Should Mom go back to school? Post-natal educational attainment and parenting practices

Although the relationship between educational attainment and parenting practices is well documented, it is typically examined at only one point in time. What happens if mothers acquire more education after the birth of their children: do they alter their parenting practices? Panel data models based on longitudinal data from ECLS-K indicate that changes in mother’s educational attainment are positively associated with increases in parental school involvement, having books in the home, and participating in non-academic family activities, but not with attitudes toward discipline. Although post-natal maternal education does not change all aspects of parenting, our findings are broadly consistent with the theory of cultural mobility and provide insights into the extent of socio-cultural mobility in contemporary American society.     

Mothers' work patterns and Children's cognitive achievement: Evidence from the India Human Development survey

As female labor force participation increases globally, the relationship between maternal employment and children's development remains unclear. Using data from the India Human Development Survey (2005), we investigate the link between maternal employment and children's arithmetic and reading achievement. We develop a work pattern typology that goes beyond standard measures of employment and captures work intensity and its compatibility with child-rearing in a transitional economy. We find that the relationship between maternal employment and children's outcomes is not unidimensional. For example, children of self-employed mothers are not disadvantaged compared to those with stay-at-home mothers, but maternal employment in salaried jobs or wage work outside the home is negatively associated with cognitive skills in children. However, this negative association is reversed at higher levels of maternal education, suggesting greater access to resources and flexibility associated with better jobs mitigate the negative aspects of maternal employment posed by time constraints. Additionally, maternal employment is associated with maternal involvement in schoolwork and financial investment in academic activities, providing evidence that both time and resources devoted to children's education are significant.     

Maternal employment when children are in preschool: Variations by race,ethnicity, and nativity

Preschool programs in the United States have expanded dramatically in recent decades. There has been significant scholarly attention to the implications of this for inequalities in children's educational outcomes, but less attention to the implications for the work-family lives of parents. Drawing on data from 2001 to 2017 American Community Surveys, this paper examines how children's preschool enrollment is associated with maternal employment, with particular attention to differences by mothers' race, ethnicity, and nativity. Findings document unequal access to preschool programs across groups but also different patterns of association between children's preschool enrollment and maternal employment. Immigrant mothers are doubly disadvantaged compared to their U.S.-born counterparts: Children are less likely to attend preschool, and when they do attend, this does little to facilitate maternal employment. The paper's conclusion addresses limitations of existing preschool programs for work-family reconciliation, but also emphasizes that limitations are more severe for some families than others.     

Do mother’s and father’s education condition the impact of parental divorce on child well-being?

We use the British Cohort Study to investigate to what extent parental resources moderate the association between parental divorce in childhood and lowered child well-being as indicated by maternal reports of child psychological well-being and by academic test scores (reading and math tests). We argue that children of mothers with more years of education suffer less when their parents split up because better educated mothers may be better able to provide a safe and stable environment for their children after divorce. In addition, we argue that having a better educated father could either aggravate or reduce the effects of parental divorce. This is one of the first studies to simultaneously investigate the role of maternal, and paternal resources, and pre-divorce shared resources. Our analyses indicate that the effect of parental divorce on psychological well-being is reduced for better educated mothers and for families with more pre-divorce economic resources, but increased for better educated fathers. For academic test scores we find a protective effect of having a better educated father and higher pre-divorce social resources.     

Family structure and the intergenerational transmission of educational advantage

I examine whether the effect of parents’ education on children’s educational achievement and attainment varies by family structure and, if so, whether this can be explained by differential parenting practices. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, I find that as parents’ education increases, children in single mother families experience a lower boost in their achievement test scores, likelihood of attending any post-secondary schooling, likelihood of completing a 4-year college degree, and years of completed schooling relative to children living with both biological parents. Differences in parents’ educational expectations, intergenerational closure, and children’s involvement in structured leisure activities partially explain these status transmission differences by family structure. The findings imply that, among children with highly educated parents, children of single mothers are less likely to be highly educated themselves relative to children who grow up with both biological parents.     

Does death really make us equal? Educational attainment and resource compensation after paternal death in Finland

Attempts to explain the persistent importance of family background for children's educational attainment typically highlight the ways in which parents pass down educational, economic and social resources to their children. However, parental resources may also play a crucial role for preventing family crises from spiraling into cumulative disadvantage. To study such compensation processes, we examine the consequences of a father's death on children's educational trajectories, using a Finnish register-based sample of children born between 1982 and 1987. The results based on multilevel linear probability models both support and contradict our compensation hypothesis. Children who lost their father were not more likely to drop out of upper secondary school, as long as their surviving mother had high levels of socioeconomic resources. Similar compensation processes were visible in the case of entering polytechnic higher education. However, with regard to university attendance, bereavement noticeably reduced the traditional advantage of children with high-resource parents.     

The relationship between neighborhood racial concentration and verbal ability: An investigation using the institutional resources model

Relatively few studies examine the relationship between racial residential segregation and educational or cognitive outcomes. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and the institutional resources model of neighborhood effects, I investigate one account of how macrostructural arrangements between race, neighborhood segregation, and school quality interact to produce inequalities in test scores. Consistent with the institutional resources model, results suggest that school quality varies across neighborhoods based, in part, on their degree of racial concentration. Indeed, school quality and other school characteristics mediate the relationship between racial concentration and verbal skills, particularly among black males. These findings have implications not only for inequalities in cognitive skills among blacks across residential space, but also between blacks and whites given high levels of residential segregation in the United States. In sum, findings illustrate yet another way in which residential segregation contributes to, and not merely reflects, racial inequalities.     

论福建船政电报学堂

为了抵制英国、丹麦、美国等列强对我国电信主权的侵略,维护国家利益,福建巡抚丁日昌在福州马尾开办了福建船政电报学堂。在1876年4月至1877年12月一年多的时间里,共培养了140多名电报人才。该校培养的电信人才,不仅在福建、天津、台湾等地的电报事业中发挥了重要作用,而且还参与了天津、南京、上海、台湾等地电报学堂的创建工作,并培养了一批后继电信人才,为我国的电信事业做出了贡献。     

Non-intact families and diverging educational destinies: A decomposition analysis for Germany,Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States

We examine whether the presence of non-intact families in society is related to increased inequality in educational attainment according to social background, as suggested by the ‘diverging destinies’ thesis. We analyze four countries, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States, that differ in the prevalence of non-intact families and in the strength of the negative association between growing up in a non-intact family and children's educational attainment. We use a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition approach to calculate a ‘counterfactual’ estimate of differences in educational attainment between socioeconomically advantaged and disadvantaged children in the hypothetical absence of non-intact families. Contrary to the diverging destinies thesis, we find little differences between actual and ‘counterfactual’ levels of inequality in educational attainment in all four countries. Whereas growing-up in a non-intact family affects the individual chances of educational attainment, the overall contribution of non-intact families to aggregate levels of social background inequality appears minimal.     

Educational assortative mating and time use in the home

This study examines the association between individuals' educational assortative mating and time spent on child care and housework. Focus is put on hypogamous couples, or couples in which wives have more education than their husbands. Relative resources and gender revolution frameworks are considered as contexts to explain why hypogamous couples may share their time differently than other couples. A series of ordinary least squares regressions with population and sampling weights are employed using American Time Use Survey data from 2003 to 2018. Three, separate analyses using relative education, gender, and all educational pairings as the independent variables of interest are presented with child care and housework as the dependent variables. The current findings show that men in hypogamous marriages perform about 10 min more of child care per day on average than their peers in hypergamous and homogamous marriages, and that this comes primarily from basic care activities. This accounts for approximately 43% of the difference between men and women in the average amount of time spent on child care. No clear pattern of significance is apparent comparing individuals’ time spent on housework by relative education, suggesting that housework and child care have evolved differently in the context of gendered domestic responsibilities. Men in hypogamous marriages are more egalitarian in their sharing of child care. However, this is only true for couples in which men have at least a high school diploma and women are highly educated.     

朱厄特《乡村医生》中父母教养方式与孩子的成长

长期以来，萨拉·朱厄特的《乡村医生》被普遍认为是作家为了实现儿时的学医梦想和感激父亲的教养之恩而创作的一部带有自传性质的小说。其实，作家创作《乡村医生》还有另外一个目的，那就是通过小说来描写和对照“放任型”“专制型”“权威型”等不同类型的父母教养方式，巧妙地“参与”到她所处时代的关于父母教养方式与孩子成长关系等社会话题的讨论中。在作家看来，“放任型”教养方式下的孩子，其个性发展由于得不到父母必要的引导和约束而会出现成长失控，甚至产生悲剧；而“专制型”教养方式下的孩子，则因为父母过分地约束和压制其个性发展而成长受挫，难以在社会上有所作为。正是意识到“放任型”“专制型”教养方式都存在缺陷，会给孩子的发展带来伤害，朱厄特还在《乡村医生》中积极探索更有利于孩子成长的教养方式。她将自己接受父母“权威型”教养方式的成长经历融入小说创作中，并自信地对其加以推荐。相较于另外两种教养方式，“权威型”教养方式下的孩子不仅能感受到来自父母的关注和重视，也能享受到父母给予的民主和自由，个性得以健全发展，从而更加快乐自然地成长，实现人生价值。这也是作家在教养方式方面的远见卓识。     

The social and genetic inheritance of educational attainment: Genes,parental education,and educational expansion

Recently, several genome-wide association studies of educational attainment have found education-related genetic variants and enabled the integration of human inheritance into social research. This study incorporates the newest education polygenic score (Lee et al., 2018) into sociological research, and tests three gene-environment interaction hypotheses on status attainment. Using the Health and Retirement Study (N = 7599), I report three findings. First, a standard deviation increase in the education polygenic score is associated with a 58% increase in the likelihood of advancing to the next level of education, while a standard deviation increase in parental education results in a 53% increase. Second, supporting the Saunders hypothesis, the genetic effect becomes 11% smaller when parental education is one standard deviation higher, indicating that highly educated parents are more able to preserve their family's elite status in the next generation. Finally, the genetic effect is slightly greater for the younger cohort (1942–59) than the older cohort (1920–41). The findings strengthen the existing literature on the social influences in helping children achieve their innate talents.     

The state of domestic affairs: Housework,gender and state-level institutional logics

Multi-level cross-national research consistently shows individual housework arrangements are structured by broader contexts of equality. Across this body of research, the United States is treated as a single entity. Yet, individual-level housework time may vary by state-to-state differences in institutional market, family and legislative logics. To test these relationships, we pair individual-level data from the American Time Use Survey (2003–2012; aged 18 to 64 n = 106,190) with three state-level indices – female labor force empowerment, family traditionalism and state government liberalism. For market institutional logics, we find wives and husbands spend more but mothers less time in housework in states where women have more labor market power. For family logics, we find mothers spend more and husbands less time in housework in more traditional states. For legislative logics, we find women and husbands spend more time in housework in more liberal states. Our results highlight the importance of state-to-state institutional logics on individuals' housework time.     

The ‘developmental gradient’ revisited: Australian children's time with adult caregivers from infancy to middle childhood

Children's time use patterns represent a potentially important mechanism for the transmission of disadvantage across generations. Recent international research indicates that more educated mothers tailor the content of time with children to favour activities that are particularly important at different developmental stages – a finding that has been termed the ‘developmental gradient’. Using time diary data for a sample of Australian children, this paper seeks to extend previous work in several ways. We first establish whether a ‘developmental gradient’ exists in Australian children's time with mothers, comparable to the results from international studies. We go further, however, by extending the analysis to consider time investments provided by fathers and other adult caregivers, and examining the importance of resources for explaining the patterns of time use. Consistent with theory, our results indicate that educational gaps in time spent ‘teaching’ are largest in the 4–5 age group, gaps in ‘play’ time with fathers are largest for toddlers (2–3), and gaps in ‘enrichment’ are largest for 6–7 and 8–9. Time with parents appears to be the primary driver of observed patterns of time spent ‘teaching’ and ‘playing’, while for ‘enrichment,’ differences are distributed across caregivers, but largest for non-parent caregivers. These results are not driven by differential access to resources. Our results suggest that the developmental gradient represents a plausible mechanism for the transmission of intergenerational disadvantage in Australia, and that policy responses focussed on better educating parents to understand the developmental needs of their children are likely to be an effective response.     

Parental education,television exposure,and children's early cognitive,language and behavioral development

The association between television exposure and children's development is subject to controversial debates. Heavy television exposure may be detrimental to children by overstimulating their developing brains. It may also infringe on time that children would otherwise spend on more developmentally beneficial activities or parental interactions. In the present analysis, we use data from the 2004/5 birth cohort of the Growing Up in Scotland study to investigate relations between hours of weekly television measured around the ages of two to four and as average over this period with children's linguistic, cognitive, and behavioral outcomes around the age of five. Our analysis shows differences in the level and growth of television exposure by parental education. However, we did not find any substantive associations between television exposure and children's cognitive or language ability. We found small associations of television exposure with conduct problems and prosocial behavior, particularly for children of less-educated parents. Overall, the results suggest that the impact of television on children's development is less pronounced than often assumed.     

A tangled web: The reciprocal relationship between depression and educational outcomes in China

Research on depression and education usually focuses on a unidirectional relationship. This paper proposes a reciprocal relationship, simultaneously estimating the effects of depression on education and of education on depression. China, which has the world's largest education system, is used as a case study. This paper applies structural equation modeling to three datasets: the China Family Panel Studies, the China Education Panel Survey, and the Gansu Survey of Children and Families. Analyses reveal a reciprocal and negative relationship between depression and educational outcomes. Specifically, early depression reduces later educational achievement, and higher educational achievement also lowers the level of subsequent depression by resulting in less peers' unfriendliness, less pressure from parents' expectations, and less teachers' criticism. More time spent on studies is not associated with higher educational achievement but significantly increases the level of depression. Children from lower SES families bear more pressure and spend more time on studies, which does not correspond to higher educational achievement but rather to higher levels of depression. In the long term, prior depression lowers educational attainment and, after controlling for prior depression, lower educational attainment is also associated with higher levels of subsequent depression. This paper shows that the lower achievers, not the high achievers, bear the major psychological burden of the education system's quest to produce high achievement. This situation reinforces these students' educational disadvantage.     

Intergenerational effects of shifts in women’s educational distribution in South Korea: Transmission, differential fertility, and assortative mating

This study examines the intergenerational effects of changes in women’s education in South Korea. We define intergenerational effects as changes in the distribution of educational attainment in an offspring generation associated with the changes in a parental generation. Departing from the previous approach in research on social mobility that has focused on intergenerational association, we examine the changes in the distribution of educational attainment across generations. Using a simulation method based on Mare and Maralani’s recursive population renewal model, we examine how intergenerational transmission, assortative mating, and differential fertility influence intergenerational effects. The results point to the following conclusions. First, we find a positive intergenerational effect: improvement in women’s education leads to improvement in daughter’s education. Second, we find that the magnitude of intergenerational effects substantially depends on assortative marriage and differential fertility: assortative mating amplifies and differential fertility dampens the intergenerational effects. Third, intergenerational effects become bigger for the less educated and smaller for the better educated over time, which is a consequence of educational expansion. We compare our results with Mare and Maralani’s original Indonesian study to illustrate how the model of intergenerational effects works in different socioeconomic circumstances.     

Grandparents' resources and grandchildren's schooling: Does grandparental involvement moderate the grandparent effect?

Recent studies have argued that grandparents have a direct effect on grandchildren's achievements, net of parental resources. However, little is known about the underlying mechanisms. One explanation is that grandchildren can benefit from the cultural resources that grandparents transmit to their grandchildren. If this is the case, one would expect strong effects in families where grandparents are highly involved in the lives of their grandchildren and weak or no effects in other families. Using new nationally representative survey data on three generations in the Netherlands, we examine if and how grandchildren's educational attainment is affected by three grandparental resources: education, occupational status, and cultural resources. We explore how these effects vary by the strength of the tie between grandparent and grandchild. We find no evidence for a main direct grandparental effect, nor do we find interactions with the strength of the tie between grandparent and grandchild. These null-findings are discussed in light of the mixed body of evidence that has been accumulated in the literature and contemporary theorizing on grandparenting.     

Growing educational differentials in the retreat from marriage among Korean men

Applying discrete-time hazard models to person-year data constructed from 1% microdata sample of 2010 Korean Census, we explore how men's education affects their transition to first marriage, and how the relationship between education and marriage has changed across three 10-year birth cohorts of Korean men born from 1946 to 1975. Drawing on Oppenheimer's theory of marriage and review of changing educational and economic contexts of Korean men, we develop a hypothesis on growing educational differentials in marriage. We find that the high educated delay marriage until later ages but catch up to the extent to which they are eventually more likely to marry than the low educated. There is a continued trend across cohorts toward the delay and avoidance of marriage at all educational levels. However, the trend of retreat from marriage has been more substantial for men with high school or less education compared to men with a university degree, leading to growing educational gaps over time in marriage. Among the three cohorts, the youngest cohort, among which low educated men's economic prospects have particularly deteriorated due to rapid educational expansion and economic crisis, shows most pronounced decline in marriage.     

Estimations of parental and self intelligence as a function of parents’ status: A cross-cultural study in Germany and Spain

With reference to the extensively reported gender differences in estimated intelligence, we used a cross-cultural study to investigate whether employment status and education of mothers and fathers (at the time of data collection, in early childhood, and in later childhood) influenced the estimation of parents’ general intelligence. Data showed that mothers’ as well as fathers’ general intelligence was significantly predicted by their education and current employment status. We additionally found a similar relationship between women’s (men’s) and mothers’ (fathers’) intelligence compared with the relationship of intelligence ascribed to their fathers (mothers). Furthermore, women’s self-estimated intelligence was significantly predicted by their mothers’ current employment, whereas men’s self-estimated intelligence was predicted by their fathers’ education. We furthermore investigated how women’s and men’s estimations differ between Germany and Spain. Results indicate that the more pronounced gender segregation in Spain was not expressed in larger gender differences in self- or parents’ intelligence estimations.