Research has associated parenthood with greater daily time commitments for fathers and mothers than for childless men and women, and with deeper gendered division of labor in households. How do these ...outcomes vary across countries with different average employment hours, family and social policies, and cultural attitudes to family care provision? Using nationally representative time-use data from the United States, Australia, Italy, France, and Denmark (N = 5,337), we compare the paid and unpaid work of childless partnered adults and parents of young children in each country. Couples were matched (except for the United States). We found parents have higher, less gender-equal workloads than nonparents in all five countries, but overall time commitments and the difference by parenthood status were most pronounced in the United States and Australia.
This article draws on a survey conducted in six provinces in summer 2008 to investigate the determinants of son preference in rural China. The analysis confirms the conventional wisdom that son ...preference is embedded within patrilineal family structures and practices. We extend our analysis by exploring specific aspects of variation within patrilineal family culture. We find that the patrilineal group (clan) composition of villages and family participation in practices such as building ancestral halls and updating genealogies significantly influence son preference. Yet even though son preference is embedded within patrilineal family culture, our analysis suggests that over time the attenuation of son preference is likely. This is because determinants associated with socioeconomic change—for instance, higher levels of education, direct exposure to official policy education materials, higher income (a proxy for rural industrialization), and agricultural mechanization—all attenuate son preference. Being younger and female are also associated with weaker son preference, and both characteristics are likely to interact with education and industrialization to further dilute son preference in the longer term. Nevertheless, our findings suggest that concerted efforts are needed to ameliorate institutional discrimination against rural people in welfare provisioning and in labor markets, and to promote multiple dimensions of gender equality, including in land rights, wage rates, and education.
When state voters passed the California Marriage Protection Act (Proposition 8) in 2008, it restricted the definition of marriage to a legal union between a man and a woman. The act’s passage further ...agitated an already roiling national debate about whether American notions of family could or should expand to include, for example, same-sex marriage, unmarried cohabitation, and gay adoption. But how do Americans really define family? The first study to explore this largely overlooked question, Counted Out examines currents in public opinion to assess their policy implications and predict how Americans’ definitions of family may change in the future. Counted Out broadens the scope of previous studies by moving beyond efforts to understand how Americans view their own families to examine the way Americans characterize the concept of family in general. The book reports on and analyzes the results of the authors’ Constructing the Family Surveys (2003 and 2006), which asked more than 1,500 people to explain their stances on a broad range of issues, including gay marriage and adoption, single parenthood, the influence of biological and social factors in child development, religious ideology, and the legal rights of unmarried partners. Not surprisingly, the authors find that the standard bearer for public conceptions of family continues to be a married, heterosexual couple with children. More than half of Americans also consider same-sex couples with children as family, and from 2003 to 2006 the percentages of those who believe so increased significantly—up 6 percent for lesbian couples and 5 percent for gay couples. The presence of children in any living arrangement meets with a notable degree of public approval. Less than 30 percent of Americans view heterosexual cohabitating couples without children as family, while similar couples with children count as family for nearly 80 percent. Counted Out shows that for most Americans, however, the boundaries around what they define as family are becoming more malleable with time. Counted Out demonstrates that American definitions of family are becoming more expansive. Who counts as family has far-reaching implications for policy, including health insurance coverage, end-of-life decisions, estate rights, and child custody. Public opinion matters. As lawmakers consider the future of family policy, they will want to consider the evolution in American opinion represented in this groundbreaking book.
This open access book focuses on family diversity from a legal, demographical and sociological perspective. It investigates what is at stake in the life of homosexuals in the field of family ...formation, parenting and parenthood, what it brings to everyday life, the support of the law, and what its absence implies. The book shows the paths leading to the adoption of laws while demographic analyses concentrate on the link between registration of same-sex marriages and same-sex parenting with a detailed focus on Spain. The sociological chapters in this book, based upon qualitative surveys in France, Iceland and Italy, underline how the importance of the legal structure influenced the daily life of homosexual families. As such this book is an interesting read to lawyers, demographers, sociologists, behavioural scientists, and all those working in the field.
Between 1955 and 1956 the Government of India passed four Hindu Law Acts to reform and codify Hindu family law. Scholars have understood these acts as a response to growing concern about women's ...rights but, in a powerful re-reading of their history, this book traces the origins of the Hindu law reform project to changes in the political-economy of late colonial rule. The Hindu Family and the Emergence of Modern India considers how questions regarding family structure, property rights and gender relations contributed to the development of representative politics, and how, in solving these questions, India's secular and state power structures were consequently drawn into a complex and unique relationship with Hindu law. In this comprehensive and illuminating resource for scholars and students, Newbigin demonstrates the significance of gender and economy to the history of twentieth-century democratic government, as it emerged in India and beyond.
Focusing on gender and the family, this erudite and innovative history reconsiders the origins of Egyptian nationalism and the revolution of 1919 by linking social changes in class and household ...structure to the politics of engagement with British colonial rule. Lisa Pollard deftly argues that the Egyptian state's modernizing projects in the nineteenth century reinforced ideals of monogamy and bourgeois domesticity among Egypt's elite classes and connected those ideals with political and economic success. At the same time, the British used domestic and personal practices such as polygamy, the harem, and the veiling of women to claim that the ruling classes had become corrupt and therefore to legitimize an open-ended tenure for themselves in Egypt. To rid themselves of British rule, bourgeois Egyptian nationalists constructed a familial-political culture that trained new generations of nationalists and used them to demonstrate to the British that it was time for the occupation to end. That culture was put to use in the 1919 Egyptian revolution, in which the reformed, bourgeois family was exhibited as the standard for "modern" Egypt.
Unstable couple relationships and high rates of repartnering have increased the share of U.S. families with stepkin. Yet data on stepfamily structure are from earlier periods, include only coresident ...stepkin, or cover only older adults. In this study, we use new data on family structure and transfers in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to describe the prevalence and numbers of stepparents and stepchildren for adults of all ages and to characterize the relationship between having stepkin and transfers of time and money between generations, regardless of whether the kin live together. We find that having stepparents and stepchildren is very common among U.S. households, especially younger households. Furthermore, stepkin substantially increase the typical household's family size; stepparents and stepchildren increase a household's number of parents and adult children by nearly 40 % for married/cohabiting couples with living parents and children. However, having stepkin is associated with fewer transfers, particularly time transfers between married women and their stepparents and stepchildren. The increase in the number of family members due to stepkin is insufficient to compensate for the lower likelihood of transfers in stepfamilies. Our findings suggest that recent cohorts with more stepkin may give less time assistance to adult children and receive less time assistance from children in old age than prior generations.
Despite increasing family studies research on same-sex cohabiters and families, the literature is virtually devoid of transgender and transsexual families. To bridge this gap, I present qualitative ...research narratives on household labor and emotion work from 50 women partners of transgender and transsexual men. Contrary to much literature on "same-sex" couples, the division of household labor and emotion work within these contemporary families cannot simply be described as egalitarian. Further, although the forms of emotion work and "gender strategies," "family myths," and "accounts" with which women partners of trans men engage resonate with those from women in (non-trans) heterosexual and lesbian couples, they are also distinct, highlighting tensions among personal agency, politics, and structural inequalities in family life.
This study examines how often adolescents interact with family members and how adolescents feel when spending time with parents, nonresident parents, stepparents, siblings, and extended family ...members. Adolescents respond to whom they spend time with, and how adolescents feel during social interactions with family has implications for adolescent relationships. Family structure remains a crucial dimension of heterogeneity in adolescent life, and family systems theory suggests family structure could differentially shape adolescent emotional functioning and social development due to differences in family-level contexts. However, less work has evaluated heterogeneity in social interactions and adolescent responses to family interactions stemming from variation in the home context. Using a large, nationally representative data sample of adolescents from the American Time Use Survey (N = 1,735), this study employs a within-group analysis to separately examine feelings of meaningfulness, happiness, sadness, and stress during social interactions for adolescents living in nuclear homes, single-parent homes, and stepparent homes. Results suggest adolescents in nuclear homes benefited from interactions with parents and were less affected by siblings and extended family members. On the other hand, adolescents in nonnuclear homes benefited from interactions with nonresident parents, older siblings, or extended family members, giving support to compensation models of family interactions. The study informs parents, clinicians, and policymakers designing interventions for adolescents, because it more precisely conveys information about which family members positively influence adolescent emotional responses.
Guided by the Common Ingroup Identity Model (S. L. Gaertner & J. F. Dovidio, 2000) and Communication Accommodation Theory (C. Shepard, H. Giles, & B. A. LePoire, 2001), we examined the role of ...identity accommodation, supportive communication, and self-disclosure in predicting relational satisfaction, shared family identity, and group salience in multiracial/ethnic families. Additionally, we analyzed the association between group salience and relational outcomes as well as the moderating roles of multiracial/ethnic identity and marital status. Individuals who have parents from different racial/ethnic groups were invited to complete questionnaires on their family experiences. Participants (N = 139) answered questions about relationships with mothers, fathers, and grandparents. The results of the multilevel modeling analyses are discussed in terms of implications for understanding multiracial/ethnic families and family functioning.
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