PS370: Family Demographics

Family

A group of two or more people connected by blood, adoption, marriage, or choice, who may rely on each other for social, emotional, and financial support

Family structures

• How many members it has

• Whether people are married

• Their ages

• Other demographic variables

Family processes

• Caring

• Sharing

• Communication

• Discipline and Support

The Standard North American Family

• Term coined by sociologist Dorothy Smith (1993) which refers to homemaker wife, working husband, two children

• Not just structure - Ideological standard

• Not clear this was ever the ‘standard

National Survey of Families and Households, compared quality of family
relationships in adoptive households

Research Tested Four Theories:
1. Stigmatization leads to poor outcomes
2. Socialization by two parents is optimal
3. Primacy of biological ties
4. Importance of family processes

Modern family

Dual earner household where roles and responsibilities still may be unequal

Postmodern family

• Deconstruction or transformation of at least one aspect of
  traditional SNAF roles

• Egalitarian gender roles, differing views on marriage

Endogamy

endorsement of in-group

Exogamy

endorsement of out-group

Polygamy

one man, many partners

Polyandry

one woman, many partners

Complexity of family life (Cherlin; Smock and Schwartz)

• Demography provides description of family life using large representative data sets like the Census

• Demographers have documented significant changes in the family life of Americans over the last decades.

• Cherlin suggests a divergence of family patterns of Americans according to education and income.

Researchers are increasingly recognizing…

• Changes in views of family-related institutions (e.g., marriage)

• Changing rates of divorce and remarriage

• Economic stagnation effects on low-income families

• Rising cohabitation rates and families extending across households

• “Growing disconnect between families and households”

What drives the evolution of the family?

• Education: value of education, gender equity

• Income: Dollar doesn’t go as far…20% less than individual 20 years ago with comparable education, etc

Marriage markets

• Cherlin suggests 3 submarkets:

  • One for the college educated

  • one for the least educated

  • one for those with a high school degree and some college.

Selection of marital partner

• Who one marries depends on one’s education more than in the past

• Religion was of greater significance for choosing spouse than today

• College grads mostly separated themselves from the rest of the marriage market now

Divorce

• Rates appear to be declining from their peak in 1980

• Appear to be diverging divorce rate—college educated divorce rates decreasing, while staying the same or increasing among less educated

• Still, lifetime probability around 40%-50% (estimates always include people who may divorce in future)

• Second (67%) and third (73%) marriages are more likely to end in divorce. Also differences by state.

Interconnectedness of Education, Marriage and Childbearing

• 93% of women with a college degree giving birth were married; 71% of women with some college were married; 57% of women with a high school degree; and 39% of women without a high school degree

• Less educated men and women are increasingly having children prior to marriage

Cohabitation

Relationships seem less stable in the US: while over 20% of married couples separate or divorce within 5 years after marriage; 50% of cohabiting couples separate after 5 years of the beginning of the relationship

Social tools for regulating family structure

• Endogamy vs. exogamy

• Polygamy vs. polyandry

• Patriarchy vs. matriarchy

Early adulthood

• New demographic transition

• What drives this new transition?

  • Education, wages

• Consequences

  • Delayed decisions of about marriage and children

  • Changing views on things like cohabiting, shared purchases (homes), etc.

Labor force participation

• Increased among women but declined among men.

• Increased access to education

• Greater access to contraception, more choice

Population projections in US

• Relatively high fertility rate in US compared to other developed countries

• Fertility rate in US (expected number of children a woman would give birth to in her lifetime) was 2.1 in 2006 (which is the level required to replace the population), but not it is 1.6 in 2025

Global fertility rates

• Global fertility rate in 2021 was 2.3 (above replacement level of 2.1) but lower than in 1990 (3.2)

• In high-income countries, fertility rates for women of all age groups have declined since 1950; in low-income countries, fertility rates are steadily declining for all age groups.

• China, Thailand, and Ukraine are among 39 countries and territories projected to have smaller populations by 2050.

• Consequences of inverted age structure?

Pregnancy and birth trends across Australia, the US, and the UK

• Inverted U adverse outcomes

• Increases in gestational diabetes, hypertensive disorders, c-sections

• But also increased access to prenatal care

• Lack of paid leave may contribute to differences in breastfeeding rates in USA

Aging

• The percentage of older Americans willrise sharply to a projected 19% in 2030

• What will the role of your parents be in your family?

• Our parents generation are

  • Living longer and healthier

  • Have an active role in supporting their children and grandchildren (42% responded they are currently responsible for most of the basic
    needs of one or more of their grandchildren)

• What happens when older persons need care themselves?

• Who pays tax in a massively aged world?

• Who pays for healthcare for the elderly?

• Who looks after the elderly? Will people still be able to retire from work?

Cultural tightness

• Strength of social norms and tolerance for norm-violating behavior within a society (Gelfand et al. 2006)

  • Tight cultures historically have: Higher population density, dependence on agriculture, higher rates of natural disasters, resource scarcity, external
    threats

The Families and Children’s Experiences (FACE) of COVID-19 Study

• Children’s emotional lability (e.g., low frustration tolerance,
  difficulty soothing, emotion dysregulation)

• Provides insight into core regulatory processes implicated in a host of outcomes (e.g., psychopathology, social
  relationships, academic success)
  1. Examine changes in children’s emotion lability across 3
  months of the pandemic and whether these trajectories
  vary across cultures
  2. Examine influences of restrictive and nurturing parenting
  on trajectories of children’s emotion lability and whether
  these trajectories vary across cultures
  3. Examine if restrictive and nurturing parenting interact to
  predict trajectories of children’s emotion lability and
  whether these trajectories vary across cultures

Child emotion lability in loose vs. tight cultures

• Children show reductions in lability over time.

• The decline is steeper in loose countries.

• Parenting predicts these changes differently as a function of culture

Acculturation stress

anxiety that individuals feel when attempting to assimilate a different culture

Extended families as supports

• Extended family (cousins, aunts, uncles) often integral part of family system

• Co-parenting roles sometimes filled by grandmothers, aunts, friends

• Co-parents can be residential or non-residential

• Positive role of and instrumental support from non-residential co-
  parents

Institutional access to resources

• Reduced access to resources (38% of Black Children live in poverty compared to 13% of white children; 14% have low birth weight compared to 6%)

• Institutional Support (e.g., health care, education

Children’s living arrangements

• Policies drugs and sentencing influence on families

• Starting in the late 1960s, policies contributed to sharp increase in the overall percentage of children living in single-parent homes

• For many children, life extended across two households

• Massive increase in incarceration impacted family structure, particularly for Black and African American children (1 in 4 born in 1990 had a parent imprisoned by the time they were 14)

• American children are more likely to experience instability in parental partnerships and household structure by age 15 than children in other Western countries

• 146,635 children who are US citizens have had a parent detained. 22,000 experienced detention of all co-resident parents.

Stress and allostasis-induced brain plasticity

• Our body has evolved to have resources that it can allocate when we need them, ie. the heart moves oxygenated blood but will move more when you run

• Body’s response should look a certain way, undergo “repeated hits” over time, ie. child growing up in abusive home, body will adapt in a way that reduces exposure to those stress hormones that are good in the short term but bad in the long term

• OR you release the response and theres no recovery, or the blunted outcome where you stop releasing those hormones

• MALADAPTIVE

Prenatal programming

• Individual level factors

  • Racial discrimination, prejudice, stigma experienced by mother

  • Inflexible work schedules

  • Acculturative stress and discrimination

  • Racial trauma

  • Racial profiling

• Community level factors

  • Exposure to hate crimes

  • Exposure to racially-motivated violence

• Structural level factors

  • Structural racism

  • Historical trauma

  • Segregation

  • Greater likelihood of living in food deserts, food insecurity

  • Neighborhood deprivation and housing instability

  • Exposure to pollutants

  • Poor quality education

  • Poverty

  • Access to healthcare

Allostatic load

• Birth

  • Discriminatory hospital practices

  • Access to healthcare

  • Increased risk for maternal mortality

  • Increased risk for poor birth outcomes such as preterm birth and low birth rate

• Infancy

  • Altered physiological responses to stress in infants

    • Lower heart rate variability

    • Greater cortisol reactivity