Do parents have any important long-term effects on the development of their child's personality? This article examines the evidence and concludes that the answer is no. A new theory of development is proposed: that socialization is context-specific and that outside-the-home socialization takes place in the peer groups of childhood and adolescence. Intraand intergroup processes, not dyadic relationships, are responsible for the transmission of culture and for environmental modification of children's personality characteristics. The universality of children's groups explains why development is not derailed by the wide variations in parental behavior found within and between societies.

Where is the child's environment? A group socialization theory of development.

In a dynamic world, mechanisms allowing prediction of future situations can provide a selective advantage. We suggest that memory systems differ in the degree of flexibility they offer for anticipatory behavior and put forward a corresponding taxonomy of prospection. The adaptive advantage of any memory system can only lie in what it contributes for future survival. The most flexible is episodic memory, which we suggest is part of a more general faculty of mental time travel that allows us not only to go back in time, but also to foresee, plan, and shape virtually any specific future event. We review comparative studies and find that, in spite of increased research in the area, there is as yet no convincing evidence for mental time travel in nonhuman animals. We submit that mental time travel is not an encapsulated cognitive system, but instead comprises several subsidiary mechanisms. A theater metaphor serves as an analogy for the kind of mechanisms required for effective mental time travel. We propose that future research should consider these mechanisms in addition to direct evidence of future-directed action. We maintain that the emergence of mental time travel in evolution was a crucial step towards our current success.

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The evolution of foresight: What is mental time travel, and is it unique to humans?

The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.

Although the inverse relationship between the number of siblings and childrens educational performance has been well established explanations for this relationship remain primitive. One explanation resource dilution posits that parents have finite levels of resources (time energy money etc.) and that these resources are diluted among children as sibship size increases. I provide a more rigorous investigation of the dilution model than previous studies testing its implications with a sample of 24599 eighth graders from the 1988 [U.S.] National Education Longitudinal Study. My analyses support the resource dilution model in three ways. First the availability of parental resources decreases as the number of siblings increases net of controls....Second parental resources explain most or all of the inverse relationship between sibship size and educational outcomes. Finally interactions between sibship size and parental resources support the dilution model as children benefit less from certain parental resources when they have many versus few siblings. (EXCERPT)

When bigger is not better: family size, parental resources, and children's educational performance*

Preface Development Research Techniques Social Research: Genesis and Scope Research Process Sampling and Sample Size Estimation Data Analysis Multivariate Analysis Data Analysis Using Quantitative Software Population, Health and Nutrition Education Water and Sanitation Poverty, Inequality and Rural Development Environment and Natural Resource Management Appendices Bibliography Index

Quantitative Social Research Methods

A recent review of 306 child nutrition surveys from developing countries concluded that evidence on sex differentials in undernutrition does not support the notion that antifemale bias in intrahousehold food allocation and health care is causing excess female undernutrition. As Marcoux noted “the statistical evidence tells us that where detectable differences by sex exist boys usually fare worse than girls by anthropometric indicators.” Sommerfelt and Arnold (1998) reached a similar conclusion after reviewing evidence on sex differentials in stunting underweight and wasting from 41 Demographic and Health Surveys. Sommerfelt and Piani (1997) examined sex differences in immunization coverage in 28 countries that participated in Demographic and Health Surveys during 1990–94 and found a “slight tendency for vaccination coverage to be somewhat higher among girls than among boys.” A detailed review of literature on intrahousehold distribution of food found little evidence of discrimination against girls in feeding. Basu drawing on field data from India and a review of literature on household allocation of food in South Asia where antifemale discrimination is believed to be widespread found little evidence of discrimination against girls. Analyzing data from a national survey in India Mishra et al. (1999) found that boys and girls were about equally likely to be stunted and underweight but boys were slightly more likely than girls to be wasted. Schoenbaum et al. (1995) also found no consistent evidence of differences by sex in feeding or nutritional status among children aged 0–18 months in the Gaza Strip. (excerpt)

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Sex Differentials in Childhood Feeding, Health Care, and Nutritional Status in India

It is now more than 2 decades since the own-children method of fertility estimation was 1st developed and applied to census data to obtain estimates of differential fertility for the US. The own-children method has become a standard tool in the demographers repertoire of indirect fertility estimation technics; the method has been applied most extensively in Asia Latin America and the US. The own-children method of fertility estimation is a reverse-survival technic for estimating age-specific birth rates for years previous to a census or household survey. This book 1) provides a concise summary of the own-children methodology and problems of application and 2) spells out step-by-step procedures for applying the methodology. Recent extensions of the own-children method include estimation of age-parity-specific birth rates age-specific birth rates for currently married women birth rates by age and duration since 1st marriage for ever-married women and age-specific birth rates for men. The ability to reconstruct statistically valid birth history data from census and large-scale household surveys promises to open vast new areas for fertility research. The own-children method has several strengths: 1) the method is useful in less developed countries where vital registration often is seriously deficient; 2) own-children estimates of fertility can be tabulated by whatever characteristics are recorded in the census or household survey; 3) the method ordinarily requires no new data collection and is therefore inexpensive to apply; 4) the large size of the census or household survey samples to which the own-children method is typically applied relative to the small sample size of the tyical fertility survey; and 5) the own-children estimates of age-specific birth rates derived for each year during the 15 year estimation period immediately preceding the census or survey do not suffer from age truncation.

The own-children method of fertility estimation

According to births in the past year as reported in Chinas 2000 census the total fertility rate (TFR) in China was 1.22 children per woman in 2000 (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2002). There is considerable debate about the accuracy of this figure however with alternative estimates as high as 1.8 children per woman (Scharping 2003a 2003b). The outcome of this debate bears directly on the question of how effective Chinas one-child family policy has been in recent years. To assess more accurately the recent in Chinas fertility (including but not limited to the year 2000) we apply the own- children method of fertility estimation to both the 1990 and 2000 censuses. The own-children method provides two estimated fertility trends--one from each census--for the 15 years prior to each census. The two trends overlap during the period 1986-90. Were the data completely accurate the two trends would coincide during the period of overlap but we find that they do not coincide. Analysis of the pattern of discrepancies provides the basis for improving the estimates of the TFR for 1990 and 2000. We also examine another set of estimates derived by applying the birth history reconstruction method of fertility estimation to the two censuses. Birth history reconstruction is an extension of the own-children method. The fertility measures considered include age-specific fertility rates (ASFRs) and a TFR calculated from ASFRs (TFR(-asfr) usually denoted simply as TFR) as well as period parity progression ratios (PPPRs) and a total fertility rate calculated from PPPRs (TFR(-pppr)). Using both of these measures of total fertility we also assess how much of the decline in fertility during the 1990s is accounted for by later marriage and less marriage and how much by falling fertility within marriage. As will be seen the results of this decomposition of fertility decline into components depend on our assessment of how fertility has really declined. We also provide estimates of differential fertility by urban/rural residence education ethnicity and migration status as well as estimates of how fertility by these characteristics has changed over time. (excerpt)

How Far Has Fertility in China Really Declined

Confluence theory was originally developed to explain the negative effect of birth order on intelligence, as well as some peculiar effects of birth order on the intelligence of last-born children, in a large set of Dutch data. Subsequently the theory was elaborated to explain positive effects and nonlinear relationships between birth order and intelligence in other data sets. We test the mathematicalform of the theory using aggregate data, between-family data, and within-family data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study and find no support for the theory. Fundamentalflaws are identified in the statistical methods used tofit the model to the Dutch data. When the analysis is done correctly, the fit is very poor. An alternative analysis based on a within-family study design that uses sibling pairs indexed by birth order in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Studyfinds no evidence of birth order effects on intelligence.

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Birth Order and Intelligence: Further Tests of the Confluence Model

The major purpose of this study is to examine the association between the measured intelligence and fertility of over 9,000 persons who graduated high school in Wisconsin in 1957. Various measures of association are considered, including the IQ selection differential, which provides an estimate of what the generational change in mean IQ would be if, hypothetically, each child in the birth histories had the same IQ as the mean of its parents’ IQ's. This is calculated not only for graduates but also, more realistically, for the complete cohort, including dropouts. The IQ selection differential for the complete cohort is estimated to be eight‐tenths of an IQ point decline in a generation. The contribution of females to this decline is estimated to be almost five times greater than the contribution of males. The value of eight‐tenths may be viewed as an upper bound of the generational decline in mean genotypic IQ for this cohort and its offspring. An educated guess, based partly on genetic models and...

Robert D. Retherford

Papers

Sex Differentials in Childhood Feeding, Health Care, and Nutritional Status in India

The own-children method of fertility estimation

How Far Has Fertility in China Really Declined

Birth Order and Intelligence: Further Tests of the Confluence Model

Intelligence and family size reconsidered.