Costs and Rewards of Children: The Effects of Becoming a Parent on Adults' Lives

How do new parents differ from their childless counterparts in social and psychological resources, daily strains, and psychological well‐being? Using a nationally representative panel of 1,933 adults who were childless at the first interview, we compare 6 indicators of adults' lives for those who became parents and those remaining childless several years later, controlling for earlier states. Becoming a parent is both detrimental and rewarding. With the exception of social integration, which is greater for all groups of new parents compared with their childless counterparts, the effects of parental status on adults' lives vary markedly by gender and marital status. Unmarried parents report lower self‐efficacy and higher depression than their childless counterparts. Married mothers' lives are marked by more housework and more marital conflict but less depression than their childless counterparts. Parental status has little influence on the lives of married men.     

Enabling children’s deliberation in deliberative systems: schools as a mediating space

In recent years, there has been a growing scholarly interest in conceptualising schools beyond their educational functions, as sites and agents of democracy. Yet this interest is often underpinned by a narrow conception of democracy, focusing solely on schools’ public and social aspects. To capture the democratic potential of schools more fully, this article suggests adopting a deliberative systems approach, which conceptualises democracy as differentiated yet linked sites of democratic communications and views schools as one such site. Using this approach as a broader framework and drawing on the fieldwork conducted in two Japanese schools, this article identifies the condition under which schools can become a meaningful part of deliberative systems. It reveals that schools contribute to deliberative systems when they serve as a bridge between children’s everyday practices and deliberative actions in the public space. In light of the findings, this article suggests conceptualising schools as a ‘mediating space’.     

Parenthood and Well-Being: A Decade in Review

Understanding social aspects of parental well-being is vital because parents' welfare has implications not only for the parents themselves but also for child development, fertility, and the overall health of a society. This article provides a critical review of scholarship on parenthood and well-being in advanced economies published from 2010 to 2019. It focuses on the role of social, economic, cultural, and institutional contexts of parenting in influencing adult well-being. The authors identify major themes, achievements, and challenges and organize the review around the demands-rewards perspective and two other theoretical frameworks: the stress process model and the life course perspective. The analysis shows that rising economic insecurities and inequalities and a diffusion of intensive parenting ideology were major social contexts of parenting in the 2010s. Scholarship linking parenting contexts and parental well-being illuminated how stressors related to providing and caring for children could unjustly burden some parents, especially mothers, those with fewer socioeconomic resources, and those with marginalized statuses. In that vein, researchers continued to emphasize how stressors diverged by parents' socioeconomic status, gender, and partnership status, with new attention to strains experienced by racial/ethnic minority, immigrant, and sexual minority parents. Scholars' comparisons of parents' positions in various countries expanded, enhancing knowledge regarding specific policy supports that allow parents to thrive. Articulating future research within a stress process model framework, the authors show vibrant theoretical pathways, including conceptualizing potential parental social supports at multiple levels, attending to the intersection of multiple social locations of parents, and renewing attention to local contextual factors and parenting life stages.     

Essential Micro‐foundations for Contemporary Business Operations: Top Management Tangible Competencies,Relationship‐based Business Networks and Environmental Sustainability

Although various studies have emphasized linkages between firm competencies, networks and sustainability at organizational level, the links between top management tangible competencies (TMTCs) (e.g. contemporary relevant quantitative‐focused education such as big data analytics and data‐driven applications linked with the internet of things, relevant experience and analytical business applications), relationship‐based business networks (RBNs) and environmental sustainability have not been well established at micro‐level, and there is a literature gap in terms of investigating these relationships. This study examines these links based on the unique data collected from 175 top management representatives (chief executive officers and managing directors) working in food import and export firms headquartered in the UK and New Zealand. Our results from structural equation modelling indicate that TMTCs are the key determinants for building RBNs, mediating the correlation between TMTCs and environmental sustainability. Directly, the competencies also play a vital role towards environmental practices. The findings further depict that relationship‐oriented firms perform better compared to those which focus less on such networks. Consequently, our findings provide a deeper understanding of the micro‐foundations of environmental sustainability based on TMTCs rooted in the resource‐based view and RBNs entrenched in social network theory. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings, and we provide suggestions for future research.     

Clarifying the Association Between Mother–Father Relationship Aggression and Parenting

Although much research examines the association between fathers' relationship aggression and mothers' parenting, little attention is given to mothers' aggression, mutual aggression, or fathers' parenting. Using a sample of coresiding couples from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 973), the authors examine the association between mothers' and fathers' relationship aggression, measured as frequency and perpetration–victimization types (mutual, mother only, father only), and mothers' and fathers' parenting. Fixed effects regression models show that fathers' aggression is positively related to mothers' parenting stress, whereas father‐only or mother‐only aggression is related to fathers' stress. For both parents, aggression perpetration is negatively related to their own engagement with children. Mother‐only aggression is negatively related to mothers' spanking and positively related to fathers' spanking. These findings suggest the importance of examining both parents' aggression and perpetrators' as well as victims' parenting to better understand the link between relationship aggression and parenting.     

Using the community of inquiry for interviewing children: theory and practice

Involvement of children in research processes requires various ethical considerations. In particular, while interviewing children, a researcher needs to take into consideration the power imbalance between a researcher and children as well as among children. This article suggests a possible way of mitigating potential risks, drawing on the idea and practice of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) as an interview method. CoI is the practice of group dialog for knowledge-making, where participants talk about a common topic by sharing their lived experiences in a cooperative manner. This article shows that CoI allows children to act as both interviewers and interviewees, which helps children in reflective knowledge-making while at the same time mitigating the ethical concerns of interviewing. To illustrate how CoI can help achieve these goals, this article draws on the empirical research conducted with a group of junior high school students in Japan.     

Gender,Family Structure,and Adolescents’ Primary Confidants

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (N = 4,190), this study examined adolescents’ reports of primary confidants. Results showed that nearly 30% of adolescents aged 16 – 18 nominated mothers as primary confidants, 25% nominated romantic partners, and 20% nominated friends. Nominating romantic partners or friends was related to increased risk‐taking behaviors, supporting the attachment notion that shifting primary confidants to peers in adolescence may reflect premature autonomy from parents. Tendencies to prefer romantic partners over parents varied by gender and family structure, which were greater for those from single‐father families and girls from mother‐stepfather families, but less for those from single‐mother families and boys from mother‐stepfather families, compared with their counterparts from two‐biological‐parent families.     

The Time Squeeze: Parental Statuses and Feelings About Time With Children

Policy makers, parents, and the public are concerned with perceived declines in parents’ time with children. Data from two national surveys (N = 1,159 and N = 821) used in this study show that nearly half of parents report feeling too little time with children. Work hours are strongly related to these feelings, even controlling for time spent with children, and explain why fathers more than mothers feel time strain. For fathers, those whose youngest child is an adolescent feel more strain than similarly situated mothers. Controlling for work hours, single parents are not more likely than married parents to feel that they spend insufficient time with children.     

Exercise Time: Gender Differences in the Effects of Marriage,Parenthood, and Employment

Using data from a supplement to the 1995 National Health Interview Survey, this article examines the relationship among three major work and family roles—marriage, parenthood, and employment—and time spent on exercise among American men and women ages 18 to 64 (N = 13,496). As the time availability perspective suggests, work and family roles curtail time for exercise. Married adults spend less time on exercising than unmarried adults. Although the number of children is not related to time spent on exercising, having children under age 5 is negatively associated with exercising. Long hours of employment are also related to less time spent on exercising, although the effect is small. Across the board, women spend less time on exercising than men, but the negative association of work and family roles, especially the role of spouse, with time for exercise is greater for men than for women.     

On Asymptotic Deficiency of Estimators

The notion of deficiency was introduced by Hodges and Lehmann. It is known that best asymptotically normal (BAN) estimators are second order asymptotically efficient in the class A₂ of all second order asymptotically median unbiased estimators. In this paper it is shown that the asymptotic deficiency of any two estimators in the restricted class D of the third order asymptotically median unbiased BAN estimators is given by the difference between the coefficients of order n^-1 of the variances of the estimators.