Young Mothers’ Experiences of Receiving the Baby Bonus: A Qualitative Study

The year 2014 marked the abolition of the Baby Bonus and its replacement with a substantially reduced parenting payment. While often criticised as “middle-class welfare,” or publicly denounced due to its purported misuse by disadvantaged mothers, this paper argues that the Baby Bonus provided valuable financial assistance to families experiencing high financial stress. To investigate young women's experience of receiving the Baby Bonus, 19 semistructured interviews were conducted with young mothers in Melbourne who had recently had babies. Many were experiencing financial stress and this payment provided much needed financial support for the basic costs arising from having a baby. Several mothers perceived work as a luxury that was out of reach due to high childcare costs relative to their earning capacity and therefore saw Paid Parental Leave as a further privilege unavailable to them. Our results suggest that while the concerns of policymakers to achieve the best use of scarce resources are critical, it should also be acknowledged that the policy change may have serious implications for many young mothers and may exacerbate disadvantage, and young mothers’ sense of alienation, ultimately leading to greater inequalities.     

Financially Overextended: College Attendance as a Contributor to Foreclosures During the Great Recession

Although subprime mortgage lending and unemployment were largely responsible for the wave of foreclosures during the Great Recession, additional sources of financial risk may have exacerbated the crisis. We hypothesize that many parents sending children to college were financially overextended and vulnerable to foreclosure as the economy contracted. With commuting zone panel data from 2006 to 2011, we show that increasing rates of college attendance across the income distribution in one year predict a foreclosure rate increase in subsequent years, net of fixed characteristics and changes in employment, refinance debt, house prices, and 19-year-old population size. We find similar evidence of college-related foreclosure risk using longitudinal household data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Our findings uncover a previously overlooked dimension of the foreclosure crisis, and highlight mortgage insecurity as an inadvertent consequence of parental investment in higher education.     

Conducive Characteristics or Anti-Racist Context? Decomposing the Reasons for Veterans’ High Likelihood of Interracial Marriage

Over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, veterans have been more likely to enter into race/ethnic intermarriages than non-veterans. Theories of race/ethnic intermarriage variously point to how minority race/ethnicity, race/ethnically diverse social settings, progressive racial attitudes, and high socioeconomic status increase individuals’ likelihood of intermarrying. Veterans’ unique racial and socioeconomic characteristics may contribute to their greater likelihood of intermarrying relative to non-veterans: larger percentages of veterans than non-veterans are members of racial and ethnic minority groups, while military service increases individual service members’ long-term economic and educational prospects. At the same time, veterans share in common their exposure to the unique military environment, which may increase their likelihood of intermarriage by diversifying their social circles, and subjecting their attitudes and behavior to group norms that are more explicitly egalitarian than those of society at large. The present study considers these two possible explanations for veterans’ greater likelihood of intermarriage. We use data on seven cohorts of men over six decades in the Current Population Survey, representing a total of 1,456,742 observations, to decompose the difference in likelihood of racial intermarriage between veterans and non-veterans among married men aged 18–65. We find that across cohorts and decades, veterans’ greater likelihood of intermarrying is not fully explained by their race/ethnic and socioeconomic composition. We argue that veterans’ greater likelihood of intermarrying may therefore be driven by their exposure to the military environment.     

Country-Level Investment in Cultural Opportunity Structures. A Potential Source of Health Differences Between 21 European Countries

Individual’s participation in cultural activities may positively affect health through a pathway mediated by social capital. We examine whether country-level investment in cultural opportunity structures was associated with between-country differences in self-rated health and, if so, whether these associations were mediated by citizens’ confidence in societal institutions, i.e., by institutional trust, regarded as a dimension of social capital. For 24,887 respondents in the European Social Survey, 2006, data on self-rated health, institutional trust (individual-level and country-level), and sociodemographic variables were linked with statistics-based country-level data on 10 indicators of cultural opportunity structures and mediator variables (gross domestic product (GDP), Gini index, and welfare state regime). Over and above the sociodemographics, six cultural indicators contributed to between-country health differences in logistic multilevel regression analysis: the percentage of arts students, the RC index, the percentage of writers and creative artists of total employment, exports of cultural goods, imports of cultural goods, and the number of feature films produced per capita. Controlling, furthermore, for trust, and country-level mediators, only imports of cultural goods contributed to between-country differences in health. No associations with other cultural indicators remained after controlling for GDP or welfare state regime. Institutional trust may partially mediate the significance of cultural investments for self-rated health. However, both cultural investment and trust may be concomitants of general prosperity and welfare policies. Future studies should investigate whether the countries’ welfare policies influence the transformation of cultural investment into institutional trust and which types of indicators best depict associations between investments and health.     

The Relationship Between Social Capital and Individualism–Collectivism in Europe

The aim of the present study was to examine the relationship between social capital and individualism–collectivism in a sample of 50,417 individuals from 29 European countries using data from the European Social Survey Round 6 (2012). Social capital was measured in terms of generalized social trust and informal social networks; individualism–collectivism was operationalized via Schwartz’s Openness to Change–Conservation value dimension. Results from a hierarchical linear modeling analysis showed that less than 10% of variance in social capital indicators was found between countries, meaning that the level of social capital varies more substantively between individuals than between the countries. Openness to Change had a weak but statistically significant and positive relationship both with the indices of Generalized Social Trust and Informal Social Networks, which remained significant even when individual age, gender, education level, and domicile were controlled for. In sum, our findings show that the positive relationship between social capital and individualism that has been found at the cultural level also holds at the individual level: people who emphasize independent thought, action, and readiness to change are also more willing to believe that most people can be trusted and are more engaged in informal social networks. The relationship is, nevertheless, very weak and the strength of the association varies significantly across different European countries. This variation, however, cannot be explained by country differences in level of democracy or human development and the country’s wealth moderates only the individual level relationship between Openness to Change and Informal Social Networks. Our findings suggest that sources of social capital at the individual level can be found in people’s immediate social surroundings, as well as their everyday social interactions.     

Missing time with parents: son preference among Asians in the USA

We study prevalence of son preference in families of East and South Asian origin living in the USA by investigating parental time investments in children using American Time Use Surveys. Estimates show that East and South Asian mothers spend an additional hour of quality time per day with their young (aged 0–2 years) sons than with young daughters; son preference in mothers’ time allocation declines as children get older. East and South Asian fathers’ time with young children is gender neutral. We find gender specialization in time with children aged 6–17 with fathers spending more time with sons and mothers spending more time with daughters.     

Toward a gender politics of aging

The article proposes a Gender Politics of Aging approach to the study of aging societies. The approach recognizes the feminization of old age, ageism’s roots in sexist discourse, and the need to recognize the role of politics in driving demographic debates. Drawing together arguments from feminist gerontology and political demography, the article argues that the intersection of politics and gender must be considered if appropriate responses to an older, feminized demography are to be produced. I conclude that the work of aging feminists provides a rich vein of research and praxis from which a gender politics of aging approach can draw.     

Investigating the differential mobility experiences of Chinese cross-border students

Recent migration studies have adopted the lens of mobility to examine the stratifying effects of border policies, but few investigate the differential mobility of migrant families and children. This paper aims to contribute to the migration literature by considering the interplay between border policies, family configurations, and differential mobility. We apply the lens of differential mobility to the experiences of Chinese cross-border pupils – young child migrants with Hong Kong permanent residency who reside in Shenzhen, China, and cross the border to attend school. We begin by describing shifts in Hong Kong’s border and immigration policies since 1997, which have created a typology of families differentiated by mixed status, citizenship rights, and mobility. We then turn to four case studies of students with unequal border-crossing experiences to elucidate how border control constrains or promotes family mobility and perpetuates inequalities.