Alternative Baby Faces

A wonderful image from "Texts from Last Night":

Whenever I'm sad I just imagine if babies were born with mustaches...

Modern Hunting and Gathering

A side thought from the Furstenberg conference.

Kevin Roy reported that among the working poor, men make more per hour, but are less stably employed than are women.

This sounds just like the relationship between hunters and gatherers.

Welfare Dads

At the Furstenberg conference, Kathryn Edin reported on a new study of poor, unmarried fathers. This is the counterpart to her work in Promises I Can Keep on poor teen mothers.

In the teen welfare mom and dad "courtship story," there is barely any courtship - and what there is begins after the baby is born. The couple meets, "get's together," has a baby, and then, if he is still around, begins to know one another. The men describe their relations with the mothers of their children, as well as their child's birth, passively. The emotional high point of the relationship is the birth of the child. The mothers are usually excited about the baby, and normally become emotionally attached right away. The fathers often also fall in love - with the baby.

Poor men and women are usually mistrustful of one another, even if they theoretically are a couple and have a child together. The women don't expect the men to provide for the child, and the men fear that they will be dumped if they don't provide. Edin found that the men would often do things to accelerate the breakup - fooling with other women or getting arrested - so she would no longer expect anything of him.

The most interesting, but sad, thing that Edin found was that these poor fathers never expected to be able to keep the love or respect of the mothers of their children. “They are confident," Edin said, that "they can be good dads because all that good fathering takes is love, not money.”

The Losing Game of Multiple Partner Fertility

One of the major issues at the Furstenberg conference was "multiple partner fertility" - that is, women who have children by different men.

Sarah McLanahan reported that when poor single mothers move from man to man, they are usually trading up, if only marginally. They have a child with the new man to give them a stronger reason to stay together.

However, McLanahan also reported, the more children women have with different men, the less help they get from the extended kin network of any of the fathers of their children.

Family Instability Hurts Boys in School

Sarah McLanahan reported from her continuing study of "fragile families" at the Furstenberg conference. She had some interesting new things to say about the effects of family instability - especially boyfriends passing in and out of the household.

One major effect is that instability increases the mother's mental health problems, especially depression and anxiety.

Another major finding is that instability hurts boys more than girls.

This led me to a thought about why girls out-perform boys in school, when the reverse used to be true: girls may be passing boys because instability hurts boys more, and family instability is increasing.

Working Class Women Are the Most Likely to Live with Multiple Partners

At the Furstenberg conference Andrew Cherlin made a case for studying working class family patterns separately from the middle class and the poor. He doesn't want to use class terms, so instead he treated high school graduates, GED holders, and two-year Associates degree holders as collectively the middle group of his analysis.

Cherlin found that women who live with multiple partners -- whether married or cohabiting -- are more likely to come from this working class/middle education group. College educated women are more likely to marry, and more likely to stay married. Poor women are less likely to live with, and especially unlikely to marry, the men they are connected with, even if they have children with them.

Bad things happen to kids each time someone significant comes or goes from their household. Working class kids are even more likely to suffer these disruptions than poor kids are. This is interesting and not obvious.

Nerd Humor: The Stata Lesson

At the end of the conference honoring family sociologist Frank Furstenberg, two of his former students offered a film tribute. The form of their tribute, though, was a mock fulfillment of a long-standing promise they had made to Furstenberg to teach him the statistical analysis program Stata.

On the screen they had the graphic for "Stata Lesson One." The problem for the lesson: "Does Frank Furstenberg still matter?" As you might imagine, this was a bouquet of a presentation, but underneath the mock serious tone was an actually serious analysis.

They plotted Furstenberg's 40 years of publications and the abundance of citations of his work by others. Then, just to be sure that he wasn't resting on his laurels "while publishing junk," they plotted the citations of his recent articles. All three graphs were impressive. Where the trend line showed a small decline over the decades, the voiceover helpfully pointed out that the confidence intervals were just wide enough that the real trend could be slightly upward.

Stat humor went over big with this crowd. Very nicely done.

What Fathering Needs

I am attending a conference at the University of Pennsylvania honoring family sociologist Frank Furstenberg. I will post some good points as they come up.

Kathryn Edin, co-author of Promises I Can Keep, about which I have blogged several times, is working on a new study about the fathers of the teen moms she studied in that book. She found that the men wanted to be attached to their children, even if they didn't have much of a relationship with the mothers. These poor men mistrust women, who think they are valued only for their resources. They do want to be fathers to their children, though:

“They are confident they can be good dads because all that good fathering takes is love, not money.”

Women On the Supreme Court Used to Have More of "It All"

Sylvia Ann Hewlett has documented the difficulties that very high achieving women have in "having it all" - marriage, children, and high-powered career. Hewlett's main finding is that women who do have it all are likely to have married young and traded off career steps with their husbands. However, there has been a paradoxical effect of opening more opportunities in public life to women since the 1970s. Women who seek the top careers are likely to put off marriage and children in favor of launching their careers first - and later run out of time.

Mrs. G. asks us to consider the case of women on the Supreme Court:

Ruth Bader Ginsburg married in 1954 and has two children with well established careers.

Sandra Day O’Connor married in 1952 and has three sons.

Sonia Sotomayor is divorced without children.

"I think there’s a codicil about women having it all, over a lifetime," she wrote to me. "If they thought in the 1950s that there was no chance of ever hitting the Supremes" they would marry, have kids, and pursue whatever career was open to them. However, "it didn’t work in the '70s and after for women who thought there was a chance of" making the Supreme Court, so they "gave up other things to go for the gold."

Alumni Survey 1: Advanced Degrees

I have been surveying the portion of Centre College alumni who graduated between 40 and 15 years ago. I focus on them because I am interested in how the parents' education, occupation, and cultural interests shape the children's educational choices. I have heard from about a quarter of those I surveyed - nearly 1400 respondents.

The first interesting finding is of how many of the graduates went on to get further degrees after college.

About a third of each entering class wants to be doctors. Another quarter express an interest in law.

Among the alumni, about 6% end up doctors or dentists, with another couple of percent getting other medical degrees.

About 14% end up as lawyers - which has been Centre's largest single occupational category since the colege's beginning nearly 200 years ago.

The business degree emerges as the second largest category, with 9% holding the MBA and another couple of percent having other professional certifications.

Teachers make up another 5% or so.

More than a quarter of the Centre alumni earned a masters degree.

All together about two-thirds of the Centre alumni in the prime of their working years hold some kind of advanced degree.

Army Successfully Fights Divorce

Here is some decent marriage news for Memorial Day. The Army, faced with an increasing divorce rate as the war has gone on, instituted a "Strong Bonds" program to help military couples learn to communicate better before they had a problem. As a result, the Army's divorce rate dropped from 2006 to 2007, and seems to be holding steady.

Still, in a survey of soldiers in Iraq in 2006, 20% said their spouses had contemplated divorce. War and deployment is unusually hard on families.

Showing the Religious Flow

Michael Bell made a fantastic chart of religious mobility, based on Pew Religion Forum data. It is lovely to ponder.

Sociology Requires Judgment

Students of my dear colleague Sarah made a tee shirt to celebrate her tenure, her impending baby, and sociology itself. (Click on the picture to read the shirts.)

Love Entangles Us - at a Distance

This goes in my The World is Wonderfully Weird file:

The Love Study takes people in love, separates them in sealed rooms, shows pictures of the beloved to one, and measures the physical state of the other. Results:

After running 36 couples through this test, the researchers found that when one person focused his thoughts on his partner, the partner's blood flow and perspiration dramatically changed within two seconds. The odds of this happening by chance were 1 in 11,000. Three dozen double blind, randomized studies by such institutions as the University of Washington and the University of Edinburgh have reported similar results.

These results drive physicists nuts. They can't explain them, they just are certain that it couldn't really happen.

I don't know why these results happen. I just think the world is wonderfully weird.

I do know that when my wife heard this story on National Public Radio, she sent thoughts to me 150 miles away. I suddenly felt moved to email her about what I was doing. Happily odd.

Underground Railroad Museum

The Underground Railroad Freedom Center is not quite in Kentucky, so is not technically part of my Kentucky 50 by 50 project. Nonetheless, I had a day in Cincinnati and had wanted to see the museum, so Providence made today the day.

The Underground Railroad museum is a new, high-profile project of the Great and the Good of Cincinnati. It is located at the foot of the Roebling Bridge, a city landmark on the Ohio River. Its neighbors are the new football stadium on the west, and the new baseball park on the east. It is nicely done. It has a few splashy items - films and audios narrated by Vanessa Williams, Angela Bassett, and Oprah Winfrey, the keys to John Brown's cell, and the centerpiece, a rebuilt slave pen rescued from Kentucky. The core historical section on slavery, abolition, and the underground railroad, are pretty substantial. The arty bits - the animated films, commissioned art, dramatic recitations - are all well done.

The Underground Railroad Freedom Center is a cause museum. Slavery, not the underground railroad as such, is the cause. The abolitionists, escaped slaves, even Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey are heroes. The slave masters, slave catchers, pro-slavery politicians, and fellow-travelers are the bad guys. Wicked, slaveholding Kentucky, visible through the picture windows, is the symbol of the evil land.

Surprisingly, the actual story of the underground railroad gets a little lost in the telling. They have a fine section on the heroic doings of Parker and Rankin in Ripley, OH, a black-and-white team who helped many across the river to freedom. The rest of the underground railroad story, though, is told in a vague way. Cincinnati is refered to as the hub of the underground railroad, but no Cincinnati sites are dealt with in any detail. There is much more told about the overland route of slaves heading south from Kentucky over the Natchez trace than there is about the ex-slaves heading in the opposite direction. Partly this is because the slave trade is better documented than the clandestine flights from slavery. Nonetheless, I was surprised that the museum did not tell more of the what is known about the entire underground railroad story.

The big theme of the museum is freedom in general. The specific kind of freedom served up, though, is that of African Americans. And fair enough. A worthwhile expedition.

Our Unmarried Births Are At Euro Levels But Our Welfare State is Not

The U.S. unmarried birth rate leaped up to 40% recently, from less than half that in 1980. This keeps pace with large rises in unmarried births in European countries.

In Europe, though, the state gives money and services to couples. In the U.S., many more of those unwed mothers are married to Uncle Sam.

We need marriage more than Europeans do. If we have the same percentage of kids of unmarrieds that they do, our kids will be worse off.

More Daughters Means More Liberal

A British study by Andrew Oswald and Nattavudh Powdthavee found that the more daughters you have, the more likely you are to vote for left-of-center parties. The reverse happens with sons.

Specifically: " For each daughter, holding family size constant, a parent is approximately 2 percentage points more likely to vote left."

Nathan Silver at fivethirtyeight.com has the link to the full study.

(I thank the mother of our two daughters and one son, all good Democrats, for finding this.)

Why Humans Are Built for Sperm Wars

A woman in Houston has given birth to twins who were conceived by different fathers.


Most of the sperm that men produce are not designed to fertilize an egg, but to fight a war against sperm from other men. Nearly ever time that sperm from two men are in a woman's vaginal canal at the same time, only one can win. Not this time.

The Abortion Center Holds, Again

There has been a buzz this week about a new Gallup finding that, for the first time, most Americans call themselves "pro-life" rather than "pro-choice," 51% to 42%. Yet when we look at the underlying trends of when, if ever, they think abortion should be allowed, the long-term trend shows almost no change. About a quarter of Americans think abortion should be legal under any circumstances, and a quarter think it should be illegal under any circumstances. In the middle are the half that think abortion should be legal under some circumstances.

What has changed this year is that a couple of percent of centrists have decided that their position is better described as pro-life than pro-choice.

I think we should remember that this choice is about what the law should allow, not what is a good idea to do. There are many centrist positions that think the law should permit choices that are almost always a bad idea, just because of that "almost." If you had only two choices, would you call that pro-life, or pro-choice?

Leah Sears for Supreme Court

This Slate compilation is meant to embarrass potential Supreme Court nominees. However, Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Leah Sears rose in my estimation for her forthright promotion of marriage, even compared to her own divorce and remarriage.