The social and genetic inheritance of educational attainment: Genes,parental education,and educational expansion

Recently, several genome-wide association studies of educational attainment have found education-related genetic variants and enabled the integration of human inheritance into social research. This study incorporates the newest education polygenic score (Lee et al., 2018) into sociological research, and tests three gene-environment interaction hypotheses on status attainment. Using the Health and Retirement Study (N = 7599), I report three findings. First, a standard deviation increase in the education polygenic score is associated with a 58% increase in the likelihood of advancing to the next level of education, while a standard deviation increase in parental education results in a 53% increase. Second, supporting the Saunders hypothesis, the genetic effect becomes 11% smaller when parental education is one standard deviation higher, indicating that highly educated parents are more able to preserve their family's elite status in the next generation. Finally, the genetic effect is slightly greater for the younger cohort (1942–59) than the older cohort (1920–41). The findings strengthen the existing literature on the social influences in helping children achieve their innate talents.     

Making use of work–family balance entitlements: how to support fathers with combining employment and caregiving

ABSTRACT

Much workplace support to parents offered by employers is gender neutral in design, but fathers’ usage rates are generally very low and far below that of mothers. This paper reflects on men’s dual roles as fathers and employees in relation to formal and informal work policies and practices, with the aim of answering the question: How could fathers feel supported by their work environment to take a more active caregiving role in the lives of their children? We take a capabilities approach to explore models of change, which supports the assumption that many fathers are somehow not fully enabled by their organisations to use policies. Focus groups were conducted within a large public sector organisation in the UK to capture the individual and interactional experiences of fathers. Findings suggest that workplace culture, line manager relationships, the ‘modelling’ behaviour of peers and gendered leave practices all impact on how fathers feel about using work-family balance policies, and whether they are likely to use them. The limits of workplace support for fathers can be challenged via the consideration of some key institutional conversion factors which if addressed may better enable fathers to exercise greater agency with regard to work-family balance entitlements.     

Working with parents of spinal cord injured adolescents: A family systems perspective

Concepts from family systems theory are used to facilitate understanding of the needs of families coping with the spinal cord injury of an adolescent. Five assumptions derived from systemic principles are discussed as related to assessment and family functioning. Related suggestions are given for assisting parents in dealing with this non-normative stressor and its long-range effects on the adolescent and family.     

Family leave legislation in the American states: Toward a model of state policy adoption

The issue of mandated family leave has drawn substantial attention in recent years. This article develops and tests empirically a model of adoption of family leave policies in the American states during the late 1980s. State family leave policies are seen as a function of three sets of variables: (a) institutional-elite variables such as partisan control of state government and the proportion of women in the state legislatures; (b) constituency disposition variables such as mass partisanship, mass ideology, and the likelihood of general support for “women's” issues; and (c) contextual-demand variables such as birth rates and women's participation in the workforce. The model provides impressive fit to the data, accurately predicting the family leave policies of 92% of the state cases. The results suggest the importance of partisan control of state government, proportion of women in the state legislature, urbanization, and feminism as a state policy as factors that affect the probability that states will adopt mandated family leave policies. His research interests include American politics, public policy, and domestic political economy. He is editor of theAmerican Politics Quarterly, and is former President of the State Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky. Her research interests include family policy and women's labor force participation. She received her Ph.D. in Family Science from the University of Georgia.     

Statutory leave entitlements across developed countries: Why US workers lose out on work–family balance

Using a composite index of legal provisions for annual and family leave in western Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan and the Republic of Korea, the authors rank legislative support for this aspect of work–family balance. The United States ranks last: its employers are not required to grant annual leave and employees can take no more than 12 weeks' family leave per year. The United States' comparatively low labour standards, the authors argue, may be due to the dominance of a market‐based conception of employment and the assumption of equal employer–employee bargaining power, neither of which is fully shared by the other industrialized democracies.     

Paid Maternal and Parental Leave Legislation and Primary Prevention

Abstract

For child development, the first three years are crucial to foundations for emotional and mental health, for toilet training and vocabulary development, and for the precipitation of conscience and essential inner controls. For this reason, these are also the primary prevention years during which marital intactness and paid maternal and parental leave benefits are of crucial importance. A comparative social policy review of the status of parental leave legislation in North America and in Europe confirms that the United States is far behind.     

Keeping Parents in the Driver's Seat

Parents receive social work services (both voluntary and involuntary) in a variety of settings. Although the parents may have come to need social work interventions for different reasons, one reason is constant: They are experiencing some difficulty with their children. Children are likely to benefit when parenting ability is strengthened. In all settings, social workers have a unique opportunity to assist parents in establishing, restoring, or maintaining healthy family dynamics.     

Working Mothers' Choice between Parental Leave and Job Continuity A Paradox in South Korea

This study investigate whether the positive relationship between the use of parental leave and job continuity of mothers exists in Korea. using a secondary dataset composed of 1,000 mothers who have already utilized maternity leave, the article finds that the relationship between the use of parental leave and job continuity of mothers is negative. To enable working mothers to reconcile paid work and family responsibility in Korea, it is therefore necessary to construct a more comprehensive policy package, including expansion of the publicly supported childcare system, the reformation of childcare responsibility between genders, and public payments for childcare provided by families.     

Paternity Leave and the Motherhood Penalty: New Causal Evidence

Objective: The objective of this study was to test how a father's paternity leave affects the within‐household gender wage gap among heterosexual couples. Background: Previous studies focus on the actual number of days of leave the father takes, but if an important driver of the gender wage gap is the effect of parental leave on gender‐specific household specialization, absolute variations in the father's leave should not be the key interest. Instead, this article tests the effect of the extent of the father's leave relative to that of the mother's leave because it is this variation that plausibly affects the division of household labor and through this the within‐household gender wage gap. Method: Full sample, administrative data are from Statistics Denmark. Causal inference was facilitated by exploiting 5 Danish parental leave reforms on 5 separate samples of all households who become first‐time parents within the year before and after each reform (N₁ = 2,304; N₂ = 45,683; N₃ = 16,668; N₄ = 42,328; N₅ = 38,978). Results: Father's leave reduces the within‐household gender wage gap through increasing mother's wages. Father's leave furthermore causes an increase in total household wage incomes. Conclusion: Father's stronger involvement in the household may be one route to more gender equality, but more so to increased financial well‐being among families.