family

The TimesOnline (UK) reports on the backlash that has begun against a culture in which all children are given prizes and young people are only used to getting their way. Reporter Margarette Driscoll writes about the overwhelming child-centeredness of life in Britain with personal anecdotes and scholarly opinions.

A UK sociologist weighs in…

Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at Kent University, believes our child-centredness is really adult-centredness. “It’s a way of reassuring ourselves that our children are going to be insulated from pain and adversity,” he said. “We tell children they are wonderful now for tying their shoelaces or getting 50% in an exam. But really it’s our way of flattering ourselves that we’re far more sensitive to children than people were in the past.”

The trouble is, Furedi says, that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. “You’re subtly giving kids the message that they can’t cope with life,” he said. “I have a son of 12 and when he and his friends were just nineI remember being shocked at them using therapeutic language, talking about being stressed out and depressed.”

While researching The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education, its co-author Dennis Hayes, visiting professor of education at Oxford Brookes University, discovered a leaflet telling students that if they studied sociology they might come across poor people and get depressed and if they studied nursing they might come across sick people and get distressed – so the university offered counselling.

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.

A recent article in the New York Times alludes to a recent trend in social science research towards studying committed heterosexual couples for insights into what makes marriages healthy.

The Times reports:

“A growing body of evidence shows that same-sex couples have a great deal to teach everyone else about marriage and relationships. Most studies show surprisingly few differences between committed gay couples and committed straight couples, but the differences that do emerge have shed light on the kinds of conflicts that can endanger heterosexual relationships.

The findings offer hope that some of the most vexing problems are not necessarily entrenched in deep-rooted biological differences between men and women. And that, in turn, offers hope that the problems can be solved.”

Although this article deals mostly with the findings from psychologists, many well-documented sociological trends are also discussed in this piece.

Read more.

Reuters reports that the likelihood of a person entering a nursing home or another type of long-term care facility is elevated immediately following the death of a spouse according to recent research from Elina Nihtila, of the department of sociology at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Nihtila suggested several reasons behind this pattern.

The Times Colonist reports on Nihtila’s interview with Reuters Health:

“It may be related to the loss of social and instrumental support, in the form of care and help with daily activities such as help in cooking, cleaning, and shopping formerly shared with the deceased spouse,” Nihtila told Reuters Health.

“Second, grief and spousal loss may cause various symptoms, such as depression and anxiety, loss of appetite, sleep disturbances, fatigue and loss of concentration that could increase the need for institutional care. Furthermore, grief may cause increased susceptibility to physical diseases.”

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.

MercuryNews.com reports on a new study out of Stanford University which suggests that the older a man is when he marries, especially after age 40, the more likely it is that his bride will be significantly younger, regardless of whether or not the man is wealthy.

Co-investigators Paula England and Elizabeth McClintock have found that “men in their 40s tend to marry women who average seven years younger, men in their 50s are marrying brides who average 11 years younger, and men in their 60s are marrying women who are 13 years younger. ” 

England and McClintock suggest that this may be due to changes in family structure after the 1960s, but attribute this trend largely to what they call “a double-standard of aging” — where “the male idea of beauty is found in women in their early twenties and remains fixed as men age.”

Science Daily reports on a new study from Christine Whelan at the University of Iowa which suggests that men whose mothers earned a college degree and worked outside the home seem to have an effect on how they choose their wives.

Whelan’s study, which focuses on high-achieving men (defined as those who are in the top 10% of earnings for their age as well as those with a graduate degrees), are likely to marry a woman whose education mimics their mothers’. Of these high achieving men in the study, almost 80% of them whose mothers had college degrees married women with college degrees.

In addition, of those men whose mothers had graduate degrees, 62% of high-achieving men married other graduate degree holders, and 27% got hitched to women with college degrees.

Science Daily reports:

“‘Successful men in their 20s and 30s today are the sons of a pioneering generation of high-achieving career women. Their mothers serve as role models for how a woman can be nurturing and successful at the same time,’ said Whelan, a visiting assistant professor of sociology in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. ‘One man I interviewed put it like this: “If your mother is a success, you don’t have any ideas of success and family that exclude a woman from working.” This Mother’s Day, I think we should thank those moms for leading the way toward gender equality for a younger generation.'”

New researcher out from Florida State University shows that teenagers who are living with one biological and one step-parent have lower grades and significantly greater behavioral problems than adolescents from intact families. Further, the study suggests that these problems increase over time. Kathryn Tillman and co-investigators studied data on 11,000 adolescents for this new study, published in the journal Social Science Research.

The authors found heightened negative effects for boys living with half-siblings or step-siblings on behavioral measures and concluded that teens who live with both half-siblings and step-siblings than those who live with one or the other.

Reuters reports:
“‘These findings imply that family formation patterns that bring together children who have different sets of biological parents may not be in the best interests of the children involved,’ said Kathryn Harker Tillman, a professor of sociology at the university.”

“‘…One half of all American step-families include children from previous relationships of both partners, and the majority of parents in step-families go on to have additional children together,’ she added in a statement.”

Talking about marriage? Call in the sociologists!

In a recent article from TheStreet.com, Lyneka Little reports on the conclusion that marriage can be a ‘double-edged sword,’ providing positive and negative benefits to each member of the couple. The effects have proven to be disproportionately favorable for married men, who make more than their single counterparts. Read more…

“‘Marriage works as a two-edge sword,’ says Stephen Sweet, an assistant professor of sociology at Ithaca College in New York. On the plus side, there is often much stability to gain from tying the knot.”

“‘Married people are better off than single people based on economic status, social status and happiness,’ Sweet says. ‘The economic gains of marriage can come from aligning yourself with another individual and increasing social capital.'”

 “…Other jobs where a ring could raise your profile? Judge, clergyman and police officer. A police officer may want to show a stable life and marriage can help that, says S. Alexander Takeuchi, a professor of sociology at the University of North Alabama.”

“And how about your productivity? ‘Once you get married, you’re going to spend more time with your spouse and family,’ and it may affect your job productivity, according to Takeuchi. For those in a creative career, Takeuchi says, ‘the amount of time that you can spend to think and visualize things, and use your imagination decreases.'”