1

PARENTS AND CHILDREN

The first part of our lives is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.
--Clarence Darrow
Penelope Leach found that the average time spent between parent and child has
dropped forty percent between 1973 and 1993. In his 1981 book New Rules,
Daniel Yankelovich wrote that "one of the most far-reaching changes in [moral]
norms relates to what parents believe they owe their children and what their
children owe them. ...The overall pattern is clear: today's parents expect to
make fewer sacrifices for their children than in the past, but they also demand
less from their offspring in the form of future obligations than their parents
demanded of them....Sixty-seven percent believe that 'children do not have an
obligation to their parents regardless of what their parents have done for
them'"(p.86). (Visit Parenttime and see the responses of experts when asked "How Parenting
Has Changed over the Century." )
Of the nearly 16.5 million births to ever-married women that
occurred from 1983 through 1988, approximately 5.8 million, or
35 percent, were unintended. Of those, about 30 percent were
unwanted, and the other 70 percent were mistimed (wanted at a later time). Statistics from a
recent National Survey of Family Growth reveal an apparent increase in unwanted births for
the first time since the widespread acceptance of the most effective methods of contraception.

Yahoo's directory of Parenting sites

Childstats.gov: "The official web site of the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and
Family Statistics" and source of Americas Children: 1999
"Trends in the Well-Being of America's Children and Youth 1998" (Dept. of Health and
Human Services)
Family Influences on Adolescence and Changes in Family Relationships from Penn State

ParentTime Guided Tour

Parenting on the Web
Michigan Electronic Library's "Children and Families"
Early Childhood Research and Practice (refereed e-journal)
ERIC Clearinghouse on Elementary and Early Childhood Education
The ABCs of Parenting
Baby Web: The Internet Parenting Resource
National Parent Information Network
ParenthoodWeb -- The new WWW community for parents and prospective parents
Deadbeat Dads Network
ParentNews
International Fertility Rates of Women 15-19: UNESCO
Foster Parent Home Page/Foster Care Providers
Single Parenting in the Nineties: Home Page
Facts for Families: Educating parents and families about psychiatric disorders affecting
children
UTTM: Parenting Points

TO HAVE OR NOT TO HAVE?

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In the 1970s, roughly 50,000 parents responded to a query by advice columnist Ann
Landers, who asked whether, if given the choice again, they would have children.
Seventy percent said no, that it wasn't worth it. Was this depressing feedback a function
of the times? biased in terms of who reads Ann Landers? or was it possibly the result of
only unhappy parents taking the time and energy to respond? Are the sociobiologists
correct in claiming that creatures must be tricked into assuming the incredible energies
required to raise the next generation?

As the family transformed from being a unit of production to being a unit of

consumption, children were no longer to be viewed as economic assets but rather as
liabilities. With this historic change, coupled with the commodification of so many
aspects of family life, it should come as no surprise that a price tag has been affixed to
the cost of having children. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture--yes, the
same folks who tell you about breeding poultry, rabbits, and livestock--the cost of
raising through the age of seventeen (college bills are an "optional") a child born in
1996 will be $149,820 ($160,140 for one born in 1999)--or just about one million dollars
for the McCaugheys, the Iowa parents of septuplets. In 1960, when the folks at
Washington first made such calculations, the tab was $25,229. Click here for the 19951999 annual reports, "Expenditures on Children by Families" (pdf file format).
Suffering from sticker shock? When framing parenting as some expensive hobby--all for
someone who doesn't write home when an adult--it would seem most rational
economically to raise cats or dogs. As far as I know, the government does not compute
the returns on this investment. Some, however, do. In the state of Texas in legal cases
involving the negligent death of an adult child, the parents can sue the guilty party for
the value of the "kindness and attention" that their deceased child would have given
them for the remainder of their lives. </B< P>
In NORC's 1994 General Social Survey, Americans were asked "People who never had
children lead empty lives--do you agree or disagree?" Below are the responses:

RESPONSE

CUM %

STRONGLY AGREE

3.5%

3.5%

AGREE

15.8% 19.4%

NEITHER

27.6% 46.9%

DISAGREE

39.6% 86.5%

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STRONGLY DISAGREE 13.5% 100%
TOTAL

1,353

Speaking of a variable that invites certain controls! What difference does actually being
a parent make? How did the sexes vary in their responses? How do answers vary across
the life-cycle? </P< B>
PERCENT DISAGREEING CHILDLESS PEOPLE LIVE EMPTY LIVES
PARENT NO KIDS TOTAL
MALES

46%

71%

48%

FEMALES 50%

78%

56%

TOTAL

71%

53%

46%

Click here for fertility rates of American women 1810Click here for inquiries into the relative marital satisfactions of childless couples and
parents.

STRUCTURES OF FAMILIES WITH CHILDREN

According to the Urban Institute's 1997 National Survey of American Families, 63
percent of children live in two-parent, 27 percent in
one-parent, and 8 percent in blended families.
The Duke of Windsor noted "The thing that
impresses me most about America is the way
parents obey their children." Since the second
world war, many have observed the rise of childcentered, as opposed to adult-centered, families in
the United States. Associated with this trend are
such phenomena as the erosion of authority
and the proliferation of adults who have never had
to "grow up."

THINKING ABOUT SOCIALIZATION

In 2002, Public Agenda released its "A Lot Easier Said Than Done: Parents Talk About
Raising Children in Today's America" survey. Among the findings:
o
o

a large majority of parents say American society is an inhospitable climate for

raising children
nearly half the parents said they worry more about protecting their child from
negative social influences than they do about paying the bills or having enough
family time together
6 in 10 rate other parents only "fair" or "poor" in raising their children

Typically, socialization studies examine the effects of parenting on children. But

socialization is a two-way street, evidenced by the IQ drops of mothers with young
children. Click here to see the impact of having children on the political views of women
and men by educational level.

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Click here for childcare arrangements of working mothers, 1977-93.
Click here for further inquiries into the socialization process.
Click here for March 1997 Gallup Poll "America's relationship with their children:
Much remains the same

WHEN WILL THEY EVER LEAVE?

One much discussed demographic trend is how more young
adults are staying with their parents. By 1990, for instance, one
in three single American men between the ages of 25 and 34 was
living with one or both parents (Click here to see the percent of
25-34-year-old males and females living at home from 1960 to
1995). Some attribute the phenomenon to the high cost of living.
Others argue that with modernity's increases of life-expectancy
and social complexity there has been a concomitant prolongation
of adolescence and dependency. See Billie Frazier's annotated
bibliography on the subject.

FOCUSING ON THE PARENTS

One of the most far-reaching changes in [moral] norms relates to what parents
believe they owe their children and what their children owe them. ...The overall
pattern is clear: today's parents expect to make fewer sacrifices for their children
than in the past, but they also demand less from their offspring in the form of
future obligations than their parents demanded of them....Sixty-seven percent
believe that "children do not have an obligation to their parents regardless of
what their parents have done for them."
--Daniel Yankelovich, New Rules: Searching for Self-fulfillment in a World Turned Upside
Down, 1981:102

THE FATHER ROLE

By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who
thinks
he's
wrong.
--Charles Wadsworth
Percentage of Americans who say their best friend is their father: 0.
Rank of Father's Day among days on which the largest number of collect calls are made:
1.
--Harper's Magazine. "Harper's Index." (Sept. 1991, June 1994).
There is a story of Boswell, the famous biographer of Samuel Johnson. In his advanced
years, Boswell reflected on the most important day of his life. He said it occurred one
day during his youth, when his father had invited him to go fishing. While most of his
childhood days had long since been forgotten, during that one day Boswell said that he

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learned about what life was about through example. Some industrious historian decided
to track down the diary of Boswell's father to see how he reflected on that most
important day in the life of his famous son. The entry: "Went fishing today with my son.
A whole day wasted."
In many ways 1993 was the Year of the Father, evidenced by the massive media
attention to the role around Father's Day. The father role was featured as cover stories
of weekly news magazines. In October of 1993, Houston Oilers docked David Williams (a
five-year starter who made $2 million a year) $125,000 for failing to play in a game
against the New England Patriots because he stayed with his wife for the birth of their
first child. Two years later, President Clinton directed all Federal agencies to review their
programs with the goal of strengthening the father role. Click here to see the response
of the Department of Health and Human Services: "Fathering: The Man and the Family."

SPENDING TIME WITH DAD

The amount of waking time 4-year-old children spend alone with their fathers
each day compared with daily waking time in day care, according to a 1986-94
study by the Netherlands-based International Association for the Evaluation of
Educational Achievement.
COUNTRY

TIME WITH DAD

TIME IN DAYCARE

Belgium

30 minutes

6.8 hours

China

54 minutes

11 hours

Finland

48 minutes

6.8 hours

Germany

36 minutes

5 hours

Nigeria

42 minutes

7 hours

Portugal

24 minutes

8.8 hours

Spain

18 minutes

7 hours

Thailand

12 minutes

11 hours

United
States

42 minutes

5.6 hours

Elsewhere, we found that, when Americans were asked to rate the roles different adults
played in the lives of children, fathers came in a poor third--behind mothers and
grandparents--scoring roughly in the midpoint between the mean scores given to
mothers and to clergy, ministers, and rabbis.
How has dad become such a peripheral guy that the government now has to track down
his "deadbeat" contingent? Why do only three out of five American children live with
their biological fathers? Historians inform us that in colonial America it was the father
who was the primary socializer, particularly of young males. Carl Degler, for instance,
observes how, until the early 1800's, child-rearing manuals were not even addressed to
mothers. In these patriarchal times, the old man was, indeed, "king of his castle." His
children were his property (when they said that's "Joe's son," the statement was
referring to this property status and not a genetic connection). In the rare instances of
divorce, his custody of them was rarely challenged.
o

With industrialization and the bifurcation of public and private life, dads' primary
(and socially approved) activities were in the public realm of work while the
sphere of mothers' control was in the private realm of family life (referred to as
the "feminization of the domestic sphere"). Adequacy of one's performance of his
father role was largely judged on the basis of his "breadwinner" activities. In
1900, one observer noted how "the suburban husband and father" had become
"almost entirely a Sunday institution." To this day, corporate America advises the
new father not to take paternity leave if he is to be "taken seriously."

6
o

The role of "father" is dialectically related to roles of "mother"--which has

changed dramatically over the post-war years, dissolving the males' distinctive
(and authority- enhancing) role as primary wage earner --and "children"-- whose
status in the family historically shifted from being economic assets to economic
liabilities as the family transformed from being a unit of production to being a unit
of consumption.
Over the postwar era, as families have become increasingly leisure- and childoriented (at least within the middle-class), instead of serving as a role model in
dealing with the public realm, fathers now often sit on the sidelines to view their
children's performances in sports and in the arts.

There are, however, signs of change:

o
o

nowadays, more than 90 percent of fathers are present in the delivery room,
compared to almost none thirty years earlier.
according to a 1993 report issued by the Population Reference Bureau (authored
by Martin O'Connell of the Census Bureau), fathers are the primary care givers for
one in five preschoolers whose mothers work.
there is a growing market for fathering "self-help" books and websites, with such
titles as How to Father, Expectant Father, Pregnant Fathers, The Birth of a Father,
Fathers Almanac, Father Power, and How to Father a Successful Daughter>

Implications of Fatherlessness
A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken
families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male
authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future--that
community
asks
for
and
gets
chaos.
--Patrick Moynihan, 1965
What are the consequences of 37% of America's children sleeping in homes where their
natural fathers don't live? Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Louis
Sullivan observed in 1994 that "Children who do not live with a mother and father are
more likely to be high school dropouts, more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol and more
likely to be dependent on welfare than children who live with both biological parents."
By the mid-1990s, 46% of families with children headed by single mothers were living
below the poverty line, compared with 8% of children living with two parents.
Elsewhere we examined the overall effects of divorce on children, but what are the
direct consequences of not having a father? Mothers and fathers are complementary and
not interchangeable roles. Fathers are not substitute mothers. Among the speculations
and findings:
o
o
o

absence of role modeling for young males;

higher risks for males of having low esteem and being emotionally rigid;
in Nancy Gibbs Time magazine cover story "Bringing Up Father" (June 28,
1993:52- 61), it was reported how some researchers find mothers' love to be
unconditional while that of fathers is more qualified and tied to performance, and
how mothers are more likely to be worried about their children's survival while
fathers are more likely to be concerned about their future success.

Yahoo's directory of Fathering sites

Nurturing Fatherhood: Improving Data and Research on Male Fertility, Family Formation
and Fatherhood
The World Wide Web Virtual Library: Fatherhood and Fatherlessness
National Center for Fathering
Joseph Peck's "Balancing Work and Family: Fathers who live with their families are
spending more time with their children. At the same time, more fathers are not living
with their families" Scientific American, June 1999

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National Fatherhood Initiative
National Fathers Network
American Coalition for Fathers and Children
Fatherhood: The Parent Role (U. Akron School of Family & Consumer Sciences)
Yahoo! - Society and Culture:Holidays:Fathers Day
FatherWork:Stories & Ideas to Encourage Generative Fathering
Full-Time Dads Home Page
At-Home Dad-- a quarterly newsletter

THE MOTHER ROLE

Every mother is a judge who sentences her children for the sins of the father.
--Rebecca West
After a touchdown is made and the camera focuses on the
scorer, what is it the football player says to millions of viewers?
It's "Hi Mom!" Indeed, the link uniting mother and son may well
be Western society's most powerful social bond, perhaps the
prototype of all future bonds. In The Moral Sense, James Q.
Wilson develops how it is disproportionately the mother's task to
establish the bonding process that makes human society
possible.
Given the centrality of the mother role, what is to be made of the
media's tendency to report its negative as opposed to its
positive role models? Recently, there was the Susan Smith story,
accompanied by such statistics as how children under the age of
nine comprise some 5 percent of American homicides, most
often the victims of their mothers. In Detroit in late 1995, a 15year-old boy who had been missing for at least 6 months was
found by police. He had been given to a drug-dealer by his
mother to settle a $1000 crack debt.
What various reasons, there
is a sense of decline in
the quality of mothering
among
contemporary
mothers. According to a
1997 Pew Foundation
study ("Mother Today--A
Tougher Job, Less Ably
Done), more than one-half of American women say mothers of children under 18 are
doing a worse job as parents than their own mothers did. To the question whether of
whether increasing numbers of mothers working outside the home is a good or bad thing
for society, beliefs in the latter consistently increase with education. In 2002, in a study
released by Child Development magazine and based on data from the National Institute
of Child Health & Human Development Study of Early Child Care (Jeanne Brooks lead
author), it was reported that early maternal employment was correlated with slower
child development.
Yahoo - Society and Culture:Gender Issues:Women:Mothering
Motherheart
Mothers At Home
Lesbian Moms Web Page
Yahoo! - Society and Culture:Holidays:Mothers Day

ON CHILDREN HAVING CHILDREN

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During the late 1980s and into the early 1990s, the
federal government reported rising rates of teen-age
pregnancy. Two-thirds of these births are to
unmarried mothers (compared to 15% in 1960). And
over one-quarter of these teenage mothers become
pregnant again within two years. What will be the
fate of the half-million children born each year to
mothers 15 to 19 years of age? Observed Marian
Wright Edelman, Children's Defense Fund president,
"Teen-age childbearing too often launches both
mother and child into a lifetime cycle of poverty and
dependency."
The United States leads the developed nations in its
incidence of pregnancy among girls ages 15 through
19 (fertility rates were actually higher in 1957 than
today), even though American adolescents are no
more sexually active. Because teen mothers are more
likely to be poorly educated and less likely to receive
proper prenatal care and to eat properly during their pregnancies, they deliver twice the
rate of low-birth weight (less than 2,500 grams, which is the case for 7.1% of all U.S.
births--the highest rate among developed nations) babies.
According to a study sponsored by the Robin Hood Foundation, American taxpayers will
spend nearly $7 billion in 1996 to deal with the social problems resulting from recent
births by girls under the age of 18. Number of births per 1,000 women aged 15-19,19901995
Country

Fertility
rate

Country

Fertility
rate

Japan

Belarus

28

Switzerland 5

Poland

28

Netherlands 7

Iceland

29

France

Slovenia

30

Italy

Croatia

32

Belgium

10

Lithuania

32

Denmark

10

Bosnia/Herz.

33

Malta

12

United Kingdom 33

Spain

12

Estonia

34

Finland

13

Latvia

35

Germany

13

New Zealand

35

Luxembour
13
g

Russian Fed.

37

Sweden

13

Moldova

38

Albania

14

Hungary

41

Ireland

16

Romania

41

Norway

19

TFYR Macedonia 41

Israel

20

Ukraine

43

Australia

21

Yugoslavia

43

Greece

22

Slovakia

44

Austria

23

Czech Rep.

46

Portugal

25

Bulgaria

59

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Canada

27

United States

64

SOURCE United Nations Population Division, World Population Prospects: The 1994
Revision, 1994.
Teenage Pregnancy (E. F. Jones et al., 1985)

SINGLE PARENTING

According to federal statistics, the birth rate of unwed mothers soared by more than 83
percent between 1983 and 1999. Unwed mothers now account for 33 percent of all
births in the United States. In 2000, 69% of American children lived with both parents,
22% only with their mothers, 4% only with their fathers, and 4% with neither parent
(about half of whom live with grandparents). Among blacks, only 38% of children were
living with both parents and 49% only with their mothers. Of all families with children,
single-parent families constitute 24 percent of all white families, 35 percent of all
Hispanic families, and 63 percent of all black families. Click here to see breakdown of
single parent groups by race, sex of householder, and marital status.

FACTOID
In 2001, according to the American Association for Single People
(Glendale, CA), thirteen states still refer to children born out of wedlock
"bastards."
Poverty rates are significantly related to the number of parents present. If in 1992 a
child lived within a two-parent household the family's median income was $43,578,
compared with $12,073 if within a mother-only family. Mother-headed households are
the fastest growing group of Americans living at or below the poverty level. Percent of
children living below the poverty line, 1990-1992

Country

Children
in Children
in
twosolo
parent family mother family

Sweden

2.2

5.2

Denmark

2.5

7.3

Finland

1.9

7.5

Belgium

3.2

10.0

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Italy

9.5

13.9

Norway

1.9

18.4

Netherlands 3.1

39.5

Canada

7.4

50.2

Australia

7.7

56.2

United
States

11.1

59.5

SOURCE Luxembourg Income Study, Working Paper No. 127. The poverty line is defined
as 50% of national median income after taxes and transfers.
Single Parenting in the Nineties: Home Page
Brookings policy paper "An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Births in the U.S.
Single Mothers by Choice: Home Page

ADOPTION AND FOSTER PARENTING

Welcome to Adoption Online Connection
AdoptINFO
daily diary of an adoptee searching for biological parent
birthquest adoption adoptee adopt birth
Foster Parent Home Page/Foster Care Providers

SURROGATE MOTHERS

WAS THERE EVER A GOLDEN AGE OF CHILDHOOD?

In 1917, two children under the legal working age were found
working in a factory where they labored more than the legal
number of hours. Their father needed them in the labor force in
order to provide for the family. A judge ruled that the Child Labor
Act was invalid in this situation and that the father had the right
to exploit his own sons.
Contrary to popular conceptions, there may well have been no
"Golden Age" of childhood. It certainly is not the present. A 1994
report prepared for the Carnegie Corporation of New York found
the U.S. ranking near the bottom of the industrialized nations in
providing such services as universal health care, subsidized child
care, and extensive work leaves for families with children under
age 3. Between 1960 and 1990, it found the following changes:
CHILDREN'S SITUATION

1960

199
0

Born to unwed mothers

5%

28
%

Under 3 living with 1 parent

7%

27
%

Under 18 experiencing divorce

<
1%

50
%

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Mothers returning to work before
53
17%
child 1
%
Living below poverty line

27%

21
%

Administration for Children and Families

Youth Indicators: Trends in the Well-Being of American Youth
National Center for Children in Poverty
National Archives of Child Abuse/Neglect
Children's Defense Fund
Children, Youth and Family
Child Advocacy
Michigan Electronic Library: Children and Families
Children
Youth and Children Resource Net
KidSource OnLine Welcome Page
Corporations:Child Care

THE SIBLING BOND

Over the past decade or so there has been renewed interest in sibling relationships,
evidenced by a new genre of books like Mom Loved You Best (William Hapworth, Mada
Hapworth, and Joan Heilman), Jane Mirsky Leder's Brothers and Sisters: How They
Shape Our Lives, and Francine Klagsbrun's Mixed Feelings: Love, Hate, Rivalry and
Reconciliation Among Brothers and Sisters. This interest may reflect the increasing
importance of this bond in this era of smaller families, working parents, divorce and
"blended" families, and diminishing interactions with extended family members. It may
also reflect the insight that sibling relationships may be the prototypical model for
eventual interactions with strangers, particularly peers. One wonders, who ultimately
has the greater socialization influence: parents or siblings?
Often this relationship has been described in terms of rivalry, featuring sibling
competitions for parental attention and approval. Longitudinal studies indicate that such
contests wane after adolescence, with growing adulthood bonds particularly between
siblings close in age and of the same sex, and later increases when aging parents need
care and disputes over inheritance arise. What needs to be stressed are the cognitive
and social skills developed in these relationships.
Among the findings in Klagsbrun's Mixed Feelings (1992):
o
o
o

only 17 percent said that they "weren't close at all" to their siblings;
84% said one or both of their parents had shown favoritism when they were
growing up;
when perceptions were that the respondents' mother had a favorite, two-thirds of
the men and slightly more than one-quarter of the women felt favored by her.
When respondents believed their father had a favorite, 62 percent of women and
49 percent of the men felt they were the favored one;
sister-sister relationships were closer to brother-brother and sister-brother
relations.

According to the NORC 1977-94 General Social Surveys, of those with a sibling the
following percentages of men and women responded at least once a month to the
question "How often do you spend a social evening with a brother or sister?"
PERCENT SPENDING A SOCIAL EVENING WITH A SIBLING AT LEAST ONCE A MONTH
AGE
18-29

MALES FEMALES
62.7%

68.1%

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30-39

49.2%

52.2%

40-49

33.3%

46.0%

50-59

32.5%

39.8%

60-69

34.0%

43.2%

70-79

32.5%

40.4%

80+

18.3%

30.8%

TOTAL

42.2%

50.6%

Download site of Robert Mare and Robert Hauser's 1994 Study of American Families,
examining sibling similarities

BIRTH ORDER EFFECTS

Return to Family Index