A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

Paid Work, Parenting, and Housework: Gender Strategies and Myths@@@The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home.

Competing Devotions: Career and Family Among Women Executives. Mary Blair-Loy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2003. 269 pp. ISBN 0-674-01089-2. $39.95 (cloth). Despite the rapid increase in women's educational attainment and enhanced labor force opportunities, women continue to lag behind men in career success. Goldin (2004) estimates that only 21%-27% of recent cohorts of college-educated women achieve "work and family" success (babies and well-paid careers) by midlife; Mary Blair-Loy, in Competing Devotions, helps us understand why. Based on in-depth interviews with 56 women in top executive positions in the finance industry and with 25 women who left these high-powered careers to focus on children and family, she illuminates the factors that impede gender equality in the labor market and the home even among those with the greatest resources and ability. According to Blair-Loy, two powerful schema help define the options of high-achieving women: the schema of "devotion to work" and "devotion to family." Schema operate at both the social and individual level: They are powerful not only because they offer shared understanding about how the world works and how it should work but also because they become internalized by the individual. The dilemma for high-achieving women is that they are caught between the widely shared belief that their profession is a calling, but so is motherhood. Under the devotion to work schema, market work is more than a job, it is a vocation. Work in these high-powered finance jobs requires single-minded devotion. In its extreme, only those who devote themselves totally to the job are worthy of the rise to the top. On the other hand, an equally powerful devotion to family schema sees motherhood in much the same light, as a life's work to which a woman must give herself over. One cannot be a "good mother" part time, and it is assumed that biology makes women, not men, the best caregivers of children. Because time is finite, it is difficult-indeed impossible for the most zealous adherents of both-to combine work and family. Fully two thirds of the 56 women in Blair-Loy's sample of top finance executives do not have children. Blair-Loy sees these women as conformists; they do not challenge the devotion to work schema by trying to combine highpowered careers with childrearing. Instead, they forego becoming mothers. On the other side, the women who have completely given up careers to rear children also do not challenge either schema but rather reinforce the notion that occupational achievement and good mothering are incompatible. Interestingly, views of what children need differ for those who devote themselves to family versus those who continue in high-powered careers while also rearing children. …

Competing Devotions: Career and Family among Women Executives

essentially UMC evangelicals who have been mobilizing against the liberals in the Church leadership on many social issues. As is well known, the mainline leadership is more liberal than the membership, and evangelical leadership is more conservative than the membership. How is it that the leadership in the mainline can be forced to the right by its members? Tipton touches upon ecclesiology as the answer, but he does not sufficiently develop the insight. The most interesting part of the book is what I think is his implicit answer: conservatives from outside of the mainline facilitate the activism of the conservatives within it in order to achieve secular political goals. For example, Chapter Five examines the Institute for Religion and Democracy (IRD), an independent activist group dedicated to fighting the liberal tendencies within mainline political activism, particularly in foreign affairs. The chapter shows how nonor marginal mainliners associated with the neo-conservatives in the Reagan administration such as Elliot Abrams, Michael Novak and Jeane Kirkpatrick worked to de-legitimate mainline activism both within and outside of the church. With 89 percent of the funding at one point coming from foundations on the political far right, such as the Scaife Family Charitable trusts (p. 175), and with connections to secular conservative institutions such as the American Enterprise Institute, the conclusion is clear—the liberal advocacy of the elites was being suppressed by secular conservatives, not by a dissenting group within the mainline. Chapter Six shows how the IRD evolved from a primary concern with foreign affairs advocacy of the mainline to fighting against the liberal leadership on culture wars issues like abortion and homosexuality. Chapter Eight is a case study of the rise and fall of a mainline dominated interfaith coalition named “Interfaith Impact for Justice and Peace.” This group died due to its inability to master another tension in the mainline, between the church as focused on “broad social teaching and focused policy research” or “mass mobilization and political organizing.” (p. 283) Chapter Nine is a case study of the advocacy of the National Council of Churches and Chapter Ten of the creation of mainline-oriented parachurch advocacy groups like the Interfaith Alliance. Unfortunately, this book lost an opportunity to provide deeper insights into the mainline’s political influence because it focuses on the trees with little view of the forest. There are extensive discussions of particular trees—profiles of directors of agencies from decades ago, details of who said what to whom, and page-long block quotes from interviews. The reader must dig through all the detail to find the unifying themes in the analysis. I learned a lot from the book, but primarily because I could put Tipton’s detailed data into my existing theoretical narrative about the mainline. For those lacking such a narrative, Tipton does not clearly provide one. But, for any scholar hoping to make an argument about the mainline’s advocacy, they must read this book, because its data will show you that certain hypotheses are just dead wrong, and others should be pursued further.

Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage:

Understanding social aspects of parental well-being is vital, because parents' welfare has implications not only for parents themselves but also for child development, fertility, and the overall health of a society. This article provides a critical review of scholarship on parenthood and well-being in advanced economies published from 2010 to 2019. It focuses on the role of social, economic, cultural, and institutional contexts of parenting in influencing adult well-being. We identify major themes, achievements, and challenges and organize the review around the demands-rewards perspective and two theoretical frameworks: the stress process model and life course perspectives. The analysis shows that rising economic insecurities and inequalities and a diffusion of intensive parenting ideology were major social contexts of parenting in the 2010s. Scholarship linking parenting contexts and parental well-being illuminated how stressors related to providing and caring for children could unjustly burden some parents, especially mothers, those with fewer socioeconomic resources, and those with marginalized statuses. In that vein, researchers continued to emphasize how stressors diverged by parents' socioeconomic status, gender, and partnership status, with new attention to strains experienced by racial/ethnic minority, immigrant, and LGBTQ parents. Scholars' comparisons of parents' positions in various countries expanded, enhancing knowledge regarding specific policy supports that allow parents to thrive. Articulating future research within a stress process model framework, we showed vibrant theoretical pathways, including conceptualizing potential parental social supports at multiple levels, attending to the intersection of multiple social locations of parents, and renewing attention to local contextual factors and parenting life stages.

Parenthood and Well-Being: A Decade in Review.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically affected employment, particularly for mothers Many believe that the loss of childcare and homeschooling requirements are key contributors to this trend, but previous work has been unable to test these hypotheses due to data limitations This study uses novel data from 989 partnered, US parents to empirically examine whether the loss of childcare and new homeschooling demands are associated with employment outcomes early in the pandemic We also consider whether the division of childcare prior to the pandemic is associated with parents? employment For parents with young children, the loss of full-time childcare was associated with an increased risk of unemployment for mothers but not fathers Yet, father involvement in childcare substantially buffered against negative employment outcomes for mothers of young children For parents with school-age children, participation in homeschooling was associated with adverse employment outcomes for mothers but not fathers Overall, this study provides empirical support for the current discourse on gender differences in employment during the pandemic and also highlights the role fathers can play in buffering against reduced labor force participation among mothers This article is protected by copyright All rights reserved

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/gwao.12614

A Gendered Pandemic: Childcare, Homeschooling, and Parents’ Employment During COVID-19

In late April 2020, we surveyed 1,060 U.S. parents in residing with a partner of a different sex in order to examine how divisions of housework and childcare may have changed since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

/pdf/us-couples-divisions-of-housework-and-childcare-during-covid-2v9we5w7tt.pdf

US Couples’ Divisions of Housework and Childcare during COVID-19 Pandemic

Using data from the National Survey of Families and Households, this study explores how single-parent, stepparent, and two-parent biological family structures may affect the transmission of gender ideology from parents to their adult children Results indicate that biological parents’ ideologies are strong predictors of their children’s ideologies Stepparents’ ideologies are predictive of their stepchildren’s only when they have high-quality relationships Parent—child gender heterogeneity, performance of traditional parenting roles, and relationship quality are related to high similarity scores The authors find evidence of converging ideologies between mothers and sons and diverging ideologies for fathers and daughters—especially in stepfamilies Finally, their results suggest that high-quality relations with a stepparent enhance transmission between same-sex biological parent—child dyads but high-quality relations with a spouse in two-parent biological families produce a competing role-model dynamic

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0192513X10396662

Family Structure and the Intergenerational Transmission of Gender Ideology

Understanding the determinants of racial/ethnic disparities in adolescent sexual risk behavior is important given its links to the differential risk of teen pregnancy, childbearing, and sexually transmitted infections. This article tests a contextual model that emphasizes the concentration of neighborhood disadvantage in shaping racial/ethnic disparities in sexual risk behavior. We focus on two risk behaviors that are prevalent among Black and Hispanic youth: the initiation of sexual activity in adolescence and the number of sex partners. Using data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Study of Youth (N = 6,985; 48 % female; 57 % non-Hispanic White) evidence indicates that neighborhood disadvantage—measured by concentrated poverty, unemployment rates, and the proportion of female-headed households—partially explains Black and Hispanic disparities from Whites in the odds of adolescent sexual debut, although the prevalence of female-headed households in neighborhoods appears to be the main driver in this domain. Likewise, accounting for neighborhood disadvantage reduces the Black-White and Hispanic-White disparity in the number of sexual partners, although less so relative to sexual debut. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

Neighborhoods and Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Adolescent Sexual Risk Behavior

Stay-at-home orders and the removal of care and domestic supports during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic substantially disrupted US parents? work and family lives. Although much is known about changes in US parents? paid labor arrangements, the evidence regarding changes in unpaid domestic labor has been largely anecdotal. This study uses novel data from 1,025 US parents in different-sex partnerships to provide a descriptive overview of changes in mothers? and fathers? participation in, and division of, housework and childcare from March 2020 to the early days of the pandemic (late April 2020). Findings show an overall increase in domestic responsibilities for mothers who were already doing most of the household labor. Still, both mothers and fathers report a general shift toward more egalitarian divisions of household labor, driven by increases in fathers? contributions. The shift toward more egalitarian sharing of domestic labor is observed across demographic groups and across types of domestic tasks. Consistent with findings from other countries, egalitarian divisions of domestic labor increased among U.S. parents during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Mothers, nonetheless, report retaining primary responsibility for domestic labor in the majority of families.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/soin.12459

Daniel L. Carlson

Papers

A Gendered Pandemic: Childcare, Homeschooling, and Parents’ Employment During COVID-19

US Couples’ Divisions of Housework and Childcare during COVID-19 Pandemic

Family Structure and the Intergenerational Transmission of Gender Ideology

Neighborhoods and Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Adolescent Sexual Risk Behavior

Changes in US Parents’ Domestic Labor During the Early Days of the COVID-19 Pandemic