lifecourse

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.

Today United Press International is running a story on new research – presented at this weekend’s American Sociological Association annual meeting -from sociologist Hannah Brueckner of Yale University, which suggests that fewer highly educated black women in the U.S. are marrying and starting families.

UPI reports, with the author’s commentary:

“In the past nearly four decades, black women have made great gains in higher education rates, yet these gains appear to have come increasingly at the cost of marriage and family,” Brueckner said.

The study on family formation and marriage longitudinal trends in the specified demographic found the marriage gap between highly educated black and white women increased dramatically between the 1970s and recent years.

In the 1970s the gap was 9 percent, while that gap rose to 21 percent in 2000-2007. Brueckner said the growing divide may be due to a lack of acceptable partners for highly educated black women.

“They are less likely than black men to marry outside their race, and, compared to whites and black men, they are least likely to marry a college-educated spouse,” she suggested.

Read more.

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.

Earlier this week Reuters Health ran a story about a new study suggesting that “people who get married and stay married may enjoy better health than the perpetually single, but losing a spouse could take a significant health toll…”

In the new study, researchers found that middle-aged and older Americans who were currently married tended to give higher ratings to their health than their never-married counterparts. They also reported fewer depression symptoms and limits on their mobility.

On the other hand, divorced or widowed adults fared worse than the never married on certain health measures — including the number of chronic health conditions reported. “Previously married people experience, on average, 20 percent more conditions and 23 percent more limitations,” the researchers write in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

Remarriage seemed to lessen some of the health effects of divorce or widowhood. However, remarried men and women were still in generally poorer health than those in a lasting marriage.

Sociologist Linda J. Waite of the University of Chicago co-authored the report:

“We argue that losing a marriage through divorce or widowhood is extremely stressful and that a high-stress period takes a toll on health,” researcher Linda J. Waite, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, said in a written statement.

“Think of health as money in the bank,” she added. “Think of a marriage as a mechanism for ‘saving’ or adding to health. Think of divorce as a period of very high expenditures.”

Read more.

A few days ago the Washington Post ran a story about how University of Washington sociologist Pepper Schwartz tutored an elderly friend in the basics of online dating…

The Post reports:

A few weeks ago Pepper Schwartz, a sociologist who studies relationships at the University of Washington, spent the day giving a friend a crash course in online dating. Never mind that the friend in question is an 80-year-old woman — she wants “what every girl wants,” Schwartz says, “love, compatibility, someone to experience life with.”

And with a few clicks, Schwartz’s octogenarian pal joined the legions of seniors turning to their computers for a second (or third or fifth or 25th) shot at romance. By 2007, the over-50 set had become the fastest-growing group of subscribers for online dating companies, and double-digit growth has continued since, according to industry watchers.

But keep in mind that Schwartz actually works for one of these companies:

Schwartz, an adviser to online dating company Perfectmatch.com, cheers the trend. If a person in their 60s or 70s lost a spouse 20 years ago, “the chances of pairing again were small,” she says, because the avenues to meet new people were limited mostly to churches, senior centers and friends of friends.

Today single seniors can go online and “be opened up to literally thousands of options,” she says.

The story concludes with some of the potential risks for seniors using these services, but ends on an optimistic note.

…Schwartz says the desire for companionship doesn’t decrease with age: “Neither love, nor romance, nor adventure are the private property of the young.”

There are pitfalls, of course. Safety is always an issue with online dating, and so is disappointment. Just like their younger counterparts, seniors who log on to find love are also risking heartbreak. “The downside,” Schwartz says, “is when you meet someone you think is wonderful, but they don’t think you are. You’ve gotta be resilient.”

And about that 80-year-old friend of hers? She had a coffee date lined up by the end of her first day online

Read the full story.

Yesterday MSNBC.com ran a story about marriage in the United States, and how some women’s fear of becoming an old maid is relatively unlikely. The story describes “a lot of fretting” women go through for fear of never being married, despite the fact that 86% of women tie the knot by age 40. But women do appear to be waiting longer to be wed, age 25 on average, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

MSNBC.com reports:

The vast majority of women who want to marry actually do, although they’re no longer in a rush to do it. Does that mean women and men are less interested in marriage than in the past?

No! Americans love marriage compared to people in other industrialized countries. While Americans get hitched at a rate of 7.5 per every 1,000 inhabitants in a given year, the French and Germans marry at a rate of 4.5 to 4.9 per 1,000, Swedes 4.0 to 4.4, Belgians 2.8 to 3.9.

But perceptions about marriage appear to be ever-changing, as a sociologist notes:

“I always tell my students that everything we study right now could be out of date in 10 years, that’s how rapidly the social environment is changing,” said Christine Whelan, a University of Iowa sociologist and author of “Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women.”

We may idolize the perfect marriage, but need to recognize that its purpose has been redefined.

The “institutional” marriages of the 19th century were practical affairs, meant to establish family bonds, distribute property and raise children as part of a unit within a community, Whelan explained. Then, from about World War I to the early 1960s, “people married for friendship, for a division of labor — what men did and what women did — and for love and attachment,” she said.

Read more.

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.

At the end of last week the New York Times ran an article about how the effects of parental imprisonment have led to a ‘tide of troubled kids.’

The Times reports (with sociological commentary):

The chances of seeing a parent go to prison have never been greater, especially for poor black Americans, and new research is documenting the long-term harm to the children they leave behind. Recent studies indicate that having an incarcerated parent doubles the chance that a child will be at least temporarily homeless and measurably increases the likelihood of physically aggressive behavior, social isolation, depression and problems in school — all portending dimmer prospects in adulthood.

“Parental imprisonment has emerged as a novel, and distinctly American, childhood risk that is concentrated among black children and children of low-education parents,” said Christopher Wildeman, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who is studying what some now call the “incarceration generation.”

Work by sociologist Sara Wakefield offers additional insight:

Quantifying other effects of parental incarceration, like aggressive behavior and depression, is more complex because many children of prisoners are already living in deprived and turbulent environments. But researchers using newly available surveys that follow families over time are starting to home in on the impact.

Among 5-year-old urban boys, 49 percent of those who had a father incarcerated within the previous 30 months exhibited physically aggressive behaviors like hitting others or destroying objects, compared with 38 percent of those in otherwise similar circumstances who did not have a father imprisoned, Dr. Wildeman found.

While most attention has been placed on physical aggression, a study by Sara Wakefield, a sociologist following children in Chicago, found that having a parent imprisoned was a mental-health tipping point for some. Thus, while 28 percent of the children in her study over all experienced feelings of social isolation, depression or anxiety at levels that would warrant clinical evaluation or treatment, about 35 percent of those who had an incarcerated parent did.

And additional sociological commentary…

With financial woes now forcing many states to rethink the relentless expansion of prisons, “this intergenerational transfer of problems should be included as an additional cost of incarceration to society,” said Sarah S. McLanahan, a sociologist at Princeton University and director of a national survey of families that is providing data for many of the new studies.

Read more.

A recent article in USA Today, based on new data from the Pew Research Center, indicates that few people see themselves as ‘old,’ regardless of their age.  USA Today reports, “No matter what their chronological age, most people say that they aren’t yet “old” — and that they feel younger than their birthday count, according to a new nationally representative survey of almost 3,000 adults by the Pew Research Center.”

The findings:

The average age considered “old” by respondents was 68 — but there were real differences in perception driven by the respondents’ own ages:

•More than half of those under 30 say the average person becomes old before 60.

•Middle-aged respondents say it’s closer to 70.

•Those ages 65 and older say “old” is not until 75.

“What you find is the older people are, the more people push back the age that is old,” says Russell Ward, a sociologist who focuses on aging at the University at Albany, State University of New York, and who was not involved in the survey. “It’s more in your future. You’re not there yet.”

A researcher at the Pew Research Center notes the following…

“We are becoming an older society, as are most advanced societies around the world, and we are about to hit a big new wave of adults entering older age,” says Paul Taylor, who directs Pew’s Social and Demographic Trends project.

The study notes that about 39 million Americans, or 13% of the U.S. population, are 65 and older — a figure that has tripled from 4% in 1900. In two years, the oldest of the nation’s 76 million Baby Boomers will turn 65. And by 2050, according to Pew Research projections, about one in five Americans will be over 65, and about 5% will be ages 85 and older, up from 2% now.

Expectations and realities about aging in the survey also differ. Among those age 65 and older, the perceived downsides of aging (such as memory loss, illness, inability to drive or an end to sexual activity) aren’t experienced as much as younger people think they’ll be.

Also, the perceived benefits of growing older (more time with family, more leisure travel, having more time for hobbies or volunteer work) are less than either age group thought they would be. Experts say the recession has reduced the “fun” part of retirement.

Read more.

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.