Parental time
Parental Desensitization to Violence and Sex in Movies
Daniel Romer et al.
Pediatrics, November 2014, Pages 877-884
Objectives: To assess desensitization in parents’ repeated exposure to violence and sex in movies.
Methods: A national US sample of 1000 parents living with at least 1 target child in 1 of 3 age groups (6 to 17 years old) viewed a random sequence of 3 pairs of short scenes with either violent or sexual content from popular movies that were unrestricted to youth audiences (rated PG-13 or unrated) or restricted to those under age 17 years without adult supervision (rated R). Parents indicated the minimum age they would consider appropriate to view each film. Predictors included order of presentation, parent and child characteristics, and parent movie viewing history.
Results: As exposure to successive clips progressed, parents supported younger ages of appropriate exposure, starting at age 16.9 years (95% confidence interval [CI], 16.8 to 17.0) for violence and age 17.2 years (95% CI, 17.0 to 17.4) for sex, and declining to age 13.9 years (95% CI, 13.7 to 14.1) for violence and 14.0 years (95% CI, 13.7 to 14.3) for sex. Parents also reported increasing willingness to allow their target child to view the movies as exposures progressed. Desensitization was observed across parent and child characteristics, violence toward both human and non-human victims, and movie rating. Those who frequently watched movies were more readily desensitized to violence.
Conclusions: Parents become desensitized to both violence and sex in movies, which may contribute to the increasing acceptance of both types of content by both parents and the raters employed by the film industry.
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A Flying Start? Maternity Leave Benefits and Long Run Outcomes of Children
Pedro Carneiro, Katrine Løken & Kjell Salvanes
Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming
Abstract:
We study the impact of increasing maternity leave benefits on long run outcomes of children, by examining a reform that increased paid and unpaid maternity leave in Norway as of July 1st 1977. Mothers giving birth before this date were eligible only for 12 weeks of unpaid leave, while those giving birth after were entitled to four months of paid leave and 12 months of unpaid leave. This increased time with the child led to a two percentage points decline in high school dropout rates and a 5% increase in wages at age 30. These effects are especially large for children of those mothers who, prior to the reform, would take very low levels of unpaid leave.
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Kevin Beaver et al.
Intelligence, September–October 2014, Pages 179–187
Abstract:
The association between family/parenting and offspring IQ remains the matter of debate because of threats related to genetic confounding. The current study is designed to shed some light on this association by examining the influence of parenting influences on adolescent and young adult IQ scores. To do so, a nationally representative sample of youth is analyzed along with a sample of adoptees. The sample of adoptees is able to more fully control for genetic confounding. The results of the study revealed that there is only a marginal and inconsistent influence of parenting on offspring IQ in adolescence and young adulthood. These weak associations were detected in both the nationally representative sample and the adoptee subsample. Sensitivity analyses that focused only on monozygotic twins also revealed no consistent associations between parenting/family measures and verbal intelligence. Taken together, the results of these statistical models indicate that family and parenting characteristics are not significant contributors to variation in IQ scores. The implications of this study are discussed in relation to research examining the effects of family/parenting on offspring IQ scores.
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The Child Adoption Marketplace: Parental Preferences and Adoption Outcomes
Mark Skidmore, Gary Anderson & Mark Eiswerth
Public Finance Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
In the United States, child adoption costs vary considerably, ranging from no out-of-pocket expense to US$50,000 or more. What are the causes for the variability in adoption expenses? We administered a survey to a sample of Michigan adoptive families to link adoptive parent characteristics, child characteristics, and adoption-related expenses and subsidies. We then estimated “hedonic” regressions in which adoption cost is a function of child characteristics. The analysis shows that up to 74 percent of the variation in adoption costs is explained by child characteristics. In particular, costs are lower for older children, children of African descent, and special needs children. Findings inform policies regarding the transition of children from foster care to adoptive families.
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Chris Herbst
Arizona State University Working Paper, September 2014
Abstract:
This paper assesses the short-run impact of first-year maternal employment on low-income children's cognitive development. The identification strategy exploits an important feature of the U.S.'s welfare work requirement rules – namely, age-of-youngest-child exemptions – as a source of quasi-experimental variation in maternal employment. The 1996 welfare reform law empowered states to exempt adult recipients from the work requirements until the youngest child reaches a certain age. This led to substantial variation in the amount of time that mothers can remain home with a newborn child. I use this variation to estimate local average treatment effects of work-requirement-induced increases in maternal employment. Using a sample of infants from the Birth cohort of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, the OLS results show that children of working mothers score higher on a test of cognitive ability. However, the IV estimates reveal sizable negative effects of early maternal employment. An auxiliary analysis of mechanisms finds that working mothers experience an increase in depressive symptoms, and are less likely to breast-feed and read to their children. In addition, such children are exposed to non-parental child care arrangements at a younger age, and they spend more time in these settings throughout the first year of life.
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Mark Curtis, Barry Hirsch & Mary Schroeder
Georgia State University Working Paper, August 2014
Abstract:
Employer mandates and other labor demand/supply shocks typically have small effects on wages and employment. These effects should be more discernible using data on employment transitions and wages among new hires rather than incumbents. The Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) dataset provides county by quarter by demographic group data on the number and earnings of new hires, separations, and recalls (i.e., extended leaves). We use the QWI to examine the labor market effects of California's paid family leave (CPFL) policy. Implemented in July 2004, it was the first such policy mandated in the U.S. The analysis compares outcomes for young women in California to those for other workers in California and to workers throughout the U.S. Relative earnings for young female new hires were largely unaffected by CPFL. We find strong evidence that separations (of at least three months) and hiring of young women increased substantively. Many young women who separated later returned to the same firm. CPFL appears to have led not only to increased time with children, but also to a decline in job lock, enhanced mobility, and increased worker flows following universal paid family leave.
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When Does Time Matter? Maternal Employment, Children’s Time With Parents, and Child Development
Amy Hsin & Christina Felfe
Demography, October 2014, Pages 1867-1894
Abstract:
This study tests the two assumptions underlying popularly held notions that maternal employment negatively affects children because it reduces time spent with parents: (1) that maternal employment reduces children’s time with parents, and (2) that time with parents affects child outcomes. We analyze children’s time-diary data from the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and use child fixed-effects and IV estimations to account for unobserved heterogeneity. We find that working mothers trade quantity of time for better “quality” of time. On average, maternal work has no effect on time in activities that positively influence children’s development, but it reduces time in types of activities that may be detrimental to children’s development. Stratification by mothers’ education reveals that although all children, regardless of mother’s education, benefit from spending educational and structured time with their mothers, mothers who are high school graduates have the greatest difficulty balancing work and childcare. We find some evidence that fathers compensate for maternal employment by increasing types of activities that can foster child development as well as types of activities that may be detrimental. Overall, we find that the effects of maternal employment are ambiguous because (1) employment does not necessarily reduce children’s time with parents, and (2) not all types of parental time benefit child development.
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Susan Averett & Sarah Estelle
Review of Economics of the Household, December 2014, Pages 613-639
Abstract:
Numerous social marketing campaigns exhort parents to talk to their children about sexual abstinence, pregnancy risk, and sexually transmitted disease prevention. The effectiveness of these conversations is difficult to ascertain if parents are more likely to broach discussions related to sexual activity with adolescents who have greater propensities to engage in these risky behaviors. Our baseline empirical results indicate that female adolescents whose mothers communicate more about sex are more likely to have sexual intercourse, practice unsafe sex, and engage in casual sex. However, once we control for the adolescent’s environment and peers through the use of school fixed effects and for the daughter’s own propensity to engage in such behaviors through a rich set of adolescent-specific covariates, the effect of a mother’s talk on her daughter’s behavior is reduced dramatically indicating that mother’s talk is endogenous to the daughter’s sexual behavior. Models employing sister fixed effects to control for family-level unobservables, although imprecisely estimated, confirm this finding.
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Paternal Antisocial Behavior and Sons’ Cognitive Ability: A Population-Based Quasiexperimental Study
Antti Latvala et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Parents’ antisocial behavior is associated with developmental risks for their offspring, but its effects on their children’s cognitive ability are unknown. We used linked Swedish register data for a large sample of adolescent men (N = 1,177,173) and their parents to estimate associations between fathers’ criminal-conviction status and sons’ cognitive ability assessed at compulsory military conscription. Mechanisms behind the association were tested in children-of-siblings models across three types of sibling fathers with increasing genetic relatedness (half-siblings, full siblings, and monozygotic twins) and in quantitative genetic models. Sons whose fathers had a criminal conviction had lower cognitive ability than sons whose fathers had no conviction (any crime: Cohen’s d = −0.28; violent crime: Cohen’s d = −0.49). As models adjusted for more genetic factors, the association was gradually reduced and eventually eliminated. Nuclear-family environmental factors did not contribute to the association. Our results suggest that the association between men’s antisocial behavior and their children’s cognitive ability is not causal but is due mostly to underlying genetic factors.
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A Constructive Replication of the Association Between the Oxytocin Receptor Genotype and Parenting
Ashlea Klahr, Kelly Klump & Alexandra Burt
Journal of Family Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Behavioral genetic studies have robustly indicated that parenting behaviors are heritable — that is, individual differences in parenting are at least partially a function of genetic differences between persons. Few studies, however, have sought to identify the specific genetic variants that are associated with individual differences in parenting. Genes that influence the oxytocin system are of particular interest, given the growing body of evidence that points to the role of oxytocin for social behaviors, including parenting. The current study conducted examinations of associations between a variant in the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR rs53576) and parental warmth, control, and negativity in a sample of 1,000 twin children and their parents (N = 500 families) from the Michigan State University Twin Registry to constructively replicate and extend prior work (Bakermans-Kranenburg & van IJzendoorn, 2008; Michalska et al., 2014). Analyses were conducted both at the level of the child and the level of the parent, allowing us to examine both child-driven (via evocative gene-environment correlation) and parent-driven genetic effects on parenting. Mothers’ OXTR genotype predicted her warmth toward her children, even after controlling for child genotype. This association was not found for fathers. These findings add to the growing body of evidence linking oxytocin functioning to parental behavior and also highlight potential etiological differences in parenting across mothers and fathers.
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Adults with siblings like children’s faces more than those without
Lizhu Luo et al.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, January 2015, Pages 148–156
Abstract:
Humans cross-culturally find infant faces both cute and highly likeable. Their so-called “baby schema” features have clear adaptive value by likely serving as an innate releasing mechanism that elicits caretaking behaviors from adults. However, we do not know whether experience with young children during social development might act to further facilitate this. Here we investigated the potential impact of having siblings on adult likeability judgments of children’s faces. In this study, 73 adult men and women (40 with siblings and 33 without) were shown 148 different face pictures of young children (1 month to 6.5 years) and judged them for likeability. Results showed that both groups found faces of infants (<7 months) as equally likeable. However, for faces more than 7 months of age, whereas the no-sibling group showed a reduced liking for faces with increasing age, the sibling group found faces of all ages as equally likeable. Furthermore, for adults with siblings, the closer in age they were to their siblings, the stronger their likeability was for young children’s faces. Our results are the first to show that having siblings can extend the influence of baby schema to children as well as infants.
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Carson Murray et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
In many mammals, early social experience is critical to developing species-appropriate adult behaviors. Although mother–infant interactions play an undeniably significant role in social development, other individuals in the social milieu may also influence infant outcomes. Additionally, the social skills necessary for adult success may differ between the sexes. In chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), adult males are more gregarious than females and rely on a suite of competitive and cooperative relationships to obtain access to females. In fission–fusion species, including humans and chimpanzees, subgroup composition is labile and individuals can vary the number of individuals with whom they associate. Thus, mothers in these species have a variety of social options. In this study, we investigated whether wild chimpanzee maternal subgrouping patterns differed based on infant sex. Our results show that mothers of sons were more gregarious than mothers of daughters; differences were especially pronounced during the first 6 mo of life, when infant behavior is unlikely to influence maternal subgrouping. Furthermore, mothers with sons spent significantly more time in parties containing males during the first 6 mo. These early differences foreshadow the well-documented sex differences in adult social behavior, and maternal gregariousness may provide sons with important observational learning experiences and social exposure early in life. The presence of these patterns in chimpanzees raises questions concerning the evolutionary history of differential social exposure and its role in shaping sex-typical behavior in humans.
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Janeen Baxter et al.
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous research has shown that the transition to parenthood is a critical life-course stage. Using data from the Household, Income, and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey and fixed-effects panel regression models, we investigate changes in men's and women's attitudes to mothering and gender divisions of labor following the transition to parenthood. Key findings indicate that attitudes become more traditional after individuals experience the birth of their first child, with both men and women becoming more likely to support mothering as women's most important role in life. We argue that these changes are due to both changes in identity and cognitive beliefs associated with the experience of becoming a parent, as well as institutional arrangements that support traditional gender divisions. More broadly, our results can be taken as strong evidence that attitudes are not stable over the life course and change with the experience of life events.
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Does Placing Children in Foster Care Increase Their Adult Criminality?
Matthew Lindquist & Torsten Santavirta
Labour Economics, December 2014, Pages 72–83
Abstract:
We evaluate the association between foster care placement during childhood and adult criminality. In contrast to previous studies, we allow associations to vary by gender and age at initial placement. We find that foster care predicts higher adult criminality for males first placed during adolescence (age 13–18). We find no significant association for boys who were placed in foster care before age 13 and no significant association on the adult criminality of girls. These null findings stand in stark contrast to the poor outcomes reported in earlier work concerning the long-run effects of foster care.
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Validating the Voodoo Doll Task as a Proxy for Aggressive Parenting Behavior
Randy McCarthy et al.
Psychology of Violence, forthcoming
Objective: Six studies (N = 1,081 general population parents) assessed the validity of the voodoo doll task (VDT) as a proxy for aggressive parenting behaviors.
Method: Participants were given an opportunity to symbolically inflict harm by choosing to stick “pins” into a doll representing their child.
Results: Individual differences in parents’ trait aggression (Studies 1, 2, and 6), state hostility (Study 3), attitudes toward the corporal punishment of children (Study 4), self-control (Study 6), depression (Study 6), and child physical abuse risk (Study 6) were associated with increased pin usage. Further, parents used more pins after imagining their child performing negative behaviors compared to after imagining their child perform positive behaviors (Study 5). A number of demographic variables also were associated with pin usage: Fathers used pins more than mothers and parents’ education level was inversely related to pin usage. Finally, on average, parents viewed the VDT as slightly uncomfortable, but not objectionable, to complete (Study 6).
Conclusions: Our evidence suggests that the VDT may serve as a useful proxy for parent-to-child aggression.
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Socioeconomic Strain, Family Ties, and Adolescent Health in a Rural Northeastern County
Karen Van Gundy et al.
Rural Sociology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In adolescence, vital sources of support come from family relationships; however, research that considers the health-related impact of ties to both parents and siblings is sparse, and the utility of such ties among at-risk teens is not well understood. Here we use two waves of panel data from the population of 8th and 12th grade students in a geographically isolated, rural, northeastern U.S. county to assess whether socioeconomic status (SES) moderates the effects of parental and sibling attachments on three indicators of adolescent health: obesity, depression, and problem substance use. Our findings indicate that, net of stressful life events, prior health, and sociodemographic controls, increases in parental and sibling attachment correspond with reduced odds of obesity for low-SES adolescents, reduced odds of depression for high-SES adolescents, and reduced odds of problem substance use for low-SES adolescents. Results suggest also that sibling and maternal ties are more influential than paternal ties, at least with regard to the outcomes considered. Overall, the findings highlight the value of strong family ties for the physical, psychological, and behavioral health of socioeconomically strained rural teens, and reveal the explanatory potential of both sibling and parental ties for adolescent health.
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Kieron Barclay & Mikko Myrskylä
Social Science & Medicine, December 2014, Pages 141–148
Abstract:
Physical fitness at young adult ages is an important determinant of physical health, cognitive ability, and mortality. However, few studies have addressed the relationship between early life conditions and physical fitness in adulthood. An important potential factor influencing physical fitness is birth order, which prior studies associate with several early- and later-life outcomes such as height and mortality. This is the first study to analyse the association between birth order and physical fitness in late adolescence. We use military conscription data on 218,873 Swedish males born between 1965 and 1977. Physical fitness is measured by a test of maximal working capacity, a measure of cardiovascular fitness closely related to V02max. We use linear regression with sibling fixed effects, meaning a within-family comparison, to eliminate the confounding influence of unobserved factors that vary between siblings. To understand the mechanism we further analyse whether the association between birth order and physical fitness varies by sibship size, parental socioeconomic status, birth cohort or length of the birth interval. We find a strong, negative and monotonic relationship between birth order and physical fitness. For example, third-born children have a maximal working capacity approximately 0.1 (p<0.000) standard deviations lower than first-born children. The association exists both in small (3 or less children) and large families (4 or more children), in high and low socioeconomic status families, and amongst cohorts born in the 1960s and the 1970s. While in the whole population the birth order effect does not depend on the length of the birth intervals, in two-child families a longer birth interval strengthens the advantage of the first-born. Our results illustrate the importance of birth order on physical fitness, and suggest that the first-born advantage already arises in late adolescence.
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Gabriela Barajas-Gonzalez & Jeanne Brooks-Gunn
Journal of Family Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Family and neighborhood influences related to low-income were examined to understand their association with harsh parenting among an ethnically diverse sample of families. Specifically, a path model linking household income to harsh parenting via neighborhood disorder, fear for safety, maternal depressive symptoms, and family conflict was evaluated using cross-sectional data from 2,132 families with children ages 5–16 years from Chicago. The sample was 42% Mexican American, 41% African American, and 17% European American. Results provide support for a family process model where a lower income-to-needs ratio is associated with higher reports of neighborhood disorder, greater fear for safety, and more family conflict, which is in turn, associated with greater frequency of harsh parenting. Our tests for moderation by ethnicity/immigrant status, child gender, and child age (younger child vs. adolescent) indicate that although paths are similar for families of boys and girls, as well as for families of young children and adolescents, there are some differences by ethnic group. Specifically, we find the path from neighborhood disorder to fear for safety is stronger for Mexican American (United States born and immigrant) and European American families in comparison with African American families. We also find that the path from fear for safety to harsh parenting is significant for European American and African American families only. Possible reasons for such moderated effects are considered.
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Gary Becker, Kevin Murphy & Jörg Spenkuch
University of Chicago Working Paper, August 2014
Abstract:
We consider the link between parents' influence over the preferences of children, parental investments in children's human capital, and children's support of elderly parents. It may pay for parents to spend resources to "manipulate" children's preferences in order to induce them to support their parents in old age. Since parents invest more in children when they expect greater support, manipulation of child preferences may end up helping children and parents. A new result, that we call the "Rotten Parent Theorem," demonstrates that if children are altruistic, then even selfish parents will make the optimal investment in kids' human capital.
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Daniel Briley, Paige Harden & Elliot Tucker-Drob
Developmental Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Parents’ expectations for their children’s ultimate educational attainment have been hypothesized to play an instrumental role in socializing academically relevant child behaviors, beliefs, and abilities. In addition to social transmission of educationally relevant values from parents to children, parental expectations and child characteristics may transact bidirectionally. We explore this hypothesis using both longitudinal and genetically informative twin data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Birth and Kindergarten cohorts. Our behavior genetic results indicate that parental expectations partly reflect child genetic variation, even as early as 4 years of age. Two classes of child characteristics were hypothesized to contribute to these child-to-parent effects: behavioral tendencies (approaches toward learning and problem behaviors) and achievement (math and reading). Using behavior genetic models, we find within-twin-pair associations between these child characteristics and parental expectations. Using longitudinal cross-lagged models, we find that initial variation in child characteristics predicts future educational expectations above and beyond previous educational expectations. These results are consistent with transactional frameworks in which parent-to-child and child-to-parent effects co-occur.
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Are boys more sensitive to sensitivity? Parenting and executive function in preschoolers
Viara Mileva-Seitz et al.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, February 2015, Pages 193–208
Abstract:
During early childhood, girls outperform boys on key dimensions of cognitive functions, including inhibitory control, sustained attention, and working memory. The role of parenting in these sex differences is unknown despite evidence that boys are more sensitive to the effects of the early environment. In this study, we measured parental sensitivity at 14 and 36 months of age, and children’s cognitive and executive functions (sustained attention, inhibitory control, and forward/backward memory) at 52 months of age, in a longitudinal cohort (N = 752). Boys scored significantly lower than girls on inhibitory control (more Go/NoGo “commission errors”) and short-term memory (forward color recall task), but boys did not differ from girls on attention (Go/NoGo “omission errors”) or working memory (backward color recall task). In stratified analyses, parental sensitivity at 36 months of age was negatively associated with number of errors of commission (p = .05) and omission (p = .02) in boys, whereas child’s age was the only significant predictor of commission and omission errors in girls. A combined analysis of both sexes confirmed an interaction between sex and parenting for omission errors (p = .03). The results indicate that sex differences in cognitive functions are evident in preschoolers, although not across all dimensions we assessed. Boys appear to be more vulnerable to early parenting effects, but only in association with omission errors (attention) and not with the other cognitive function dimensions.
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Fathers’ Sensitive Parenting and the Development of Early Executive Functioning
Nissa Towe-Goodman et al.
Journal of Family Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using data from a diverse sample of 620 families residing in rural, predominately low-income communities, this study examined longitudinal links between fathers’ sensitive parenting in infancy and toddlerhood and children’s early executive functioning, as well as the contribution of maternal sensitive parenting. After accounting for the quality of concurrent and prior parental care, children’s early cognitive ability, and other child and family factors, fathers’ and mothers’ sensitive and supportive parenting during play at 24 months predicted children’s executive functioning at 3 years of age. In contrast, paternal parenting quality during play at 7 months did not make an independent contribution above that of maternal care, but the links between maternal sensitive and supportive parenting and executive functioning seemed to operate in similar ways during infancy and toddlerhood. These findings add to prior work on early experience and children’s executive functioning, suggesting that both fathers and mothers play a distinct and complementary role in the development of these self-regulatory skills.