Guardians of the Future
Once upon a Time in Parenthood: Adolescents' Attitudes Toward Parents' Time with Children, 1991–2019
Abby Young & Ann Beutel
Sociological Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent decades have seen increases in parents' time with children and their endorsement of time-intensive parenting, but little is known about adolescents' attitudes regarding the time that parents in general (i.e., not their own parents specifically) spend with children. We analyze separate attitudinal measures of fathers' time and mothers' time with children using data from the eighth and tenth grade Monitoring the Future surveys for 1991 to 2019. Overall, the majority of adolescents agree that most fathers and mothers, but especially fathers, should spend more time with their children than they do. Black girls are the most likely to agree that fathers and mothers should spend more time with their children while white boys are the least likely. The largest increases in agreement that fathers and mothers should spend more time with their children are found for white girls. Exploring parental education and mother's employment as potential mechanisms for these trends, we find that attitudes about the time most fathers and mothers should spend with children have converged across parental education levels and maternal employment statuses over the years of our study.
Further Evidence on the Global Decline in the Mental Health of the Young
David Blanchflower et al.
NBER Working Paper, May 2024
Abstract:
Prior to around 2011, there was a pronounced curvilinear relationship between age and wellbeing: poor mental health was hump-shaped with respect to age, whilst subjective well-being was U-shaped. We examine data from a European panel for France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden called, Come-Here, for 2020-2023, plus data from International Social Survey Program (ISSP) surveys for 2011 and 2021 and some country-specific data. Mental ill-health now declines in a roughly monotonic fashion with age, whilst subjective well-being rises with age. We also show that young people with poorer mental health spend more time daily in front of a screen on the internet or their smartphone, and that within-person increases in poor mental health are correlated with spending more time in front of a screen. This evidence appears important because it is among the first pieces of research to use panel data on individuals to track the relationship between screen time and changes in mental health, and because the results caution against simply using the presence of the internet in the household, or low usage indicators (such as having used the internet in the last week) to capture the role played by screen time in the growth of mental ill-health.
Infants who are rarely spoken to nevertheless understand many words
Ruthe Foushee & Mahesh Srinivasan
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 4 June 2024
Abstract:
Theories of language development -- informed largely by studies of Western, middleclass infants -- have highlighted the language that caregivers direct to children as a key driver of language learning. However, some have argued that language development unfolds similarly across environmental contexts, including those in which child-directed language is scarce. This raises the possibility that children are able to learn from other sources of language in their environments, particularly the language directed to others in their environment. We explore this hypothesis with infants in an indigenous Tseltal-speaking community in Southern Mexico who are rarely spoken to, yet have the opportunity to overhear a great deal of other-directed language by virtue of being carried on their mothers’ backs. Adapting a previously established gaze-tracking method for detecting early word knowledge to our field setting, we find that Tseltal infants exhibit implicit knowledge of common nouns (Exp. 1), analogous to their US peers who are frequently spoken to. Moreover, they exhibit comprehension of Tseltal honorific terms that are exclusively used to greet adults in the community (Exp. 2), representing language that could only have been learned through overhearing. In so doing, Tseltal infants demonstrate an ability to discriminate words with similar meanings and perceptually similar referents at an earlier age than has been shown among Western children. Together, these results suggest that for some infants, learning from overhearing may be an important path toward developing language.
The scent of cuteness -- Neural signatures of infant body odors
Laura Schäfer et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
The smell of the own baby is a salient cue for human kin recognition and bonding. We hypothesized that infant body odors function like other cues of the Kindchenschema by recruiting neural circuits of pleasure and reward. In two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, we presented infantile and postpubertal body odors to nulliparae and mothers (N=78). All body odors increased BOLD response and functional connectivity in circuits related to olfactory perception, pleasure and reward. Neural activation strength in pleasure and reward areas positively correlated to perceptual ratings across all participants. Compared to postpubertals, infant body odors specifically enhanced BOLD signal and functional connectivity in reward and pleasure circuits, suggesting that infantile body odors prime the brain for prosocial interaction. This supports the idea that infant body odors are part of the Kindchenschema. The additional observation of functional connectivity being related to maternal and kin state speaks for experience-dependent priming.
Employment and Labor Supply Responses to the Child Tax Credit Expansion: Theory and Evidence
Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach & Michael Strain
NBER Working Paper, June 2024
Abstract:
The 2021 Child Tax Credit (CTC) expansion increased government benefits to families, and especially to families with the lowest incomes. Economic theory predicts that this policy intervention would have led to a reduction in labor supply among adults in those families. Our review of available research suggests that employment within broadly defined demographic groups was not reduced by the 2021 CTC changes. However, we present evidence that employment was reduced among mothers with relatively low levels of education -- the demographic group that was most affected by the CTC expansion. For the 2021 CTC expansion, theory and evidence were in the strongest alignment when the research design that produced the evidence was most focused on the demographic groups most likely to be affected by the expansion.