When Does Time Matter? Maternal Employment,Children’s Time With Parents,and Child Development

This study tests the two assumptions underlying popularly held notions that maternal employment negatively affects children because it reduces time spent with parents: (1) that maternal employment reduces children’s time with parents, and (2) that time with parents affects child outcomes. We analyze children’s time-diary data from the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and use child fixed-effects and IV estimations to account for unobserved heterogeneity. We find that working mothers trade quantity of time for better “quality” of time. On average, maternal work has no effect on time in activities that positively influence children’s development, but it reduces time in types of activities that may be detrimental to children’s development. Stratification by mothers’ education reveals that although all children, regardless of mother’s education, benefit from spending educational and structured time with their mothers, mothers who are high school graduates have the greatest difficulty balancing work and childcare. We find some evidence that fathers compensate for maternal employment by increasing types of activities that can foster child development as well as types of activities that may be detrimental. Overall, we find that the effects of maternal employment are ambiguous because (1) employment does not necessarily reduce children’s time with parents, and (2) not all types of parental time benefit child development.     

China’s First Large-Scale Birth Cohort Study Will Start This Year

According to China News Net, a large-scale birth cohort study, in line with international norms, will be started in the second half this year in Shanghai, and in full expands next summer. It is reported that the project will be led by Professor Zhang Jun,director of Department of Environment and Children’s Health of Shanghai Xinhua Hospital and Shanghai Key Laboratory.     

The Interrelationship between Fosterage,Schooling, and Children’s Labor Force Participation in Ghana

This paper examines the interrelationship between fosterage, school attendance, and children’s employment in Ghana. Using the 1991/1992 Living Standards Survey data on children aged 7–17 years and a trivariate probit model, the paper demonstrates that ignoring the linkages between these outcomes leads to downward-biased estimates of the impact of fosterage on schooling and upward-biased estimates of the impact of fosterage on work. Gender and age are important considerations in family decisions regarding children’s activities. Joint decision-making is more common for girls aged 12–17 than for boys of a similar age. A significant negative correlation is also observed between the likelihood of employment and the likelihood of school attendance among adolescent girls.     

Market Access and the Border Effect of China’s Labor Migration

This paper introduces a new economy geography index,market access, to analyze the dynamic mechanism of labor migration in China based on the sample data from China’s labor cross-region flow 1998 ～ 2008.The empirical test prove the reversed U-shape of Market access -Wage - Migration and finds that market access in early period of China’s reform increased labor migration significantly from peripheral zone to the central area which caused China’s core-peripheral competition landscape.However with the appearance ofLewis turning pointand disappearance of demographic dividend,the M-W-M mechanism tends to weaken.The calculation shows that the estimated value of hidden barriers against labor migration, i.e.border effect, is 3.94,and the values of border effects boast of a ladder-type rising trend from the east to the west in China.The labor market in the central area is relatively open while more isolated in peripheral zone.To change China’s center-periphery pattern into more balanced development among regions and to maintain the competitiveness of China’s industrial production,it is important for government to have proper policies to maintain free market and ensure efficient allocation of production factors.     

Cohort Differences in Women’s Educational Attainment and the Transition to First Marriage in Ghana

This study explores the effects of educational attainment on the transition to first marriage across successive generations of women in Ghana. Considering the significant improvements in women educational attainment and career opportunities in recent decades, the paper questions the tacit assumption of prior research on the time-invariant effect of women’s educational attainment on marriage timing. Using discrete time frailty models with pooled data from the 1988, 1993, 1998 and 2003 Ghana Demographic and Health Survey, women with higher educational attainment were found to have longer transition to first marriage than their less educated counterparts. More importantly, the effect of higher education on the transition to first marriage was larger among younger women even after controlling for other factors. The stronger effect among contemporary women has been discussed in relation to ideational changes on family formation and the enhanced career opportunities for contemporary educated women.

The Astonishing Population Averted by China’s Birth Restrictions: Estimates,Nightmares, and Reprogrammed Ambitions

China launched an unprecedented program to control its population in 1971. Experts have dismissed the official estimate of 400 million births averted by this program as greatly exaggerated yet neglect to provide their own estimates. Counterfactual projections based on fertility declines in other countries suggest that China’s program-averted population numbered 360–520 million as of 2015. The low end of this range is based on Vietnam—China’s best national comparator, with a two-child program of its own—and the high end is based on a 16-country comparator selected, ironically, by critics of the official estimate. The latter comparator further implies that China’s one-child program itself averted a population of 400 million by 2015, three-quarters of the total averted population. All such estimates are projected to double by 2060, due mostly to counterfactual population momentum. These and other findings presented herein affirm the astonishing impact of China’s draconian policy choices and challenge the current consensus that rapid socioeconomic progress drove China’s fertility well below two children per family. International comparisons of fertility and income suggest instead that China’s very low fertility arrived two or three decades too soon. If China had not harshly enforced a norm of 1.5-children during the last quarter century, most mothers would have had two children, one-half birth higher than observed.     

Children and Careers: How Family Size Affects Parents’ Labor Market Outcomes in the Long Run

We estimate the effect of family size on various measures of labor market outcomes over the whole career until retirement, using instrumental variables estimation in data from Norwegian administrative registers. Parents’ number of children is instrumented with the sex mix of their first two children. We find that having additional children causes sizable reductions in labor supply for women, which fade as children mature and even turn positive for women without a college degree. Among women with a college degree, there is evidence of persistent and even increasing career penalties of family size. Having additional children reduces these women’s probability of being employed by higher-paying firms, their earnings rank within the employing firm, and their probability of being the top earner at the workplace. Some of the career effects persist long after labor supply is restored. We find no effect of family size on any of men’s labor market outcomes in either the short or long run.     

Canada’s evacuation policy for pregnant First Nations women: Resignation,resilience, and resistance

Background

Aboriginal peoples in Canada are comprised of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit. Health care services for First Nations who live on rural and remote reserves are mostly provided by the Government of Canada through the federal department, Health Canada. One Health Canada policy, the evacuation policy, requires all First Nations women living on rural and remote reserves to leave their communities between 36 and 38 weeks gestational age and travel to urban centres to await labour and birth. Although there are a few First Nations communities in Canada that have re-established community birthing and Aboriginal midwifery is growing, most First Nations communities are still reliant on the evacuation policy for labour and birthing services. In one Canadian province, Manitoba, First Nations women are evacuated to The Pas, Thompson, or Winnipeg but most – including all women with high-risk pregnancies – go to Winnipeg.

Women’s Short-Term Employment Trajectories Following Birth: Patterns,Determinants, and Variations by Race/Ethnicity and Nativity

Despite a large literature documenting the impact of childbearing on women’s wages, less understanding exists of the actual employment trajectories that mothers take and the circumstances surrounding different paths. We use sequence analysis to chart the entire employment trajectory for a diverse sample of U.S. women by race/ethnicity and nativity in the first year following childbirth. Using data from the 1996–2008 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation and sample selection models, we find that women employed before childbirth show a high degree of labor market continuity. However, a notable share of them (24 %) took less stable paths by dropping out or scaling back work. In addition, mothers’ attachment to the labor force is simultaneously supported by personal endowments and family resources yet constrained by economic hardship and job characteristics. Moreover, mothers’ employment patterns differ by race/ethnicity and nativity. Nonwhite women (blacks, Hispanics, and Asians) who were employed before childbirth exhibited greater labor market continuation than white women. For immigrant women, those with a shorter length of residence were more likely to curtail employment than native-born women, but those with longer duration of residence show greater labor force attachment. We discuss the implications of these findings for income inequality and public policy.     

Males’ Later-Life Mortality Consequences of Coresidence With Paternal Grandparents: Evidence From Northeast China, 1789–1909

In this study, we investigate the effect of early-life coresidence with paternal grandparents on male mortality risks in adulthood and older age in northeast China from 1789 to 1909. Despite growing interest in the influence of grandparents on child outcomes, few studies have examined the effect of coresidence with grandparents in early life on mortality in later life. We find that coresidence with paternal grandmothers in childhood is associated with higher mortality risks for males in adulthood. This may reflect the long-term effects of conflicts between mothers and their mothers-in-law. These results suggest that in extended families, patterns of coresidence in childhood may have long-term consequences for mortality, above and beyond the effects of common environmental and genetic factors, even when effects on childhood mortality are not readily apparent.     

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.     

The Impacts of Rural Labor Migration on China’s Economy and Regional Disparities

This study constructed Computable General Equi-librium(CGE) model of four-regions and six-departments to analyze the impacts of rural labor migration on economic growth and regional disparities in China, based on 2000 and 2007 China’s Regional Input-Output Tables. The results showed that it had made China’s GDP respectively grow from 1.054% in 2000 to 5.565% in 2007.The impacts had the most obvious effects on the eastern region’s economic growth, the largest growth rate on the central region’s economic growth, and a negative-to-positive transformation on the western region’s economic growth. Compared with rural labor migration within regions, it widened gap among regions in 2007,making the disparities of eastern-central, eastern-western and central-western respectively grow by 5.738%,6.668% and 12.627%. These disparities were much higher than those in 2000.Meanwhile the migration led value added in nonagricultural sectors to increase and added value in agricultural sector to decrease. Also it left the greater impact on the service sector of the central region and greatest impact on the heavy industrial sectors of the western region.     

Going to extremes: Family structure, children’s well-being, and social science

In this article I argue that public discussions of demographic issues are often conducted in a troubling pattern in which one extreme position is debated in relation to the opposite extreme. This pattern impedes our understanding of social problems and is a poor guide to sound public policies. To illustrate this thesis I use the case of social scientific research examining how children are affected by not living with two biological parents while they are growing up. Over the last decade, I maintain, most of the public, and even many social scientists, have been puzzled and poorly informed by this debate. In particular I consider Judith Wallerstein's clinically based claims of the pervasive, profound harm caused by divorce and, at the other extreme, Judith Rich Harris's reading of behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology, which leads her to dismiss the direct effects of divorce. Neither extreme gives a clear picture of the consequences of growing up in a single-parent family or a stepfamily.     

Children’s educational attainment,occupation, and income and their parents’ mortality

Using data from Finland, this paper contributes to a small but growing body of research regarding adult children's education, occupation, and income and their parents' mortality at ages 50+ in 1970–2007. Higher levels of children's education are associated with 30–36 per cent lower parental mortality at ages 50–75, controlling for parents' education, occupation, and income. This association is fully mediated by children's occupation and income, except for cancer mortality. Having at least one child educated in healthcare is associated with 11–16 per cent lower all-cause mortality at ages 50–75, an association that is largely driven by mortality from cardiovascular diseases. Children's higher white-collar occupation and higher income is associated with 39–46 per cent lower mortality in the fully adjusted models. At ages 75+, these associations are much smaller overall and children's schooling remains more strongly associated with mortality than children's occupation or income.     

Let’s Not,and Say We Would: Imagined and Actual Responses to Witnessing Homophobia

We compared imagined versus actual affective and behavioral responses to witnessing a homophobic slur. Participants (N = 72) witnessed a confederate using a homophobic slur, imagined the same scenario, or were not exposed to the slur. Those who imagined hearing the slur reported significantly higher levels of negative affect than those who actually witnessed the slur, and nearly one half of them reported that they would confront the slur, whereas no participants who actually heard the slur confronted it. These findings reveal a discrepancy between imagined and real responses to homophobic remarks, and they have implications for the likelihood that heterosexuals will actually confront homophobic remarks.     

Is Stepfamily Status Associated With Cohabiting and Married Women’s Fertility Behaviors?

Children from prior relationships potentially complicate fertility decision-making in new cohabitations and marriages. On the one hand, the “value of children” perspective suggests that unions with and without stepchildren have similar—and deliberate—reasons for shared childbearing. On the other hand, multipartnered fertility (MPF) research suggests that childbearing across partnerships is often unintended. Using the 2006–2010 National Survey of Family Growth and event-history models, I examine the role of stepfamily status on cohabiting and married women’s fertility and birth intendedness, with attention to union type and stepfamily configuration. Adjusting for covariates, women in stepfamily unions are more likely to have a first shared birth in a union than women in unions in which neither partner has children from past relationships, but stepfamily births are less likely to be intended than unintended. Further, this association varies by union type: married women have similar birth risks across stepfamily status, but births are less likely to be intended in marital stepfamilies. For cohabitors, women in a stepfamily are more likely to have a birth than women in nonstepfamily unions, with no differences in intendedness. Configuration (whose children and how many) also matters; for instance, women with one child from a past relationship are more likely to have a birth and to have an intended than unintended birth than women with other stepfamily configurations. It appears that children from either partner’s prior relationships influences subsequent fertility decision-making, undermining the utility of the “value of children” perspective for explaining childbearing behaviors in complex families.     

Addictive Substances,Users’ Health,and the Government’s Perceived Responsibility: French People’s Perspective

This paper uses a semiparametric latent variable transformation model for multiple outcomes to examine the effect of education and maternal education on female multidimensional well-being and proposes a procedure to build a well-being index that is less susceptible to functional form misspecification. We model multidimensional well-being as an unobserved common factor underlying the observed well-being outcomes. The semiparametric methodology allows us to alleviate misspecification bias by combining multiple indicators into a latent construct in an unspecified, data-driven way. Using data from female participants of the 1974–2010 waves of the US General Social Survey, we find that education, intelligence, and maternal education contribute positively to multidimensional well-being. However, the effects of education and maternal education on female multidimensional well-being declined steadily between the mid-1970s and the 1990s, and have not rebounded since.     

Children’s Rights,School Psychology,and Well-Being Assessments

This paper addresses interrelationships among the notions of children’s rights, school psychological services, and child well-being assessments. Increasing attention has been paid in recent years to the notions of children’s rights, as best expressed in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). In the current paper, we discuss the relevance of the emerging conceptions of children’s rights to the school context. We argue that given the centrality of schooling to children’s lives, school psychologists, who are serving in the role of child advocates, are in a unique position to contribute to integrating the children’s rights movement and educational progress. Situated within the context of the CRC and the practice of school psychology, we further discuss how advances in child well-being assessment can inform the implementation and evaluation of CRC principles and related policies. We propose that the use of evidence-based, developmentally appropriate objective and subjective measures of well-being should contribute a key component to meaningful assessments of the status of children’s rights and well-being.