PERSPECTIVE ARTICLE: The impact of Nordic countries’ family friendly policies on employment,wages, and children

The Nordic countries at the same time exhibit a remarkably high participation rate of mothers and a more moderate decline in fertility rates compared to other Western countries. This has been attributed to the fact that the welfare state model and, especially, the family friendly policies chosen in the Nordic countries are unique. In this paper we evaluate the impact of Nordic countries’ family friendly policies on employment, wages and children’s well-being. We demonstrate that, although the ‘Nordic model’ has been successful in boosting female employment, it is a costly solution. Furthermore, family-friendly policies mainly directed towards giving mothers the right to be on long paid maternal leave have adverse effects on women’s wages with consequences for gender equality. Indeed, extensive family-friendly schemes may even have created a ‘system-based glass ceiling’ hindering women’s career progression. There is no evidence however of a trade-off between family-friendly policies and family welfare as effects on child development and children’s well-being of publicly provided child-care are found to be modest or even positive.

Saving for Children’s College Education: An Empirical Analysis of the Trade-off Between the Quality and Quantity of Children

This paper examines the effect of children’s college expenses on household savings. The theoretical model introduces life-cycle savings into the quality–quantity model of fertility and derives predictions for the impact of expected expenses on parents’ savings. Using the actual amount of parents’ financial support reported in the Survey of Consumer Finances, the empirical model estimates the expected expenditures on children’s college education and investigates the effect of expected expenditures on parents’ savings. The results show that parents’ support for each of their children’s college expenses decreases with the number of children. The results are consistent with the predictions of the life-cycle theory of saving and consumption that households save in advance for expected expenses to smooth their consumption.

Parental religiosity and daughters’ fertility: the case of Catholics in southern Europe

Preferences, including preferences for children, are shaped during the formative years of childhood. It is therefore essential to include exposure to religious practice during childhood in an attempt to establish a link between religiosity and fertility. This path has not been explored in the documented literature that looks at the relationship between current religiosity and fertility. The International Social Survey Programme: Religion II (ISSP) provides the data base. It includes information on maternal/paternal/own mass participation when the respondent was a child (nine levels each), as well as on his current churchgoing (six levels) and prayer habits (eleven levels). These variables are included as explanatory variables in ‘fertility equations’ that explain the number of children of Catholic women in Spain and Italy. The core findings are that exposure to religiosity during the formative years of childhood, has a pronounced effect on women’s ‘taste for children’ that later on translates into the number of her offspring. In Spain, the two parents have major opposite effects on women. Most striking is the negative effect of the mother’s intensity of church attendance on her daughter’s fertility: Women who were raised by an intensively practicing mother have on average one child less that their counterparts who were raised by a less religious mother. On the other hand, an intensively practicing father encourages the daughter to have more children (by about 0.8, on average). The Italian sample confirms the statistically significant negative effect of the mother’s religiosity. The father’s religious conduct has apparently no effect on Italian women’s birth rates. Current religiosity seems to be irrelevant, both in Spain and in Italy. It follows that religiosity and fertility are interrelated but the mechanism is probably different from the simplistic causality that is suggested in the literature.

A Historical Perspective on High School Students’ Paid Employment and Its Association with High School Dropout

Discussions about the role of paid employment in high school students’ lives usually involve untested assumptions about historical trends in the frequency, intensity, and selective nature of students’ employment behaviors. Using several nationally representative data sources, we find few changes in rates of employment or hours worked per week among adolescents since 1940 or among students since 1980. We observe important changes in recent decades in racial/ethnic and gender differences in employment and intensive employment. Finally, we observe that the relationship between students’ intensive employment and high school completion has been stable and persistently significant since the late 1960s.

Parents’ Beliefs about Emotions and Children’s Recognition of Parents’ Emotions

This study investigated parents’ emotion-related beliefs, experience, and expression, and children’s recognition of their parents’ emotions with 40 parent-child dyads. Parents reported beliefs about danger and guidance of children’s emotions. While viewing emotion-eliciting film clips, parents self-reported their emotional experience and masking of emotion. Children and observers rated videos of parents watching emotion-eliciting film clips. Fathers reported more masking than mothers and their emotional expressions were more difficult for both observers and children to recognize compared with mothers’ emotional expressions. For fathers, but not mothers, showing clearer expressions was related to children’s general skill at recognizing emotional expressions. Parents who believe emotions are dangerous reported greater masking of emotional expression. Contrary to hypothesis, when parents strongly believe in guiding their child’s emotion socialization, children showed less accurate recognition of their parents’ emotions.

Educational Attainment and the Lesbian Wage Premium

This paper provides insight into the wage gap between lesbians and heterosexual women. Using data from the 2000 Decennial Census, we find a lesbian premium that equals approximately 10% for women without a bachelor’s degree, and is nearly non-existent for women with higher levels of education. These findings are consistent with proposition that the gap between lesbians’ and heterosexual women’s commitment to the labor market narrows at higher levels of education. We also find that controls for industry and occupation exert only a small effect on the gap between lesbian and heterosexual women’s wages.

Households’ precautionary behaviors—the effects of the introduction of National Health Insurance in Taiwan

By reducing risk of large out-of-pocket medical expenses, comprehensive social health insurance may reduce households’ motivation to engage in precautionary behaviors such as saving, procurement of private insurance, and spousal labor-force participation. We use the natural experiment provided by the 1995 introduction of National Health Insurance in Taiwan to examine these effects, using pre-existing differences in access to health insurance (tied to the household head’s and spouse’s joint employment status) to identify the effects of increasing insurance coverage. We find that comprehensive health insurance has a statistically significant and large effect on household savings, but no significant effects on purchase of private accident insurance and spousal employment.

Evidence of the Effectiveness of Child Support and Visitation: Examining Food Insecurity among Children with Nonresident Fathers

Over six million children who reside with a single mother and have a father who lives elsewhere are food insecure. This study examines the effectiveness of two aspects of nonresident father involvement, in-person visitation and financial contributions, in reducing food acquisition problems using data from the National Survey of America’s Families. We find that frequent visits by nonresident fathers are related to a reduced likelihood that the resident mother’s household will experience indicators of food insecurity. The effects of child support receipt on reducing food acquisition problems, however, are less consistent. Our results support policies designed to recognize and encourage nonresidential parents to make both monetary and nonmonetary contributions to the lives of their children.

Money Matters: Young Adults’ Perception of the Economic Consequences of their Parents’ Divorce

A qualitative study examined the perceptions of 22 Israeli young adults (ages 20–25) of childhood parental divorce. Respondents discussed their experiences, including economic consequences of the divorce. Results related to the practical aspect of economic decline, to economic issues as embodiment of parental conflicts, and to children’s emotional and practical roles connected to economic changes. Children’s understanding and coping with financial issues are related to three profiles of overall adjustment identified in this study—resilience, survival, and vulnerability. Resilient young adults interpreted as empowering their understanding and coping; the survivors recognized their efforts as meaningful but burdensome; and vulnerable participants felt that economic changes caused a heavy financial and emotional price. Limitations and implications are discussed.

“Which One Is Yours?”: Children and Ethnography

This paper explores roles that children play in ethnographic research. Based on the limited literature on children in the field, and drawing on examples from ethnographies across disciplines, I identify four roles for children: 1) as “wedges,” or as instrumentally important in helping adult ethnographers gain access in various ways; 2) as collaborators; 3) as objects of study; and 4) as subjects of study. I also discuss the ways in which these roles illuminate key methodological issues in ethnography, like reflexivity, ethics, and agency. The paper synthesizes and integrates previously disconnected research on the presence of children in the field with ethnographies in which children and childhood are the topics of research. I draw on my own fieldwork experiences for further illustration.

Close to Home: A Simultaneous Equations Model of the Relationship Between Child Care Accessibility and Female Labor Force Participation

Rising rates of maternal employment among current and former welfare recipients have increased the use of non-parental child care. Little empirical work examines the relationship between women’s labor supply and the geographic supply of child care. We combine census data with child care provider information for the state of Maryland to explore the relationship between female labor supply and the geographic supply of child care. OLS and 3-SLS equations are estimated, and the findings are consistent across each estimator: Women’s labor supply is sensitive to the geographic supply of child care and vice versa. These results are important because states now spend significant money on quality improvement initiatives, many of which increase child care supply in low-income neighborhoods.

Married Couples’ Time Allocation Decisions and Marital Stability

The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), 1985–1992, are the data used to simultaneously examine the role of family stability to both market and household time allocation for both spouses and the role of couples’ time allocation in their probability of divorce. The study found that increases in the probabilities of divorce were only significantly correlated with decreases in wife’s housework time. It was also found by the study that increases in the husband’s market work hours and increases in the wife’s household work hours had negative effects on the probability of divorce.

Offspring of Parents with Gambling Problems: Adjustment Problems and Explanatory Mechanisms

We compared offspring of problem gamblers (n = 42) to offspring of parents without gambling problems (n = 100) to see (1) whether the two groups differed with respect to depressive feelings and conduct/antisociality problems and (2) whether ineffective parenting or the offspring’s own gambling problems played a mediating role in this context. Participants were drawn from a relatively large community-based study (N = 1,872). Parents rated their own gambling and other mental health problems when their children were in mid-adolescence. The children’s self-reports on depressive feelings and conduct/antisociality problems were assessed at two points in time: by mid-adolescence and again by early adulthood. Results showed that children of parents with gambling problems reported more depressive feelings and more conduct problems by mid-adolescence than children of parents without gambling problems. Children of problem gamblers also experienced an increase in their depressive symptoms from mid-adolescence to early adulthood. Importantly, ineffective parenting, but not children’s gambling problems, mediated almost all the links between parental problem gambling and children’s adjustment problems. These results add to a very small data base showing that children of problem gamblers are at risk for a variety of adjustment problems.

Modeling Unemployment Duration in Slovenia using Cox Regression Models

This paper applies the semi-parametric Cox regression approach to model unemployment duration in Slovenia. The empirical analysis is based on a comprehensive dataset that consists of all unemployment spells in Slovenia from 2002 to 2005. The impact of the variables age, gender, level of education, and region on the hazard ratio is discussed. It takes longer for female and older unemployed persons to find a job and on average the duration of unemployment decreases with increasing level of education. Surprisingly, unemployed persons with a professional college degree or a bachelor’s degree are better off than unemployed persons with a master’s degree. A comparison of the Cox proportional hazards model and the Cox regression model with a time-dependent covariate reveals that the more appropriate model with a time-dependent covariate places greater emphasis on higher levels of education.

Did the legalization of abortion increase women’s household bargaining power? Evidence from labor supply

I estimate the impact of abortion legalization on spouses’ labor supplies to test whether legalization increased women’s household bargaining power, in a collective household behavior framework. Based on CPS data, I find that wives’ labor supply decreased and their husbands’ increased, which is consistent with the bargaining hypothesis. This contrasts with most studies of abortion and birth control technologies, which predict a labor supply effect only for women, and of opposite sign. Also consistent with the bargaining interpretation, I estimate no significant impact on anti-abortion religious couples or on those who regularly used contraceptives. PSID data yield supportive evidence.

Chinese Contract Law and the Economic Reform

China’s previous contract laws had many contradictions and failed to meet the needs of China’s developing market economy. Although some problems still need to be dealt with, the unified contract law is more advanced, systematic and plays an important role in fostering and encouraging transactions.

The Monster Within: Countertransference Reflections on a Gay Adolescent’s Struggle with Sexual Identity

This paper concerns the author’s countertransference reflections on her work with a gay adolescent who identifies with powerfully destructive internal objects, including Hitler and the Monster. The author describes her countertransference inquiry through which she experiences her own potential destructiveness in order to help accommodate her adolescent patient’s rejected and disowned self states.

Male Child Sexual Abuse: A Phenomenology of Betrayal

Being deeply understood relies on the ability of the social work clinician to have authentic and genuine empathy for their client. This phenomenological study sought to understand the lived experience of men sexually abused as boys in their childhood, and what life is like for them as sexual abuse survivors in adulthood. Analyses of fourteen male survivors’ narratives into the abuse they experienced as children, and the meaning they make of that experience today, offer insights for therapists. Findings suggest that therapists have a responsibility to ask male clients about sexual victimization, even when this is not the presenting problem but they exhibit sexual abuse related problems; an obligation to educate one’s self on responding therapeutically to disclosure; a duty to receive training to counsel sexually victimized males; a responsibility to advocate for the development of men’s services; and taking an active role in shifting attitudes towards men’s vulnerabilities.

Married Women’s Labor Supply and Spousal Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: Results from Panel Data

This paper investigates the effect of spousal insurance coverage on married women’s labor supply. This effect was hypothesized to be negative, since married women have an incentive to seek employment in jobs that will provide insurance when their husbands do not provide coverage. Panel data from the 1996–2004 Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys was used to control for the potential correlation between unobserved characteristics and spousal insurance. The findings suggest that spousal coverage does have a negative effect on married women’s labor supply, and that most of the reduction in labor supply seems to derive from shifts out of the labor force rather than between part-time and full-time work.

Understanding and Utilizing Parallel Processes of Social Interaction for Attachment-based Parenting Interventions

In an effort to meet both the parenting and treatment needs of substance-abusing women who are parents, residential drug treatment programs have been struggling to find the best approach. A qualitative-quantitative study of the parenting experience of mothers in residential drug treatment programs housing both mothers and their children found that relational processes characterized how these mothers perceived parenting as well as treatment. The findings presented the interplay and mutuality between a mother’s interactions (natural or facilitated) with the external social world that includes her child and those connected to the treatment facility and the internal formation of her sense of herself, her child, and others, along with the changes in both areas that took place in the facility. These findings lend important support to the use of attachment-based parenting interventions in residential drug treatment programs by drawing on these relational processes.