andrea Chronis-Tuscano, a psychologist at the University of Maryland. If children have ADHD, their mothers are 24 times more likely than other mothers to have it, and fathers are five times more likely, her studies find. Adults with ADHD may be impulsive and find it hard to concentrate or solve problems.

“That can lead to conflict in marriage,” she says, “and a child with ADHD only adds to the stress.”

But the sociologist disagrees…

In other studies, parents of children with ADHD have said they’re less satisfied with marriage. But not all researchers agree that they divorce more. A large Canadian report last year found no higher divorce rate for parents of children with ADHD. Pelham’s group may have particularly bad symptoms because their parents sought treatment, says Lisa Strohschein, a sociologist at University of Alberta who did the Canadian study.

Read more.

This morning USA Today covered a new study by the Pew Research Center that surveyed 1,260 individuals about decision-making in the ‘typical American home.’ The study found that women had the final say in decisions at home in 43% of the couples.

USA Today called in a sociologist…

Sociologist and gender studies expert Michael Kimmel of Stony Brook University-New York says the responses suggest the path for couples is “far grayer” these days as couples weave in more equality.

“There’s far more fluidity in family decision-making around these topics than ever before, and that’s the real news,” he says. “Sometimes she makes the plans, sometimes he does. It’s who has the spare time.”

Kimmel offers three ways to interpret the findings: “One is ‘Only 43% of women make most of the decisions.’ Another way is ‘Couples are in their homes navigating and negotiating equality far more than ever before.’ A third way to read it is ‘In both very traditional couples and in very egalitarian couples, women’s sphere of influence has always been the family purse. She pays the bills, decides which dinner parties they go to. He goes along with family projects.’ “

Read the full story.

The Telegraph (UK) reported today on a new results from a survey by parenting website Netmums which revealed that one in six mothers favored one child over others. The website surveyed more than 1,000 parents, and found that nearly 20 percent of them said that they love one of their children more than the others. Netmums also revealed that one-third of parents said they loved all their children equally, and half said they love their children equally but ‘in different ways.’ And of course, they couldn’t resist seeking out sociological commentary…

The Telegraph reports:

There can be negative impacts to having a favourite child, however, which can lead to undesirable personality traits in later life for both the child itself and other siblings.

Dr Martina Klett-Davies, a sociologist specialising in families and sibling relationships at the London School of Economics (LSE), said: “If there is a favourite child, they probably become too spoiled and find it difficult in later life.

“But the imbalance could prepare siblings for unfairness in later life when you leave the family circle by teaching them to be fighters.”

The full story.

The Washington Post recently posted comments from sociologist Andrew Cherlin on the state of the American family. The online forum was developed to address vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s remarks about her own family.

The Post reports: 

“If the candidates wished to convince viewers that their families were just like ours, they were undone by a 21st-century reality: There is no typical family anymore — at least not in terms of who lives in the household and how they are related. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin noted as much on Wednesday when, while introducing her clan to a cheering crowd of the Republican faithful, the GOP vice presidential nominee said: ‘From the inside, no family ever seems typical. That’s how it is with us.'”

View the transcript of the online forum here.

The exchange features topics like homosexual family formation, and Cherlin’s own work, but centers mostly around families currently in the political spotlight. The exchange was in part a response to a piece by Cherlin in the Post in the ‘Outlook’ section this past Sunday. 

Cherlin writes: 

That traditional family unit has been replaced by a wide variety of living arrangements. Today, only 58 percent of children live with two married, biological parents. Many others live with stepparents or with single parents. Even having a pregnant teen in the home is not that unusual: About one out of six 15-year-old girls will give birth before reaching age 20, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

The candidates seemed to realize that none of their families is typical in the old sense. None of them tried to look like the ’50s family. Instead, they focused on being “typical” in a different, 21st-century sense: They worked hard to show us how emotionally close they are.

Read more.

Recently the headlines have been filled with commentary on Republican VP pick Sarah Palin. Two articles that caught the Crawler’s attention brought in the sociologists to answer current questions about Palin’s future.

Reuters generated an article on Palin’s ability to galvanize the political ‘left.’ For this article they drew upon the expertise of Michael Lindsay.

“Everybody pays attention to the mobilizing affect on the right but equally important is the mobilizing affect that Palin’s nomination makes for the left,” said Michael Lindsay, a political sociologist at Rice University in Houston who has written extensively on the U.S. evangelical movement.

“In many ways she is a much more mobilizing figure for both sides than John McCain because he is seen as much more of a moderate middle of the road political figure,” he said.  [Full article]

But will a ‘middle of the road’ image win the Republican ticket the election?

The second article supplemented by sociologist expertise ran in the LA Times and purported to explain the ‘new feminism’ offered by Palin’s candidacy. 

Debbie Walsh, director for the Rutgers Center for the American Woman and Politics, said Palin had already been caught in a bind between her political obligations and her family. That happened when she and her husband, Todd, issued a news release announcing that their daughter Bristol was pregnant.

“It’s terrible, like a Sophie’s choice situation, where you are in this horrible position as a mother,” said Walsh, “to feel that you have to reveal this piece of information about your daughter and not just to a few people in your family but to the national press corps?”

Pepper Schwartz, a University of Washington sociologist, agreed that the parenting questions came up more readily for Palin because she is a woman.

“I’m all for being a working mom,” Schwartz said. “But I do have a sense from having two children how totally unsuited and uncapable I would be with five.” [Full Article]

Can Palin convince the American voters that she can successfully balance work and family?