lifecourse

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 Chicago Tribune noted that the summer concert season is overwhelmingly dominated by 60-somethings. They cite the upcoming concerts in Chicago by Elton John (age 62), Billy Joel (age 60), and Crosby (67),  Stills (64), Nash (67) and Young (63). The Tribune also noted that Bob Dylan (age 68) celebrated a No. 1 album last week, and is about to embark on a tour with Willie Nelson (76) and John Mellencamp (57).

The paper reports,

This cataloging of rock’s geriatric movement is meant simply to point out what’s both obvious and startling: Rock’s biggest names have gotten old.

“I think all of us are pretty amazed at the lengths of the careers of the acts that pretty much defined rock ‘n’ roll,” said Gary Bongiovanni, editor in chief of the concert-industry trade publication Pollstar. “If you look at the ones that demand the highest prices, it’s all acts that date back to the ’60s and ’70s.”

A sociologist explains how these aging musicians are still able to rock…

How sustainable can this business be when so many key players could be cashing retirement checks?

Celia Berdes, a sociologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s Buehler Center on Aging, Health & Society, thinks rockers who maintain a healthy lifestyle and diet can keep going for a while.

“In gerontology, we think that people can continue their level of activity and productivity well into their 70s,” she said, noting that guitarists probably maintain excellent dexterity thanks to the continual finger exercise. “The worry I would have for the rock musicians is they’ve burnt the candle. It’s possible they may be aging at a faster rate, particularly with regard to hearing.”

Singers go through other types of changes as well. Elton John’s voice is much deeper than it was in his ’70s heyday, and many older singers typically key down their songs to compensate for their range loss on the high end.

Read more.

Both ABC news and the New York Times ran stories over the weekend about the relationship between job loss and health. New research by sociologist Kate Strully, a sociologist at the State University of New York-Albany, examines unemployment data from 1991, 2001, and 2003 and finds that job loss is “linked to a higher risk for high blood pressure, heart disease, heart attack, diabetes or depression, even when the person finds a new job. Losing a job through no fault of one’s own, if a company shut down, for example, led to a 54 percent increase in that person reporting poor health.” 

She told ABC News:

“Jobs are so fundamental to who you are and where you fall into society,” said Kate Strully, an assistant professor in sociology at the State University of New York at Albany and the author of a new study. “In looking at what happens to people after they lose such a big component of their class position and social identity … [the study asked] did they lose their job because they were sick or did they get sick because they lost their job?”…

Still, Strully’s data is based on situations from the 1990s and early 2000s, when the economic climate was not as universally challenging as it is now. People who lost their jobs may have been in a better position to find alternate employment or receive financial help via credit, mortgages or family and friends.

“We were looking at a situation where the economy was better than now and there were still sizable health hazards associated with job loss,” Strully said. “Common sense suggests that the situation today for displaced workers is probably worse.”

The New York Times reported:

Workers who lost a job through no fault of their own, she found, were twice as likely to report developing a new ailment like high blood pressure, diabetes or heart disease over the next year and a half, compared with people who were continuously employed. Interestingly, the risk was just as high for those who found new jobs quickly as it was for those who remained unemployed.

Though it has long been known that poor health and unemployment often go together, questions have lingered about whether unemployment leads to illness, or whether people in ill health are more likely to leave a job, be fired or be laid off. In an effort to sort out this chicken-or-egg problem, the new study looked specifically at people who lost their jobs through no fault of their own — for example, because of a plant or business closing. The author, Kate W. Strully, said she looked at situations in which people lost jobs for reasons that “shouldn’t have had anything to do with their health.”

Read more from ABC.

Read more from the New York Times. 

The Philadelphia Enquirer reports on new research out of the University of Chicago suggesting that “for older adults, feelings of loneliness can actually be detrimental to their health…  older adults who feel least-isolated are five times more likely to report very good health compared to their lonelier counterparts, regardless of actual social connectedness.”

One of the co-aduthors on the study is sociologist Linda Waite…

“The relationship between social disconnectedness and mental health appears to operate through feelings of loneliness and a perceived lack of social support,” says study co-author Linda Waite, a Professor in Sociology at the University of Chicago and a leading expert on aging.

The study:

Researchers measured the degree to which older adults were socially connected and socially active, as well as whether they feel lonely and expect family and friends to support them in need. The study found that older adults who feel most isolated reported 65 percent more depressive symptoms than those who feel less isolated, despite actual connectedness.

Waite told the Enquirer that the research suggests a need to better understand how adults cope with changing relationships, because older adults who are “able to withstand socially isolating experiences or adjust expectations” are more likely to stay healthy.

Read more.

Early this week USA Today ran a story about last weekend’s Council on Contemporary Families conference in Chicago, during which experts discussed how topics such as sexual orientation, sexual labeling, and gender-bending were no longer “x-rated or adults-only topics, but rather subjects that young people talk about as they figure out how they fit in.” Psychologist Braden Berkey told conference attendees, “Youth are saying they don’t want to be defined by gender or orientation.” 

USA Today reports:

Berkey is founding director of the Sexual Orientation and Gender Institute at the Center on Halsted, which opened in 2007 to offer support services and programming for the area’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. He talked about the evolution of sexual and gender labels and how young people today are trying to dissolve them. He says the terms created in the early days, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, are giving way to other descriptions, such as polygender or multisex. Young people, he says, reject narrow gender definitions and say they don’t want to be defined by their sexuality.

However, a presentation by sociologist Barbara Risman of the University of Illinois at Chicago suggested that for the middle-schoolers she’s studied, attitudes about sexual orientation are less open-minded, especially for boys. She says these boys fear the label “gay.”

More from Barbara Risman…

Among boys, “homophobia in middle school is used to police gender,” she says. In-depth interviews with 43 students at an urban middle school in the Southeast found vast differences between the sexes.

“Today, girls are free to do sports and be competitive. No one thought they had to play dumb to get a boyfriend. The women’s movement has done great things for middle school girls,” she says.

“It’s another story with boys. I feel like we’re in a time warp. We have not dealt with men and masculinity in a serious enough way,” she says.”Boys police each other. There’s no room not to do anything not traditionally masculine.”

Risman says it’s important not to generalize the findings to most American children, but she says the fact that boys are labeled quickly suggests that this is a developmental stage. The study, she adds, was limited by many rules requiring parental permission for contact with minors.

Risman says it’s the stigma of homosexuality that looms among young boys. Being emotional or caring too much about clothes or liking to dance are reasons that boys give for describing someone as “girlish,” she says.

Read more.

The Houston Chronicle ran a front page story earlier this week about how new numbers from the Pew Center indicate a shift in immigrant demographics. Nearly one in ten Texas children has an undocumented parent, while 73% of the children of illegal immigrants are U.S.-born citizens.

The Chronicle reports:

The Pew Hispanic Center released a report Tuesday estimating that about 73 percent of the children of illegal immigrant parents were U.S.-born citizens in 2008, up from roughly 63 percent in 2003. During that time frame, the estimated number of children born in the U.S. to undocumented parents increased from 2.7 million to 4 million. The report estimates that at least one in 10 Texas school children has a parent in the country illegally.

Pew’s estimates were based largely on March 2008 Census Bureau survey data, which was adjusted to account for census undercounting and legal status.

The report’s findings highlight an emotional issue in the immigration debate: mixed status families of undocumented parents and U.S.-born children. High-profile immigration enforcement raids across the country in recent years have generated stories of American schoolchildren coming home to find out their parents had been picked up by immigration officials.

The demographic shift will have significant implications through the summer as the immigration reform debate heats back up. Last week, the Obama administration indicated it was gearing up to tackle reform, including creating a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants.

The sociological commentary…

“These are American citizens, and we’re rounding up and deporting their parents,” said Rice University sociologist Stephen Klineberg, calling the overall immigration strategy “totally bankrupt,” and in need of repair.

Sociologist Katherine Donato elaborates…

Vanderbilt Sociology Professor Katharine M. Donato said the Pew Center’s findings highlight a marked shift in illegal immigration patterns, which in turn have changed the demographics of the nation’s undocumented population.

Donato said the U.S. immigration system used to be largely cyclical, with workers — legal and undocumented — returning to their home countries on a regular basis, until the massive buildup of agents and infrastructurealong the Southwest border in early 1990s.

Facing more dangerous treks and steeper smuggling fees, many illegal immigrants opted instead to bring their families to the U.S. and settle in here, which accounts for the growth in the share of births in the U.S., she said.

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.

Newswise (a press release service) highlighted a recent study out of the University of Chicago, which suggests that “not having many close friends contributes to poorer health for older adults, those who also feel lonely face even greater health risks and that older people who are able to adjust to being alone don’t have the same health problems.”

The study is the first to examine the relationships between health and two different types of isolation. Researchers measured the degree to which older adults are socially connected and socially active. They also assessed whether older adults feel lonely and whether they expect that friends and family would help them in times of need.

“Social disconnectedness is associated with worse physical health, regardless of whether it prompts feelings of loneliness or a perceived lack of social support,” said study co-author Linda Waite, the Lucy Flower Professor in Sociology at the University of Chicago and a leading expert on aging.

However, the researchers found a different relationship between social isolation and mental health. “The relationship between social disconnectedness and mental health appears to operate through feelings of loneliness and a perceived lack of social support,” Waite explained.

Older adults who feel most isolated report 65 percent more depressive symptoms than those who feel least isolated, regardless of their actual levels of connectedness. The consequences of poor mental health can be substantial, as deteriorating mental health also reduces people’s willingness to exercise and may increase health-risk behaviors such as cigarette smoking and alcohol use, Waite explained.

Read more.

USA Today reports on new numbers released from the National Center for Health Statistics, indicating that 2007 set an all-time record for births in the United States, with some interesting changes in the motherhood landscape.

The USA’s banner year for babies in 2007 set a record of 4.31 million — and was driven in large part by growing numbers of unmarried adult women giving birth, new government data show. Childbearing by unmarried women reached “historic levels,” the report says, to an estimated 1.7 million, or 40% of all births. There were increases in the birth rate and the proportion of births as well as an increase in the number. Teen moms accounted for 23%. The report, based on preliminary data, was released Wednesday by the National Center for Health Statistics.

Since 2002, all measures of childbearing by unmarried women have been “climbing steeply,” says Stephanie Ventura, a demographer who worked on the government report, which is based on birth certificates. The report found 60% of women 20-24 who had babies in 2007 were unmarried, up from 51.6% in 2002. Among ages 25-29, 32.2% of births were to unmarried women, vs. 25% in 2002. For ages 15-19, almost 86% were unmarried, compared with 80% in ’02.

But what about the number of births we can expect during the recession? Call in the sociologist!

Evidence from the Depression and past recessions has shown that numbers of births fall in hard economic times.

But University of Chicago economist and sociologist Gary Becker says that may not hold true anymore, with greater numbers of women in the labor force. Women laid off from their jobs might see unemployment as the time to have a child, he says: “Births might go up during recession.”

Read more.

Yesterday the Minneapolis Star-Tribune ran a story on the state of teenage girls in the United States. The article featured the work of sociologist Mike Males, who is fighting the myth that these young women are floundering. Instead, he argues, they are doing better than ever.

Mike Males believes it, and he’s preaching that message to anybody willing to listen. All he needs now is a strong set of fins to propel him upstream. That’s because Males, a sociologist, author and senior researcher for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, says popular culture prefers to keep tweener and teen girls in familiar boxes labeled vulnerable, shallow, mean, violent and depressed.

“Girls are doing spectacularly well,” said Males, who spoke to a packed house this month at a lecture sponsored by the University of Minnesota’s Konopka Institute for Best Practices in Adolescent Health.

But Males is quick to acknowledge that there are still many challenges facing teen girls in the US.

He doesn’t dismiss the challenges, whether eating disorders, substance abuse, bullying or pornography. “But these problems exist throughout adult society, as well,” he said. “To generalize these problems to all girls is simply wrong.”

Columnist Gail Roseblum asks, “Why such a discrepancy between belief and reality?”

Males says it could be because of racial stereotyping, (these shifts are occurring amid unprecedented racial diversity in this country); or sexism (we seem more comfortable with the idea of girls being “innately vulnerable”), or simple data manipulation. A new book, “The Triple Bind: Saving Our Teenage Girls from Today’s Pressures,” for example, correctly reports that suicide rates among girls ages 10 to 14 increased 76 percent between 2003 and 2004. In real numbers, though, the jump was from 56 to 98 deaths, among nearly 10 million girls of that age group. While not dismissing the profound grief experienced by those families, Males said that “a high-schooler is three times more likely to suffer a parent’s suicide than the other way around.”

The biggest sin in his mind? Omission. We know the ugliest demon our girls face, Males said. We just don’t want to talk about it.

“Violence in the home is the Number 1 cause of injury to females,” Males said. “This issue is too important to trivialize, but the media gloss right over it.”

Read more.