family

This week the press release services are aflutter with stories about parenting, with father’s day just a few days away, but one particular story caught my eye about ‘non-traditional fathers’ authored by a sociologist who interviewed low-income fathers about the meaning of fatherhood – specifically in light of the difficulties faced by these fathers parenting in the absence of a spouse or a father-figure role model in their own lives.

Newswise reports:

This Father’s Day, a Brigham Young University sociologist is focusing on dads that don’t fit the traditional script – dads in the mold of the character played by Will Smith in the film The Pursuit of Happyness (before he earned millions as a stockbroker).

These dads are poor. They’re unmarried. Their own fathers commonly were a lesson in what not to do. Defining fatherhood as they go, these dads shared the meaning they find as self-taught fathers in a study Professor Renata Forste published in a recent issue of the journal Fathering.

“Those who didn’t have a role-model type father, they know what they don’t want to do, but they don’t know what to replace it with,” Forste said.

A clear theme emerged from in-depth interviews with 36 such single dads: Their relationship with their own father determined whether they aimed to succeed, or aimed not to fail. The men who felt close to their fathers tried to “pass the baton” and be a nurturing parent that balances work and family time. One 23-year-old dad in this group had this succinct answer: To make as much money as you can while spending the most time with your kids.

The impact of the absence of positive role models was also noted in the study…

“A lot of them talked about coaches, Scout leaders, and fathers of friends,” Forste said. “They desperately need positive role models and men in their lives. Anybody who works with youth has an opportunity to make a difference.”
Forste also notes the work of Princeton sociologist Sarah McLanahan with a project called Fragile Families. McLanahan’s research finds that attending the birth of their child can be a life-changing moment for young men that may not otherwise embrace fatherhood.

The dads interviewed in the BYU study – selected because they are involved parents – also cast the birth of their children in life-altering terms:

Right away I knew I had a responsibility and it was mine so I wasn’t going to deny it or try to forget about it or anything.

Read more.

Yesterday The Examiner ran a story on an article published in the  American Journal of Sociology – and winner of the 2008 Kanter Award Winner for Excellence in Work-Family Research – about the ‘motherhood penalty’:  the pattern demonstrating that working mothers make less than women without children. The study, authored by Shelley J. Correll of Stanford University, Stephen J. Benard, and In Paik also suggests that, “the mommy gap is actually bigger than the gender gap for women under 35.”

About the methods:

188 men and women participated in the study. Researchers used two types of experiments in the study; a laboratory experiment and audit study. The laboratory experiment was used to determine “how evaluators rate applicants in terms of competence, workplace commitment, hireability, promotability and recommended salary.” The audit portion of the experiment measured “positive responses to applicants based on the number of callbacks from actual employers.”

Researchers created fictitious resumes and cover letters and found that the starting salaries were quite different for the women with children versus their counterparts, even though the qualifications in the resumes were equal. The researchers also created fake resumes for both working dads and men without children and found no difference in starting salary for the male gender.

And the findings…

The study found that “Mothers were penalized on a host of measures, including perceived competence and recommended starting salary.” On the other hand, men were not. In fact, according to the study, some working dads actually benefited from being a father.

On average, working mothers were offered $11,000 less pay per year than equally qualified women without children.

According to the report, women without children received 2.1 times as many callbacks as mothers who were equally qualified.

Women without children were recommended for hire 1.8 times more than equally qualified moms, while fathers were recommended for hire and called back at a higher rate.

Read more.

Yesterday Newsweek ran a story entitled “Like A Virgin No More: MySpace Generation Brides Go For Sexy, Not Virginal,” and explored “why modern brides are opting for racy gowns, wild bachelorette parties and sexy Maxim-style pre-wedding photo shoots.”

Newsweek reports:

Two decades ago, when young girls wondered how brides were supposed to look and behave, they’d most likely conclude—with some prompting from Cinderella—that on their big day they’d be a princess. They’d be blushing, virginal and wrapped from head to toe in tulle and lace.

So why is it that these days, some brides seem to be taking their cues more from Jessica Rabbit than Cinderella? More vamp than virgin, they’re having bachelorette parties that are as raunchy as their fiancés’ sendoffs. They’re selecting cleavage- or lower-back-baring bridal gowns that might get a gasp from conservative relatives. “A big-selling style is a sheer lace corset midriff,” says Millie Martini Bratten, the editor in chief of Brides magazine. “It’s clearly meant to look like you’re seeing through someone’s shirt.” And today’s wife-to-be is hiring photographers for what are called “boudoir shoots,” where they pose Maxim magazine-style in lingerie or nothing at all and give the prints to their grooms—a trend that Bratten says began about three years ago. “It’s the ultimate display of freedom and empowerment,” says Bee-Bee Kim, the founder of Weddingbee.com, a wedding-planning site that gets more than a million unique visitors a month.

What is going on here? Lucky for us, they consult several sociologists…

Newsweek’s assessment?

While most sociologists agree that women admitting to lust and wanting to be sexually empowered is a good thing, they see a problem with making exhibitionism the centerpiece of the wedding ceremony: it might crowd out other aspects of the marriage. “You’re highlighting what should just be a piece of the relationship,” says Stephanie Coontz, a social historian and the author ofMarriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, which looks at how recent the idea of marrying for love is. “I worry that it can take over. The message you’re sending about your appearance can override other conversations you should be having about your future.” And in what she wants for the future, Jessica Rabbit has got nothing on the average American bride.

Read more.

University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal this past weekend entitled “The Real Pregnancy Crisis.”

What sparked this piece? Wilcox writes,

Earlier this month, Bristol Palin turned herself into a poster child for the nation’s continuing effort to prevent teenage pregnancies. She made the rounds on the morning TV show circuit and spoke at town hall meetings to drive home the point that other teens shouldn’t make the same mistake she did. Ms. Palin’s campaign could not have come at a better time. According to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control, the U.S. — after witnessing a 14-year decline in teenage childbearing from 1991 to 2005 — saw the number rise from 2005 to 2007. In 2007, the latest year for which data are available, about 450,000 adolescents gave birth.

The recent uptick in teenage childbearing has public-health experts, scholars and government leaders concerned. “Let’s hope this sobering news on teen births serves as a wake-up call to policymakers, parents and practitioners,” said Sarah Brown, CEO of The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, “that all our efforts to convince young people to delay pregnancy and parenthood need to be more intense, more creative and based more on what we know works.”

He offers several explanations and recommendations…

Here are three more likely explanations: First, young Americans have been postponing marriage, but they are not postponing sex and cohabitation. Indeed, my own research indicates that cohabiting couples are much more likely to get pregnant than couples who do not live together. Second, working-class and poor men have seen their real wages fall since the early 1970s, which makes them less attractive as husbands to their girlfriends and to the mothers of their children. This also helps explain why nonmarital childbearing is concentrated among blacks, Latinos, and working-class and poor whites.

Third, the meaning of marriage in the U. S. has changed over the past 40 years. As sociologist Andrew Cherlin has noted, marriage used to be the “foundation” for adulthood, sex, intimacy and childbearing. Now, marriage is viewed by many Americans as a “capstone” that signals that a couple has arrived — financially, professionally and emotionally.

This also helps to explain why college-educated mothers are bucking the trend toward having children out of wedlock. It is easier for these women to attain the level of achievement that the newer, luxury model of marriage before childbearing requires. Only 7% of college-educated women are having children out of wedlock, compared with more than 50% of women with a high-school degree or less, according to a recent Child Trends study.

So the next time you hear a college-educated academic or advocate talking about marriage and motherhood, do as they do, not as they say.

Read more.

The National Center for Health Statistics published a report earlier this week about the increase in unwed mothers having children in the United States. The Washington Post covered the story and included some sociological commentary…

The number of children being born out of wedlock has risen sharply in recent years, driven primarily by women in their 20s and 30s opting to have children without getting married. Nearly four out of every 10 births are now to unmarried women.

“It’s been a huge increase — a dramatic increase,” said Stephanie J. Ventura of the National Center for Health Statistics, which documented the shift in detail yesterday for the first time, based on an analysis of birth certificates nationwide. “It’s quite striking.”

Although the report did not examine the reasons for the increase, Ventura and other experts cite a confluence of factors, including a lessening of the social stigma associated with unmarried motherhood, an increase in couples delaying or forgoing marriage, and growing numbers of financially independent women and older and single women deciding to have children on their own after delaying childbearing.

One sociologist weighs in…

“I think this is the tipping point,” said Rosanna Hertz, a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wellesley College. “This is becoming increasingly the norm. The old adage that ‘first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage’ just no longer holds true.”

“Women can have children on their own, and it’s not going to destroy your employment, and it’s not going to mean that you’ll be made a pariah by the community,” Hertz said. “It’s much more socially acceptable.”

And another….

Other couples today feel less compelled to marry just because they are having a child.

“It seems to be more wrong to be in a marriage with someone who you don’t love and consider to be your best friend than not to be in a marriage at all,” said Barbara Katz Rothman, a professor of sociology at the City University of New York. “It’s not that people care less about marriage. In some ways, it’s because they care more.”

Read more. 

Miller-McCune ran a story yesterday based on new research presented at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America this past weekend. Miller-McCune reports, “We’ve long known that high-pressure jobs can be hazardous to one’s health. New research suggests that, for working mothers [especially those who are less-educated], employment-related stress may also be detrimental to their children’s intellectual development.”

Sociologist Amy Hsin, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, and economist Christina Felfe at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, compared assessments of verbal skills of 5- to 12-year-olds with the jobs their mothers held. Those jobs were ranked in terms of stress, with both physical hazards and social pressures taken into account.

High-stress jobs for well-educated mothers included nursing and teaching. Those for less-well-educated mothers included factory work and housecleaning.

“For both less-educated and highly educated mothers, the degree of hazards or social stress experienced at work is negatively correlated with children’s language development,” Hsin reports. The researchers did not find that the stressed-out mothers spend fewer hours with their offspring.

“We find that total time (a mother spends with her child) and time spent on educational activities (i.e. playing, reading, arts and crafts, etc.) do not differ across work conditions,” Hsin said. “We speculate that the source of the problem is less about time per se than the type of interactions that are occurring during time spent together.

“When a woman comes home from a stressful day at work, she may be less patient, less responsive and talk less to her children. Or the type of conversation may be short or even dismissive rather than interactive and engaging.”

The researchers believe better access to intellectually enriching day care and preschool programs is a possible solution to this problem. “Providing affordable, high-quality day care is beneficial for mom, child and family,” Hsin said.

Read more.

Sociologists have been up in arms over a recent article in the Washington Post by sociologist Mark Regnerus, of the University of Texas at Austin, who claims that women should not delay in getting married.

Regnerus writes,

“Today, as ever, marriage wisely entered into remains good for the economy and the community, good for one’s personal well-being, good for wealth creation and, yes, good for the environment, too;” but that parents do teens a disservice when they “advise our children to complete their education before even contemplating marriage, to launch their careers and become financially independent.”

He also notes that,

“The average age of American men marrying for the first time is now 28. That’s up five full years since 1970 and the oldest average since the Census Bureau started keeping track. If men weren’t pulling women along with them on this upward swing, I wouldn’t be complaining. But women are now taking that first plunge into matrimony at an older age as well.”

Well, this erupted in the sociological blogosphere, specifically on Scatterplot. Shakha writes on Scatterplot,

What have we learned? That women are emotional beings bound by biology and objects of desirability of men. Men, by contrast, need to get good jobs. That may take a while. So men can and should be older than women (they work; women provide childen). “Society” does a disservice to men and women by encouraging them to marry older. You see, people should be married at younger ages because, “Marriage actually works best as a formative institution, not an institution you enter once you think you’re fully formed.”

This has all become very confusing. Apparently women can enter marriage earlier because they’re formed earlier; men are formed later. But marriage itself is not for people how are already formed. I’m lost.

Sociologist Andrew Cherlin published a rebuttal in the Washington Post the following day, entitled “Real Wedding Bell Woes.” He counters many of Regnerus’ claims, and offers additional commentary on the state of marriage in the United States.  Read here.

It seems that the debate about marriage rages on, even amongst sociologists…

This week, Newsday ran a story about what might lead certain people to commit murder-suicide, drawing upon scholars’ expertise on identifying key traits of perpetrators. The article was specifically concerned with the practice of familicide, also referred to as ‘family annihilation,’ which is committed by men nearly 95% of the time according to the Violence Policy Center.

The psychological perspective…

Louis Schlesinger, forensic psychology professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, said there were two different types of familicidal offenders.

One takes a proprietorial view of his wife, gets angry, and attacks her and everyone around her. The second type is “the despondent male,” who feels he must kill his family and himself to spare them the humiliation or pain of what life will bring, Schlesinger said.

“It’s not rational, it’s not reasonable,” he said. “If he tries to kill himself and survives, he views the [slain] family with sympathy. . . . He feels tremendous regret.”

The sociological perspective…

But Jack Levin, a sociologist and criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston, said there is almost always a “catastrophic loss that precedes a family annihilation.”

Triggers can be a loss of a job, money, a relationship or a loved one. Often, he said, there is a feeling of isolation.

“Most family annihilators, and typically it’s the husband and father, have been frustrated and depressed over a long period of time,” he said. “But they, unlike other depressed individuals, blame everybody else for their miseries.”

Or, he said, in cases when the man may be described as a dedicated husband and devoted father, the motive may be “a perverted sense of altruism that they’d be better off dead than live in this miserable existence.”

In general, he said, most familicides are suicidal rampages, “but first the killer will take care of his loved ones.”

If the person is religious, “He may feel he can reunite with loved ones in the hereafter, or wants to spare his loved ones the humiliation of his suicide.”

Read more.

A New York Times Style-section column by Michelle Slatalla caught my eye this morning, declaring that I should be a patriot and hire a housekeeper(???) I decided to peruse the column and saw that it was mostly devoted to Slatalla’s musings on ‘spring cleaning’ with her family. But I read on, and was pleased to learn that Slatalla had consulted a sociologist when she became exasperated trying to get herself and her family in gear for cleaning the house. She writes:

And that [cleaning grease from the stove and noticing the filthy baseboards] was when I finally gave up. I couldn’t do this on my own anymore. I needed the help of an expert to motivate my family.

“How am I going to get the rest of them to help me keep the house clean?” I asked Pamela J. Smock, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who studies how housework affects family relationships.

“Let me ask you a question,” she said. “Are you still able to afford to hire someone to clean your house?”

“ ‘Afford’ is a state of mind,” I said. “My household hasn’t lost income — yet — but my husband and I are journalists, the most endangered species there is outside of Detroit.”

I’m superstitious: Maybe if I appease the God of the Bad Economy with this offering — cutting my discretionary spending — I can ward off a worse fate.

That’s the wrong way to think, Professor Smock said.

“Right now, the bad economy is hurting people who clean houses for a living much more than it’s hurting the middle class,” she said. “So anybody who is solidly in the middle class or above should hire the cleaners back. Absolutely. Immediately. You’ll be serving your country.”

I stopped to consider this argument, which sounded, frankly, like the exact opposite of the old conventional wisdom.

“I used to feel guilty about hiring housecleaners,” I said. “Like I was selfishly relying on the hard labor of poorly paid workers to make it easier to pursue my own career without sacrificing my comfort.”

Forget that claptrap, said Professor Smock, who pays $110 for housecleaning twice a month.

“If I got a raise, I’d do it every week, and also hire the cleaning lady’s husband to install the underground sprinklers,” she said. “Right now, people need jobs. It’s a bad idea to cut back on things you used to do normally. Don’t do your own hedging. Don’t start mowing, either.”

Put that way, I saw she had a point. How could I have been so selfish? I called the cleaners right away, of course, and that made me feel so patriotic that I decided to do more.

Read more.

The Columbia Daily Tribune (Missouri) ran a story on Friday about sociologist Maria Kefalas’ work on how “poor women find redemption in having a baby.”

When Maria Kefalas started visiting low-income neighborhoods in Philadelphia to interview the young, single and often welfare-dependent mothers who lived there, many of the grandmothers were her age. When one mother heard Kefalas, at 32, had just become pregnant with her first child, she said, “Isn’t it wonderful that the doctors were proved wrong and you were able to get pregnant?”

The woman, who had her own first child in her teens, assumed Kefalas had been trying without success to have a baby since 19 or 20. This wasn’t true, of course. In her early 20s, Kefalas had college to think about. Summer vacations spent traveling. Her future career. But this was still an assumption she encountered in these neighborhoods while conducting research with another sociologist. One 14-year-old told her, “I’ve been trying to have a baby ever since I could.”

As Kefalas puts it, childbirth has very little “competition” in these women’s lives.

“The stylish careers, fulfilling relationships and exceptional educations that will occupy middle- and upper class women’s twenties and thirties are unattainable dreams to the women driving the non-marital childbearing trend,” she writes on her blog on the Huffington Post. She sees children out of wedlock not as a decline in family values in poverty-stricken areas but as yet another symptom of the growing divide between the haves and the have-nots in the United States.

In a phone interview, Kefalas said she believes talking to these women allowed her to dig past survey and statistical data that provide information but few answers. When the question “Why do poor women have children outside of marriage?” comes up, society responds that individuals in low-income neighborhoods don’t believe in marriage.

The innovative and important contribution of this work…

Kefalas and Edin’s research doesn’t refute the notion that repairing family structures will help end welfare dependency by stabilizing homes. But it does challenge the assumption that the women living in Philadelphia’s worst neighborhoods didn’t care about marriage. In fact, the young women they met cared deeply about it.

“Everyone’s notions of marriage have changed in society,” Kefalas said. The difference is, “upper-class young couples are able to achieve those raised” expectations, although “among low income couples you see the raised standards like everybody else, but actually more diminished opportunities to achieve those goals.”

For example, if the dream for marriage is a stable, dependable husband, these women had little hope of finding him. Many don’t go to college and remain in the neighborhood where they grew up. The men around them are engaged in high-risk behavior and are often involved in the drug economy. Many spend some time in prison. Seen in this light, marriage is far from a stabilizer. The relationships are very “volatile,” and the divorce rate for these low-income couples is significantly higher than the national rate.

Having a child, however, does seem to provide new sense of purpose for the women Kefalas interviewed. It can act as a stabilizer in a neighborhood, family or financial situation that is otherwise chaos.

“Having a child offers a source of redemption,” Kefalas said. “You go from being this teenager who is wild and out of control to being this young woman with a baby, and if your baby’s clean, people stop you on the street and say, ‘You’re such a wonderful mother.’

“These young women say, ‘Having a baby saved my life.’ ”

Read more.