Family Matters
Thanks for nothing: Income and labor force participation for never-married mothers since 1982
Matthew McKeever & Nicholas Wolfinger
Social Science Research, January 2011, Pages 63-76
Abstract:
We examine the changing social and economic characteristics of women who give birth out of wedlock. Using Current Population Survey data collected between 1982 and 2002, we find that never-married mothers remain impoverished. Their income growth over these years was modest despite substantial gains in education, employment, and other individual characteristics generally associated with prosperity. These results affirm the ongoing role of family structure in shaping American inequality.
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Yours, Mine and Ours: Do Divorce Laws affect the Intertemporal Behavior of Married Couples?
Alessandra Voena
Stanford Working Paper, October 2010
Abstract:
Divorce laws determine when divorce is allowed and establish spouses' individual property rights over household assets. This paper examines how such laws influence the intertemporal behavior and the welfare of U.S. married couples. I build a dynamic model of household choice where moving from mutual consent divorce to unilateral divorce brings limited commitment and renegotiation of intra-household allocations. I estimate the key parameters of the model exploiting panel variation in U.S. divorce laws from the late 1960s to the 1990s. In states with equal division of property couples responded to unilateral divorce by increasing savings about 20 percent more than in states where assets are kept by the spouse with the formal title of property, suggesting that equal division may be costly for primary earners. Also, wives responded to unilateral divorce by temporarily reducing their employment by over 5 percentage points, only in states with equal division of property. These estimates suggest that the threat of unilateral divorce allowed wives to appropriate a larger share of household resources (consumption and leisure), thanks to the leverage provided by equal division of property. My estimates also indicate that equal division of assets benefited divorcing women when it was first introduced, as they had a smaller share of resources in marriage and thus less property in their name than their husbands. However, counterfactual experiments indicate that equal division may be potentially detrimental to women who consume in marriage as much as their husband, but have lower wages. When spouses have the same levels of private consumption, secondary earners are better off in a separate property regime, as they may need more savings than the breadwinner to smooth consumption when going into a divorce.
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Does paying child support reduce men's subsequent marriage and fertility?
Kermyt Anderson
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Due to tradeoffs between mating and parental effort, men who pay child support to children from previous unions should be less likely to have subsequent children or to remarry than men who do not pay child support. I evaluate this prediction using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), a nationally representative sample of American households. As predicted, child support payment is associated with lower probability of subsequent birth. However, the prediction was not met for marriage: men who paid child support were more, rather than less, likely to remarry. One interpretation of this result is that child support payment is an honest signal of men's willingness to commit to parental investment: by continuing to pay child support, men signal to prospective mates that they are good investors. Child support may thus function to some extent as mating effort, by attracting subsequent long-term mates.
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Richard Eibach & Steven Mock
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Since parenting involves protecting children from various risks and dangers, tendencies towards increased risk perception, risk-averse decision-making, and distrust of strangers may come to be associated with the parental role. Consequently, parents may be more likely to exhibit each of these psychological tendencies when their parental role is situationally salient than when it is not salient. We tested this hypothesis in two studies that manipulated the salience of the parental role in samples of parents and nonparents and measured the effects on participants' risk perceptions, risk-aversion, and trust in strangers. As we hypothesized, parents perceived greater risk (Study 1), made more risk averse choices (Study 1), and trusted strangers less (Study 2) when their parental role was salient than when it was not salient. Implications for understanding psychological adaptations to social roles are discussed.
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Lower Parental Investment in Stepchildren: The Case of the Israeli "Great Journey"
Sigal Tifferet, Sharon Jorev & Rinat Nasanovitz
Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, May 2010, Pages 62-67
Abstract:
In comparison to genetic children, stepchildren receive less parental investment, in accordance with the theory of discriminative parental solicitude. The present study investigated this bias in parental funding of "The Great Journey" that many Israeli youths embark on after their military service - typically a backpacking tour in Asia or Latin America. In the current study, 82 students - about half with divorced parents - reported the amount of funding they had received for their "Great Journey." As expected, children whose genetic parents were married received more money to fund their trip than children whose genetic parents were divorced, even after controlling for sex, age, and family income. A novel finding of the study was that youths who were raised by stepfathers received more money for their trip than youths who were raised by stepmothers. This finding is in accordance with the notion that stepfathers use parental investment as a mating strategy.
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Parenting, courtship, Disneyland and the human brain
Craig Palmer & Kathryn Coe
International Journal of Tourism Anthropology, 2010, Pages 1-14
Abstract:
Using evidence drawn from the Southern California tourist industry, Geoffrey Miller argues that creativity, storytelling, humour, wit, music, fantasy, and morality, evolved as forms of courtship behaviour. Although he refers to the 'mind as amusement park' he fails to include in his analysis the most famous amusement park in the world, Disneyland, which is one of the most dense concentrations in the world of exactly those aspects of culture (art, creativity, storytelling, humour, wit, music, fantasy, and morality) that he claims have evolved as courtship displays. Yet, Miller's hypothesis cannot account for the fact that Disneyland is devoted to children. Disneyland, and other similar amusement parks, instead support the alternative hypothesis that the aspects of the human brain involved in these activities evolved in the context of parents influencing their offspring, and offspring responding to their parents, not in the context of courtship.
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Audrey Light & Taehyun Ahn
Demography, November 2010, Pages 895-921
Abstract:
Given that divorce often represents a high-stakes income gamble, we ask how individual levels of risk tolerance affect the decision to divorce. We extend the orthodox divorce model by assuming that individuals are risk averse, that marriage is risky, and that divorce is even riskier. The model predicts that conditional on the expected gains to marriage and divorce, the probability of divorce increases with relative risk tolerance because risk averse individuals require compensation for the additional risk that is inherent in divorce. To implement the model empirically, we use data for first-married women and men from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to estimate a probit model of divorce in which a measure of risk tolerance is among the covariates. The estimates reveal that a 1-point increase in risk tolerance raises the predicted probability of divorce by 4.3% for a representative man and by 11.4% for a representative woman. These findings are consistent with the notion that divorce entails a greater income gamble for women than for men.
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Father death and adult success among the Tsimane: Implications for marriage and divorce
Jeffrey Winking, Michael Gurven & Hillard Kaplan
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Human fathers are heavily involved in the rearing of children around the world. Early evolutionary explanations focused on the greater need of human children and mothers compared to other species and the consequent increased benefits available to investing fathers and pair-bonded husbands. Contrary to this hypothesis, research suggests that the impact of men's care on the survivorship and physical well-being of juvenile offspring is cross-culturally variable and often unsubstantial. Proper testing of the hypothesis, however, also requires exploring how well children raised with paternal investment fare as adults, compared to those raised in the absence of fathers. We explore this issue among the Tsimane, who exhibit high levels of paternal provisioning and very low divorce rates, by testing the impact of early father death on five measures of adult success: completed height, body mass index (BMI), age of first reproduction, completed fertility for age and number of surviving offspring for age. Of these five tests, a significant effect in the predicted direction was found only for body mass index of adult daughters. Therefore, there is no substantial evidence that Tsimane fathers have a large impact on the success of adult children. We explore alternative explanations for the high levels of paternal involvement and low divorce rates observed among the Tsimane, including the positive effects of men's investments on couple fertility and the constraints imposed by female preferences and the availability of alternative partners.
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How Teenage Fathers Matter for Children: Evidence From the ECLS-B
Stefanie Mollborn & Peter Lovegrove
Journal of Family Issues, January 2011, Pages 3-30
Abstract:
Much is known about how having a teenage mother influences children's outcomes, but the relationship between teenage fatherhood and children's health and development is less well documented. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort, the authors investigated how teenage fathers matter for children. They expected teenage fathers' influence on children to differ from adult fathers' in three domains: the household context, the father- mother relationship, and the father-child relationship. Teenage fathers were less often married and more often cohabiting or nonresident, and their children experienced a variety of social disadvantages in their household contexts. The quality of the father-child relationship did not often differ between adolescent and adult fathers. Fathers' marital status and children's household contexts each fully explained the negative relationship between having a teen father and children's cognitive and behavior scores at age 2. These findings suggest that policy interventions could possibly reduce these children's developmental gaps in the critical preschool years.
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Ralf Kaptijn, Fleur Thomese, Theo van Tilburg & Aart Liefbroer
Human Nature, December 2010, Pages 393-405
Abstract:
Low birth rates in developed societies reflect women's difficulties in combining work and motherhood. While demographic research has focused on the role of formal childcare in easing this dilemma, evolutionary theory points to the importance of kin. The cooperative breeding hypothesis states that the wider kin group has facilitated women's reproduction during our evolutionary history. This mechanism has been demonstrated in pre-industrial societies, but there is no direct evidence of beneficial effects of kin's support on parents' reproduction in modern societies. Using three-generation longitudinal data anchored in a sample of grandparents aged 55 and over in 1992 in the Netherlands, we show that childcare support from grandparents increases the probability that parents have additional children in the next 8 to 10 years. Grandparental childcare provided to a nephew or niece of childless children did not significantly increase the probability that those children started a family. These results suggest that childcare support by grandparents can enhance their children's reproductive success in modern societies and is an important factor in people's fertility decisions, along with the availability of formal childcare.
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Grandmothering and natural selection
Friederike Kachel, L.S. Premo & Jean-Jacques Hublin
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 7 February 2011, Pages 384-391
Abstract:
Humans are unique among primates in that women regularly outlive their reproductive period by decades. The grandmother hypothesis proposes that natural selection increased the length of the human post-menopausal period - and, thus, extended longevity - as a result of the inclusive fitness benefits of grandmothering. However, it has yet to be demonstrated that the inclusive fitness benefits associated with grandmothering are large enough to warrant this explanation. Here, we show that the inclusive fitness benefits are too small to affect the evolution of longevity under a wide range of conditions in simulated populations. This is due in large part to the relatively weak selection that applies to women near or beyond the end of their reproductive period. However, we find that grandmothers can facilitate the evolution of a shorter reproductive period when their help decreases the weaning age of their matrilineal grandchildren. Because selection favours a shorter reproductive period in the presence of shorter interbirth intervals, this finding holds true for any form of allocare that helps mothers resume cycling more quickly. We conclude that while grandmothering is unlikely to explain human-like longevity, allocare could have played an important role in shaping other unique aspects of human life history, such as a later age at first birth and a shorter female reproductive period.
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Alexandra Burt et al.
Archives of General Psychiatry, December 2010, Pages 1309-1315
Context: Previous studies have indicated that marriage is negatively associated with male antisocial behavior. Although often interpreted as a causal association, marriage is not a random event. As such, the association may stem from selection processes, whereby men less inclined toward antisocial behavior are more likely to marry.
Objective: To evaluate selection vs causation explanations of the association between marriage and desistence from antisocial behavior.
Design: Co-twin control analyses in a prospective twin study provided an analogue of the idealized counterfactual model of causation. The co-twin control design uses the unmarried co-twin of a married twin to estimate what the married twin would have looked like had he remained unmarried. Discordant monozygotic (MZ) twins are particularly informative because they share a common genotype and rearing environment.
Setting: General community study.
Participants: Two hundred eighty-nine male-male twin pairs (65.1%MZ) from the Minnesota Twin Family Study underwent assessment at 17, 20, 24, and 29 years of age. None of the participants were married at 17 years of age, and 2.6% were married at 20 years of age. By 29 years of age, 58.8% of the participants were or had been married.
Main Outcome Measure: A tally of criterion C symptoms of DSM-III-R antisocial personality disorder, as assessed via structured clinical interview.
Results: Mean differences in antisocial behavior across marital status at age 29 years were present even at 17 and 20 years of age, suggesting a selection process. However, the within-pair effect of marriage was significant for MZ twins, such that the married twin engaged in less antisocial behavior following marriage than his unmarried co-twin. Results were equivalent to those in dizygotic twins and persisted when controlling for prior antisocial behavior.
Conclusions: Results indicate an initial selection effect, whereby men with lower levels of antisocial behavior are more likely to marry. However, this tendency to refrain from antisocial behavior appears to be accentuated by the state of marriage.
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Cohabiting, Family and Community Stressors, Selection, and Juvenile Delinquency
Christopher Kierkus, Brian Johnson & John Hewitt
Criminal Justice Review, December 2010, Pages 393-411
Abstract:
Prior research has established that children from traditional, two-parent nuclear families experience a lower risk of delinquency than children raised in alternative family structures. However, many studies have ignored the effect of parental cohabiting on delinquent development. A growing body of research suggests that cohabiting (even among biological parents) may be harmful to children. This study tests the hypothesis that cohabiting is associated with four different types of delinquent behavior. It examines two theoretical models, a family stress model and a community stress/selection model, as possible explanations of ''the cohabiting effect.'' The analysis reveals that cohabiting is generally associated with increased risk of misbehavior (although the effects do vary somewhat by type of delinquency). Although the theoretical models could not completely explain ''the cohabiting effect,'' substantial evidence of both mediation and moderation is found. The implications of the findings are discussed.
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The Impact of Conditional Cash Transfers on Marriage and Divorce
Gustavo Bobonis
Economic Development and Cultural Change, January 2011, Pages 281-312
Abstract:
A growing number of less-developed countries have introduced conditional cash transfer programs in which funds are targeted to women. Economic models of the family suggest that these transfer programs may lead to marital turnover among program beneficiaries. Data from the experimental evaluation of the PROGRESA program in Mexico is used to provide new evidence on the short-run impacts of targeted transfers on couples' union dissolution and individuals' new union formation decisions. We find that, although the overall share of women in union does not change as a result of the program, marital turnover increases. Intact families eligible for the transfers experienced a modest (0.32 percentage points) increase in separation rates, with most of the effect concentrated among young and relatively educated women households. In contrast, young single women with low educational attainment levels experienced a substantial increase in new union formation rates. The marital transition patterns are consistent with the workhorse economic model of the marriage market - individuals with the greatest prospects to start new unions and those who may become more attractive in the marriage market are more likely to transition out of existing relationships and form new ones.
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Gender, Work-Family Responsibilities, and Sleep
David Maume, Rachel Sebastian & Anthony Bardo
Gender & Society, December 2010, Pages 746-768
Abstract:
This study adds to a small but growing literature that situates sleep within gendered work- family responsibilities. We conducted interviews with 25 heterosexual dual-earner working-class couples with children, most of whom had one partner (usually the mother) who worked at night. A few men suffered disrupted sleep because of their commitment to being a coparent to their children, but for most their provider status gave them rights to longer and more continuous sleep. By contrast, as they were the primary caregiver during sentient hours, women's sleep was curtailed and interrupted by responding to the needs of family members at night and at the beginning of each day, and this was true for women who worked nights as well as days. Furthermore, in struggling to meet their daily employment and familial obligations while tired and sleepy, women further stressed their bodies in ways that can cause cumulative sleep debt. This article demonstrates that sleep deficits are another manifestation of gender inequality, with important implications for long-term health and well-being.
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A shift toward birthing relatively large infants early in human evolution
Jeremy DeSilva
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
It has long been argued that modern human mothers give birth to proportionately larger babies than apes do. Data presented here from human and chimpanzee infant:mother dyads confirm this assertion: humans give birth to infants approximately 6% of their body mass, compared with approximately 3% for chimpanzees, even though the female body weights of the two species are moderately convergent. Carrying a relatively large infant both pre- and postnatally has important ramifications for birthing strategies, social systems, energetics, and locomotion. However, it is not clear when the shift to birthing large infants occurred over the course of human evolution. Here, known and often conserved relationships between adult brain mass, neonatal brain mass, and neonatal body mass in anthropoids are used to estimate birthweights of extinct hominid taxa. These estimates are resampled with direct measurements of fossil postcrania from female hominids, and also compared with estimates of female body mass to assess when human-like infant:mother mass ratios (IMMRs) evolved. The results of this study suggest that 4.4-Myr-old Ardipithecus possessed IMMRs similar to those found in African apes, indicating that a low IMMR is the primitive condition in hominids. Australopithecus females, in contrast, had significantly heavier infants compared with dimensions of the femoral head (n = 7) and ankle (n = 7) than what is found in chimpanzees, and are estimated to have birthed neonates more than 5% of their body mass. Carrying such proportionately large infants may have limited arboreality in Australopithecus females and may have selected for alloparenting behavior earlier in human evolution than previously thought.