Baby Boom Economics

Did laborsaving household appliances that proliferated in the United States after World War Two leave homemakers with little to do other than shop and contemplate their alienation a la Betty Freidan? While some conservatives have adopted this feminist spin of the 1950s, three economists in the American Economic Review suggest that the “atypical burst in technological progress in the household sector” kept women busy, not bored. By lowering the cost of bearing children, those domestic advances allowed women to have larger families, triggering the dramatic increase in postwar fertility known as the baby boom.

Challenging conventional wisdom that sees the baby boom as a response to the trauma of economic depression and war, the researchers note not only that the boom actually started in the 1930s, but also that the women most responsible for the peak of the boom in 1960 (when they were between 20 and 24 years of age) were too young to have been affected by those two experiences. Yet these young mothers were not too young to reap measurable gains in household efficiency that had been in the  works for decades and reduced the burdens of housekeeping and child-rearing.

The economists chronicle the “unparalleled technological advance in the household sector” of the twentieth century, including refrigerators in the 1920s, fully automated washing machines in the 1930s, and frozen foods in the 1940s. They note that between 1929 and 1975, the household appliance-to-GDP ratio increased by a factor of 2.5. They also credit the home economics movement with improving the design of appliances and houses, resulting in modern kitchens, complete with continuous work surfaces and located at the center of the house. The impact of these advances began to gather steam, they note, in the 1930s and 1940s, exactly when fertility started to rise.

Even as market productivity improved sevenfold during this time, the economists found that their documented, relatively modest 1.2-fold increase in the efficiency of the household sector was all that was needed to boost fertility rates. While they do not explore why this increase was unable to sustain higher fertility rates beyond one generation, their analysis nonetheless confirms that investing in the home economy pays dividends in the nursery.

(Source: Jeremy Greenwood, Ananth Seshadri, and Guillaume Vandendroucke, “The Baby Boom and Baby Bust,” The American Economic Review 95 [March 2005]: 183-207.)

No Trade-Off Between Quantity and Quality  

Family size is often negatively correlated with child outcomes, particularly education attainment, leading social scientists to theorize that having fewer children enables parents to channel more attention and resources to their offspring, allegedly boosting child quality. Not content with this suggestion of a causal relationship between the two variables, three economists in the Quarterly Journal of Economics analyze Norwegian data only to conclude “that there is little if any family size effect on child education” and that “children may not necessarily be better off than if their family had been larger.”

Using data from Statistics Norway that covers the entire adult population of that country and provides details on birth order, twin status, family size, and educational attainment, the researchers did find a negative correlation between family size and the educational attainment of offspring. These negative effects of family size, however, were cut in half in regressions that controlled for parents’ education and were reduced to almost zero in tests that controlled for birth order. Even though the correlation remained statistically significant (p< .05), the small effect (a linear coefficient of -0.01) of family size when both controls are added “suggests that family size has very little effect on educational attainment.”

In place of family size, the economists found “very large and robust effects” of birth order on education, even when controlling for family size, family structure, and parental education. Separate regressions for particular family sizes, for example, found a large and negative effect of being a second child for all family sizes. They estimate that the difference between the first and the fifth child in a five-child family is the same as the educational difference between blacks and whites in the 2000 census.

The only exception to the birth-order effect is their finding that “only” children achieve much lower educational attainment than the average child in two- or three-child families. Yet because the only-child effect disappeared in their intact family sample, the researchers attributed this effect to family structure. In contrast, the birth-order effect was the same regardless of family structure, suggesting that birth order exerts an independent effect in educational attainment.

While the researchers do not offer explanations for birth order effects, their study puts to rest the argument that when it comes to children, quality and quantity are mutually exclusive.

(Source: Sandra E. Black, Paul J. Devereux, and Kjell G. Salvanes, “The More the Merrier? The Effect of Family Size and Birth Order on Children’s Education,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 120 [May 2005]: 669-701.)

Quantity Is Quality  

For years, mothers that work full-time outside the home have argued that, even though they spend less time with their children than their stay-at-home peers, they enjoy “quality” time that allegedly compensates for the reduced attention. Yet a recent study on the extent and nature of family dinners in the lives of teenagers commissioned by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University clearly shows that quality time with children doesn’t happen without large quantities of time.

CASA conducted a telephone survey of 1,000 teens, ages 12 to 17, and 829 parents of teens in the spring of 2005 to identify factors that increase the risk of adolescent use of cigarettes, alcohol, and illegal drugs, including marijuana. Confirming a more statistically rigorous study at the University of Minnesota (see NEW RESEARCH, September 2004, p. 2) that documented the protective nature of regular family meals in tempering risky behaviors, CASA discovered that teens who are home for dinner at least five times per week — relative to teens who have no more than two family meals per week — are also more likely to rate their family dinners as high quality.

Of teens that dine infrequently with their parents, 45 percent say the television is usually on when they do eat together, 29 percent say the family does not talk very much, and 16 percent lament that their dinners are often cut short. But among the teens who frequently eat with the family at home, only 34 percent say the television is on, only 12 percent say the family does not talk much, and only 5 percent think that their dinners do not last long enough.

The frequency of family dinners also appears to improve the quality of family relations, not just the dinners. Relative to teens who have infrequent family meals, their peers from families with a regular dinner time not only report less tension in the home, but are also more likely to approach their mother or father or both when confronting a serious problem. They also are more likely to say that their parents are “very proud” of them.

These documented benefits of the dinner table suggest that, building on the adage about the family that prays together, the family that dines together binds together.

(Source: “The Importance of Family Dinners II,” The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, September 2005.)

Losing Parent, Then Home, Then…  

Compared to peers who stay put during their adolescent years, teens who move during adolescence are significantly more likely to engage in the pre-marital sexual activity traditionally referred to as fornication.  Compared to stay-put peers, these teens-on-the-move are also more likely than their stay-put peers to engage in delinquent activities and are less likely to do well in school.  But then for many of these peers, the change in residence that brings such trouble in its wake is itself the result of a parental divorce or separation.

The deleterious consequences of a change in residence for adolescents recently received attention from a team of sociologists at the Ohio State University and the University at Albany, SUNY.  These scholars carefully examined survey and interview data collected between 1994 and 1996 for 4,862 randomly selected students attending grades 7 through 12 at 134 high schools and their feeder middle schools. The researchers discern a distinct propensity toward problematic behavior among the adolescents who had changed residence within the two-year period before the first survey in 1994.  Compared to peers who had not moved, teens who had experienced a change in residence were “perhaps surprisingly ... more likely ... to initiate sexual activity” (p< 0.05).  (Presumably, the researchers express surprise at this finding because — unlike peers who have stayed put — adolescents who engage in sex after a recent move are perforce having intercourse with relative strangers.)  The transplanted teens who begin to fornicate also stumble into other troubling behaviors: the researchers find that “delinquent behavior is positively associated with the likelihood of experiencing first intercourse, and [that] adolescents’ GPA is inversely associated with the probability of first sex.”

Further scrutiny of the data leads the Ohio State and Albany scholars to infer that transplanted teens are particularly trouble-prone because in a typical school setting “newcomers are more likely to be welcomed into — and perhaps embraced by — low-performing and relatively delinquent cliques.”  In other words, it is “becoming integrated into low-performing, pleasure-seeking networks [that] causes mobile adolescents to adopt the behaviors these [networks] espouse — including sexual activity.”

But just who are the teens whose residential transience primes them for such a problematic life course?  Disproportionately, they are the children of never-married or divorced parents (the custodial unwed or divorced parent generally being the mother).  “Compared to stayers,” the researchers point out, “adolescent movers are less likely to live in two-parent families and more likely to have a parent who recently experienced a divorce or separation.” 

The researchers plausibly interpret their findings as evidence of “the often detrimental effect of moving on adolescent development and functioning.”  Who, though, can wonder at the moral confusion of teens who have lost both a parent (usually a father) and a home?

(Source: Scott J. South, Dana L. Hayne, and Sunita Bose, “Residential Mobility and the Onset of Adolescent Sexual Activity,” Journal of Marriage and Family 67 [2005]: 499-514.)

Blue Children  

Although some theorists have argued that depression first emerges as a clinical problem in adolescence, a team of psychiatrists at the University of Queensland has recently adduced strong evidence of depression in very young children.  Noting a cluster of psychological symptoms observed in the children of 5,259 Brisbane mothers — symptoms documented among children who were crying a lot, feeling worthless or inferior, expressing persistent fears or worries, and suffering from insomnia — the Australian scholars conclude that “it is common for children as young as 5 years of age to be perceived to manifest a variety of symptoms of depression and/or anxiety.”Indeed, in the study sample, “some 312 children were categorized as depressed at the 5-year [mark].” 

But just who are the children evincing symptoms of depression at such a young age?  When the Australian scholars analyzed the backgrounds of children apparently suffering from such depression, the marital history of the mother emerged as a significant predictor.  Like maternal health problems and maternal anxiety, a mother’s having experienced “one or more partner changes” during the child’s life is a statistically significant predictor that a child will manifest symptoms of depression (p<0.001).

Stressing that most children avoid depression even when living in difficult circumstances, the researchers suspect that genetics may render some children “biologically more susceptible” to this mental illness than others.  The Australian scholars’ findings, however, indicate that the children who are most likely to actually manifest perceptible symptoms of such depression are those exposed to certain social or household risks — including that of living with “mothers who are separated or divorced.” 

(Source: Jake M. Najman et al., “Predictors of depression in very young children: A prospective study,” Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology 40 [2005]: 367-374.)

Morose and Maladjusted   

Which boys are most likely to become depressed and antisocial as young men? According to a newly completed Finnish study, it is boys growing up in broken homes who are especially likely to plunge into melancholy and misanthropy.

By matching childhood data collected in 1989 for a nationally representative sample of eight-year-old Finnish boys with data extracted between 1999 and 2004 from the Finnish national military registry for the same Finnish males, now young men, a research team drawn from several Finnish universities hoped to identify the childhood antecedents of later psychiatric disorders. Their analysis — published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry — highlights the psychological vulnerability of young men growing up without both of their parents.

In their simplest statistical analysis of their data, the researchers identify the young men who had lived in a nonintact family at age eight as more than twice as likely to manifest symptoms of at least one psychiatric disorder than were peers who had lived in an intact family at age eight ( Odds Ratio of 2.2; p<0.001). When looking at specific types of psychopathology, the Finnish scholars conclude that in comparison with peers from intact families, young men from nonintact families were three-and-a-half times more likely to develop an antisocial personality (Odds Ratio of 3.5; p<0.001), three-and-a-half times more likely to abuse harmful substances (Odds Ratio of 3.5; p<0.001), and more than twice as likely to manifest mood disorders (Odds Ratio of 2.3; p<0.05). 

When the researchers re-analyze their data using a more sophisticated multivariate statistical model (one taking into account childhood depression, childhood school performance, and other background variables), they find that young men from nonintact families were still distinctively more likely than peers from intact families to suffer from at least one psychiatric disorder of some sort (Odds Ratio of 1.4; p<0.05), to experience mood disorders (Odds Ratio of 2.1; p<0.05), and to evince an antisocial personality (Odds Ratio of 2.5: p<0.01). No matter how they are parsed, the numbers clearly indicate that “not living in a family with two biological parents when the child was 8 had an independent predictive association with mood and antisocial personality disorders in early adulthood.”

In interpreting their findings, the researchers cite earlier research indicating that “living in a nonintact family in early childhood is associated with experience of loss of a parent figure, family discord, parental psychopathology, and economic disadvantage, which may all be risk factors for negative psychosocial development patterns and future adult disorders.” 

Because recent decades have brought higher divorce and illegitimacy rates to American cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, the dismal connection between family failure and young men’s psychological problems is doubtlessly manifesting itself in places far from Helsinki.

(Source: Andre Sourander et al., “Childhood Predictors of Psychiatric Disorders Among Boys: A Prospective Community-Based Follow-up Study From Age 8 Years to Early Adulthood,” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 44 [2005]: 756-757.)

Unhealthy Vigil  

A healthy mind screens out a good many potential threats; an unhealthy mind fixates on and is consequently paralyzed by the first indication of peril. In an unhealthy fixation on potential signs of emotional danger, a team of Arizona State psychologists think they may have isolated the reason that children of divorced parents are particularly at risk for certain kinds of emotional disorders.

Analyzing data collected from 109 young adults from intact, bereaved, and divorced families, the researchers identify three different psychological outlooks. Among the young adults from intact families, the Arizona State scholars find — as they expected — “a ‘protective bias’ that functions to direct attention away from negative cues, thereby limiting vulnerability to affective disorder.” In contrast, among young adults whose parents have divorced, the researchers recognize — again as expected — a “threat vigilance” of the sort that “may increase the risk of mental health problems.” In their statistical analysis, the researchers underscore the difference they detect in attentional bias separating young adults from intact families on the one hand from peers from divorced families on the other (p<0.01).

What surprises the researchers, however, is the mental outlook of young adults from bereaved families (that is families that have lost a parent through death). Although these young adults lacked the “protective bias” of peers from intact families, they also did not manifest signs characteristic of the kind of “threat vigilance” seen among peers from divorced families. 

The researchers acknowledge their initial perplexity: “Our finding that participants from divorced families rather than those from bereaved families showed vigilance toward loss-related cues was somewhat unexpected.” But the researchers recognize the congruity between their findings and early studies in which “fear of abandonment, suggestive of sensitivity to loss, has been shown to be strongly related to anxiety or adjustment problems in children of divorce.” Indeed, it would appear that, even more than parental death, “divorce can produce a general sense of vulnerability to abandonment or loss.”

(Source: Linda J. Luecken and Bradley Appelhans, “Information-Processing Biases in Young Adults From Bereaved and Divorced Families,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 114 [2005]: 309-313.)