Young unwed fathers of afdc children: do they provide support?

We examine the support provided by fathers of children born to disadvantaged teenage mothers. Our sample includes the fathers of 6,009 children born over a two-year period to 3,855 teenage mothers receiving AFDC in three economically depressed inner cities. These fathers provide little social and economic support to their children. Support declines as their children age from infants to toddlers and as fathers’ relationships with the mothers grow more distant. Fathers’ employment status and educational attainment positively affect the amount of economic support that they provide but do not strongly influence the amount of social support they provide.     

Family and neighborhood sources of socioeconomic inequality in children’s achievement

We examined family and neighborhood sources of socioeconomic inequality in children’s reading and mathematics achievement using data from the 2000–2001 Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey. To describe inequality in achievement scores, we used Gini coefficients and concentration indices and multilevel regression models. We found no inequality in children’s achievement by family income when other variables in the model were held constant. Mother’s reading scores and average neighborhood levels of income accounted for the largest proportion of inequality in children’s achievement. Neighborhood economic status appears to be strongly associated with children’s skills acquisition.     

Women's adjustment to widowhood: does social support matter?

Widowhood is a stressful event for women, often coinciding with health, financial, and relationship losses. Researchers have considered many aspects of women's adjustment to widowhood, typically including social support in analyses. This study analyzed relationships between social support and adjustment from 19 previous widowhood studies. Contrary to intuition and most researchers' assumptions, the majority of relationships did not show that social support positively impacted adjustment. Analyses examined whether type of support or study methods affected the likelihood of finding a significant relationship between support and adjustment. Chi-square statistics indicated that neither of these factors influenced the effect of social support on women's adjustment to widowhood.     

Immigrants’ economic performance across Europe – does immigration policy matter?

Drawing on panel data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP), the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), we compare the economic performance of immigrants to Great Britain, West Germany, Denmark, Luxembourg, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Austria to that of the respective indigenous population. The unit of analysis is the individual in the household context. This allows us to define immigrants state of integration into the host society at the family level taking into account issues such as immigrant/native intermarriage. Economic performance is measured in terms of the country-specific pre-government income position and change in the relative income position due to redistribution processes within the respective tax and social security systems. Our work is based on the premise that countries may be categorized – similarly to existing categorizations based on the type of welfare regime – according to the nature of their immigration policy. From an economic point of view, a successful and integrative immigration policy should result – at least when controlling for background characteristics such as education – in a non-significant differential between the economic performance of immigrants and that of the indigenous population. At first glance, our results indicate that this ideal is not attained in all of the countries analysed, particularly not in Germany and Denmark, where the economic performance of immigrants is much lower than that of the indigenous population. However, results from GLS random-effects models show that immigrants to these countries improve their economic situation rapidly with increasing duration of stay in the host country. This implies that these countries also do fairly well in fostering in the economic integration of immigrants. Our empirical results further reveal that the substantial cross-country differences in the immigrant/native-born performance differential persist even when controlling in detail for socioeconomic characteristics of the household and for indicators of the state of the immigrants integration, such as years since migration and immigrant/native intermarriage. This suggests that not only the conditions of entry to a country impact on immigrants economic performance, but also country-specific institutional aspects such as restrictions on access to the labour market and parts of the social security system that are related to citizenship or immigrant status. There still is a great deal of heterogeneity across EU member states in this respect. This should be taken into account when working towards the harmonization of national EU immigration policies.This paper benefited substantially from discussions at the EEA 2003 Conference in Stockholm, Sweden, and the EPUNet 2003 Conference in Colchester, UK. We also acknowledge very helpful comments resulting from the reviewing process     

Self-care: Why do parents leave their children unsupervised?

We used a preferences-and-constraints model to develop four hypotheses to explain why parents may choose self-care (an unsupervised arrangement) as the primary child care arrangement for their children over supervised alternatives and tested them in a multivariate framework using 1995 data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation. We found that the choice of self-care over supervised care alternatives is linked to the availability of parents' time to care for children, the child's level of responsibility and maturity, and the neighborhood context. However, we found no evidence that parents' ability to pay for child care is related to the choice of self-care. The results also suggest that parents use different decision-making processes, depending on their children's ages.     

An analysis of factors affecting attitudes toward same-sex marriage: do the media matter?

Using a survey of more than 5,000 American consumers, this study examines connections between attitudes toward same-sex marriage and media consumption. A positive attitude is predicted by being liberal and less religious, supporting gender and racial equality, willing to try anything once, considering television the primary form of entertainment, watching political talk shows, and reading blogs. The theoretical and methodological contributions and real-world implications of these findings are discussed.     

Women’s economic capacity and children’s human capital accumulation

Programs that increase the economic capacity of poor women can have cascading effects on children’s participation in school and work that are theoretically undetermined. We present a simple model to describe the possible channels through which these programs may affect children’s activities. Based on a cluster-randomized trial, we examine how a program providing capital and training to women in poor rural communities in Nicaragua affected children. Children in beneficiary households are more likely to attend school 1 year after the end of the intervention. An increase in women’s influence on household decisions appears to contribute to the program’s beneficial effect on school attendance.     

Child support and non-resident fathers’ contact with their children

The paper presents a model of a non-resident father’s child support and contact with his child, which combines the public good treatment of “child quality” with “trade” in father–child contact time in a setting of non-cooperative interaction. It predicts that father’s income and mother’s non-labour income should have exactly the same effect on the frequency of father–child contact if he chooses to make lump sum payments to the mother. If he does not or there is a binding child support payment order, they have effects opposite in direction. A higher binding support order reduces father–child contact but may well raise “child quality”.

Fathers�� time investments in children: do sons get more?

This paper uses the 2003 American Time Use Survey to examine the effects of child gender on paternal time with children in married two-parent families. The results show that fathers of boys invest more time in children than those with only daughters and reduce their leisure time without children to do so. Boys get more of this time than girls in all-girl families and compared to their own sisters. Girls with brothers receive more of fathers’ time than girls with only sisters, but this is primarily in television watching, so whether this advantages them is open to question.     

Does parents’ valuation of children’s health mimic their valuation of own health?

A single latent variable model of health status and therapeutic health care utilization is estimated for parents and own children of 6,557 US households. The equation system that identifies latent health status simultaneously determines a number of indicators of general health, including presence of morbidity symptoms, mobility limitations, medication needs, and utilization of therapeutic health care services. The main goal of the paper was to obtain an unbiased estimate of parents’ marginal substitution rate between own and child health. Results indicate that parents’ valuation of their children’s health exceeds their valuation of own health by almost twofold on average.

Does Child Gender Predict Older Parents’ Well-Being?

Inconsistencies in comparisons of older parents’ well-being with that of older, childless adults may be resolved by considering the separate effects of sons and daughters on parents. The hypothesis was that older parents of only daughters have greater life satisfaction, more satisfying relations with their children, more intimate family relations, and greater social support satisfaction compared to older childless adults and parents of only sons. Childless older adults were predicted to have more intimate friends. The effect of having both sons and daughters was also explored. Longitudinal results indicated parents had greater life satisfaction than childless adults, and parents of daughters were more satisfied with relations with their children than parents of only sons. Childless adults had more relations with friends and fewer family intimate relations. Neither social support satisfaction or affect varied across groups. The findings are related to gender socialization, social support, and normative expectations.     

From Child to Parent? The Significance of Children’s Education for Their Parents’ Longevity

In addition to own education and other socioeconomic resources, the education of one’s children may be important for individual health and longevity. Mothers and fathers born between 1932 and 1941 were analyzed by linking them to their children in the Swedish Multi-generation Register, which covers the total population. Controlling for parents’ education, social class, and income attenuates but does not remove the association between children’s education and parents’ mortality risk. Shared but unmeasured familial background characteristics were addressed by comparing siblings in the parental generation. In these fixed-effects analyses, comparing parents whose children had tertiary education with parents whose children completed only compulsory schooling (the reference group) yields a hazard ratio of 0.79 (95 % CI: 0.70–0.89) when the socioeconomic position of both parents is controlled for. The relationship is certainly not purely causal, but part of it could be if, for example, well-educated adult children use their resources to find the best available health care for their aging parents. I therefore introduce the concept of “social foreground” and suggest that children’s socioeconomic resources may be an important factor in trying to further understand social inequalities in health.     

Raising charitable children: the effects of verbal socialization and role-modeling on children’s giving

This paper uses nationally-representative data from the PSID and CDS to estimate the causal effects of two parent socialization actions—talking to children about giving and role-modeling—on children’s decisions whether or not to give to charity. We develop an identification framework based on the intra-household allocation and cultural transmission literatures that shows how different assumptions about parental response to time-varying unobserved changes in children’s prosocial values can be combined with the child fixed effects estimate and the difference between siblings’ over-time-differences estimate to infer a bound on the causal effect of parental action to socialize their children. Under the identifying assumption we think is most reasonable for socializing the willingness to give to charity, that parents treat the socialization actions of others as cultural substitutes, our estimates imply that talking to children about giving raises the probability of children’s giving by at least .13. We find no evidence that parental role-modeling affects children’s giving, except among non-African-American girls. The identification framework and substantive results have implications for those with a general interest in using data from naturalistic settings to estimate causal effects of parental socialization actions, those interested in the external validity of laboratory findings, and those interested in the socialization of warm glow.     

Causal Attributions and Parents’ Acceptance of Their Homosexual Sons

This Internet-based study examined the association between Israeli parents’ attributions regarding the cause of their son’s homosexuality and their level of acceptance of their homosexual son. The sample (N = 57) was recruited via Internet Web sites (gay forums and support groups). Findings suggest that more essentialist (versus constructivist) causal attributions were associated with higher levels of parental acceptance. Length of time parents knew of their son’s homosexual orientation predicted the degree to which their attributions were essentialist. Implications are discussed.     

Parents’ education as a determinant of educational childcare time

We analyze the relationship between parents’ education and the time devoted to childcare activities, with a focus on activities aimed at increasing the child’s human capital. We use the sample of opposite-sex couples with children under age 18, from Spain (2002) and the UK (2000), included in the Multinational Time Use Study. By estimating a seemingly unrelated regressions tobit model, we find that mothers’ education is associated with an increase in the time devoted to educational childcare by fathers in both Spain and the UK, while it is associated with an increase in the time devoted to educational childcare by mothers in Spain. We also find that fathers’ education has no effect on the time devoted to educational childcare time by either parent. It seems that what really matters in determining the time devoted to educational childcare at the couple level is the educational level of the mother.     

Investing in children’s education: are Muslim immigrants different?

Using a unique data set on immigrants living in France in 2003, we investigate whether Muslims invest differently in their children’s education compared to non-Muslims. In particular, we want to assess whether educational inequalities between the children of Muslim and non-Muslim immigrants stem from differences between or within families. After controlling for a broad set of individual and household characteristics, we find no difference in education between children of different religions. However, we do find more within-family inequality in children’s educational achievements among Muslims relative to non-Muslims. The within-family variance is 15 % higher among Muslims relative to Catholics and 45 % higher relative to immigrants with other religions, but the intra-family inequality remains difficult to explain. Overall, our results suggest that Muslim parents tend to redistribute their resources more unequally among their children.     

The importance of child characteristics: children’s health and mothers’ subsequent childbearing

Journal of Population Research - Existing literature rarely includes child characteristics as a predictor variable when investigating family life events. Using data from the Danish Longitudinal...     

The ‘fallacy of normalcy’: A content analysis of women's online post-childbirth health-related support

BackgroundOnline forums have changed traditional sources of seeking help because they provide an anonymous and non-judgemental environment particularly suited for women with post-childbirth problems.QuestionWhat support is given to mothers who have posted questions about post-childbirth morbidities?MethodsA total of 333 messages posted on a post-childbirth online forum were loaded into NVIVO 12 Pro and were analysed using content and thematic analysis. Content analysis identified the major health problems, and thematic analysis was used for identifying motivations and the support offered.FindingsSeventeen different health problems were discussed on posts, with a strong emphasis on pelvic problems, followed by mental health concerns. The key motivation for seeking online help identified using ‘typology of advice solicitation’ was request for opinion or information (48.85%). The two main support themes were: peer to peer support (82%) and normalisation (not always appropriate) of post-childbirth problems (18%). Most of the support offered was emotional (56.9%) followed by practical (22.7%) and informational support (20.4%).DiscussionPostpartum adjustment of post-childbirth experiences can be supportive but if ill-informed may provide a barrier to safe and reliable health care.ConclusionWe recommend women have access to online forums moderated by healthcare providers who can notify participants when a problem requires support from a relevant health professional opinion.     

Population forecast accuracy: does the choice of summary measure of error matter?

Population projections are judged primarily by their accuracy. The most commonly used measure for the precision component of accuracy is the mean absolute percent error (MAPE). Recently, the MAPE has been criticized for overstating forecast error and other error measures have been proposed. This study compares the MAPE with two alternative measures of forecast error, the Median APE and an M-estimator. In addition, the paper also investigates forecast bias. The analysis extends previous studies of forecast error by examining a wide range of trend extrapolation techniques using a dataset that spans a century for a large sample of counties in the US. The main objective is to determine whether the choice of summary measure of error makes a difference from a practitioner’s standpoint. The paper finds that the MAPE indeed produces error values that exceed the robust measures. However, except for situations where extreme outliers rendered the MAPE meaningless, and which are rare in real world applications, there was not a single instance where using an alternative summary measure of error would have led to a fundamentally different evaluation of the projections. Moreover, where differences existed, it was not always clear that the values and patterns provided by the robust measures were necessarily more correct than those obtained with the MAPE. While research into refinements and alternatives to the MAPE and mean algebraic percent error are worthwhile, consideration of additional evaluation procedures that go beyond a single criterion might provide more benefits to producers and users of population forecasts.