Supporting breastfeeding: current status and future challenges.

Although breastfeeding is an optimal source of nutrition that promotes the health and development of infants, rates of breastfeeding have been declining. International conventions and strategies, such as the Innocenti Declaration and the 10 Steps to Successful Breastfeeding, are helping to educate society about the benefits of breastfeeding and to create supports for mothers and their children, but advocacy and education are still needed     

The mass class and teaching assistants: A case for discussion exercises

Sociology courses, particularly introductory courses, with 200 or more students are increasingly being offered in U.S. colleges and universities. Within the “mass class” structure, teaching assistants are often utilized to instruct students in smaller discussion sessions. This creates unique conditions of instruction for both professors and teaching assistants. For instance, professors are faced with coordinating teaching assistants’ activities, while teaching assistants need to develop skills relating to provoking discussion. Both must deal with effects of a hierarchy of instruction. After discussing these conditions we present structured classroom exercises that focus on sociological concepts typically presented in introductory courses to help teaching assistants create an engaging learning experience, attain teaching skills, and facilitate the professor’s coordination of instruction.     

Family policies,employment and poverty among partnered and single mothers

The risk of poverty for single mothers ranges from less than 2% in Sweden to more than 35% in the United States; less extreme cross-national variations also exist for partnered mothers. We explore which family policies are most effective at directly reducing poverty among families with children, and whether these policies indirectly reduce poverty through supporting mothers’ employment. We combine microdata from the Luxembourg Income Study with the Work-Family Policy Indicators dataset, and use multilevel logistic regressions to examine the associations between policy and poverty, controlling for individual-level factors. We find significant effects of family allowances, generous parental leaves and childcare provisions, with more powerful effects for single mothers. We further show that parental leave and childcare operate through boosting mothers’ employment, illustrating that work-family policies are useful for reducing poverty by enhancing mother's employment.