Are husbands today more likely to pressure their wives to become working stiffs or more likely to encourage them to stay home with the kids? No longer embarrassed as they once were to depend on their wives for support, American men represent a little-noticed factor in the movement of mothers into the workforce. According to three economists writing in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, the growing acceptance on the part of husbands to the idea of wives working outside the home is due to the increased numbers of men who, since World War Two, grew up in families in which their own mothers worked.

Using the Integrated Public Use Micro sample of the U.S. Census Bureau for the decades 1940 to 1980, the researchers document the rising proportion of men raised by working mothers, state by state, who were either directly or indirectly affected by the labor changes triggered by World War Two. Building in part upon an earlier study in the Journal of Political Economy that documented how the increase in women's labor force participation during the war reduced the relative wages of men right after the war (see New Research, July 2004, p. 3), these researchers document how that increase in the employment of women during the war generated even higher levels decades later.

Looking specifically at women born between 1930 and 1935 (who were too young to be directly affected by the war, but would be affected by the change in the pool of available men decades later), the researchers found that a 10 percent higher war mobilization rate of men yielded a 16 percent total increase in the employment of these women between 1940 and 1980. While the "direct" effect of the war on women born prior to 1930 was found to fade over time, the war's "indirect" or "echo" effect on these younger women persisted because, the researchers theorized, they had married men whose war-time mothers had worked when they were young. The greater numbers of men in the population whose mothers had worked, they claim, "encourages women to increase their investment in market skills."

To support that theory, the researchers found that states with higher ratios of children being raised in families with working mothers relative to nonworking mothers experienced higher levels of female labor force participation in the following generation, a statistically significant pattern that held over several decades. "Having a working mother significantly increases the probability that a man's wife works; the magnitude of the effect ranges from 24 to 32 percentage points, depending on the definition of a working mother and the data set used."

Whether the generational pattern leading to higher levels of maternal employment can be reversed is not a question the economists ponder. But their study at least suggests that husbands ought to encourage their wives to stay at home, not simply for the well-being of their own children, but to increase the possibility that their grandchildren might also enjoy the benefits of full-time motherhood.

(Source: Raquel Fernandez, Alessandra Fogli, and Claudia Olivetti, "Mothers and Sons: Preference Formation and Female Labor Force Dynamics," The Quarterly Journal of Economics 119 [2004]: 1249-1299.)

Cohabitation: A Greater Risk for Children  

Governmental social agencies love to identify populations at risk to justify intervention programs that allegedly minimize those risks. But rarely is the welfare industry willing to relate childhood risks to parental marital status, perhaps fearing that acknowledging that children suffer from parental divorce or single parenthood might lower the self-esteem of their client base.

Yet the evidence continues to pour in, this time from across the Atlantic, that the retreat from marriage puts children at risk. In a new study of British data from the Office of National Statistics (ONS), researcher Henry Benson of the Bristol Community Trust has found that three quarters of all family breakdowns that affect young children involve cohabiting, but unmarried, parents.

According to the ONS numbers on divorce and jointed registered births, some 88,000 children under the age of five suffered from the separation of their unmarried parents in 2003. That compares with only 31,000 children under the age of five who experienced the divorce of their married parents.

Given that 59 percent of British households with children are headed by married parents and that 11 percent are headed by cohabiting parents, the disproportionately high number of breakups among the latter suggest their inherent instability and, one might add, their inherent unsuitability for rearing children who yearn for stability and belonging.

Whether social agencies, given their track record in dealing with domestic affairs, should attempt to entice cohabitants to marry is not all that clear. Yet they could begin to address the issue by elevating marriage as a public good and discouraging those things that deny the public good, including cohabitation, divorce, and illegitimacy, because they leave children out in the cold.

(Source: Alexandra Frean, "Unmarried Families Are More Likely to Fall Apart," The London Times, February 5, 2005.)

Not Just Poverty  

Why are young people reared in poverty especially likely to commit crimes?  A new study of the criminality of the poor, recently published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, focuses on family problems.

By scrutinizing twenty-one years of data collected for 1,265 New Zealanders born in 1977, a team of sociologists from Christchurch School of Medicine were able to tease out the various social circumstances that predispose young people toward crime. Their analysis especially highlights the importance of  "family adversity."  In particular, when the researchers used statistical models that took "family factors" into account, they "reduced the C[rime] I[ncidence]R[ate]R[atio] ... substantially."  The New Zealand scholars thus stress "the major role of family factors" in mediating the relationship between poverty and crime. 

The researchers' conceptual definition of "family adversity" comprises a number of things, including "reduced levels of maternal care; changes in parental figures [such as those caused by divorce and remarriage]; [and] low attachment to parents."  All of these adverse family characteristics appear implicated in the incubation of criminal tendencies.

Though they concede that others might interpret their findings differently, the authors of the new study see them as "support [for] a social learning account in which the higher rates of crime amongst young people from disadvantaged families are a consequence of an accumulative exposure to adverse family circumstances, individual predispositions, and peer influences." 

The authors of this new study restrict their attention to children growing up in impoverished households, but their readers may wonder about the broader applicability of their findings.  After all, throughout the industrialized world, children of affluent parents are denied maternal care and given day-care instead, live through revolving-door parenting because of parental divorce and remarriage, and end up feeling only weakly attached to their father and mother.   If "family adversity" is not restricted to the poor, then the harm of such adversity probably isn't either.

(Source: David Fergusson, Nicola Swain-Campbell, and John Horwood, "How does childhood economic disadvantage lead to crime?" Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 45 [2004]: 956-966.)

Black Babies in Peril  

Although American health officials have seen a gratifying drop in overall infant mortality rates in recent decades, they have made dismayingly little progress during this period in protecting black babies.  Indeed, health officials have watched with deep concern as the racial disparity in infant mortality rates has widened: the black-white mortality ratio stood at 2.0 in 1980, but had grown to 2.3 in 1997 and to 2.4 by 2000.  To try to understand this disconcerting trend, a team of demographers at the University of Texas at Austin recently analyzed birth and infant death data collected by the National Center for Health Statistics for 1989-1990 and 1995-1998.  Among the reasons they identify for the widening racial gap in infant mortality rates, the Texas scholars point in particular to a pronounced difference in marital patterns.

As they examine the distinctively elevated mortality rates documented for black infants in both study periods, the researchers find that black mothers are "quite disadvantaged with respect to their risk profile."  The adverse risks faced by blacks include "continuing inequality in social resources, including 'knowledge, money, power, prestige, and beneficial social connections.'"  Among the "beneficial social connections" receiving attention in this study is that of wedlock.  In both periods, black babies were far more likely to be born to an unmarried mother than were white babies (66% vs. 16% in 1989-1990; 69% vs. 21% in 1995-1998), a disparity relevant to epidemiologists since maternal marital status emerges as a predictor of infant mortality in all five of the researchers' statistical models (p < 0.01 in all five statistical models).  The researchers view "the higher mortality rate among infants who are born to unmarried mothers ... [as a] reflection of inadequacy of social and economic resources and/or lifestyle differences." 

It is hardly surprising, then, that when the Texas researchers use statistical models that take into account interracial differences in "social factors" (including maternal marital status), these models "substantially diminish the racial disparity in [infant mortality] risk."

It would appear that better protecting black babies requires more than just new medicine.  It requires a renewed commitment to wedlock within the black community. 

(Source: W. Parker Frisbie et al., "The Increasing Racial Disparity in Infant Mortality: Respiratory Distress Syndrome and Other Causes," Demography 41 [2004]: 773-800.)

The Short Single Life  

Who sheds the most tears at weddings? Probably morticians lamenting lost prospects for early business. The relationship between singleness and early death stands out starkly in a study recently published in Social Science & Medicine by a team of epidemiologists affiliated with a number of institutions, including the University of Minnesota, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Examining 16 years of mortality data for 5115 urban adults who were between the ages of 18 and 30 in 1985-86, the authors of the new study identify singleness as one of a number of important "psychosocial predictors of premature mortality." That single status is strongly associated with AIDS mortality among men will surprise few, given that the disease is typically spread through extramarital (usually homosexual) sex. But the strength of the association is remarkable: compared to married peers, single men are almost seven times as likely to die of the disease (Relative Risk of 6.63).

But singles' distinctive vulnerability persists even when the researchers look at data for premature death from all causes for both sexes. In assessing "patterns of association with all-cause mortality" in a statistical model that adjusts for the effects of age, sex, and race, the analysts identify "being single" — like suffering from diabetes, like cigarette smoking, and like developing liver disease — as a predictor of early death. In this model, singles were three times more likely than married peers to suffer a premature death (Relative Risk of 3.0). The same model also establishes a clear link between marital failure and premature death, with separated and divorced individuals more than twice as likely as married peers to die young (Relative Risk of 2.30).

The researchers see in their findings "major implications for preventive medicine and social policies." Might these implications include a need to reverse America's headlong retreat from marriage?

(Source: Carlos Iribarren et al., "Causes and demographic, medical, lifestyle and psychosocial predictors of premature mortality: the CARDIA study," Social Science & Medicine 60 [2005]: 471-482.)

Virginity, the Healthy Alternative  

Elite opinion continues to demonize abstinence-until-marriage education curricula, especially as Congress has increased federal funding for such programs. Yet a study of adolescent risk-taking published by the Guttmacher Institute, the research affiliate of Planned Parenthood, confirms what every high school biology student knows: Virgin adolescents don't have to worry about sexually transmitted diseases. The study further documents that sexually active teens that say they use condoms represent — perhaps to the surprise of the "safe sex" crowd — a significant portion of youth who have contracted a STD.

Using data from Wave 1 (1995) of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, the researchers grouped nearly 14,000 teens into 16 clusters representing various combinations of sexual and substance use behaviors. The three clusters containing abstinent teens (those with no substance use, those with little or no current substance use, and those who had not consumed alcohol in the past 12 months) represented 55 percent of the sample, but only 1.7 percent of the sample with an STD.

On the other hand, the two clusters containing sexually active teens, the majority of whom reported using condoms, who reported infrequent substance use or drinking occasionally, represented just 20 percent of the sample, but 43 percent of the sample with an STD. Confirming other studies, the researchers also found that the 23 percent of teens who had abstained from both sex and substance use — the only cluster that yielded no STDs whatsoever — were more likely to live with two parents and to have parents who are better educated.

While clearly not the researchers' intention, their findings provide evidence that President Bush's abstinence push is not the lost cause that critics claim, but a healthy alternative to the mantras of the sex education industry.

(Source: Carolyn Tucker Halpern et al., "Implications of Racial and Gender Differences in Patterns of Adolescent Risk Behavior for HIV and other Sexually Transmitted Diseases," Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 36 [November-December 2004]: 239-247.)

Role Reversal Risks  

Conventional wisdom says that divorce is more likely during the first seven years of marriage, but is less clear about factors that contribute to young couples breaking up. Yet a study in the Netherlands finds that divorce is significantly more likely to occur within ten years of marriage when a couple — during the first five years of marriage — reverses traditional sex roles with the husband working less than the wife and the wife working more than the husband.

Using data from the 1998 Divorce in the Netherlands survey, Anne-Rigt Poortman of the Vrije University in Amsterdam focused on 1,296 Dutch women who married between 1943 and 1997, of which 1,024 eventually divorced between 1949 and 1998. In her five statistical models, the researcher consistently found that the more hours the husband works, and the less hours the wife works, the less likely they were to divorce (p <.05 for all ten measures).

These robust correlations held true even when the husband earned less than other men, providing no support for the theory that lower earnings of a husband bring financial stress to a marriage that would increase the risk of divorce. It also held true when a husband worked overtime, nixing the theory that overtime work might also reflect financial pressures that might increase divorce risk. Financial stress, however, was found to contribute to divorce when husbands worked fewer hours than their wives. Poortman nevertheless maintains that this financial stress plays only a minor part in the higher divorce risk (she estimates 15 percent) as husband's fewer working hours "continue to increase the risk of divorce when the resulting financial strains are taken into account."

The study also found no support for the theory that the increased divorce risk when wives work more than their husbands is due to the corresponding decrease in couples' interaction time. "The results of a direct test for the mediating role of marital interaction time confirm that low marital interaction time does not explain the destabilizing influence of a wife's working hours."

While they discredit more than document theories that seek to explain the link between work patterns and divorce, Poortman's findings nonetheless provide additional evidence that reversing sex roles do not a successful marriage make.

(Source: Anne-Rigt Poortman, "How Work Affects Divorce: The Mediating Role of Financial and Time Pressures," Journal of Family Issues 26 [March 2005]: 168-195.)

The Presence of a Husband  

Advocates for gender equality have gained a lot of territory during the past generation, but they are finding that the institution of marriage works against sexual egalitarianism, judging from the results of a study in Australia that explored differences in the domestic division of labor between married and cohabiting couples.

Using data representing 2,231 households from the 1996-97 survey, "Negotiating the Lifecourse: Gender, Mobility, and Career Trajectories," sociologist Janeen Baxter of the University of Queensland found that regardless of marital status, women spend more time on housework than do men. They also do a significantly larger proportion of childcare and indoor housework. While this comes as no surprise, married women spent more time doing housework than cohabiting women, while men's time doing housework did not change relative to marital status (although the allocation of household work among married men shifted more to outdoor housework).

These patterns held true even in multivariate analysis that controlled for statistically significant differences between the two types of households, including that married men spend more time per week in paid employment than their cohabiting peers (the reverse of women) and that cohabitants were younger, were less likely to have children, and expressed more egalitarian sex role attitudes than their married peers.

Baxter also found that premarital cohabitation changed the allocation of housework on the part of married women, but not of married men. Married women who did not cohabit prior to marriage, relative to those who did, tended to do more indoor housework and less outdoor housework. But in terms of the amount of housework, no differences were found between these two types of married women, as they each spent an average of six hours more per week doing housework than cohabiting women.

Given her findings, Baxter concludes that marriage seems to have power in and of itself: "For women, it is not just the presence of a man that leads to spending more time on housework and having greater responsibility for more of the household tasks, but it is the presence of a husband. It appears that the institution of marriage exerts influence on men and women to behave in particular kinds of ways, independent of the social and economic differences between married women and women in de facto unions."

(Source: Janeen Baxter, "To Marry or Not to Marry: Marital Status and the Household Division of Labor," Journal of Family Issues 26 [April 2005]: 300-321.)