Parent Trap
The Competitive Saving Motive: Evidence from Rising Sex Ratios and Savings Rates in China
Shang-Jin Wei & Xiaobo Zhang
Journal of Political Economy, June 2011, Pages 511-564
Abstract:
The high and rising household savings rate in China is not easily reconciled with the traditional explanations that emphasize life cycle factors, the precautionary saving motive, financial development, or habit formation. This paper proposes a new competitive saving motive: as the sex ratio rises, Chinese parents with a son raise their savings in a competitive manner in order to improve their son's relative attractiveness for marriage. The pressure on savings spills over to other households. Both cross-regional and household-level evidence supports this hypothesis. This factor can potentially account for about half the actual increase in the household savings rate during 1990-2007.
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Shari Motro
Stanford Law Review, March 2011, Pages 647-698
Abstract:
Unmarried lovers who conceive are strangers in the eyes of the law. If the woman terminates the pregnancy, the man owes her nothing. If she takes the pregnancy to term, the man's obligation to support her is limited. The law reflects this lovers-as-strangers presumption by making a man's obligation towards a woman with whom he conceives derivative of his paternity-related obligations; his duty is towards his child, not towards the woman in her own right. Thus, a pregnant woman's lost wages and other personal costs are her private problem, and if there is no child at the end of the pregnancy, there is no one-from a legal perspective - that the man must support. The law also endorses this lovers-as-strangers default in the way in which it treats men who do support their pregnant lovers. It does this through the tax code. Current tax law likely regards payments between unmarried lovers as gifts or as child support. This characterization not only misses the mark descriptively, it also misses an opportunity to reward and encourage a behavior that is critically important in an age when sex and procreation outside of marriage are common. This Article argues that the law should develop a new framework for addressing the unique relationship between unmarried lovers who conceive and that tax reform offers a practical and relatively modest first step for doing so. To this end, it proposes that Congress create a pregnancy-support deduction to benefit taxpayers who already support pregnant women, thereby extending to them the same deduction we now give taxpayers who pay alimony.
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Corporal Punishment's Influence on Children's Aggressive and Delinquent Behavior
Sara Morris & Chris Gibson
Criminal Justice and Behavior, August 2011, Pages 818-839
Abstract:
Studies show that children subjected to corporal punishment may engage in more aggression and delinquent behaviors than those who are not. Past research, however, is limited methodologically. This is largely the result of a lack of matched corporally punished and nonpunished children. To address this limitation, a propensity score matching analysis was used to estimate the effects of corporal punishment on children's behaviors. Using data from the longitudinal study of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, findings indicate that (a) a large amount of selection bias exists, indicating that child and family characteristics of those subjected to corporal punishment are substantially different from characteristics of those not punished, and (b) when children exposed to corporal punishment (vs. those who are not) are matched on their propensities of being punished, the relationship between punishment and subsequent aggression and delinquency become statistically nonsignificant and substantively small. Findings are discussed in light of past research on corporal punishment, and limitations of the current study and ways of overcoming them in the future are discussed.
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Does "Hovering" Matter? Helicopter Parenting and Its Effect on Well-Being
Terri LeMoyne & Tom Buchanan
Sociological Spectrum, July/August 2011, Pages 399-418
Abstract:
The phenomenon popularly referred to as helicopter parenting refers to an overinvolvement of parents in their children's lives. This concept has typically been used to describe parents of college-aged young adults. Despite much anecdotal evidence, little is known about its existence and consequences from an empirical perspective. Using a sample of college students at a university in the United States (N = 317), the exploration and measurement of this concept is examined. Results of factor analysis of helicopter parenting items constructed for this study support the use of the scale. Results suggest helicopter parenting is negatively related to psychological well-being and positively related to prescription medication use for anxiety/depression and the recreational consumption of pain pills.
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Fiscal Externalities of Becoming a Parent
Douglas Wolf et al.
Population and Development Review, June 2011, Pages 241-266
Abstract:
Theoretical and empirical results suggest that there are externalities to childbearing, but those results usually assume that these externalities accrue uniformly within a homogeneous population. We advance this argument by developing separate estimates of the fiscal externalities associated with parents - those who devote time or material resources to minor children - and nonparents. Our analysis uses data from the US Panel Study of income Dynamics on the age profiles of taxes paid and publicly funded benefts consumed by parents and nonparents, together with a previously developed intertemporal economic-demographic accounting model. The accounting framework takes into account the net fiscal impacts of future generations as well as the present population. Our findings indicate that, with a 3 percent discount rate, parents produce a substantial net fiscal externality, about $217,000 in 2009 dollars. This is equivalent to a lifetime annuity of nearly $8,100 per year beginning at age 18. The results are sensitive to both the discount rate used and the proportion of parents within the cohort.
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Leisure goods, education attainment and fertility choice
Ragchaasuren Galindev
Journal of Economic Growth, June 2011, Pages 157-181
Abstract:
This paper proposes a novel mechanism for the fertility decline that occurred across the world since the late nineteenth century. It suggests that the rise in the cost of children relative to leisure goods in the process of development contributed to the decline in fertility. The paper develops a unified growth model in which children are substitutes for leisure goods in the parental utility function. The theory suggests that the rise in income, the decline in the relative price of leisure goods and the increase in educational attainment in the process of development speed up the demographic transition from high to low fertility and contributed to the transition from stagnation to growth.
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The Disappearing Nutritional Bias against Chinese Girls
John Bishop, Haiyong Liu & Lester Zeager
Contemporary Economic Policy, July 2011, Pages 461-468
Abstract:
This paper investigates whether China has reached postnatal nutrient intake equality between boys and girls, despite an exceptionally high ratio of boys to girls at birth, after dramatic technological advances in prenatal sex determination, rapid increases in income, and improved educational opportunities for females. Dominance methods applied to data from the Chinese Health and Nutrition Surveys (selected years 1991-2004) reveal no bias in calorie consumption between girls and boys. We find some weak evidence of protein bias toward boys in 1991, but it disappeared by 2004.
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Predictors of parenting stress among gay adoptive fathers in the United States
Samantha Tornello, Rachel Farr & Charlotte Patterson
Journal of Family Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The authors examined correlates of parenting stress among 230 gay adoptive fathers across the United States through an Internet survey. As with previous research on adoptive parents, results showed that fathers with less social support, older children, and children who were adopted at older ages reported more parenting stress. Moreover, gay fathers who had a less positive gay identity also reported more parenting stress. These 4 variables accounted for 33% of the variance in parenting stress; effect sizes were medium to large. Our results suggest the importance of social support and a positive gay identity in facilitating successful parenting outcomes among gay adoptive fathers.
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Economic Recession and Fertility in the Developed World
Tomáš Sobotka, Vegard Skirbekk & Dimiter Philipov
Population and Development Review, June 2011, Pages 267-306
Abstract:
This article reviews research on the effects of economic recessions on fertility in the developed world. We study how economic downturns, as measured by various indicators, especially by declining GDP levels, falling consumer confdence, and rising unemployment, were found to affect fertility. We also discuss particular mechanisms through which the recession may have influenced fertility behavior, including the effects of economic uncertainty, falling income, changes in the housing market, and rising enrollment in higher education, and also factors that influence fertility indirectly such as declining marriage rates. Most studies find that fertility tends to be pro-cyclical and often rises and declines with the ups and downs of the business cycle. Usually, these aggregate effects are relatively small (typically, a few percentage points) and of short durations; in addition they often influence especially the timing of childbearing and in most cases do not leave an imprint on cohort fertility levels. Therefore, major long-term fertility shifts often continue seemingly uninterrupted during the recession - including the fertility declines before and during the Great Depression of the 1930s and before and during the oil shock crises of the 1970s. Changes in the opportunity costs of childbearing and fertility behavior during economic downturn vary by sex, age, social status, and number of children; childless young adults are usually most affected. Furthermore, various policies and institutions may modify or even reverse the relationship between recessions and fertility. The first evidence pertaining to the recent recession falls in line with these findings. In most countries, the recession has brought a decline in the number of births and fertility rates, often marking a sharp halt to the previous decade of rising fertility rates.
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The Public Costs of Births Resulting from Unintended Pregnancies: National and State-Level Estimates
Adam Sonfield et al.
Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, June 2011, Pages 94-102
Context: Births resulting from unintended pregnancies are associated with substantial maternity and infant care costs to the federal and state governments; these costs have never been estimated at the national and state levels.
Methods: The proportions of births paid for by public insurance programs in 2006 were estimated, by pregnancy intention status, using data from the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System and similar state surveys, or were predicted by multivariate linear regression. Public costs were calculated using state-level estimates of the number of births, by intention status, and of the cost of a publicly funded birth.
Results: In 2006, 64% of births resulting from unintended pregnancies were publicly funded, compared with 48% of all births and 35% of births resulting from intended pregnancies. The proportion of births resulting from unintended pregnancies that were publicly funded varied by state, from 42% to 81%. Of the 2.0 million publicly funded births, 51% resulted from unintended pregnancies, accounting for $11.1 billion in costs-half of the total public expenditures on births. In seven states, the costs for births from unintended pregnancies exceeded a half billion dollars.
Conclusions: Public insurance programs are central in assisting American families in affording pregnancy and childbirth; however, they pay for a disproportionately high number of births resulting from unintended pregnancy. The resulting budgetary impact warrants increased public efforts to reduce unintended pregnancy.
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Martha Bailey
University of Michigan Working Paper, May 2011
Abstract:
Almost 50 years after domestic U.S. family planning programs began, their effects on childbearing remain controversial. Using their county-level roll-out from 1964 to 1973, this paper reevaluates these programs' shorter- and longer-term effects on U.S. fertility rates. I find that the introduction of family planning is associated with significant and persistent reductions in childbearing driven by both delay and reductions in completed number. Although federal family planning programs account for a modest portion of the large U.S. fertility declines from 1959 to 1974, the estimates are large enough to explain 22 to 30 percent of the decline among poor women.
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Can countries reverse fertility decline? Evidence from France's marriage and baby bonuses, 1929-1981
Daniel Chen
International Tax and Public Finance, June 2011, Pages 253-272
Abstract:
A number of countries have begun implementing tax incentives designed to reverse the decline in fertility. Whether such incentives are effective or equitable remains an open question. During the early twentieth century, France initiated an unusual tax policy to promote fertility and marriage: Household income was divided by family size to obtain a final tax bracket. The policy was regressive in that fertility incentives were so large and greatest among the rich. Similar policies whose fertility benefit increases with income are being implemented today. Using hand-collected archival data from aggregate tax returns and three natural experiments, I find mixed evidence that these kinds of tax incentives affect fertility and marriage.
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The Motivational Salience of Infant Faces Is Similar for Men and Women
Christine Parsons et al.
PLoS ONE, May 2011, e20632
Abstract:
Infant facial features are thought to be powerful elicitors of caregiving behaviour. It has been widely assumed that men and women respond in different ways to those features, such as a large forehead and eyes and round protruding cheeks, colloquially described as 'cute'. We investigated experimentally potential differences using measures of both conscious appraisal ('liking') and behavioural responsivity ('wanting') to real world infant and adult faces in 71 non-parents. Overall, women gave significantly higher 'liking' ratings for infant faces (but not adult faces) compared to men. However, this difference was not seen in the 'wanting' task, where we measured the willingness of men and women to key-press to increase or decrease viewing duration of an infant face. Further analysis of sensitivity to cuteness, categorising infants by degree of infantile features, revealed that both men and women showed a graded significant increase in both positive attractiveness ratings and viewing times to the 'cutest' infants. We suggest that infant faces may have similar motivational salience to men and women, despite gender idiosyncrasies in their conscious appraisal.
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The Effects of Teenage Fatherhood on Young Adult Outcomes
Jason Fletcher & Barbara Wolfe
Economic Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper uses national longitudinal data and several new empirical strategies to examine the consequences of teenage fatherhood. The key contribution is to compare economic outcomes of young fathers to young men whose partners experienced a miscarriage rather than a live birth. The results suggest that teenage fatherhood decreases years of schooling and the likelihood of receiving a high school diploma and increases general educational development receipt. Teenage fatherhood also appears to increase early marriage and cohabitation, and has mixed short-term effects on several labor market outcomes.
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Katrina Kimport, Kira Foster & Tracy Weitz
Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, June 2011, Pages 103-109
Context: The experiences of women who have negative emotional outcomes, including regret, following an abortion have received little research attention. Qualitative research can elucidate these women's experiences and ways their needs can be met and emotional distress reduced.
Methods: Twenty-one women who had emotional difficulties related to an abortion participated in semi-structured, in-depth telephone interviews in 2009. Of these, 14 women were recruited from abortion support talklines; seven were recruited from a separate research project on women's experience of abortion. Transcripts were analyzed using the principles of grounded theory to identify key themes.
Results: Two social aspects of the abortion experience produced, exacerbated or mitigated respondents' negative emotional experience. Negative outcomes were experienced when the woman did not feel that the abortion was primarily her decision (e.g., because her partner abdicated responsibility for the pregnancy, leaving her feeling as though she had no other choice) or did not feel that she had clear emotional support after the abortion. Evidence also points to a division of labor between women and men regarding pregnancy prevention, abortion and childrearing; as a result, the majority of abortion-related emotional burdens fall on women. Experiencing decisional autonomy or social support reduced respondents' emotional distress.
Conclusions: Supporting a woman's abortion decision-making process, addressing the division of labor between women and men regarding pregnancy prevention, abortion and childrearing, and offering nonjudgmental support may guide interventions designed to reduce emotional distress after abortion.
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Do grandparents favor granddaughters? Biased grandparental investment in UK
Antti Tanskanen, Anna Rotkirch & Mirkka Danielsbacka
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Differential grandparental investment in grandchildren is often explained with paternity uncertainty. The asymmetric inheritance of the sex chromosomes, especially of the X chromosomes, may also bias grandparental investment. Recent studies show that ignoring the sex of the grandchild can mask important differences in the investment patterns of the same grandparent category, but this has not been tested in contemporary societies with nationally representative data. With 17 variables from the Involved Grandparenting and Child Well-Being 2007 survey, we tested differential grandparental investment as reported by British and Welsh adolescents and compared predictions based on X-chromosomal relatedness with predictions based on paternity uncertainty. The theories are expected to differ with regard to grandmaternal investment in grandsons and granddaughters. We test whether paternal grandmothers invest (H1) more in granddaughters than in grandsons, (H2) more in granddaughters than maternal grandmothers do and (H3) less in grandsons than maternal grandmothers do. In addition, following the suggestion that paternal grandmothers may reduce sibling competition between girls and boys by harming grandsons, we study whether (H4) paternal grandmothers channel more noninvestment into grandsons than into granddaughters. The results show no convincing support for the type of sex discrimination of grandchildren that is predicted by X-chromosomal relatedness theories, but do provide support for the paternity uncertainty theory. X-chromosomal relatedness does not appear to shape grandparental behavior in developed societies.
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Beverly Strassmann & Wendy Garrard
Human Nature, July 2011, Pages 201-222
Abstract:
We conducted a meta-analysis of 17 studies that tested for an association between grandparental survival and grandchild survival in patrilineal populations. Using two different methodologies, we found that the survival of the maternal grandmother and grandfather, but not the paternal grandmother and grandfather, was associated with decreased grandoffspring mortality. These results are consistent with the findings of psychological studies in developed countries (Coall and Hertwig Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33:1-59, 2010). When tested against the predictions of five hypotheses (confidence of paternity; grandmothering, kin proximity, grandparental senescence, and local resource competition), our meta-analysis results are most in line with the local resource competition hypothesis. In patrilineal and predominantly patrilocal societies, the grandparents who are most likely to live with the grandchildren have a less beneficial association than those who do not. We consider the extent to which these results may be influenced by the methodological limitations of the source studies, including the use of retrospective designs and inadequate controls for confounding variables such as wealth.