Care of an ill or disabled family member or friend is disproportionately done by women and typically is done in late midlife. Because this is-also a time in the life course when women's labor force participation peaks, many women faced with caregiving demands have to decide how to balance them with their employment. In this study we use the National Longitudinal Survey (NLS) of Mature Women to examine the causal relationship between employment and caring for an ill or disabled friend or relative over a three-year period. We find that employment does not affect whether or not women start caregiving, but that women who do start are more likely to reduce employment hours or stop work. Thus, the causal relationship between employment and caregiving in late midlife is largely unidirectional, with women reducing hours to meet caregiving demands.
individual and cohort change in housework are examined over a 13-year period. Responsibility for household tasks declined 10% from 1974-75 to 1987-88. For individual women, changes in housework are associated with life course shifts in time availability as well as with changes in gender attitudes and marital status, but are not related to changes in relative earnings. Cohort differences exist in responsibility for housework in the mid-1970s and they persist over the 13-year period. Overall, these findings suggest that aggregate changes in women's household labor reflect both individual change and cohort differences.Women's and men's family roles have undergone enormous change over the last several decades. The traditional nuclear family, composed of a mother-homemaker and a father-provider, is a reality for only a fraction of today's families (Spain
Using data collected from 10,511 kindergarten children and their parents from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten Cohort, this study examines child well‐being across cohabiting 2‐biological‐parent families; cohabiting stepfamilies; married stepfamilies; and married 2‐biological‐parent families. Findings indicate no differences in child well‐being for children living in cohabiting stepfamilies and cohabiting 2‐biological‐parent families. Multivariate models controlling for child characteristics, economic resources, maternal depressive symptoms, stability, and parenting practices show no significant differences across family types in child well‐being indicators, with the exception of reading skills. Important factors in explaining the link between cohabitation and child well‐being include economic resources, maternal depressive symptoms, and parenting practices.
With dramatic changes in family life over the last several decades, child custody law has shifted from a maternal preference to a more egalitarian standard, the best interests of the child. Despite this change in the law, scholars have debated whether gender continues to play a role in the resolution of custody disputes. Drawing on feminist legal scholarship and sociolegal research on judges, I assess the current debates over gender and custody by examining the accounts of judges who frequently adjudicate custody cases. I conduct in‐depth, face‐to‐face interviews with twenty‐five trial court judges in Indiana and investigate judges' accounts about whether they continue to use the tender years doctrine in custody disputes, even though the custody statute is explicitly gender‐neutral. Then, I assess several competing explanations of the variation across judges' accounts, including the judges' gender role attitudes, gender, age, and political party affiliation. In exploratory analyses, I also examine the contested custody rulings of a subset of nine judges to assess whether judges' accounts are congruent with their actual custody decisions. I discuss the implications of these findings in light of feminist legal scholarship as well as empirical research on child custody adjudication.
Services spent $2 million on an ad campaign to promote breastfeeding by educating mothers about the risks of not doing so.Those risks were often communicated in provocative ways. One television ad, for example, showed a pregnant African American woman riding a mechanical bull, and then the message appears on the screen, "You wouldn't take risks before your baby is born.Why start after?" BREASTFEED
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