Archive: Aug 2014

As seasonal aisles are taken over by backpacks and Elmer’s glue, there’s no denying the start of a new school year. For parents of preschoolers whose birth dates are on or near the cutoff, thinking about school means deciding how early their child should begin kindergarten. While there is lots of evidence that children who are old for their grade tend to have better long-term academic outcomes, Fabrizio Bernardi’s new study shows that this is not necessarily true for everyone. It turns out that the importance of a child’s age relative to his or her classmates’ depends on the family’s socioeconomic status.

Using data on elementary school children in France, where about 20 percent of students have to repeat a grade in primary school, Bernardi investigates who is getting held back. By looking at how likely children born in different months are to be successfully promoted every year in primary school, he determines that indeed, the older students have the upper hand. However, when Bernardi compares the patterns for children of different social classes, there are stark differences among the groups. For the children of university- educated parents, there is almost no difference between being older or younger at the start of school. For the children of less educated parents, however, relative age matters significantly.

Bernardi hypothesizes that upper class children who experience an early disadvantage are more likely to catch up because they benefit from compensatory advantages. One such advantage may be in the way upper-class parents react to their children’s setbacks. For example, upper class parents might invest more resources to help a son who fails, whereas, in contrast, lower-class parents might respond by redirecting their scarce resources to his siblings, resulting in a smaller investment in him.

Looking at the big picture, this means that compensatory advantage contributes to vast educational inequalities among children from different social classes. Understanding how it operates may be a step in a journey of a million miles, but it is a step in the right direction.

We have unions to thank for the “invention” of the weekend in the U.S., and most of us look forward to the end of our work week so we can sleep in, make plans with friends and family, and catch up on our favorite tv shows. But would we enjoy that time away from work as much if we had no one to share it with? Research by Young and Lim finds that the structure of the standard work week influences our social and emotional life on a much deeper level than we realize.

In a study comparing the happiness of workers and the unemployed on weekends versus weekdays, Young and Lim find that not all time off is valued equally. Participants in their study did not simply value time off for time off’s sake – instead, the value of time off depends on the ability to coordinate it with others. While the unemployed are less happy overall, both workers and the unemployed see a significant rise in positive emotions and decrease in negative emotions on weekends as compared to weekdays. Further, compared to the employed, the unemployed experienced little to no benefit from their time off when the work week starts.

The results reinforce the argument that most unemployed people are not enjoying their time away from paid work in a way that would outweigh the downsides of being unemployed. This research also has potential implications for the happiness of those who work increasingly common “non-standard” work schedules, meaning they also miss out on time with their families and friends on weekends.