Cause or Effect?

Is public funding of daycare a response to maternal employment or is the latter a response to the former? Shedding light on the equation, a study looking at female employment patterns worldwide by Becky Pettit and Jennifer Hook of the University of Washington suggests that politicians pushing for state funded daycare or mandated parental leave options may actually feed the very problem they claim to be solving.

Pettit and Hook analyzed micro-level data from 19 member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development gleaned from the fourth wave (mid-1990s) of Luxembourg Income Study. They first estimated the probability that women will be employed as a function of demographics, country by country. Across the board, they found that women with higher levels of education are more likely to be employed, whereas women with children, women with more children, and women with younger children are less likely to be employed. The relationship of being married to being employed, however, varied. That relationship was negative in the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, and the United States, but positive in the Scandinavian countries, Belgium, France, Hungary, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

In measuring the effects of economic and policy factors, the sociologists found that parental leave (including both paid and unpaid) and publicly supported daycare are each significantly related to the above demographic correlations with women’s employment. Parental leave tends to keep mothers of children under the age of six attached to the workplace. Each additional week of leave is associated with a 2.2 percent increase in the probability of employment of mothers with children under age three (p<.05). However, the non-linear relationship begins to weaken when the leave period reaches close to three years. As the sociologists observe, “Extended leave appears to reinforce the breadwinner-homemaker model.”

More consistent associations were found when it comes to daycare. Their regressions reveal that state funded daycare significantly reduces the differences in the probability of employment between married and unmarried women and between women with or without children. Each percentage point increase in daycare funding is associated with a 1.5 percent increase in the effects of being married on employment and having children ages four to six (both correlations, p<.05). The effect almost doubles for women having children ages three or less (a 2.9 percent increase, p<.10). The first two correlations held in all three statistical models, while the third remained significant in two models.

The researchers also discovered that in countries where state daycare provisions are low (i.e., the Czech Republic) the effect of having children is negatively related to women’s employment. But in countries where public provision of daycare is high (Belgium, Sweden, and Denmark), the effect of having children under age three on women’s employment “shrinks and in some cases turns positive.”

Pettit and Hook conclude: “This research suggests that employment decisions of women, and especially mothers, are influenced by policy context.” Conceding that economic issues of supply and demand play a role, the professors nevertheless believe their research challenges the theory that “personal preferences” drive women into the labor force and “stands in stark contrast” to what they term “essentialist explanations” for women’s employment.

(Source: Becky Pettit and Jennifer Hook, “The Structure of Women’s Employment in Comparative Perspective,” Social Forces 84 [December 2005]: 779-801.)

Abortion and the Marriage Market  

Twenty-five years ago, economist Gary Becker argued that a division of labor between husband and wife makes marriage an economic bargain. While he documented how the rise of women in the workplace upsets that equilibrium—making marriage less attractive and divorce more attractive—two economists at the University of Toronto now document how another phenomenon of the past generation—the legalization of abortion—also reduces the economic gains to marriage for young adults, depressing marriage rates.

Using U.S. Census data, the researchers construct population vectors showing that the number of marriage-available men increased 46 percent, while the number of available women increased 39 percent, between 1970 and 1980. And using vital statistics, they construct bivariate distributions showing that the number of marriages between the years 1971-72 and 1981-82 increased only marginally, by 6.5 percent. Their bivariate age distributions further show that the average age of men and women who married increased between the two reference points, even as the average age of available men and women actually declined.

Then borrowing Becker’s static transferable utility model of the marriage market, they estimate the net gain relative to not marrying for men and women, finding that 20-year-old women receive the largest gains when marrying slightly older men and that 20-year-old men receive the largest gains when marrying slightly younger women. Yet in plotting the changes in marriage gains over the decade, they find “a sharp drop in the estimated total gain to marriage to young adults between the ages of 16 and 30.”

To quantify the impact of abortion on this decline, the economists break down their results state by state, finding—in 1970 but not in 1980—lower gains to marriage in 12 “reform” states that had made legal abortion easier to obtain prior to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision relative to the remaining 38 states that had not. And the difference was concentrated among younger men and women: “The drop in the gains to marriage for same-age spouses, between the ages of 19 and 26, living in reform states in 1971-72 relative to those living in nonreform states is substantial.”

Had the nonreform states also partially legalized abortion before 1973, the economists claim that fewer U.S. couples would have tied the knot in 1971-72. They estimate that for men, ages 16 to 25, that social change “would have lowered the total number of marriages in this age group by 4.2 percent, where as among 16 to 25-year-old women, the decrease is about 3.6 percent.” For men and women older than 26, the respective figures are 3.8 percent and 5.2 percent.

While recognizing that other factors also contribute to changing marriage patterns during the 1970s, these two professors nonetheless show that when judges or legislators claim to be granting new rights to women, they end up taking other things away, in this case the likelihood of living happily ever after.

(Source: Eugene Choo and Aloysius Siow, “Who Marries Whom and Why?” Journal of Political Economy 114 [February 2006]: 175-201.)

The Difference a   Father Makes  

As a disproportionate amount of research on teenage sexual behavior focuses on disadvantaged youth—particularly those living in broken families or with single parents—perceptions of promiscuity among teens in general are often exaggerated. Yet a study by Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas, provides a sharper picture of high school students from standard, intact families, identifying clues that might help parents keep their teenagers on the straight and narrow.

Among his chief findings: Teen daughters of married parents are more likely to retain their virginity if they enjoy close relationships with their fathers (p<.01 in the first statistical model; p<.10 in the second), a pattern that was not replicated with sons or in connection with the quality of relationships with mothers. The finding comes from regression analysis of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, where Regnerus used a subsample of almost 2,400 respondents (ages 15 and above) living in biologically intact families who were interviewed initially in 1995 and a year later. In this sample, while 63 percent of boys and 66 of girls were virgins in the first wave, those proportions declined to 49 percent and 51 percent, respectively, by the second wave.

While these percentages might still seem high given the sample, the second statistical model accounts for other factors that also increased the odds that his virgin teens remained so between the two interviews. For both boys and girls, not dating or dating infrequently, as well as anticipating guilt if they engaged in premarital sex, were each strongly associated with keeping one’s virginity (p<.001 for all four coefficients). For girls (but not boys), attending church regularly and perceiving that their parents disapprove of premarital relations also increased the odds of remaining chaste (p<.05 for both).

While dads often feel off balance when their little girls become teenagers, these findings demonstrate that involved dads make a difference, especially when they connect to their daughters, attend church with them weekly, and keep their dating to a minimum.

(Source: Mark D. Regnerus and Laura B. Luchies, “The Parent-Child Relationship and Opportunities for Adolescents’ First Sex,” Journal of Family Issues 27 [February 2006]: 159-183.)

The Gamble of State Lotteries  

When initially adopted by various states, lotteries were sold as harmless mechanisms to increase state revenue without raising taxes. Why the public fell for the gamble remains a puzzle, but a study by two political scientists at the University of Maryland exposes the emptiness of that pitch by documenting how lotteries are major generators of income inequality.

The professors chart the Gini coefficient—a standard measure of income concentration in a political jurisdiction—based upon the Current Population Survey of the Census Bureau from 1976 and 1995, comparing states without a lottery against states with a lottery during every year of the analysis. During the twenty-year period, the increase in the level of income inequality was 40 percent greater in the lottery states relative to the non-lottery states. In fact, the trend lines reversed themselves; whereas the non-lottery states began with a higher Gini factor in 1976, the lottery states surpassed the non-lottery states by 1993.

Multivariate regressions that included measurements of other state tax policies, demographic factors, and welfare spending on income inequality in all fifty states confirmed “the lottery effect” as an independent and significant contributor to income inequality, as the presence of a state lottery positively correlated with inequality in all three models (p<.05). According to the researchers, “the magnitude of the effect is sizable,” comparable to a full standard deviation change in manufacturing employment (which is negatively associated with inequality) and greater than the per-revenue-dollar impact of either the sales or state income tax (each of which were positively associated with inequality).

Each statistical model also found that increases in state welfare spending were associated with increases in income concentration (p=.01 in all three models).

While these findings may not prompt states to reassess their dependence on this revenue source, they document the problematic nature of lotteries and raise questions as to whether the increased popularity of all sorts of gaming are also related to increases in both state spending and the family tax burden.

(Source: Elizabeth A. Freund and Irwin L. Morris, “The Lottery and Income Inequality in the States,” Social Science Quarterly 86 [December 2005 Supplement]: 996-1012.)

Churches Key to Urban Marriage  

Given the retreat from marriage and high rates of out-of-wedlock childbearing among African Americans, some observers see little hope for a recovery in marriage in urban America. Yet a study by Brad Wilcox of the University of Virginia and Nick Wolfinger of the University of Utah finds that both the idea and the reality of marriage remain very much alive among urban blacks that attend church regularly.

Using the first two waves of data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, the sociologists focus on urban parents of more than 3,000 children born between 1998 and 2000 that were interviewed shortly after childbirth and one year later. As expected, they found that church attendance is more prevalent among urban mothers that are married (p<.001) and urban mothers that are African American relative to those who are white or Hispanic (both correlations, p<.001). But they also discovered that unmarried mothers who attend church regularly are more inclined to marry within a year after childbirth than their peers that do not worship regularly (p<.10).

This association of church attendance with marriage after childbirth was especially strong among African-American mothers, remaining statistically significant (p<.05) in models that controlled for variables found to also increase the likelihood of marriage after childbirth. Those variables included mother’s commitment to marriage as normative (p<.001), as well as father’s regular church attendance (p<.01), father’s sexual fidelity to the mother (p<.01), and father’s supportiveness (p<.001).

The researchers also found that mothers identified as conservative or “sectarian black Protestant” are more likely to marry after childbirth (p<.05) relative to those with no religious affiliation, a correlation that was not significant with any other religious affiliation, including “mainline black Protestant.”

While African-American mothers who attend church still face lower odds of marriage than do white churchgoing mothers, the odds are reduced by a third when the comparison group is white mothers who do not go to church. “Taken together, these results show that the low rate of marriage among black urban mothers would be even lower were it not for their high levels of church attendance.”

As their findings document a reciprocal relationship between church and family, the researchers observe: “One of the ways religious institutions foster marriage is by promoting relationship-related beliefs and behaviors that are conducive to marriage.” At the same time, “women who believe strongly in the importance of marriage are probably more likely to seek out religious institutions that reinforce their commitment to marriage.”

(Source: W. Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas Wolfinger, “Then Comes Marriage? Religion, Race, and Marriage in Urban America,” forthcoming in Social Science Research.)

The Depressed Only Child  

Many American environmentalists, Malthusians, and left-leaning progressives have viewed China’s one-child policy as part of an enlightened social blueprint.  A study recently completed in China by Japanese scholars, however, raises disturbing new questions about the effects of that policy.

In a recent analysis of high-school students in China’s Heilongjiang Sheng Province, researchers from the University of Tsukuba in Japan have uncovered troubling evidence that the one-child policy is stranding millions of only children in psychopathology.  The indications that Chinese only children are experiencing psychological distress surfaced when the Japanese scholars compared survey data collected from urban children with siblings with data from urban children with no siblings.  In these comparisons, “urban only children showed significant negative mental health tendencies” not evident in peers with siblings. 

The Japanese researchers limn an unsettling overall psychological profile of the urban only child.  Compared to peers with siblings, the urban only child suffers from “significantly lower love awareness from family, higher neurotic and social depression, trait anxiety, perceived stressors, and interpersonal dependency.”  The researchers particularly stress the importance of diminished “love awareness” in incubating the rest of the only child’s dismal brood of mental illnesses.  They reason that Chinese only children experience “lower love awareness from family” is that their parents are “preoccupied by urban wealth … [and therefore] lack sufficient time to share familial bonds with their children.”  In contrast, “the presence of a sharing brother/sister” fosters greater love awareness among urban children with siblings, resulting in “better mental health.”

The Japanese researchers do not see the same pattern of psychological distress among only children living in rural regions, presumably because of “the communal extended family systems in the rural areas.”  Cousins may replace siblings in such an extended family context.  Unfortunately, such extended family ties are largely unavailable to urban only children, who appear so “emotionally deprived” that they “tend to live a reclusive life even at school.”

Though America has never had a state-enforced one-child policy, the cultural forces responsible for the remarkable American birth dearth of the late 20th century have probably given Boston and Buffalo only children just as psychologically disoriented as those in Beijing.

(Source: Chenying Liu, Tsunetsugu Munakata, and Francis N. Onuoha, “Mental Health Condition of the Only-Child: A Study of Urban and Rural High School Students in China,” Adolescence 40 [2005]: 831-845.)

An Echoed Warning  

Seventy years ago, when the economic malaise of the Depression helped drive fertility rates down throughout the industrialized world, many scholars were greatly alarmed at the prospect of shrinking populations.  Today, when the cultural erosion of marriage and family has again depressed fertility throughout the developed world, the works of some of those scholars are coming in for renewed attention.  Thus, in a recent issue of Population and Development Review, the editors have chosen to reprint a 1937 essay of D.V. Glass, long associated with the London School of Economics and the Royal Commission of Population. 

As he contemplated the consequences of a “continuous decline in numbers,” Glass warned of economic problems traceable to “changes in the size and nature of the demand for goods and services, [and] decreasing flexibility of the system due to shrinkage in the flow of new recruits to industry.”   A contracting population, Glass remarked, “would involve the constant remoulding of the economic structure at a rate which might very well tax its powers of recuperation.”  Glass accordingly concluded that “the difficulties brought in the train of a continuously falling population would be of a magnitude demanding the most serious consideration.”  Even if “they could be surmounted … [these difficulties] would probably divert, in the process, energies which might be better utilized” for other purposes.  Glass in fact feared that “in an individualist civilization,” like that of the capitalist West, “a continually falling population” would prove “thoroughly disastrous.” 

Glass further recognized the extreme difficulty of reversing the dynamic of depopulation.  “To be successful, measures for raising fertility will have to alter the attitude of the average person to marriage and the family,” he observed. Glass considered success in effecting such alteration “extremely unlikely … unless at the same time, some of the major characteristics of the present social and economic milieu are also altered.”

Glass has regained scholarly attention in the 21st century for very good reasons.   After all, the United Nations estimates that in 2005 fertility tumbled below replacement level in 65 countries, countries in which 43 percent of the world’s population now reside.  The slide in fertility is especially pronounced in Europe, where a completed fertility rate of 1.4 lifetime births per woman translates into “a shrinkage of the total population by one-third over a generation—roughly every 30 years.”  No wonder the editors of Population and Development Review believe that “Glass’s commentary remains highly relevant to the discussion of the problems of low fertility today.”

(Source: D.V. Glass, “D.V. Glass on the Problems of a Declining Population,” Population and Development Review 31 [2005]: 557-572.)

Children at Risk   

Again and again, homosexual activists repeat a reassuring mantra: “We’re just ordinary folks, not really different from everyone else.”  Sympathetic politicians, entertainers, and journalists have so often amplified this message that it has become part of conventional wisdom for all too many Americans.  Indeed, only widespread acceptance of that message can account for the decision by some states and professional organizations (including the National Association of Social Workers) to accept homosexuals as foster and adoptive parents.  But from time to time hard realities puncture that conventional wisdom, so casting grave doubts on the new policies allowing homosexuals to serve as surrogate parents.  One of those hard truths recently surfaced in the pages of Psychological Reports, where researcher Paul Cameron published disquieting evidence that when they do become foster parents, homosexuals are far more likely than heterosexuals to sexually abuse the children placed in their care. 

In data reported for 1997-2002 by the child protective services (Department of Children & Family Services) for the state of Illinois, Cameron identified a total of 270 foster parents involved in “substantiated sexual abuse.”  Of these 270 sexually abusive foster parents, more than one-third (34%) were involved in same-sex (i.e., homosexual) abuse.  Because available evidence indicates that homosexuals constitute no more than 3% of foster parents even in jurisdictions that “recruit homosexual foster parents aggressively,” Cameron has good reason to emphasize “the disproportionality of the homosexual footprint.”  And given that such disproportionality has also shown up in previous analyses of foster care based on survey and journalistic data, he seems fully justified in questioning the prudence of those now “abandoning the tradition of excluding homosexuals as foster parents.”

(Source: Paul Cameron, “Child Molestations by Homosexual Foster Parents: Illinois, 1997-2002,” Psychological Reports 96 [2005]: 227-230.)

Deadly Parental Divorces—Part 2  

A decade ago, researchers at the RAND Corporation and the University of California, Riverside (UCR) captured the attention of many of their colleagues with a sobering 1995 study identifying “parental divorce as the primary early life social predictor of life-span mortality risk.” The statistical analysis for that study limned “a striking effect of parental divorce,” with children from divorced families dying an average of 4 years earlier than did their peers reared in intact families.  Now that same research team has published a follow-up study based on a larger data set and amplified by the inclusion of a more subtle statistical analysis.

Adding numbers for the late 1990’s to their previous data set, the RAND and UCR scholars again confirm “the association between experiencing parental divorce in childhood and a subsequently increased mortality risk … for the period of 1950 through 2000” (p < 0.001).  The expanded body of evidence once again indicates that children from broken homes are likely to end up in the cemetery or crematorium significantly sooner than peers from intact families.

When the researchers turn their attention to “likely mediators or moderators” of the linkage between parental divorce and premature death, they are able to tease out a few clues as to just how family disintegration shortens children’s lives.  Not surprisingly, “smoking behavior” proved “the strongest” mediator between parental divorce and early mortality.  Smoking rates run particularly high among the offspring of divorced parents; consequently, in a statistical model that controlled for smoking behavior, the Risk Hazard associated with parental divorce declined from 1.5 to 1.3.  Still, the researchers marvel that “even in this reduced sample [of smoking individuals] and alongside this powerful behavioral predictor [i.e., smoking], the experience of parental divorce maintains a substantial effect size and marginal statistical significance” (p < 0.10).  Curiously, in a gender-by-gender statistical model smoking emerges as “an even greater risk factor for women whose parents had divorced” than for women whose parents had not divorced.

Further statistical analysis of variables that might mediate between parental divorce and early mortality indicates that for sons, at least, part of the elevated mortality may be traced back to diminished life satisfaction and achievement.  The researchers consequently find that, when compared to peers from intact families, men who have experienced parental divorce as children experience “greater risk from low satisfaction/ achievement,” and this elevated risk in turn translates into a deadly rise in mortality risk. 

Overall, however, the researchers concede that they have uncovered “only a few [intervening variables that] indicated an explanatory pathway” between parental divorce and early death.  Most of the variables that the researchers hypothesized would mediate between parental divorce and early mortality carry no statistical significance.  The expectation, for instance, that parental divorce might be less lethal for those children who subsequently develop favorable personality traits as adults does seem reasonable.  But this expectation finds no substantiation in the data: “None of the adult personality variables significantly moderated the relationship between parental divorce and mortality risk.”  Similarly, while the researchers’ theory leads them to believe that “positive aspects of family [should be] helpful to children of divorce,” they find themselves puzzling over “hints that boys with more positive family attributes were at slightly higher risk [of early death after parental divorce] than those with fewer.”  Possibly, the researchers concede, this finding needs to be interpreted not in terms of their theory but rather in terms of earlier empirical research indicating that “dismantling a seemingly functional family may be more traumatic and have more significant long-term negative effects than the dissolution of a clearly troubled family.” 

Researchers still may not be able to fully explain why parental divorce sends many children to an early grave.  But they now possess yet more evidence that it does. 

(Source: Leslie R. Martin et al., “Longevity Following the Experience of Parental Divorce,” Social Science & Medicine 61 [2005]: 2177-2189, emphasis added.)

The Ironies of the Academy  

While common sense and women’s intuition have affirmed for centuries that the marriage-based family serves children best, many social scientists have only recently come around to this conclusion. Identifying that important shift in scholarly opinion between the 1970s and 1980s, Norval Glenn of the University of Texas and Thomas Sylvester of the Institute for American Values nonetheless warn that many scholars still remain in denial that “the preponderance of the evidence indicates that children tend to do best” when reared by their married, natural parents.

Reviewing the content of the Journal of Marriage and Family from 1977 to 1992, the researchers identified 266 articles dealing with the effects of family structure on children, noting a steep increase in their frequency, from 31 articles between the years 1977-82 to 83 articles between the years 1998-2002. More important, they found a “substantial and statistically significant” increase in such articles that expressed concern about negative family structure effects. Rating each article on a 1 to 5 scale (assigning a 1 where the authors claim that divorce or illegitimacy are not important factors and a 5 where the authors strongly affirmed that family structure makes a substantial differences in the lives of children), they found that the mean rating increased from 2.81 for articles published during the period 1977-82 to 3.42 for those published between 1983-87.

While the mean rating did not essentially rise after the 1983-87 period, the proportion of these articles, relative to all articles published, continued to increase. In fact, the proportion of articles reporting results of empirical research—relative to all articles on family structure effects—quadrupled during the 26 years. Moreover, the authors dealing with hard data were more likely to convey “more concerned” views than those who wrote qualitative, theoretical, and synthetic articles not subject to peer review. Also among the quantitative studies, those using nationally representative samples expressed more concern about family structure than those that used small or convenience samples, as did longitudinal studies relative to cross-sectional studies. As Glenn and Sylvester put it: “The better the research design, the more likely the researchers were to conclude that there were important family structure effects on children.”

While encouraged by the greater recognition among scholars of the importance of family structure, Glenn and Sylvester do not think this shift represents a new consensus, lamenting that a “nontrivial portion of scholars” continues to downplay the consequences of family structure with interpretations rarely applied to social science data. Scholars never say, for example, that growing up in poverty does not automatically result in poor outcomes, nor do they emphasize that low levels of maternal education do not necessarily lead to educational difficulties for children. Yet Glenn and Sylvester provide abundant evidence of rhetorical contortions where scholars hedge their bets on family structure, claiming that single parenthood “does not necessarily” handicap children, that unhealthy relationships—not divorce per se—is the “better predictor” variable, or that because they represent indirect rather than direct effects, family structure effects are somehow less important.

This failure—whether ideologically or therapeutically driven—to follow the data suggest that scholars can’t always be trusted when it comes to the truth, especially the truth about the family.

(Source: Norval Glenn and Thomas Sylvester, “The Shift: Scholarly Views on Family Structure Effects on Children, 1977-2002,” and “The Denial: Downplaying the Consequences of Family Structure for Children,” New York: Institute for American Values, March 2006.)

Not Just Selection Effects  

Some sociologists spin data by appealing to “selection” effects, claiming happy people make a marriage more than marriage makes people happy. Yet a new study by two Swiss economists of more than 15,000 German men and women find that while happier singles are indeed more likely to marry (especially at younger ages), selection effects do not fully explain the robust correlation between marriage and happiness.

Crunching data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study, a longitudinal study that began in 1984 of households in the Federal Republic of Germany, and from 1990 to 2000, including households of the former East Germany, they found that married people report a 0.30 point higher life satisfaction than do single adults. They claim the difference is “sizeable” and statistically significant, equal to the effect of earning 2.5 times the mean household income and 0.30 as good as having a job.

In order to measure election effects, the researchers estimate the effects of a change in martial status for each individual. Taking into account this time-invariant base level of happiness (which is independent of personality factors that influence happiness) and averaging them across the sample, the economists find that the positive and sizeable effect of being married rather than single remains: “The positive correlation in the baseline estimation cannot simply be explained by a selection of happier people into marriage.”

What other factors might then influence marital happiness? The researchers found that couples who specialize their roles along the lines of the breadwinner/homemaker model, relative to dual-income couples, reported higher levels of life satisfaction, the difference being statistically significant for the first seven years of marriage. The pattern was especially pronounced for wives with young children, who reported much higher life satisfaction than wives with young children in marriages where roles were more the same. No such differences were found among husbands with young children, weakening the claim that traditional marriage arrangements benefit men more than women.

While these findings may not resolve the selection debate, one wonders why scholars seem more willing to use the selection argument to downplay marriage effects than to downplay the negative effects of poverty or the positive effects of education.

(Source: Alois Stutzer and Bruno S. Frey, “Does Marriage Make People Happy, or Do Happy People Get Married,” The Journal of Socio-Economics 35 [2006]: 326-347.)

Punching the Clock Risks Mom’s Health  

Social science research documents a number of negative effects of full-time maternal employment on the well-being of children, but what about the impact on the well-being of mothers? While policymakers around the globe continue to push for more mothers to work full-time outside the home, a new study by researchers at the University of Queensland finds that combining motherhood and full-time employment yields a significant “health burden” for women.

Looking at the responses of more than 2,200 Australian men and women who responded to the “Negotiating the Lifecourse” study, a longitudinal panel study conducted in two waves (1996-97 and 2000), the researchers studied the interaction of employment and parental status on self-reported health. While their most complex statistical model found no significant interactions between these variables for men, it yielded key correlations for women, suggesting that “work and family commitments operate differently for men than women.” For example, having children under 18 significantly lowered the odds of reporting poor health for women not working outside the home (p<.05) or only working part-time (p<.01), compared to their peers working full-time outside the home. In other words, for mothers with children, working outside the home full-time represents a health risk whereas staying at home (or only working part-time) represents a health benefit.

As their findings found greater similarities between mothers who work part-time with women who did not work at all, the researchers suggest that studies that do not differentiate between full- and part-time employment overlook important differences among women.

The analysis also yielded statistically significant correlations between marriage and health among women, but not men. In the most complex interaction model, previously married women (separated, divorced, or widowed) as well as cohabiting women were more likely to report poorer health than married women (p<.05 for both variables). Women who never married were also more likely to report poor health, but the association was not statistically significant.

(Source: Belinda Hewitt, Janeen Baxter, and Mark Western, “Family, Work, and Health: The Impact of Marriage, Parenthood, and Employment on Self-Reported Health of Australian Men and Women,” Journal of Sociology 21 [March 2006]: 61-78.)

The Irony of Easy Divorce  

No-fault divorce statutes are often justified on the basis that easy divorce is necessary to help women escape from abusive relationships. Yet how many wives actually experience physical violence by their husbands? While hard data is difficult to come by, a new Dutch study finds that as divorce has become easier to obtain and more commonplace, severe behavior factors like abuse are less the motive for ending a marriage, suggesting that marital violence may be dramatically less than feminists claim.

Using their own 1998 study, “Divorce in the Netherlands,” the researchers analyzed data from more than 1,700 Dutch men and women who divorced between 1949 and 1996. Among the 17 identified motives for divorce, the study found that those grouped in the “relational” category were cited most frequently by the divorcees. Among all respondents, 75 percent cited “growing apart,” “having not enough attention for each other,” and “not being able to talk to each other” as a motive for divorce. Forty percent indicated sexual problems as a divorce motive. Smaller percentages cited “behavioral” motives: 37 percent cited their spouse’s sexual infidelity and 22 percent cited substance abuse. Only 17 percent named physical violence as a motive.

More important, behavioral motives were cited with less frequency, while relational motives with more frequency, over time. For example, among the Dutch women who divorced in the 1950s, 54 percent cited a husband’s infidelity as a motive and 45 percent cited physical violence. By the 1990s, those two figures declined to 38 percent and 21 percent. Accordingly, among the women who divorced in the 1950s and 1960s, 57 percent claimed they divorced because they had grown apart from their respective husbands, a percentage that increased to 79 percent among the more recently divorced.

These patterns suggest that more restrictive divorce laws did in fact protect women a generation ago when marriages were perhaps more problematic. Yet the patterns also suggest that under regimes encouraging easy divorce, more couples end up divorcing for trivial reasons and when marriages appear less troubled. If this is the case, what social good has no-fault divorce legislation wrought?

(Source: Paul M. de Graaf and Matthijs Kalmijn, “Divorce Motives in a Period of Rising Divorce: Evidence from a Dutch Life-History Survey,” Journal of Family Issues 27 [April 2006]: 483-505.)

Boys and Girls Out of Control  

Troublemaking boys far outnumber troublemaking girls.  However, in a recent study of preadolescent conduct problems, psychiatrists at King’s College in London find that living in a single-parent or step-parent household pushes both boys and girls toward bad behavior. 

To identify the antecedents of children’s problem behavior, the King’s College scholars scrutinize data collected from almost three thousand boys and three thousand girls (ages 5 to 10) over three years by the British Department of Health.  The British researchers identify “strong associations” between DBDs  (Disruptive Behavior Disorders) and a number of family characteristics, including family structure.  After limning these statistical associations for boys and girls, the British investigators conclude that “children of both sexes are equally sensitive to this range of risks.”  A close look at the study’s statistical results, however, suggests that girls are at least slightly more sensitive than boys to the risks attendant to living in a non-intact family. 

When the focus is on living in single-parent households, the elevation in DBD risk for girls looks almost identical to that for boys.  The researchers calculate that, compared to boys living in intact families, boys living in single-parent families are almost three times as likely to evince symptoms of DBDs (Odds Ratio of 2.7; p < 0.001).  The effects of living in a single-parent family look remarkably similar for girls: compared to girls living in intact families, girls in single parent families are, again, almost three times as likely to be diagnosed with DBDs (Odds Ratio of 2.9; p < 0.001). 

But when the focus shifts to reconstituted step-parent families, the elevation in DBD risk for girls actually looks worse than it does for boys.  Compared to boys who live in intact families, boys living in reconstituted families are about twice as likely to evince DBDs (Odds Ratio of 1.8; p < 0.01).   On the other hand, girls living in reconstituted families are fully three times more likely to develop DBDs than are girls in intact families (Odds Ratio of 3.0; p < 0.001).

The multiplication of single-parent and step-parent families on both sides of the Atlantic can only mean a parallel multiplication in the number of boys and girls running wild.

(Source: Julie Messer et al., “Preadolescent Conduct Problems in Girls and Boys,” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 45 [2006]: 184-191.)

Better Than Prozac  

Enduring marriage safeguards mental health—for both men and women.  But marital failure immediately jeopardizes the psychological well-being of men and women.  To investigate the timing and character of the psychological harm visited upon both genders when marriages fail, sociologists at the University of Alberta recently pored over data collected between 1994 and 1998 from a nationally representative sample of over eleven thousand men and women.  They began their analysis of the data fully aware that “despite the growing retreat from marriage in both Canada and the United States … studies clearly show that married individuals enjoy longer lives and are in better physical and mental health than their unmarried counterparts.”   What they sought to establish through their analysis, however, is whether marital breakup affects men and women in the same way, particularly in the short run.

The Alberta scholars’ analysis first confirms what the researchers already knew.  “We find,” the researchers report, “that marriage continues to be beneficial for mental health.”  The Canadian men and women in a stable marriage throughout the study period experienced “significantly lower levels of distress relative to those who remain single, separated, or divorced.”  The data further indicate that “entry into marriage is associated with lower levels of distress and a transition out of marriage increases psychological distress.”  But the Alberta team naturally focuses on the answer to their primary research question:  “We find no evidence,” the investigators write, “to suggest that the short-term effects of change in marital status on psychological distress are different for men and women.”  In other words, the disintegration of a marriage puts the former husband and the former wife in equal short-term psychological peril.

(Source: Lisa Strohschein et al., “Marital Transitions and Mental Health: Are There Gender Differences in the Short-Term Effects of Marital Status Change?” Social Science & Medicine 61 [2005]: 2293-2303.)

Long-Lasting Harm  

The myth of the Resilient Child has long served as a rhetorical support for those favoring easy divorce.  After all, if a child can bounce back quickly from the adverse effects of seeing parents part, why worry overmuch about preventing divorce?  The trouble is that this myth is an utter illusion.  The latest evidence that parental divorce actually leaves children with long-lasting scars appears in a study recently published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence by a team of researchers at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.

To determine the long-term psychological impact of parental divorce, the Utrecht scholars set about examining data collected in 1991, again in 1994, and finally in 1997 from a nationally representative sample of 1,274 Dutch adolescents and young adults (ages 12 to 24).  The researchers began their investigation wondering if parental divorce might not predict patterns of internalizing problems (depression, nervousness, dejection, stress) and of externalizing behavior (vandalism, violent crime, substance abuse). 

The parsing of the data does indeed reveal that “at all three waves, adolescents and young adults of post-divorce families report more internalizing and externalizing problem behavior than their peers of intact families,” with the differences reaching the threshold of statistical significance in five out of six comparisons.  And family structure remains a strong predictor of both internalizing and externalizing problem behaviors (p < 0.01 for both internalizing and externalizing symptoms) in a multi-variable statistical analysis taking into account family income and adolescent education.

The Dutch scholars strike hard at the myth of the Resilient Child by emphasizing that the “negative effects of parental divorce” are remarkably long-lasting.  The researchers marvel that the internalizing and externalizing symptoms they have in view were being measured after “a parental divorce [that] had on average been experienced nine years  previously.”   Evidently, “even years after the parental divorce, adolescents and young adults still show increased levels of internalizing and externalizing problem behaviors, compared to their peers of intact families.”  In other words, “a parental divorce can result in long-lasting differences in the adjustment of children compared to children whose parents were continuously married,” as “adverse associations [in internalizing and externalizing problems] persist into adolescence and young adulthood.”

Perhaps it is finally time to relegate the myth of the Resilient Child to its proper place—alongside the stories of Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster.

(Source: Inge VanderValk et. al., “Family Structure and Problem Behavior of Adolescents and Young Adults: A Growth-Curve Study,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 34 [2005]: 533-546, emphasis added.)

Protected from Sudden Death  

Households of any type can experience the heartbreak of Sudden Infant Death  Syndrome (SIDS).  However, a growing body of research suggests that this tragedy is far less likely to strike the intact two-parent family than it is to hit the single-mother household.  The latest evidence appears in a study recently published in Pediatrics by researchers from Cambridge University and the British Medical Research Council. 

Analyzing data drawn from the Scottish Morbidity Record for the years 1992 to 2001, the British scholars establish a clear linkage between maternal marital status and risk of SIDS.  Indeed, the researchers calculate that for the years in question less than one-third (30.2%) of the Scottish SIDS deaths involved infants with married mothers!  Even in multi-variable statistical analysis that accounts for the child’s birth weight and the mother’s age and tobacco use, the researchers calculate that babies with married mothers are only about half as likely to die of SIDS (Adjusted Odds Ratio of 0.54; p = 0.001). 

The authors of the new study discuss hopes for reducing the risk of SIDS by deploying health professionals armed with symptom diaries and apnea monitors to make weekly visits to new mothers.  How strange that they say nothing about the need to guide prospective mothers toward the wedding chapel!

(Source: Gordon C.S. Smith and Ian R. White, “Predicting the Risk for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome From Obstetric Characteristics: A Retrospective Cohort Study of 505,011 Live Births,” Pediatrics 117 [2006]: 60-66.)

Maturing Too Early, Suffering Too Much  

Unusually early puberty is no blessing—especially for young women living in single-parent households.  The troubling vulnerability of young women who experience early puberty in a single-parent family has recently been identified by researchers at Ohio State University and the University of Florida. 

Life changes profoundly with the onset of puberty.  To better understand how that life change can expose young people to physical violence, the Ohio State and Florida researchers pored over data collected in 1995-96 from a nationally representative sample of adolescents (grades 7 through 12).  The researchers discern a troubling linkage in that data between early puberty and adolescent experiences of violent physical victimization.  “Early puberty,” the researchers remark, “ …places adolescents at greater risk of victimization experiences,” further specifying that this increased risk of victimization appears “among both males and females.”  With good reason, the researchers assert that “victimization should be added to the long list of adverse outcomes associated with early pubertal development.”

But the researchers trace the risk of physical victimization to more than early puberty.  Family circumstances clearly affect vulnerability. The data indicate that “adolescents from two-parent families, those who have more highly educated parents, and those reporting higher levels of parent-child attachment have lower levels of victimization.” 

The relative safety of adolescents in two-parent families (and the corresponding vulnerability of peers in single-parent households) shows up in statistical analyses of data for the entire study sample (p < 0.05).  But further statistical scrutiny reveals that family structure particularly affects the relative safety of adolescent young women. That is, when the researchers look just at the data for the physical victimization of adolescent young men, they find that the effects of family structure fall below the threshold of statistical significance.  In contrast, when the researchers look just at the physical victimization of young women, they still see the effects of family structure very clearly (p < 0.05).  In other words, living in a single-parent family puts adolescent young women—particularly those experiencing early puberty—in distinct danger of violent physical victimization.

And yet feminist leaders continue to treat wedlock with indifference or open hostility.

(Source: Dana L. Hayne and Alex R. Piquero, “Pubertal Development and Physical Victimization in Adolescence,” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 43 [2006]: 3-35.)

Sweet Home Alabama  

The Gallup organization reports that nearly 60 percent of citizens in four southern states—Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina—attend public worship once a week or almost once a week. Why do Southerners remain the most churchgoing people in the nation? Judging from a study by Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the South’s greater religious and ethnic homogeneity may have a lot to do with it.

Looking at the 1984 through 2000 waves of the General Social Survey (GSS) and the Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample (IPUMS) of the 1990 Census, the economist found that the higher the density of a faith tradition in a given area, the higher rates of church attendance. This held true in a measure of “religious market density” of one’s stated religion in a given area, but especially in his more sophisticated measure of religious density based upon the ancestral distribution in a given area and the religious distribution of each ancestry. With the GSS data, Gruber discovered that a 10 percent rise in his first measure raised church attendance by 1.3 percent and that a 10 percent increase in his second scale increased church attendance by 8.5 percent.

Yet the positive effects of “religious density” were found to extend beyond the spiritual realm. Using the IPUMS data, Gruber found that living near ancestors that share one’s religious preference also resulted in higher household incomes, higher levels of education, lower rates of welfare dependency, higher odds of marriage and having more children, and lower odds of divorce. Each 10 percent increase in religious density correlated with a 0.91 increase in household income and with 0.05 more years of education.

His estimates of the economic effects of church attendance from the GSS analysis were even greater, showing that the doubling of religious attendance raises household income by 9.1 percent and education by roughly 0.5 years. The doubling of religious attendance also translated into a 4.4 percent increase in the odds of being married, a 4.4 percent reduction in the odds of being divorced, and a 0.4 percent reduction in the odds of receiving welfare.

Gruber believes his findings are striking: “These effects are sizeable and are robust to a variety of specification checks. And they do not appear to be driven by selection of higher ability individuals into areas where there is more density of religion.”

(Source: Jonathan Gruber, “Religious Market Structure, Religious Participation, and Outcomes: Is Religion Good for You?” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 11377, May 2005.)

Teen Faith Brightens Family Ties  

Both popular culture and its derivative, youth culture, tend to set adolescent children against the culture of parents. Yet a new study on the role of faith in the family by two University of Texas sociologists suggests that teen religiosity can temper the subversive effects of pop culture by making teens consistently more satisfied with their families and their parents.

Mark Regnerus and Amy Burdette looked at data representing more than 13,000 adolescents and their parents who participated in the 1995 and 1996 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health. In their first set of tests, they found that teen religious saliency, which they measured with rankings of how important religion is to the respondents, was correlated with teens reporting better relationships with fathers and higher levels of satisfaction with their families (p < .05 for both dependent variables). More important, teens that said religion is important to them were more likely to indicate that their relations with their mothers and fathers improved and that their satisfaction with their families increased during the course of the study (p < .001 for all three variables). So teen religiosity not only contributes to better family dynamics, but also improves those dynamics over time.

The researchers’ second group of models looked at how increases in teen religiosity improve family dynamics. While only 15 percent of the adolescents reported growth in at least one of four measures of religiosity, teens whose religious saliency score increased between the two study waves were also more likely to report improved mother-child relations, improved father-child relations, and increased levels of family satisfaction during the same time. These three positive effects remained statistically significant in tests that controlled for the effects of behavioral changes like teen drug use, drinking, and delinquency, which were shown to have the reverse effect.

While church attendance by itself did not appear to improve family relations, teens who reported having, between the two study waves, a “born again” experience in the same faith tradition as their family—relative to their peers who did report such an experience—were more likely to report improved relationships with their fathers (p < .05).

In explaining their findings, the two researchers conclude: “Adolescents for whom religion is important—and certainly among those for whom religion has grown in importance between study waves—are more likely to understand, think about, and act upon the implications of their religious commitments for family life.”

(Source: Mark D. Regnerus and Amy Burdette, “Religious Change and Adolescent Family Dynamics,” The Sociological Quarterly 47 [Winter 2006]: 175-194.)

Depressed and Angry Victims  

Children who are victims of various forms of mistreatment are especially likely to become depressed or angry.  The linkage between victimization and psychopathology stands out sharply in a study recently published in Social Science & Medicine by sociologists at the University of New Hampshire.  But when the researchers turn their attention to the circumstances in which victimization typically occurs, they end up highlighting the effects of family structure.

To assess the psychological effects of victimization, the researchers carefully examine data collected in 2002-03 from a nationally representative sample of 2030 American children ages 2 to 17.  The New Hampshire researchers’ statistical analyses focus on exposure during childhood or adolescence to five types of negative experiences: sexual assault, child maltreatment, witnessing family violence, other major violence, and non-victimization adversity. These analyses clearly indicate “the negative mental health implications of victimization experiences and other forms of adversity.”  Indeed, the five types of childhood stressors “all have independent effects on both internalizing symptoms of depression and on externalizing feelings and behaviors, like anger and aggression.” 

But the New Hampshire scholars stress that not all children are equally vulnerable to victimization and subsequent psychopathology.  “One of the strongest and most consistent group differences in victimization and adversity exposure,” the researchers report, “was observed across variations in family structure.  For all five [child-stressor] domains considered, children currently living in single parent and stepfamilies had significantly greater lifetime exposure than those living with two biological or adoptive parents.”  The victimization and adversity that children are particularly likely to experience in broken homes naturally translates into symptoms of depression, anger, and aggression.  In other words, what the authors of the new study see among children in single-parent and stepfamilies is a pronounced “risk for mental health problems.”  The researchers’ data do indicate that impoverished or minority children are less likely than affluent or white children to live in an intact two-parent family.  However, “the effect of family structure on mental health” persists in statistical models that take such background differences into account, so establishing that this effect is “independent of race and socioeconomic status.”  The markedly elevated levels of victimization and mental distress evident among children living in single-parent and stepparent households prompts the researchers to surmise that “there may be something inherent in these family structures or in the characteristics of divorcing parents that increases the risk for child victimization.”

Protecting children from the psychological trauma of victimization would appear to require strong efforts to reverse our national retreat from wedlock and end our national epidemic of divorce.

(Source: Heather A. Turner, David Finkelhor, and Richard Ormrod, “The Effect of Lifetime Victimization on the Mental Health of Children and Adolescents,” Social Science & Medicine 62 [2006]: 13-27.) 

A Natural Division of Labor  

Many young mothers and fathers may say they like the idea of sharing equal roles, especially when it comes to caring for children, but few actually pattern their lives that way. This fact—that mothers are almost always more involved than fathers in the lives of those to whom they have given birth—continues to surprise the gender police. Yet an Australian study suggests that that reality may never change, given the degree to which motherhood involves far more than simply “care giving” and differs in nature from fatherhood.

Looking at data tracking 4,000 households that participated in the 1997 Australian Bureau of Statistics Time Use Survey, researcher Lyn Craig found not only that mothers in intact families spend more time with their children than do fathers, but also that the nature of that time differs in both kind and quality. Mothers provide more physical care (bathing, feeding, dressing) of children than do fathers in both absolute and relative terms. Mothers also do more interactive care of (talking to, playing with, reading to) children, although when measured as a portion of their total time spent with their children, they enjoy less interactive time than fathers.

This leads Craig to observe that fathers enjoy relatively more fun time with children, as they exercise more discretion over when they can be involved with their children (unlike physical care, interactive activities don’t follow a timetable). In contrast, mothers find themselves more time constrained in dealing with children, suggesting that “paternal time with children is less like work than is maternal time.”

These gendered differences in parenting held true in multivariate tests that controlled for demographic characteristics, including maternal employment. In fact, the time-constraints on mothers who work full-time outside the home were even greater than for their stay-at-home peers. The researcher does not say this, but her implication is that moms with outside careers enjoy even less fun time with their children.

Craig concludes: “Mothering involves more double activity, more physical labor, a more rigid timetable, and more overall responsibility than fathering.” So why does elite opinion ignore these realities and push mothers to take on even more responsibilities? Perhaps it’s time to stop fighting this natural division of labor and elevate motherhood to the full-time calling that it is.

(Source: Lyn Craig, “Does Father Care Mean Fathers Share? A Comparison of How Mothers and Fathers in Intact Families Spend Time with Children,” Gender and Society 20 [April 2006]: 259-281.)

Bait and Switch?  

While social scientists tend to celebrate the growing diversity of living arrangements in America that depart from the natural family, occasionally their guild concedes that not all family forms are created equal. In documenting the “wide and deep” diversity of living arrangements in America, a special issue of Social Science Research nonetheless finds “very significant” differences in these arrangements, especially between marriage and cohabitation and between first and second marriages.

Introducing an issue devoted to family research, Steven Nock of the University of Virginia cites “growing equality between the sexes” as perhaps the “most obvious” contributor to what he calls a “restructuring of intimate relationships” like marriage and cohabitation. And while not lamenting these changes per se, he nonetheless observes—without noting the irony—that what sexual equality has given it may have also taken away, as these changes in family structure increasingly represent the basis of social inequality. He writes:

“The ‘haves’ are generally those in stable marriages. The ‘have nots’ are generally those who live outside of marriage, especially with children. So vast is the difference, one is tempted to replace the traditional notion of social class with the more descriptive term marriage class. Marriage now divides the population in much the same way social class once did. Indeed, it may do so more profoundly. Neither education nor occupation so clearly discriminates between those at the two ends of the economic spectrum as marital status does. Those with higher levels of education, income, and occupational stability are more likely to be married and vice versa. The poor or precarious are more likely to be single and vice versa.”

Yet the sociologist seems unable to nock off the baggage of his peers, cautioning against reading too much into what he admits are “pervasive correlations,” because “the reality is far more complicated.” And rather than questioning parents who chose to live outside the protective bonds of marriage, Nock ends up claiming that “family economics,” more than family structure, drive the “intergenerational transmission of disadvantage” associated with deviations from the married norm.

So a journal that initially sees “very significant” differences in family forms pulls a bait and switch, ending up making the case for “the pervasive impact of poverty on children,” pointing out how “parents can moderate significantly the otherwise deleterious consequences of poverty by their own behavior and choices.” Unfortunately none of the articles suggest that marrying or staying married might be among those responsible choices that might make a significant difference for children.

(Source: Steven L. Nock, “Illustrations of Family Scholarship: Introduction to the Special Issue,” Social Science Research 35 [June 2006]: 322-331.)