family

Yesterday the New York Times reported on a new study indicating that at-home mothers rate themselves higher than working moms.

About the study:

The analysis, by the Pew Research Center, is based on several of their telephone polls, the most recent of which was conducted this summer and included 1,815 people 16 and older. It found that among the at-home mothers, 43 percent rated themselves 9 or 10, at the top of the scale, while 33 percent of working mothers did so.

“In perhaps the most powerful evidence of the cross-pressures that many working mothers feel every day,” the study said, “only 13 percent of moms who work full time say having a mother who works full time is the ideal situation for a young child.”

Conclusions with sociological commentary…

Women without a job outside the home are more likely to have an infant in the household and have less than a high school degree, the bureau found.

“It makes sense that the stay-at-homes are younger, as young people are more likely to be in school,” said Guillermina Jasso, a sociology professor at New York University.

Additional findings:

The Pew study found that 3 out of 10 stay-at-home mothers say family responsibilities keep them out of the labor force. While two-thirds of women with children 16 or younger work full time outside the home, most say they would prefer to work part time, the Pew study said.

The Pew study also found that in 66 percent of married couples with children under 18, both spouses were in the labor force.

The census data also revealed that the nation’s 5.6 million stay-at-home moms represent 24 percent of all married couples with children under 15.

Read more.

Earlier this week National Public Radio News ran a story about the emerging trend of women becoming the family breadwinners. NPR host Jennifer Ludden talked with Heather Boushey from the Center for American Progress and sociologist Michael Kimmel of SUNY-Stonybrook about new findings published by the Center for American Progress documenting how women are rapidly becoming the sole breadwinners of the household because men  account for three out of every four jobs lost in this recession. The new study also “looks at how families struggle to afford health care, housing and living expenses on a woman’s salary and how men cope with their changing role.”

Read the transcript.

Listen to the story.

Earlier this week Newsweek ran a story entitled, “You Will Be a Parent to Your Parents,” devoted to the emerging trend of having multiple generations under one roof in American households.

Newsweek reports:

Census data show that the number of U.S. households with three or more generations increased by 38 percent between 1990 and 2000. There were about 4 million multigenerational households in 2000, and that number appears to be on the rise. Between 2000 and 2007, the number of parents living in the homes of their adult children increased by a whopping 67 percent. In other cases, grown children with families of their own are moving back into a parent’s house. Experts say harsh economic realities like high housing costs and low incomes are probably a driving force behind the trend.

One sociologist notes…

“It is so much less expensive to have one kitchen, one living room, one dwelling to heat,” says Frances Goldscheider, professor emeritus of sociology at Brown. “If you can manage to be polite to each other … you can get all the benefits of the reduced costs.” Other forces at work include immigration—certain cultures favor extended-family living—and increased longevity, since multigenerational households can care for aging parents.

The article also draws upon commentary from sociologist Philip Cohen:

Philip Cohen, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of the upcoming book Family: Diversity, Inequality and Social Change, predicts that the economic downturn will contribute further to the rise in multigenerational living. “Especially with foreclosures and people losing their homes, where do people turn?” he asks. “They’re most likely to go to their families first.”

Read more.

Yesterday The Guardian (UK) ran a story about a new trend documented by sociologists at Oxford University. The Guardian reports:

More families are eating together at home as a result of the recession, a report by Oxford academics has found.

A quarter of parents questioned say they are trying harder to ensure that everyone in the household eats the same meal to help keep costs down, while 48% of parents say they are eating out less frequently. One in six cited more family time as a side effect of the downturn.

Changing Plates, based on research by the department of sociology at Oxford University and YouGov, and commissioned by Birds Eye, found that 67% of UK adults eat a meal with their families at least three times a week. Almost half do so every day.

The study’s author notes,

Jonathan Gershuny, from the Department of Sociology at Oxford University, said: “The findings of this report suggest that while the family meal is adapting and becoming more relaxed, the social significance of eating together remain.”

Read more.

Over the weekend the Los Angeles Times ran a story about what sociologists now know about how men and women learn to parent. The new findings, presented at the American Sociological Association’s annual meetings suggest that women tend to use their own mothers as parenting role models, while men do not.

The LA Times reports…

Researchers at Ohio State University studied how often parents in the 1990s spanked their children, read to them and showed affection. Their practices were compared to mothers’.

“We were surprised that mothers seem to learn a lot about the parenting role from their own mothers, but fathers don’t follow their mothers as much,” Jonathan Vespa, a co-author of the study, said in a news release. “Although more women were entering the workforce then, they still did the lion’s share of parenting and childcare…. There was good reason to expect that fathers would have learned parenting from their mothers.”

The study did not measure whether men learned parenting from their fathers. So that is certainly possible. “We really need to learn a lot more about how fathers learn to parent,” Vespa said.

The study also reflected some big changes in parenting practices between the generations. The most recent generation of parents reads more to their kids, shows more affection and spanks less. Fathers who were spanked as children appeared especially reluctant to spank their own children.

“If parents really just learned from their own parents, we wouldn’t witness such dramatic generational shifts as were seen in this study,” Vespa said.

Read more from the LA Times.

The story was also picked up by US News & World Report today, which elaborated on the study’s findings, specifically on fathers.

“There was good reason to expect that fathers would have learned parenting from their mothers,” Vespa explained. “These fathers were growing up in the [1970s and 1980s] and received much of their parenting from their mothers. Although more women were entering the workforce then, they still did the lion’s share of parenting and child care,” he added.

“We really need to learn a lot more about how fathers learn to parent,” Vespa said.

As for generational parenting practices, the researchers found significant changes with much more reading and affection shown to children today, and less spanking.

“While parents, particularly women, are learning many parenting practices from their mothers, there [are] also a lot of new practices they are picking up from the broader culture,” Vespa said.

Read more from US News & World Report.

This study was also picked up, a week later, by the New York Times. Read here.

Science Daily posted a release on new work by Markella Rutherford of Wellesley College to be published in the upcoming issue of Qualitative Sociology about how children today enjoy more freedom from chores and other demands at home, but are more restricted in their activities when they are outside of the house.

Rutherford’s project:

Children have certainly mastered the art of selecting, negotiating and even refusing the chores their parents assign to them. This growth in personal autonomy at home over the last few decades could be the result of shrinking opportunities to participate in activities outside the home, without Mom and Dad looking over their shoulder, according to Dr. Markella Rutherford from Wellesley College in the US. Her analysis of back issues of the popular US magazine, Parents, maps how the portrayal of parental authority and children’s autonomy has changed over the last century…. She analyzed a total of 300 advice columns and relevant editorials from 34 randomly chosen issues of Parents magazine, published between 1929 and 2006, to see how parental authority and children’s autonomy have been portrayed over the last century.

The findings:

The articles in Parents showed that children were increasingly autonomous when it came to their self-expression, particularly in relation to daily activity chores, personal appearance and defiance of parents. In contrast to this increased autonomy that child-centered parenting has given children, the 20th century has seen, in other ways, children’s autonomy curtailed, through increasingly restricted freedom of movement and substantially delayed acceptance of responsibilities. Children now have fewer opportunities to conduct themselves in public spaces free from adult supervision than they did in the early and mid-twentieth century.

Read more about the study.

The BCC World Service Business Desk ran a story several days ago featuring an interview with Johns Hopkins University sociologist Andrew Cherlin. The discussion centered on how ordinary people are changed by the current global economic recession. Cherlin’s work suggests that although one might think that hard economic times would take a more severe toll on marriages, leading to more divorce, this is not the case. Instead, Cherlin explains, divorce is on the decline in our current recession, a trend mirroring the last significant rise in unemployment.

LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW.

Earlier this week, a Crawler reader pointed me to a fantastic video interview with well-known sociologist Mary Pattillo as part of the Conversations from Penn State series from Penn State Public Broadcasting. The interview covers Pattillo’s path through academia, her two books on the black middle class, as well as what the Obama family means for the study of race and family.
See the video below, or link to the site here.

National Public Radio (NPR) ran an interesting story yesterday about the effects of the recession on young, low income families, drawing up the expertise of well-known sociologist Maria Kefalas.

The NPR blurb:

Financial and emotional stability can be an elusive fantasy for young, low-income families. Writer Laura Sessions Stepp, who wrote about “fragile families” in this week’s Washington Post Magazine , discusses how unemployment and financial troubles can shatter even the most loving young families. And sociology professor Maria Kefalas explains how family stability has become a class privilege in America.

Listen to the broadcast, here.

With a fascinating new article in Gender & Society, the Sociologists for Women in Society issued a press release through EurekAlert, making its way onto the Crawler radar today. The study suggests that pressure to work overtime in the workplace is adversely affecting families – dads are overworked and tired while moms may be more likely to be demoted or fired.

EurekAlert reports,

If dad looks exhausted this Father’s Day it could be due to his job, suggests new research that found many male employees are now pressured to work up to 40 hours of overtime—often unpaid— per week to stay competitive.

Women face the same pressures, but family obligations may force them to work fewer hours on the job, putting them at risk for demotions or even firings.

The new findings, published in the journal Gender & Society, add to the growing body of evidence that heightened competition in the workplace, combined with modern business practices, are resulting in near-unprecedented levels of overtime that may not even be productive in the long run.

“This clearly does not ease the situation for women and men who want to combine career and family-life,” concluded lead author Patricia van Echtelt and colleagues. “Moreover, a growing body of literature shows that working long hours does not automatically lead to greater productivity and effectiveness, and thus not necessarily contributes to employers’ needs but potentially harms the well-being of employees.”

Their conclusions…

Van Echtelt, a Netherlands Institute for Social Research scientist, and her team found that, among the survey respondents, 69 percent of all men worked overtime versus 42 percent of women. Women who work overtime do so at a rate that is about one-third lower than that of their male colleagues.

It’s “usually explained by the continuing trend for women to be more involved in unpaid family work,” the researchers noted. And even when partners share family chores, “men often characterize their contribution as ‘helping’ their wives, without feeling to have the main responsibility.”

The researchers therefore predict families with more kids and at-home responsibilities will become “more constrained in their opportunities to indulge the ‘choice’ to work overtime.”

Choice is turning into expectation at most companies built upon the “team work” model, with pressures coming from project teams, responsibility for meeting profit or production targets, imposed deadlines and employees left to manage their own careers. A separate study at a software engineering firm, for example, determined that interdependent work patterns, “a crisis mentality,” and a reward system based on individual heroics led to “inefficient work processes and long working hours.”

Read more.