Grandparents & Family Crisis

When family crisis occurs, are grandparents part of the solution or part of the problem? Both possibilities have been advanced in a spate of recent books and articles about intergenerational relations. Some authors have urged grandparents to take a more active role inn helping to solve the family\u27s problems, while others have called for legislation to help ease the effects on grandparents of crises such as divorce. However, a national study of grandparents that we recently completed, to be published by Basic Books this September (Cherlin and Furstenberg, 1986), suggests that most grandparents are unlikely to become either the saviors of the family of the helpless victims of family disruption. Our study consisted of interviews conducted in 1983 with the grandparents of a nationally representative sample of children who had been interviewed previously in 1976 and 1981, yielding a unique, three-generational national survey. The study indicated that grandparents play a limited but important role in family dynamics. This role prevents them from becoming major forces in their grandchildren\u27s lives, but it also provides them with ways of avoiding some of the severe shocks of family crisis

Living Together Apart in France and the United States

Union formation involves a number of stages, as does union dissolution, and new couples often spend an initial period in a noncohabiting intimate relationship. Yet while certain couples never share the same dwelling, "living apart together"(1) has not developed widely as a long-term lifestyle option. Claude MARTIN in France, and Andrew CHERLIN and Caitlin CROSS-BARNET in the United States have studied a symmetrical phenomenon, that of couples who continue to live together while considering themselves to be separated. In this article, they draw together their analyses to describe an arrangement which, while marginal, reveals situations where residential separation is not possible, either because of the need to keep up appearances, often for the children's sake, or because total separation is too frightening or living in separate homes is unaffordable. Beyond the differences between the two countries and the two survey fields, the authors analyse the ways in which persons who "live together apart" describe their loveless relationship that has led to explicit conjugal separation within a shared home.La formation des couples est un processus qui connaît des étapes, et il en va de même pour leur dissolution. Le début de la vie en couple passe souvent par une période de " conjugalité non cohabitante ". Mais, bien que certains couples ne partagent jamais le même logement, " vivre en couple chacun chez soi "(1) ne s'est guère développé comme mode de vie durable. Claude Martin en France, Andrew Cherlin et Caitlin Cross-Barnet aux États-Unis, se sont intéressés à un phénomène symétrique des couples non cohabitants, celui des couples qui continuent à vivre ensemble bien qu'ils se considèrent comme séparés. Ils rassemblent ici leurs analyses pour décrire un phénomène qui, s'il reste également marginal, révèle des situations dans lesquelles la séparation résidentielle n'est pas possible, soit pour maintenir la fiction du couple, notamment pour les enfants, soit par crainte des difficultés qu'entraînerait une rupture complète ou pour des raisons matérielles liées aux difficultés de logement dues à la " rupture résidentielle ". Au-delà des différences entre les deux pays et les terrains d'enquête, ils analysent la manière dont ces personnes qui " vivent ensemble séparés " décrivent leur situation dans laquelle la disparition du sentiment amoureux conduit à une séparation conjugale explicite dans une résidence commun

Does religion make a difference? : assessing the effects of Christian affiliation and practice on marital solidarity and divorce in Britain, 1985-2005

Marital breakdown rates were examined among 15,714 adults from the British Social Attitudes dataset for 1985-2005. Separation and divorce peaked at around 50 years of age, and increased significantly over the period of study. Ratios of separation or divorce were compared between respondents who had no religious affiliation and (a) Christian affiliates who attended church at least once a month, (b) Christian affiliates who attended church, but less than once a month, and (c) Christian affiliates who never attended church. The results showed that active Christians were 1.5 times less likely to suffer marital breakdown than non-affiliates, but there was no difference between affiliates who never attended church and those of no religion. Christians who attended infrequently were 1.3 times less likely to suffer marital breakdown compared to non-affiliates, suggesting that even infrequent attendance at church may have some significance for predicting the persistence of martial solidarity

Parental Divorce in Childhood and Demographic Outcomes in Young Adulthood

We investigated the long-term effects of parental divorce in childhood on demographic outcomes in young adulthood, using a British longitudinal national survey of children. Our analyses control for predisruption characteristics of the child and the family, including emotional problems, cognitive achievement, and socioeconomic status. The results show that by age 23, those whose parents divorced were more likely to leave home because of friction, to cohabit, and to have a child outside marriage than were those whose parents did not divorce. Young adults whose parents divorced, however, were no more or less likely to marry or to have a child in a marriage. Moreover, even in the divorced group, the great majority did not leave home because of friction or have a child outside marriage.NICH

The Changing Nature of Poverty

Since the beginning of the War on Poverty, the poverty rate has fluctuated widely, and at the same time the poverty population has undergone many changes, some mirroring the changing stereotypes of the poor and others less pronounced than the changing stereotypes would lead us to believe. A feminization of poverty has occurred, with many more of the poor now in households headed by women. Interestingly, aging of the poverty population has not occurred despite growth in the elderly segment of the overall population. Concerning turnover in the poverty population, we find that despite poverty theories emphasizing persistence, recurrent poverty is relatively rare and poverty is not generally passed from one generation to the next. Poverty prevention has come from both economic growth and government transfers; however, inequality in economic growth has contributed to poverty. With the proportion of elderly and female- headed households likely to continue at a high level into the future, poverty rates are also likely to remain high unless government transfers are increased.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/66979/2/10.1177_000271628547900103.pd

The Ups and Downs in Women's Employment: Shifting Composition or Behavior from 1970 to 2010?

This paper tracks factors contributing to the ups and downs in women’s employment from 1970 to 2010 using regression decompositions focusing on whether changes are due to shifts in the means (composition of women) or due to shifts in coefficients (inclinations of women to work for pay). Compositional shifts in education exerted a positive effect on women’s employment across all decades, while shifts in the composition of other family income, particularly at the highest deciles, depressed married women’s employment over the 1990s contributing to the slowdown in this decade. A positive coefficient effect of education was found in all decades, except the 1990s, when the effect was negative, depressing women’s employment. Further, positive coefficient results for other family income at the highest deciles bolstered married women’s employment over the 1990s. Models are run separately for married and single women demonstrating the varying results of other family income by marital status. This research was supported in part by an Upjohn Institute Early Career Research Award

Determinants of Minority-White Differentials in Child Poverty

This paper uses data from the 1993-2001 March Current Population Survey to estimate the extent to which child living arrangements, parental work patterns, and immigration attributes shape racial and ethnic variation in child poverty. Results from multivariate analyses and a standardization technique reveal that parental work patterns as well as child living arrangements are especially consequential for black and Puerto-Rican economic circumstances. Child immigration generation and parental length of residence seem to play a detrimental role in shaping poverty among Asian, Mexican, and Central/South American children. We also found that the extent to which differences in the composition of and returns to parental resources determine white-minority economic gaps varies substantially across racial and ethnic lines. The social and economic implications of the findings for understanding racial and ethnic inequality are discussed in the final section of the article