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Saturday, February 01, 2003
FATHER ABSENCE: Lynn White and Joan Gilbreth of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln did a study, using data from the National Survey of Families and Households, looking at the effects of stepfathers and noncustodial fathers on child outcomes. They found: [Among children with stepfathers], 30% had no contact with their father in the last year, including 10% who said that they did not know whether their father was alive or dead.Emphasis added. Source: White, L. & Gilbreth, J.G. (2001). When children have two fathers: Effects of relationships with stepfathers and noncustodial fathers on adolescent outcomes. Journal of Marriage and Family, 63(1), 155-167. "About 400 self-styled pro-anorexia (or "pro-ana") Web sites currently exist online. They are places where girls at every stage of the disease go to seek out sympathetic sufferers and feel accepted. But what worries doctors is that the sites often encourage girls to embrace their disease, to lose even more weight, rather than seek treatment. Some of the sites describe themselves as "pro-choice" or "pro-tolerant," and have names like "The Thin Page," "Starving for Perfection" and "Ana by Choice." EXCERPTS from the Gores' Joined at the Heart, Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It, and McLaughlin and Kraus's The Nanny Diaries. "These findings, from the first Australian study of the effect of multiple child-care arrangements on young children, appear to overturn a popular belief that parents are forced into a patchwork of care due to a shortage of child-care places and the high cost of formal care. Instead, the study found that working parents were choosing a mixture of formal and informal child care because they believed it was better for their children." "Living Simply with Kids": "The Center for the New American Dream, a Maryland-based nonprofit that tries to fight 'rampant consumerism,' sponsored a contest asking kids what they wanted that money couldn't buy. More than 2,000 children submitted wishes for everything from deceased relatives to more time with parents to world peace. 'A lot of it felt like a cry from kids that they feel too rushed and pressed," said Taylor, the center's president. She incorporated many of the responses into her book.'" Friday, January 31, 2003
"According to a recent study from the Centers for Disease Control, the number of high-school students who say they�ve never had sexual intercourse rose by almost 10 percent between 1991 and 2001. Parents, public-health officials and sexually beleaguered teens themselves may be relieved by this �let�s not� trend. But the new abstinence movement, largely fostered by cultural conservatives and evangelical Christians, has also become hotly controversial." From a December 2002 article in Newsweek. Here's a group that's involved in this movement. WHAT A GOOD MARRIAGE CAN DO: The most overused phrase in the marriage promotion debate is �marriage is not a panacea,� especially with regard to poverty. Yet a research team led by Glen Elder of the University of North Carolina found, in a study of 429 inner-city families, that A strong relationship between married partners in the Black sample completely buffers the negative effects of economic hardship on emotional distress and parental efficacy. In discordant and partner-absent families, by contrast, we find parents whose loss of confidence in their parenting ability is more fully mediated by the link between economic pressure and depressed affect.Moreover, For the Black single-parent household, neither the presence of another adult [e.g., an uncle or grandparent] nor social support from kin and friends protects parents from emotional distress.A good marriage can�t do everything (response here). But it can do a lot. Source: Elder, G.H., Jr., J.S. Eccles, M. Ardelt, and S. Lord. 1995. "Inner-City Parents Under Economic Pressure: Perspectives on the Strategies of Parenting." Journal of Marriage and the Family, 57(August): 771-784. MARRIAGE GAP: "This deep divide between voters along matrimonial lines -- marrieds favoring Republicans, unmarrieds favoring Democrats -- highlights the large role values play in national politics ... According to an iVillage.com/Knowledge Networks survey conducted in March 2000, only 16 percent of single men thought that sex and violence on television were a very serious problem, compared with 47 percent of married men. By comparison, 42 percent of single women and 56 percent of married women thought they were a problem." Thinking about the new Tom Edsall piece (discussed here) on "The Morality Gap" in U.S. politics, I was reminded of this interesting piece from 2001, from a Dem point of view, on "The Marriage Gap." A new study of mental health problems among college students at a large midwestern university finds that, over the past 13 years, the number of students being seen for depression doubled; the number of suicidal students tripled; and the number of students seen after a sexual assault quadrupled. "Researchers have found that women who lose a child are much more likely to commit suicide, die in an accident and even die from disease compared with other mothers. Fathers are also affected but to a lesser extent." Two new studies suggest that "despite parents' best efforts, strongly restricting TV viewing at home among children and teens can have several unintended effects." SELF-PARODY?: NOW's feminist analysis of Super Bowl ads is now available. James Taranto has a snide reply (scroll to the bottom). Thursday, January 30, 2003
SPERM DONORS (CONT.): "The case occurred when a Family Court refused a Sydney man access to the Auckland-based child he willingly fathered for a lesbian couple, via artificial means but not in a clinic.The trio had drawn up a detailed written agreement, including giving the father access to the baby boy for at least a fortnight a year. But the friendship broke down. The father, a gay man in a stable relationship, applied to the courts for contact with the child but the mother and her partner were reluctant. The Family Court ruled against the father's wish to have access ..." Again, what surprises and saddens me is all the talk of rights and who gets "access," and so little talk of whether children need fathers. ALAN WALKER (scroll down): "The youth enthused by his anti-war and social justice messages, however, had little empathy for his moralising against alcohol, gambling and sex outside marriage. Evangelicals admired his Wesleyan decrying of government for precipitating "a moral disaster by encouraging de facto relationships, homosexuality and prostitution" but spurned Sir Alan's pacificism and denunciation of the excesses of capitalism. Some might think the mix made him an enigma. Certainly, it made him a compelling character in Australian life and history." IT'S DE FACTO: "The rich have partners, football players have fiancees, criminals and welfare recipients have de factos." It's the newest sexual euphemism, down under. EMAIL KEEPS YOU CALM, reports the Washington Post, which says that divorced parents with joint custody are finding email an easier way to keep each other posted about the kids� lives and avoid nasty phone calls: "It's wonderful," said Beth Pierce, a Washington attorney and mother of three who is in the midst of a divorce, "when you need to have the most basic conversations, like, 'Can you pick up the kids at four and don't forget the rain boots.' It lets you calmly discuss things that otherwise might be explosive�.� ABSENT FATHERS ARE THE THEME of much new music by Generation X and Y. Just another recent example: When 28 teenage performance poets warmed up the crowd for a taping of "Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry" at HBO studios in Midtown Manhattan, a NYT article today reports that the poems were filled with anger �at parents, at lovers, at being poor, at racism, militarism and domestic abuse.� Absent fathers were another theme. In his poem, Carlos Young, 15, who lives in Brooklyn, asked plaintively, "Why can't I meet the man who helped create my life?" Wednesday, January 29, 2003
�INNOVATIVE� JOINT CUSTODY ARRANGEMENTS are all the rage � let�s move the kids between divorced mom and dad�s houses every week, or every few days, or have them alternate years, going to a new school each time. Such arrangements seek to give the kids equal face time with mom and dad, but they keep the kids spinning -- literally, as they circle from house to house, and internally, as they continually adjust to a different household with its own inhabitants, rules, and expectations. To prevent this, a few parents have tried leaving the kids in one house and having the adults move in and out every week. This is at least admirable for trying to put the onus on the parents, not the kids, and the arrangement may last for a while � at least until mom or dad start dating or remarry, and new adults, not so fond of sharing a home with their lover�s ex, enter the picture. A recent NYT Travel section article features one such arrangement, when couples attempt to continue sharing their expensive weekend homes after the divorce � complete with new wives moving the ex-wife�s clothes out of the master bedroom on her weekends and throwing out her favorite knick-knacks, and the ex-wife retaliating by putting locks on the drawers. (Unfortunately, the kids weren�t interviewed for the article.) Within a few years, both parties had been divorced again. Sound relaxing? This poor guy reportedly faked his disappearance after learing that his girlfriend was pregnant. The story also says that he did the same thing five years ago ... after learning that his then girlfriend was pregnant. U.K. STEPS: "Step-parents will have to fund their partners' children through university for the first time. A clause in the government's higher education strategy says the definition of family income will include their wages from 2006." THE "MORALITY GAP": "Whereas elections once pitted the party of the working class against the party of Wall Street, they now pit voters who believe in a fixed and universal morality against those who see moral issues, especially sexual ones, as elastic and subject to personal choice." From an interesting essay by Thomas Edsall arguing that divisions on sexual and moral questions -- including views on marriage -- are now exceptionally accurate predictors (more accurate than anything except party affiliation and race) of whether people vote D or R. And Edsell concludes that, since the country is steadily tilting "left" on these sexual-moral issues, that is good news for the Dems. CORRECTION: Regarding Seven Secrets of a Happy Marriage (cited below), with an intro by David Popenoe, I just learned that the book is not "forthcoming," but has been out for several months. I'm looking forward to reading it. AUSSIE DROPOUTS (CONT.): I just read the study mentioned below on school dropouts in Australia, and my suspicion was correct: not even a mention of family disruption as a predictor of dropping out. Meanwhile, from Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur's Growing Up with a Single Parent: "Regardless of which survey we look at, children from one-parent families are about twice as likely to drop out of school as children from two-parent families." Another problem with the Australian study is its "finding" that poor reading and writing skills constitute a big risk factor for dropping out. It's true, but it comes close to being a tautology: doing badly in school is a risk factor for ... doing badly in school. This is the same methodolgically flawed game played by Robert Blum in a recent U.S. study, in which he argued that we should go "beyond" family structure as an explanation for problems such, for example, teenage alcohol abuse, since, according to his research, spending lots of time with friends who drink is at least as accurate as family structure as a predictor of drinking. Well, what a surprise! You can always increase the accuracy of the predictor by making sure that it is integrally connected to what is being predicted. Watch this. My research shows that stinking of cigarette smoke all the time is "at least" as accurate as family structure as a predictor of smoking cigarettes. Therefore, family structure is not a real issue. See how easy -- and silly -- that is? And yet it's done frequently, by people who certainly ought to know better. All of this is more than a quibble about social science methods. Why? Because when we come to the recommendations sections of these reports, many of which help to influence policy makers and others, we are typically urged to do many things, but trying to do something about the problem of family fragmentation is seldom among them. The Business Council of Australia, which sponsored this study, needs to go back to the drawing board, especially since Australia ranks (along with the U.S.) as a world leader in rates of divorce and unwed childbearing. Tuesday, January 28, 2003
FROM AN AUSSIE STUDY OF SCHOOL DROPOUTS: "The research highlighted a number of factors contributing to dropping out, including living in rural areas, coming from a low socio-economic background and having poor literacy and numeracy skills." I haven't read the study (The Cost of Dropping Out: The Economic Impact of Early School Leaving), but I would bet anyone the biggest lunch in New York that: a) living in a one-parent home is as accurate a predictor of dropping out in Australia as "living in rural areas, coming from a low socio-economic background and having poor literacy and numeracy skills," but that: b) the report makes little or no mention of this fact. If someone can show that I'm wrong on this, I'll gladly to make the correction. (I'm not sure about the lunch ... ) SPERM DONORS (CONT.): "Children conceived by donor insemination in New Zealand can ask for details about their biological father when they turn 18. Dr Guy Gudex, the clinical director of Fertility Plus at National Women's Hospital, said about six years ago fertility clinics in New Zealand voluntarily agreed they would only accept donors willing to be identified when their child turned 18." All of these reports are cast as "children's right to know," but I nevertheless see them in part as fatherhood stories, or to be more precise, father-absence stories, since this story, like many of the others, reports that small but growing numbers of sperm recipients are unmarried women. WITH ENEMIES LIKE THESE, WHO NEEDS FRIENDS? The web magazine Salon routinely mocks the marriage movement. So I was surprised by this interview with a Salon columnist who recently wrote a book on serial monogamy: In your book, you assert that cohabitation "is a great way to ensure that nuptials will almost certainly never take place." Why do you think living together makes marriage less likely?And: I have had married friends tell me that the big advantage to being married is that not every fight winds up bringing up the question of whether or not you should stay together�. I would imagine that this cuts down fighting time considerably.Sounds a lot like something David Popenoe or Wade Horn might say! (Here's my diatribe against the interviewer�s silly diatribe against the marriage movement. Read it and be shocked, shocked that she is also a regular contributor to NPR.) CAN THIS MARRIAGE BE SAVED?: Probably the most influential, and I'm certain longest-running, marriage feature in a popular U.S.magazine is "Can This Marriage Be Saved?", which began 50 years ago in the Ladies Home Journal. The original column was based on the cases of Dr. Paul Popenoe, a pioneering and in his day quite influential marriage counselor (he also regularly appeared on the old "Art Linkletter" TV show) who is the father of my friend David Popenoe, today the co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers. Later this year a book about all this, SEVEN SECRETS OF A HAPPY MARRIAGE: Wisdom from the Annals of Can This Marriage Be Saved? , will be published by Workman. In 1991, when a number of us were just beginning to work on the fatherhood issue, David Popenoe wrote a moving essay, "Remembering My Father: An Intellectual Portrait of the Man Who Saved Marriages," available as an Institute for American Values working paper. I look forward to reading the book -- it touches on a small, but I think important and revealing, part of our history and society. FATHERHOOD ON OPRAH: Roland Warren, President of the National Fatherhood Initiative, will be a guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show tomorrow. THE �GOOD DIVORCE� IS AN APPEALING CONCEPT � surely, if parents do divorce, it is better for everyone if they minimize conflict in the aftermath. But a low-conflict divorced family is still, for the children, a split existence. A recent posting by David Blankenhorn pointed out the �happy talk� in an article on new terms used by courts (�residence� instead of �custody�, �contact� instead of �access�), as if changing the words will somehow change the experience of children who must switch homes routinely to suit their mothers and fathers. Children of divorce, however, will tell you something different. Jen Robinson, a New York City poet whose essay, �Normal Abnormal,� opens an excellent new collection edited by Ava Chin, titled Split: Stories from a Generation Raised on Divorce, writes of her parents� divorce when she was ten years old: �It wasn�t supposed to affect me; my parents were having a �good� divorce � still on speaking terms with each other, each still wanting to actively parent� Everything was just fine.� She continues: �Of course that wasn�t quite true. Dad wasn�t there tying his tie in the bathroom mirror when I was brushing my teeth. Mom wasn�t there when my sister and I came home from school. And when my parents were around, I now worried about both of them.� She now realizes that her parents� divorce had lasting repercussions on her developing self, manifested, as one example, in how she made friends at college: ��I made friends easily; but always in distinct groups that never interacted. When they did, I felt internally pressured to please both groups and at the same time to negotiate the interaction between them� Occasionally such situations would become unbearable� I realized at some point I needed to reintegrate myself, to let myself be the whole of who I was with everyone who knew me.� The stories of children of divorce make clear � a good divorce may help salve the wounds for divorcing adults, but any kind of divorce, no matter how amicable or conflictual, creates a new family system, one that shapes children in ways our society has barely begun to understand. COLLEGE STUDENTS ARE WILLING TO PAY FOR PRIVACY, reports a NYT article. High-priced new dorms with single rooms for students are going up at elite universities around the country, as a way to attract this generation of students who never had to share a bedroom growing up and aren�t going to start now. But an architect of the new dorms says there is another reason for their appeal: �Changing attitudes toward sex also have led students to insist on their own bedrooms, Mr. Rawn says. �There�s a lot of cohabitation,� he said. �That privacy is very important to the students.�� In our report on hooking up on college campuses, we wrote that today�s coed dorms seem to function as �cohabitation training� for college students. But we noted that, for some reason, the term �cohabiting� is not used to describe these college couples who spend every night together. On that point, apparently, we were wrong. Now, not only do students live together, but college administrators commission new dorms to suit that purpose. Monday, January 27, 2003
A research brief (requires PDF) from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing project at Princeton finds a positive association, among non-cohabiting low-income couples, of child support enforcement with domestic violence. (About 22 percent of the mothers in the sample had child support orders, while 37 percent reported getting informal child support from the fathers). One key finding: About 17 percent of the mothers with orders reported being hit or slapped by the father in the 12-18 months following the birth of the child, compared to 13 percent of mothers without orders in place. Obviously this finding is troubling, and more research and other work needs to be done in this area. I think that many marriage buffs (me included) haven't paid enough careful attention to this issue, and it has damaged our credibility. Three quick reactions to this finding. One, since child support and access tend to go together, the finding in some respects is not surprising, since many of the mothers without orders have no (or almost no) contact with the fathers. Two, this finding does suggest that emphasizing child support enforcement alone -- understood as using the law to compel unwilling men to pay -- may contribute to a small increase in at least lower-level ("hitting or slapping") domestic violence. And three -- and this point is addressed to those who would use this finding against all efforts at marriage promotion -- if we outlawed marriage tomorrow, it is almost certain that domestic violence would increase as a result, since marital commitment and seeking to conform to society's marital norms are on the whole clear (if far from perfect) inhibitors of domestic violence. I'd be happy to post your comments on this issue. FAMILY LAW IN SCOTLAND: A legal scholar implores the Scottish Executive to be 'brave" and "do the honourable thing"--meaning accept cohabitation as the legal equivalent of marriage. Some of the practical and social reasons for aspiring to marital status have clearly lost their force. People see the decision now purely as a matter of lifestyle choice, with little social pressure to marry. ... In many Commonwealth countries, including Australia and Canada, cohabiting and married couples have equal legal rights because it is recognised that cohabitation now performs the same functions of child rearing and homemaking as marriage and people should be protected in the same way. "The future of humanity passes by way of the family": Several articles here on the Catholic Church's 4th annual World Meeting of Families, held this year in Manila. Sunday, January 26, 2003
SUPER BOWL SPECIAL: Blogger Oliver Willis on his initial interest in American football: "Only child of a single mom, I still had an interest in this 'guy' thing. People were voluntarily hitting each other, and I was enamored by it." SUPER BOWL SPECIAL: Who says the feminist left lacks a sense of humor? The National Organization for Women "gets in the game" with a "first-ever feminist review of Super Bowl commercials." Now that's funny. "SPARING THE CHILDREN A SPLITTING HEADACHE": An amazing example of happy talk about how it's not divorce, but how the parents transact divorce, that affects children -- as if changing the name from "custody" to "residence" and tinkering with who lives where can lead to "terminating a relationship without it impacting, significantly, in a negative way, upon a child." |
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