Dual-earner parents’ work-family time: the effects of atypical work patterns and non-parental childcare

Finding time to both earn money and raise children is demanding. Within the constraints and opportunities of their employment and social policies affecting work and family, parents seeking to manage their time may use a number of strategies. For example, they can outsource childcare or adopt atypical work patterns: non-standard work schedules, self employment, working from home. In this paper we compare the effects of these measures on the household time use and gender division of labour of dual-earner couples with children, using data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics Time Use Survey, 2006 (n?=?772 couples). We find that these strategies do help households manage their work and family time. However, this is almost exclusively a result of women changing their time use. Such measures generally enable mothers, not fathers, to adjust paid work around family commitments, and offer little amelioration of gendered divisions of labour. This reinforces normative gender-role expectations and is probably a result of institutional constraints, including sparse social policy and workplace support for mothers?? full-time employment and for fathers?? involvement in childcare.     

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’ Religious Involvement,Family Socialization and Development of Their Children in a Chinese Sample of Hong Kong

The present study investigates the effects of parents’ religious involvement on their psychological health, family functioning and development of their children from a Chinese sample of parent–child pairs in Hong Kong. Results support the beneficial effects of religious involvement on effective parenting and favorable outcomes of their children, which have been well reported in western studies. Besides, this investigation finds that (1) parental psychological health is a mediator between their religious involvement and positive family processes; (2) family processes is an important family socialization factor with spill-over effects into the function of parenting; (3) different family socialization factors have different effects on child outcomes; (4) parental positive religious coping is a function of their intrinsic religiosity; and (5) both parental religious coping and their intrinsic religiosity have a protective effect on parental psychological difficulties, with the former having robust direct effects on positive family processes and effective parenting, and (6) both intrinsic religiosity and positive religious coping in parents show significant total indirect effects on respective child outcomes through parental psychological and family socialization factors. Implications and directions for further study are also discussed.     

The Influence of Local Price and Availability on Parents’ Choice of Child Care

The striking variation in patterns of child care usage across states reflects differences in family characteristics, but may also reflect exogenous differences in local child care markets. Type of care selected will be influenced by the availability, cost, and accessibility of supply in the child care market as well as by family and child characteristics and cultural preferences. This study contributes to the growing literature on parental demand for child care by using a recent detailed data set from the state of Minnesota. We link household-level data on child care usage and family characteristics with county-level data on average provider rates and availability by type of care in order to estimate multinomial logit models analyzing the family, child, and market characteristics that predict type of care. Our analysis shows that using a relative or friend to care for a child is largely determined by availability, and choice of family care providers is most responsive to price for employed mothers. The types of care chosen by mothers who are not in the paid labor force differ substantially from the choices of employed mothers, and their use of center care is influenced by the prices of both center and family providers. Attitudes towards relative care are also shown to influence type of care chosen.     

Parental leave regulations, mothers’ labor force attachment and fathers’ childcare involvement: evidence from a natural experiment

In 2007, Germany implemented a generous parental leave regulation in order to make parenthood more attractive and more compatible with a working career, especially for mothers. We evaluate the reform using a natural experiment that compares outcomes of parents with children born shortly after and before the coming into effect of the law, and find a significant decrease in mothers’ employment probability during the 12 months after giving birth, and an increase in mothers’ employment probability after the transfer expires. The implementation of two daddy months is currently not reflected in significant changes in fathers’ time devoted to childcare.     

Consequences of family disruption on children’s educational outcomes in norway

Using high-quality data from Norwegian population registers, we examine the relationship between family disruption and children’s educational outcomes. We distinguish between disruptions caused by parental divorce and paternal death and, using a simultaneous equation model, pay particular attention to selection bias in the effect of divorce. We also allow for the possibility that disruption may have different effects at different stages of a child’s educational career. Our results suggest that selection on time-invariant maternal characteristics is important and works to overstate the effects of divorce on a child’s chances of continuing in education. Nevertheless, the experience of marital breakdown during childhood is associated with lower levels of education, and the effect weakens with the child’s age at disruption. The effects of divorce are most pronounced for the transitions during or just beyond the high school level. In models that do not allow for selection, children who experienced a father’s death appear less disadvantaged than children whose parents divorced. After we control for selection, however, differences in the educational qualifications of children from divorced and bereaved families narrow substantially and, at mean ages of divorce, are almost non-existent.     

A Structural Equation Model Estimation of the Role of Social Vulnerability as a Predictor of People’s Feelings of Unsafety

Social Indicators Research - People’s perception of insecurity is linked to a wide range of factors and up-to-date sources stress the impact of socially constructed concerns on feelings of...     

Schematising hospitality: Ai WeiWei’s activist artwork as a form of dark travel

The article provides a holistic appraisal of activist-artist Ai WeiWei’s work. It argues that, despite its topical innovations and evolution, it continues to be informed by narratives of ‘hospitality’ as an experiential form of engagement with variations of otherness (father, migrant, tourist and refugee). Dividing Ai’s artwork into two overlapping phases of development (national and international/global), it considers the artist’s construction of a cosmopolitan identity with uses of ‘technology’ as embodied and communal property. As Ai’s work on the refugee crisis on Lesbos attests, his (dark) artistic cosmopolitan symbolisations use geo-political imaginaries of justice and hospitality in subsequent projects.     

Parents’ economic support of young-adult children: do socioeconomic circumstances matter?

We assess how the support parents provide to young adults as they leave school and begin working is related to their family’s socioeconomic circumstances. We do this using an innovative Australian data set which merges survey and administrative data. The survey data inform us about intergenerational co-residence and financial gifts and the administrative data about the family’s welfare receipt history. We find that disadvantaged young people are more likely to be economically independent of their parents than are their more advantaged peers. This disparity is larger for financial gifts than for co-residence and increases with age. Moreover, there is a complex relationship between parental support and participation in study and work. We find no evidence, however, that a lack of parental support is the source of the socioeconomic gradient in either studying or employment. These results are important in eliminating one potential pathway through which socioeconomic disadvantage limits young people’s outcomes.     

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 Decomposition of Economic Outcomes as a Result of Changes in Brazil’s Male Age–Education Structure

In Brazil, the age and education compositions of the male labor force is changing with great regional variation. Based on Demographic Census microdata, results indicate that cohort size has a negative impact on earnings, but this effect is decreasing over time. In this study we consider the impact on earnings by age and education, as well as estimated income inequality reduction and racial differentials. Fertility decline and improve regarding educational attainment had a significant influence on the decline of income inequality in the country. Moreover, the non-white population has been experiencing less success in relation to educational achievement, compared to the white population.     

Modelling the impact of women’s education on fertility in Malawi

Many studies have suggested that there is an inverse relationship between education and number of children among women from sub-Saharan Africa countries, including Malawi. However, a crucial limitation of these analyses is that they do not control for the potential endogeneity of education. The aim of our study is to estimate the role of women’s education on their number of children in Malawi, accounting for the possible presence of endogeneity and for nonlinear effects of continuous observed confounders. Our analysis is based on micro data from the 2010 Malawi Demographic Health Survey, and uses a flexible instrumental variable regression approach. The results suggest that the relationship of interest is affected by endogeneity and exhibits an inverted U-shape among women living in rural areas of Malawi, whereas it exhibits an inverse (nonlinear) relationship for women living in urban areas.     

Infant Mortality Rate as a Measure of a Country’s Health: A Robust Method to Improve Reliability and Comparability

Researchers and policymakers often rely on the infant mortality rate as an indicator of a country’s health. Despite arguments about its relevance, uniform measurement of infant mortality is necessary to guarantee its use as a valid measure of population health. Using important socioeconomic indicators, we develop a novel method to adjust country-specific reported infant mortality figures. We conclude that an augmented measure of mortality that includes both infant and late fetal deaths should be considered when assessing levels of social welfare in a country. In addition, mortality statistics that exhibit a substantially high ratio of late fetal to early neonatal deaths should be more closely scrutinized.     

Children’s Resilience-Related Beliefs as a Predictor of Positive Child Development in the Face of Adversities: Implications for Interventions to Enhance Children’s Quality of Life

This paper reports the findings of a longitudinal childhood resilience study which investigated the relationship between resilience-related beliefs and positive child development. Three waves of data collection (T1, T2, and T3) were completed in January 2005, July 2005, and January 2006 with a sample of 843 grade 4 pupils, drawn from six primary schools in Hong Kong, and their parents or guardians. At T1, parents/guardians responded to a 24-item inventory of life adversities affecting their children since birth; at T1 and T3, they completed a 25-item Parental Assessment of Child’s Habit, which provided parental evaluation of children’s performance at home and in school. At T1, T2, and T3, children responded to a 58-item Child and Youth Resilience Measure, a 9-item scale on Chinese cultural beliefs about adversity, and an 11-item Chinese Resilience Measure for Children and Adolescents in Hong Kong. Regression analyses, based on linear mixed models, controlling for gender, T1 and T2 scores, personal variables, and random effects of schools, were conducted to test and validate the hypothesis that children’s resilience beliefs are predictive of positive child development, and that this predictive relationship is stronger with increasing adversity in children’s lives. Implications of these findings for the development of resilience-based interventions to enhance the quality of life of children facing adversities are examined.     

Constructing a city,building a life: Brazilian construction workers’ continuous mobility as a permanent life strategy

This article provides an ethnographic analysis of domestic labor mobility among Brazilian construction workers in the context of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. We start from the premise that mobile laborers are crucial for the physical development and expansion of cities. However, the importance of domestic migrants in this process is insufficiently addressed in mobility studies. Building on existing research on domestic population movements in Brazil, we argue that the current generation of mobile construction workers draws on the intangible and material infrastructure generated by previous generations of migrants to enable novel kinds of (permanent) labor mobilities.     

Adult Children’s Education and Later-Life Health of Parents in China: The Intergenerational Effects of Human Capital Investment

Social Indicators Research - Recent research has shown that in high-income countries, investing in children’s education could be an effective strategy to improve parental health in older age....     

“He’s a total TubeCrush”: post-feminist sensibility as intimate publics

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the website TubeCrush, where people post and share unsolicited photographs of “guy candy” seen on the London Underground. We use TubeCrush as a case study to develop Berlant’s intimate publics as a lens for examining post-feminist sensibility and masculinity in the liminal space between home/work. The paper responds to notions of reverse sexism and post-sexism used to make sense of women’s apparent objectification of men in the digital space, by asking instead where the value of such images lies. We suggest that in TubeCrush, value is directed onto the bodies of particular men, creating a visual economy of post-feminist masculinity of whiteness, physical strength, and economic wealth. This celebration of masculine capital is achieved through humor and the knowing wink, but the outcome is a reaffirmation of urban hegemonic masculinity.     

‘Continuity of Care Experiences’ within pre-registration midwifery education programs: A scoping review

BackgroundMidwifery is based on the philosophy of woman-centred care. The continuity of care experience in pre-registration education programs exemplifies this philosophy. Wide variation in how education providers implement ‘Continuity of Care Experiences’ into their programs of study can challenge this valuable learning opportunity.AimTo provide a comprehensive analysis of the governance and empirical evidence of knowledge, practice and enablers to support continuity of care experiences within pre-registration midwifery education.MethodA scoping review of research, policy and professional documents pertaining to the continuity of care experience in pre-registration education programs was conducted with 46 articles meeting the inclusion criteria.FindingsSeveral factors were identified that support the implementation, facilitation and evaluation of the continuity of care experience within pre-registration midwifery education. These include: a woman-centred model of maternity care; enabling midwifery students and women to develop ‘relational continuity’; tripartite support models; optimising the sequencing of these experiences within the program and, woman-led evaluations of student performance. There was little consensus regarding the pedagogical intent and, therefore, an inability to clearly define and measure the learning outcomes of the continuity of care experience.ConclusionIn countries where the predominant model of maternity care is fragmented and not woman-centred, further research is required to understand the pedagogical intent of the continuity of care experience.     

Health professionals’ perceptions of a midwifery model of woman-centred care implemented on a hospital labour ward

BackgroundTheoretical models as a basis for midwives’ care have been developed over recent decades. Although there are similarities between these models, their usefulness in practice needs to be researched in specific cultural contexts.AimTo explore whether, when adopted by midwives on labour wards, a midwifery model of woman-centred care (MiMo) was useful in practice from the viewpoint of a variety of health professionals.MethodsData were collected from a variety of health professionals before and after an intervention of implementating MiMo at a hospital-based labour ward in Sweden, using nine focus group interviews with a total of 43 participants: midwives (n = 16), obstetricians (n = 8), assistant nurses (n = 11) and managers (n = 8). The text from interviews was analysed using content analysis.FindingsFrom expressing no explicit need of a midwifery model of woman-centred care before the intervention, there was a shift in midwives, obstetricians and managers perceptions towards identifying advantages of using the MiMo as it gives words to woman-centred midwifery care. Such shift in perception was not found among the assistant nurses.DiscussionClarification of the various roles of health professionals is needed to develop the model. Heavy workloads and stress were barriers to implementing the model. Thus, more support is needed from organisational management.ConclusionsThe model was useful for all professional groups, except for assistant nurses. Further studies are needed in order to clarify the various professional roles and interdisciplinary collaborations in making the MiMo more useful in daily maternity care.