Play, supervision and pressured parenting
On the changing norms of childhood, children’s safety and parenting — from traffic fatalities in New York City circa 1910 to hypervigilance at local playground in the present day, via Unequal Childhoods and research on children’s physical fitness.
What do to about the 1% meme?
A series of posts on the old claim that women only own 1% of the world’s property, which has been repeated in many forms and places since the 1970s, and still pops up today. I explain the origins of the claim, it’s continued resilience, a recent blog-and-Twitter-driven flareup, and finally a stab at empirical debunking.
Distorting data on divorce at the National Marriage Project
The National Marriage Project is telling some tall tales, courtesy of a grant from the Templeton Foundation‘s “Foundations of Marital Generosity Project.” By using private foundation money and taking his results directly to the media, the National Marriage Project bypasses the peer-review system — but they use the image of that system to bolster their prestige and authority.
Doing color with babies
Color is everywhere; gender is everywhere; color and gender have a varied, changing, and hard-to-pin-down relationship, which nevertheless creates powerful, explicit and implicit signals by and for both the people who apply colors (to their kids, themselves, their cars) and those who see them (including themselves). With the recent news of Disney moving its product lines into the delivery room, I was wondering how one could study the application of colors by parents to their children in real life.
.
After I commented on Time‘s story about young women earning more than young men, “Workplace Salaries: At Last, Women on Top,” Editor-At-Large Belinda Luscombe was good enough to drop in with her comment on my comment. Our exchange led me back to look at the story, and that led me to tinker with the data. This is the result.
Receding birth rates: Milestone or tipping point?
Less than two years ago I was asking, “Why Are American Women Having More Children?” So, is it true that the recession has changed the birth calculus, raising the specter of “more mouths to feed”? The evidence looks — mostly — like the recession has prompted a downturn in birth rates. But the long-term implications aren’t clear.
Citizenship: Because I said so
Democracy is a living monument to individual rights. Except not in real life, where nationalism protects the patriot’s political shenanigans from the shame of selfishness. Today’s example: citizenship. For a newborn baby, yet to commit its first sin, what is the moral principle that lets the citizenship of it parents determine its rights?
Gay prom controversy (1980-2010)
Some practices are between formal and informal – rituals that have a symbolic importance without a legal finality. One of these is the high school prom, which is why it remains a culture-war battleground.
Educated motherhood
Do more educated parents do it better, or are there other things about these homes, families, neighborhoods, friends, schools, etc., that account for this pattern? If education really is the issue, it’s a big part of how families transmit inequality — how rich parents produce rich children, and poor kids turn out poor.
Recession, resilience, divorce?
In hard times, families are a big part of how people make it through, but hard times are also hard for a lot of marriages. If it’s true that the husband’s job loss especially increases stress on a marriage – as previous research suggests – we may yet see that emerge for the current crisis.
