Raising Children: Emerging Needs, Modern Risks, and Social Responses

Raising Children

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Raising Children Emerging Needs, Modern Risks, and Social Responses

EDITED BY JILL DUERR BERRICK AND NEIL GILBERT

1 2008

3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright ª 2008 by Oxford University Press Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Raising children : emerging needs, modern risks, and social responses = edited by Jill Duerr Berrick and Neil Gilbert. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-19-531012-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Child rearing—United States. 2. Parenting—United States. I. Berrick, Jill Duerr. II. Gilbert, Neil, 1940HQ769.R1695 2008 306.8740973'09045—dc22 2007024285

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Table of Contents

Contributors

vii

Introduction

1 Part I.

1.

Children in Families

The Past Is Not a Foreign Country: The Historical Education of Policy 9 Paula S. Fass

2.

From Private to Public: Paying Grandparents as Caregivers Jill Duerr Berrick

3.

Supporting Fathers’ Engagement with Their Kids Philip A. Cowan, Carolyn Pape Cowan, Nancy Cohen, Marsha Kline Pruett, & Kyle Pruett

4.

Can Women Have Careers and Babies Too?

81

Mary Ann Mason

5.

Motherhood, Work, and Family Policy

98

Neil Gilbert

6.

Child Support: How Much Is Just Right? Ira Ellman & Tara Ellman

116

44

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Table of Contents

Part II. 7.

Outside Forces: Shaping Health and Education

Framing Public Interventions with Respect to Children as Parent-Empowering 151 Stephen D. Sugarman

8.

Childhood ADHD: Biological Reality or Social Construction, with Policy Implications 167 Stephen P. Hinshaw

9.

Do Immigrant Children Have a Fair Chance?

183

Sylvia Guendelman & Kate Cosby

10.

Nonacademic Needs of Students: How Can Schools Intervene? 201 Susan Stone

11.

Families and Schools Raising Children: The Inequitable Effects of Family Background on Schooling Outcomes 221 W. Norton Grubb

Conclusion Index

257

250

Contributors

Jill Duerr Berrick Professor of Social Welfare; Co-Director, Center for Child and Youth Policy, University of California, Berkeley Kate Cosby Program Associate, Maternal and Child Health Program, University of California, Berkeley Nancy Cohen Program Director, Cancer Lifeline, Seattle, Washington Philip A. Cowan Professor of Psychology Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley Carolyn Pape Cowan Professor of Psychology Emerita, University of California, Berkeley Ira Ellman Willard H. Pedrick Distinguished Research Scholar and Professor of Law, Arizona State University; Visiting Scholar, University of California, Berkeley Tara Ellman Economic Consultant, Tempe, Arizona Paula S. Fass Margaret Byrne Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley

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Contributors Neil Gilbert Chernin Professor of Social Welfare; Co-Director, Center for Child and Youth Policy, University of California, Berkeley W. Norton Grubb David Gardner Chair in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley Sylvia Guendelman Professor and Chair, Maternal and Child Health, School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley Stephen P. Hinshaw Professor and Chair, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley Mary Ann Mason Professor of Social Welfare, University of California, Berkeley Kyle Pruett Clinical Professor of Child Psychiatry, Director of Medical Studies, Yale University School of Medicine Marsha Kline Pruett M. B. O’Connor Chaired Professor, Smith College Susan Stone Assistant Professor of Social Welfare, University of California, Berkeley Stephen D. Sugarman Roger J. Traynor Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley

Introduction Jill Duerr Berrick & Neil Gilbert

Over the past half-century, technological and medical advances, shifting patterns of employment, the loosening of marital bonds, changing social norms, and the women’s rights movement have dramatically altered the landscape of family life. In this new terrain, parents struggle with balancing the demands of work and child care responsibilities, selecting the right schools, and sorting through a bewildering array of medical and psychological nostrums. As mothers and fathers strive to nurture and protect their children, public officials are under increasing pressure to formulate policies that assist parents to meet the challenges of child rearing in contemporary society. This book examines some of the most pressing issues in health, education, and family life that affect child rearing in modern times, and it critically assesses alternative policy responses to these developments. The percentage of women who work is on the rise, increasing from 38% in 1960 to 60% in 2002. Women with very young children have not exempted themselves from this dramatic change. In 1980, 44% of married women and 45% of single women with children under the age of 6 were in the labor force; by 2002, those figures climbed by roughly 50% (to 61% and 71%, respectively). Women struggle with the transition to the workforce—particularly when their children are young. Many are haunted by worries about who will care for their children in their absence, along with concerns about their appropriate role as provider versus parent. While some employers have attempted to make the workplace more ‘‘family friendly,’’ the reality is that significant public policy has been developed to make families more ‘‘work 1

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Raising Children

friendly.’’ Child care programs, after-school programs, flexible work schedules, and telecommuting are all innovations that, at their heart, are designed to increase women’s (and men’s) capacity to be fully engaged in the workplace. In addition to emerging needs created by the changing work patterns of American families, the family itself is undergoing change. Fertility rates have declined, as has family size. Between 1976 and 2002, the proportion of women over 40 years of age who had either no children or one child increased by 80%; at the same time, the proportion of women in that age group with three or more children declined by 50%. The most recent U.S. census suggests that the fastest growing family-group pattern in the United States is the ‘‘noparent family’’: children raised in relative-headed households with no mother or father present. While traditional students of the family may celebrate that rates of single parenthood are finally stabilizing and that marriage rates have nudged up a bit, the more recent trends in children’s living arrangements are startling, if not alarming, and suggest undercurrents in family life that are profoundly unstable. On the new terrain of family life, children face myriad risks to their wellbeing, whether from unstable families, exposure to poor-quality child care, attendance in substandard schools, violence in the neighborhood, or coping with chronic health conditions. While some families manage to protect their children against these risks better than others, even mainstream middle-class Americans worry regularly about protecting their children from harm. And in struggling to raise their kids, many subgroups across America—immigrants, gay and lesbian couples, teenage parents, and low-income adults—experience heightened vulnerability. Raising Children offers a fresh perspective on the most troubling concerns of modern family life and raises provocative questions about the benefits and hazards of policy alternatives designed to alleviate these issues. Take, for example, the rapid expansion in the number of children now being reared by their grandparents instead of their parents. While child welfare professionals praise grandparents for stepping in to care for these children, it is easy to forget that children have lost something important in the transition to Grandma’s house— their parents. How these fundamental changes in living circumstances affect children’s well-being is little understood. Asking whether policies that promote kinship care are desirable challenges conventional wisdom in this realm. Drawing on the disciplines of history, law, education, psychology, and social welfare, this volume frames the emerging needs and new risks that have an impact on child rearing, addressing issues such as the following:





Why do some men become positively involved with their young children while others remain at a distance? What are the benefits for children if their fathers develop strong, nurturant relationships with them? How can we create programs that promote fathers’ active participation in the daily lives of their children? Neither the child on whose behalf support payments are made nor the parent charged with making them are likely to live alone. Can the law of child

Introduction

















3

support continue to pretend they do? Do we want child support to insure the child’s welfare or to ensure that each parent pays a fair share of the child’s expenses? With the surge of media attention and controversy over Attention-Deficit= Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) as a diagnostic category (and medication as a major treatment), what are the facts and what are the myths? To what extent is ADHD a social construction devised to manage children’s challenging behavior? Do family-friendly policies such as daycare and parental leave harmonize work and family life or create incentives for both parents to enter the workforce— and intensify the daily struggle between the demands of work and child rearing? Are some families better served by family-friendly policies than others? Who are the women with fast-track careers? What happens when they face the challenge of balancing childbirth and infant care with the high-pressure demands of professional life? Are recent efforts to provide health and psychosocial services in schools likely to benefit students? How do families and schools raise students together? Must public-health policies aimed at reducing drinking, smoking, and obesity among children be seen as overriding parental authority in the ‘‘best interests’’ of children, or can they be formulated as measures that enable parents to exercise better control over their children? How does the U.S. health-care system serve immigrant children, most of whom live in working poor families? What practical solutions can be implemented to reduce barriers to care for immigrant children?

In addressing these issues, the volume is divided into two parts that focus on how children are affected by modern circumstances inside and outside of family life. To place these developments in a broader perspective, Part I begins with a historical overview of the problems and issues of child rearing in American families. Chapter 1 reminds us that although contemporary concerns are not exactly the same as past concerns, social anxieties about the fragility of family life are not unique to the twenty-first century. The subsequent chapters in this section analyze the needs and risks of children raised under various settings of modern family life. Children raised by grandparents or teenage mothers face a new environment of adaptation as they fashion a normative childhood in the context of ‘‘other.’’ Millions of children are being cared for by their grandparents, often at public expense. Chapter 2 examines the recent trends and social implications of government support for kinship care of children. Over the past several decades, research on family life has generated increasing interest in the role of fathers in child rearing. Chapter 3 looks at how fathers’ positive relationships with children foster the children’s well-being and what can be done to promote such relationships. While fathers are encouraged to become more actively involved with their children, mothers struggle to balance the responsibilities of raising children and working outside the home. And, as parents have increasingly left home for work, varied provisions have been made to supply the daily care of children.

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Raising Children

Chapters 4 and 5 explore the form and substance of ‘‘family-friendly’’ measures to help balance work and child rearing over the life course of women in occupational positions ranging from high-powered professional careers to middle- and working-class jobs. When families break up, questions arise concerning the fair division of responsibility for the support of children. Chapter 6 probes the complex realities of child support arrangements, the fundamental conflict between the core purposes of child support, and how to ameliorate this perplexing situation. In Part II, the focus shifts to the forces outside of family life that affect a child’s physical, psychological, and educational well-being, particularly those emanating from medical and academic institutions and the state. A bewildering array of modern drugs and medical technology has generated rising expectations for longer and healthier lives. At the same time, parental anxieties are fueled as diagnostic advances uncover new childhood disorders and ailments, the cost of medical care continues to rise, and children engage in behaviors that may be detrimental to their health. Heightened concerns about children’s health are matched by a growing sense of the need for an adequate education to prepare children to work and flourish in an increasingly competitive global market. The chapters in this section consider how schools are changing to meet the evolving needs of children and their parents, the risks of overpathologizing normal variations in children’s behavior, the role of the state in shaping health-related behaviors among children, and the need to extend health care to vulnerable populations. Although public intervention is often thought to substitute for or undermine parental responsibility, Chapter 7 formulates an approach that emphasizes framing social policies in such a way that they are seen as strengthening rather than limiting parental authority in family life. This analysis shows how proposals to deal with controversial issues such as childhood obesity and school choice can be understood as measures to empower parents. Along with concerns about the growing problem of childhood obesity, many parents struggle with what to do about the increasing diagnosis of ADHD in children— a condition that is poorly understood. Chapter 8 illuminates the myths and facts about ADHD, the behaviors that define the disorder, controversies surrounding medication and psychosocial treatments, and the need to understand the stigmatizing implications of the condition. While all parents sometimes worry about maintaining their children’s health, these anxieties are particularly intense in the absence of insurance for care. Examining the wellbeing of children from this perspective, Chapter 9 surveys the access to care for children of the working poor, among whom immigrant children are most likely to lack health-insurance coverage and least likely to receive medical care. Children’s physical and psychological ills are not only handled within the purview of medical institutions. Over the past few decades, schools have increasingly been called upon to provide not only for the education but also for the heath and mental health care of children. Chapter 10 questions how well these nonacademic needs of children are being met by school programs and

Introduction

5

whether, in fact, such special interventions provide added benefits in wellfunctioning schools. Finally, Chapter 11 reminds us that although forces emanating from institutions outside the family influence the well-being of children, it is rarely a case of either=or—parents are always in the equation. When it comes to education, parents and schools raise children together. This final chapter analyzes the impact of family characteristics on a child’s educational achievement and suggests how school reforms can address the problem of low-performing students. Beyond a wide-ranging examination of various needs and risks tied to raising children in modern times, the chapters in this volume illustrate the importance of perspective and context in understanding and responding to these issues. The opening chapter places the issues of child rearing in a historical context that suggests that the problems encountered today are more of an ongoing struggle occurring over generations than what might feel to some to be a unique crisis of modern times. This tempers our outlook and sets a tone for policy recommendations that seek adjustments and changes that are ameliorative rather than transformative. The needs of children with ADHD are not only examined according to their substantive character but also framed in the larger context of the stigmatization of mental health patients. The health care of immigrant children is assessed in the broader context of children of the working poor. The recent practice of public subsidies for grandparents serving as caregivers of young children is appraised against the larger backdrop of informal kinship care in the privacy of family life. The struggles of caring for children by mothers in working-class, middle-class, and high-level professional jobs are seen from a life-cycle perspective. The involvement of fathers in raising children is seen as affected by the context of other important relationships in which the father–child relationship is embedded. State interventions that affect children are framed as measures designed to empower parents. The conventional method for determining child support is reframed, shifting the calculation from the marginal expenditures of an intact family to more nuanced considerations of the competing purposes of support. Children’s educational achievement is examined from the perspectives of both family background and school-based programs. In each case, the context and perspective on these issues inform policy recommendations that address essential features of the modern challenge to raising children. Of course, the policies suggested in this volume offer no grand, utopian solutions. Rather, they are mostly incremental in nature, and all of them are debatable. Looking at these needs and risks from different perspectives and in alternative contexts would elicit other policy responses. Our objective is not so much to resolve the issues as it is to open avenues of understanding and to stimulate debate about where they might take us.

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PART I CHILDREN IN FAMILIES

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1 The Past Is Not a Foreign Country: The Historical Education of Policy Paula S. Fass

The American imagination is peopled by rugged individuals. From John Henry to John Wayne, we have pictured ourselves as a nation of self-sufficient men and (occasionally) women who set off on Walt Whitman’s Open Road, pursue Huck Finn’s Western territory, inhabit Emily Dickinson’s lonely soul, or hunt the seas for a great white whale. American literature and popular culture have always been replete with such images. How do we fit into this picture a regard for society or, in less grandiose terms, an ability to live with other people and create an effective sense of social connection and responsibility? Traditionally, Americans have assigned this task to the family, the one institution that they trust to devise controls on individual impulse through effective child rearing, provide a means to convey laws and regulations to all its members, and be counted on to wrestle individual selfishness into safe directions without entirely taming the emphasis on a self-defined destiny. Since colonial days, the burden on the family has been large, and whatever the family’s real achievements or failures along these lines, the family has been regarded with considerable awe precisely because we as a society have invested it with so much freight as the one institution we entrust with our commitments for both maintaining social order and protecting the individual. In a society that has historically rejected many of the strong agents of control common elsewhere, such as a powerful central state and an established national church, and which has depended on voluntary bonds for its rich associational life, the family alone is viewed as a stable force for order and a reliable source of authority. Indeed, the family has historically been intimately 9

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Children in Families

involved in the protection of individual rights, as Martin Guggenheim1 recently pointed out, and parental rights in the United States have traditionally been regarded as a vehicle for and expression of individual rights. In this chapter, I offer suggestions as to how this reliance on the family as the source of social life has created special anxieties about family stability. As a result of those anxieties, family change is often not viewed realistically, while we cling to earlier family forms with fervor. I also suggest ways that policy makers can use a realistic understanding of our historical commitment to advance more effective policies regarding children.

The Family as an Approved Social Space When we use the word family today, we usually have a very particular concept in mind—a small, nuclear unit composed of a married couple and its children. In fact, however, this definition of family is largely a Victorian invention.2 Until the middle of the nineteenth century, when Americans spoke about families they often meant households, rather than the nuclear units that we are likely to imagine when we use the term today. A seventeenth- or eighteenthcentury ‘‘family’’ could be composed of a variety of individuals, many of whom we would hardly recognize as belonging to the family today, including servants (often indentured for a period of years); apprentices (under contract); dependent parents or parents-in-law; and sometimes other individuals, including other people’s children, who might have been placed in the home by public authorities as dependent paupers or orphans. Even prisoners could be inserted into households during the colonial period.3 In the South (and, far less frequently but more often than we imagine, in Northern states as well), a household could include slaves (as household servants, skilled workers, or as part of a plantation gang). By the mid-nineteenth century, many of these unrelated individuals had disappeared from households, leaving mostly related family members. Some of these households=families still contained unmarried spinster aunts, aged single parents, fostered children who had been placed out, and, occasionally in poor urban households, boarders not capable of or willing to maintain their own residences. The household together with its family represented a living unit, and it was also the basic form of social interaction. It was this variously composed family=household (not to be confused with a truly extended family) that was looked to in the colonial period for a large number of social functions, including financial support, vocational training, operations of law and social control, and dispensing of community assistance. In a society such as that of the United States in the nineteenth century, in which people moved often and immigrants left familiar institutions behind, the ‘‘family’’ was an indispensable institution. It ordered the life of the individual in a nation that was constantly renewing itself and, in newer western regions especially, was often lacking in other forms of social life. Even many older regions of the country were still undergoverned and underserviced.

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By the mid-nineteenth century, the more intimate, domestic family of the Victorian period no longer provided the array of services that the colonial family had, and during the second half of the century it began to emphasize (and, indeed, to create) special family events such as birthday and holiday celebrations in order to define itself around these personal affairs rather than its older links to the social order. Above all, the domestic family began to concentrate on child rearing as it turned increasingly inward, especially in the privacy-seeking middle class. In so doing, it lost some of its more obvious social markings. As it turned toward private life, the family became more obviously the center of personal and emotional sustenance, which is how we recognize it today. But for most nineteenth-century families, especially in rural areas (which were dominant until the early twentieth century), the family continued to provide economic and other services to its members, and it remained symbolically the institution everyone looked to as a reminder of the fact that, even in the United States, the individual lived in and depended on group supports. This does not mean that all people lived in families. Throughout American history, some people have lived alone, as frontiersmen, fur trappers, and woodsmen—beloved in our cultural myths—and as city bachelors, sailors, and students. They have also lived in groups such as religious and secular communes; lumbering, mining, and other labor camps; army encampments; school dormitories; orphanages; and prisons. None of these were ‘‘households’’ as I have defined them, although they did provide social linkages. But, throughout most of American history, the social connection to others usually came from within some kind of family-based household. Even slaves, who could not legally marry or form families, belonged to households—those of their masters. Despite the central importance of the family=household, Americans have also viewed this social unit as peculiarly vulnerable. And just as Americans have come to rely on its services, they have also very much, even disproportionately, feared its dysfunction or dissolution. This is the paradox of American family history: in a land of individuals, where other social forces were often weak, the family has seemed always to be both deeply necessary and perceived to be in peril. This was true to some extent even before the formation of the nation; thus town governments in seventeenth-century Massachusetts appointed tithingmen to guard their households in order to make certain that they performed their functions fully. It is interesting that commonlaw marriage remained a legal option throughout most of the nineteenth century in many American states, longer than in most European countries—a sign, perhaps, of the need for defining institutions, even in the absence of observed rituals.4 Throughout our history, American family life has been under some kind of ‘‘nervous microscope.’’ I suggest that part of this is the result of the fact that family life has been constantly changing as it adapts to other social forces and factors, while our images of what families are have often remained constant, as if families exist outside of time and history. In the seventeenth

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century, while families adapted to ‘‘New World’’ conditions, Puritans enforced a static biblical view of the family and the way in which it was supposed to operate. In the twenty-first century we are apt to enforce an idealized image, often drawn from a static and media-driven view of what families were like in the mid-twentieth century.5 Thus, while families successfully change and adapt, our images of families are much less elastic, and this disconnect can cause considerable anxiety. If Americans have worried long and hard about families, they have also worried about the children these families raise. In no other place in the world are so many child-rearing books and manuals available and sold. And this growth industry is not new: child-rearing experts began to provide parents— first fathers, then mothers—with advice in the nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century, this advice and those who dispensed it, almost all now addressing themselves to women, became the basis for a small industry. So widespread was the interest in obtaining up-to-date advice that pediatricians such as L. Emmett Holt and psychologists such as John Watson became celebrities. Beginning in the early twentieth century, the U.S. Children’s Bureau distributed pamphlets that guided parents in rearing their children properly.6 Founded in 1912, the bureau distributed 4.5 million copies of its bulletin between the time of its founding and 1925. These pamphlets were addressed to ‘‘the average mother of this country.’’ Each year, the bureau received about 125,000 letters from these ‘‘average mothers.’’7 From these letters, it is clear that the readers were hardly all middle class; rather, they represented a large cross-section of American mothers who were hungry for advice about everything from infant formula feedings to discipline and schooling. Watson was so worried about this average mother’s trustworthiness that he warned her to follow his confining regimen strictly, so that she might avoid the pitfalls of other mothers and (potentially) raise happy children.8 By the 1950s, the American home bible was Baby and Child Care, and millions of mothers turned eagerly to Dr. Benjamin Spock, their new guru, for advice. This hunger for advice is a sign of the desire of Americans to achieve successful, wholesome family life. It is also a sign of the anxiety Americans bring to this task. While Europeans have begun to recognize their own child care advisors, I doubt whether any other nation’s insecurities about child rearing and family relations have been quite so blatant as those in the United States. The American search for ideal ways to raise children is also an indicator of how much the family has changed from the earlier household, where all kinds of work and social services were being provided to the members. A midnineteenth-century domestic adviser such as Catherine Beecher spent most of her time instructing women about household management—for example, how to arrange their kitchens and hire servants. Today, child rearing and caregiving, and their associated emotional and psychological tasks, have become the center of gravity of concern in family life.

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Family Policies In the first full century of national life, the nineteenth century, Americans attempted to create very few explicit social policies that operated directly on the family, although laws of many forms regarding marriage, divorce, adoption, and custody were created by states throughout the Union.9 The one exception was the strong movement to create schools and enforce school enrollments on all students, starting in the 1840s and 1850s in the North and Midwest and progressing somewhat later in the century in the South and West. Although we do not often view schooling as a form of family or social policy, in fact schools took authority from the family in its most intimate sphere, its control over children.10 The American common school was the most deeply and widely influential nonfamily social institution in nineteenthcentury America, not only because it required all members of the republican community to have some schooling but because it acted apart from the family and directly on the individual child.11 In so doing, the school inherited the possibility of becoming the other institution of choice—as an alternative to the family—for channeling innovative policies in regard to children. During the nineteenth century, public schools became a familiar part of the social scene, and it was largely through the social institution of the school in the early twentieth century that a variety of publicly desirable policies regarding health, nutrition, civic education, and vocational preparation, among others, were attempted. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, however, most schooling was local and brief (most children attended for 4 to 6 years), and the facilities were rudimentary. It was only in the twentieth century that schooling became a much more long-lasting, centralized, and potent form of social intervention.12 As the United States joined other industrial societies, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in seeking to address a range of matters that related to the welfare of its population, and as the state enlarged its own powers in these arenas, it was through these two institutions—the family and the school—that most of these attempts took place. Families were regarded with ever more heightened concern, and the apparatus of the state provided a powerful position from which to observe families; it was also capable of establishing enforceable norms about family life. Once the state began to channel resources to families, it also began to monitor and supervise the ways in which families were defined. One of the results was that the informal concerns regarding family life, existent in the nineteenth century and even earlier, became, in the twentieth century, an almost uninterrupted discourse of declension and anxiety. Thus, even as the accelerating interest in child-rearing advice was demonstrating the attempts by families to improve, the new observer=experts of the family seemed to be charting its steady decline. Starting in the early twentieth century, as state governments created institutions such as the juvenile court to oversee family relations and mother’s

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Children in Families

pensions to provide assistance to poor children, and as schools were augmented with a variety of welfare services, the parallel (and related) development of social science disciplines (such as sociology, education, and child study= psychology) provided information about the workings of family life. These observations made their way into the media, as well as into government councils such as the White House Conferences on Child Welfare. What had previously been diffuse concerns about the family voiced by ministers, journalists, or other observers now took on a sharper, and more systematic, edge that continued to define American plaints about family life throughout the twentieth century. When I lecture on the modern American family to undergraduates in my American social history class, I always begin with two long quotes, one from a New York Times article published in the 1970s13 and the other from sociologist Ernest Mowrer’s 1932 book on the family.14 I ask students to identify which is which, a difficult task, as (apart from subtle changes in language) they are very much alike in content and tone. Both view the family as a fundamental social institution in which the society invests its hopes, and both argue that the family is at a crossroads, assaulted by social changes that have rendered it increasingly unstable and vulnerable. Unfortunately, too often we imagine that as families face various crossroads, it doesn’t matter much which path they follow: their voyage always lands them in trouble. Over the 40 years between the writing of these two quotes, worries about the decline of family life have not diminished, while much has actually changed both in the larger society and in families’ adjustments to societal changes. This persistence of concern about the family in the twentieth century, I tell my students, is its most obvious feature. In fact, probably one of the few things we can predict with some certainty about the family in the near future is that it will remain an object of public concern and anxiety. Another striking consistency is that in both the 1920s and the 1970s (and even today), when Americans thought about families they had in mind the Victorian institution of the married couple and its children that, as I suggested earlier, became the defining center of the urban household only in the mid-nineteenth century. This family form, which some seem to think has been in place since time immemorial, was really a new kind of family, adjusting to its time and place. But much had changed in the society, and families were adapting to those changes. Today, the family remains a social unit that binds individuals to each other and to the larger society, but it is no longer necessarily composed of either married couples or of those couples and their many children.

Observing Families in Motion To understand this relentless concern, the appropriate initial point of historical departure, as in many matters related to social policy, is the social and political landscape of the very late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which became the site for progressive agitation and policy proposals.15 That landscape

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contained a complex jumble of problems associated with the rapid expansion of urban life and its associated disorder, both perceived and real. The cities were chaotic, dangerous, and filthy, and they were rapidly filling with an enormous population of recent immigrants from many European countries. The strangeness and foreignness of these people’s lives in these tumultuous places called forth first indignation and then, as more and more thoughtful people came to observe the scene, proposals for solutions. Initially, these observers were journalists, novelists, artists, charitable visitors, and settlement-house workers. Academic social science and the policies it influenced also grew out of observations about this troubled urban scene, and the attendant analysis was deeply influenced by the larger social complex in which it appeared. These groups began to urge that the chaotic and often unsavory lives of the people they observed had to be understood not just as a result of poverty, lack of hygiene, and the increasing precariousness of industrial work but also as the result of the kinds of families people came from and these families’ inability to cope with and survive the onslaughts of city life. Some of this literature was deeply racially tinged, and some of it became the basis for eugenics policies. But many of the most thoughtful analysts, who were eager to understand poverty as a result of poor environments, unemployment, and bad luck, also turned to explanations that saw families as implicated in the equation. Robert Hunter, 16 for example, in his important study titled, simply, Poverty, distinguished those families whose unfortunate circumstances led to impoverishment from those whose very flawed nature predisposed them to a kind of poverty he called ‘‘pauperism.’’ The early sociological literature on families reinforced the emphasis on family dynamics as a prerequisite for effective solution to the problems posed by new economic conditions. The first really important examinations tended to emphasize the special fragility of family life for migrants from the countryside. Perhaps the best-known example of this form of analysis is the multivolume investigation by William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki,17 The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, which quickly became a sociological classic. But there was a sizable literature on all aspects of this problem pouring out from what became known as the Chicago School of Sociology. Members of this school identified various parts of the city geography with greater or lesser instability and ascribed stable and unstable social structures, including families, to this geography. Greater instability led to more disorganized personal styles of life and personality structures and was associated with all manner of antisocial behavior. While the close association between geography and instability was a deep Chicago School fixation, the broader point—that traditional families were buffeted by rapid change to which they could not adequately respond—was a view that was more generally held in the profession, and it reached far beyond the academy. Change itself became a threat— change associated with economics, with geography, and with culture. But, while all these were culprits, the city was the one category that contained all of these destabilizing elements.

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In the background of most of these portraits of instability was the image of a rural countryside, which many academics viewed as the ‘‘natural’’ place for human habitation and stable family development. From this perspective, the problem began when families moved from this grounding environment. Theodore Roosevelt, who was not only a president but also a historian and a vocal social observer, set the tone for this perspective when he noted, ‘‘It is not a good thing to see cities grow at disproportionate speed relatively to the country.’’18 In the view of many, the farm provided an environment in which families worked together and each member had a job and a purpose. The family’s economic function anchored its interdependence, ensuring its stability and trustworthiness. Work and play were natural expressions of rural life, and the family was stable, meaningful, and coherent. Many also imagined that this family was the locus for multigenerational interdependence, with innumerable grandparents and other family members joining parents and children in family solidarity; but even without this imagined sense of family structure, parents and children were thought to be bound to each other and to the natural stability of the hearth.19 From this perspective, the shift to cities itself was problematic, eroding the economic functions of the participants and dissolving the family’s glue-like connectivity within itself and with other stabilizing institutions in the local community. Immigrants suffered from all of these problems to a heightened degree because many not only came from the farms but had the additional and special disadvantage of cultural dislocation, and by relocating they lost all their connections with familiar community supports. Jane Addams,20 who was deeply sympathetic to immigrants, wrote a series of essays, The Spirit of Youth in the City Streets, that captured many of these issues and articulated them effectively enough to engage the public mind. Distilling this social analysis into a series of vivid portraits of the consequences for city youth, she offered up a picture of America’s children stranded in industrial cities with few meaningful aspirations and connections, whose vitality and sexual drives left them prey to commercialized forms of leisure and vice. John Dewey’s21 vision of the modern school drew upon this perspective as well, because for him urban schooling needed to create proxies for this rural-based experience. Oscar Handlin22 incorporated this perspective into his Pulitzer Prize–winning portrait of American immigration, The Uprooted, which he proposed as the master narrative of modern American life, portraying the immigrant torn from the soil and his children alienated and vulnerable in the modern world. From presidents and sociologists to social agitators, philosophers, and historians, the founding visions of family affliction during the first half of the twentieth century were significantly derived from this compelling conceptualization. All or most of the problems of the twentieth century could thus be traced to the basic social transformations of industrial and urban life, complicated by immigration, and all of it was expressed in forms of family pathology. Early in the twentieth century, the portrait pivoted on a belief in the loss of the family’s economic function. In part, of course, families over the course of

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the nineteenth century did lose many of the economic functions once belonging to households that also functioned as workshops and places of apprenticeship and training. The remaining domestic unit in the nineteenth century was more loosely connected, as mothers replaced fathers at home and children were increasingly taught by state schools rather than by their fathers or masters. Industrialization did alter family ties and the meaning of households. But family analysts somehow missed the point by measuring (after the fact) the present against a past standard, while family life itself not only adapted to but facilitated economic change, with children in working-class industrial households deployed in a new version of the family economy.23 Most analysts missed the successful transition that was taking place and began to worry that as households lost their obvious economic enterprises, individual members were being released from their secure places and from their responsibility to each other in the most fundamental social institution. Contemporary observers believed that social stability and personal competence were dependent on their own historically derived visions of family interdependence. Many believed that what they saw in the chaos of early-twentiethcentury industrial cities, with their poverty and despair, were the palpable consequences of families’ being made irrelevant and rendered fragile. This image of the relationship between urban poverty and family fragility and the association between urban economics and family malfunction continued to influence American visions well into the twentieth century. It became so familiar, so ‘‘naturalized,’’ that one now has to work hard to understand its historical specificity as a form of diagnosis. This set of associations has also meant that for much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, American public discussions have rarely taken note of the deep-seated and pervasive existence of rural poverty and the needs of rural families.24 It took Michael Harrington’s25 tract of the 1960s to make this seem obvious. Rural families, as imagined within the paradigm of city disorder, are naturally resilient, interdependent, and selfsufficient. Similarly, it is not true that the change from rural to urban life, or the consequences of migration, or the change from preindustrial to industrial existence, has doomed urban families, even in the inner city; this is true for both those moving from European villages and those leaving American cotton fields. On the contrary, migration often leads to new aspirations, new kinds of interdependence, and new opportunities.25 There is no doubt that some urban families did not function well, but neither did many rural families. Despite the clear resilience of most families in the context of urban change, American policies regarding poverty have often taken this analysis as a point of departure, and they have developed particular ways of dealing with it. One of these is to imagine that recreating traditional family cohesion is itself a form of solution; another is to create policies around the maintenance of particular kinds of families that many assume are better suited to social living and provide better environments for children. By the 1920s, the newly professionalized field of scientific social work had incorporated these views and values and took the family as its primary unit of

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treatment. As Linda Gordon26 has demonstrated, the case-work method assumed that the individual problems social workers were called on to treat reflected some kind of family pathology. Their aim was not simply to provide relief from suffering at any one moment but instead to deal with a family’s unfolding problems—problems assumed to be based in family dynamics. Government aid was also guided by this view. Shoring up the family was the basis for the creation of mother’s pensions by states early in the twentieth century and became the basis for Social Security payments during the New Deal. Indeed, during the Great Depression, as the problem of poverty ballooned to include a huge proportion of a normally hard-working population, relief was imagined and dispensed in terms of families, not individuals. Not only was there widespread fear that spreading poverty would destabilize families,27 thus releasing children into the streets and onto boxcars, but work relief was usually offered with families in mind. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) illustrates this well, but it was also true of other programs such as the National Youth Administration (NYA), a part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Through employment by these agencies, young people were given federal benefits in order to help support and stabilize their families. Recipients were assumed to be responsible for each other’s welfare within the family unit. A CCC recruit automatically had his wages sent home, and employment in other agencies was often family-, rather than individual-, specific, with no two members of the same family employed at the same time.12 The economics of the family has remained a fundamental unit of calculation in part because Americans, despite their beloved mythology of the ruggedly independent individual, have continued to imagine that this is the natural basis of social authority.28

From Family Economy to Family Affection The growing fears about the family’s potential fragility and the accompanying social diagnosis were not the result only of perceptions about lost family functions. Even though the early Chicago School sociologists left a deep imprint on the way we think about the family in an urban environment, family life was not altogether given up because it was no longer rural and multigenerational. By the 1920s, many social theorists had managed to reinvest the family with a new basis for authority and significance as they renegotiated the substance of family relationships, from the economic to the emotional. William Ogburn,29 a prominent Columbia University sociologist, concluded, ‘‘It does not seem probable that the family will recover the functions it has lost. But even if the family doesn’t produce thread and cloth and soap and medicine and food, it can still produce happiness.’’ This perspective seemed to give the modern urban family a new lease on life, although many still imagined that this required the family to remain a coherent unit defined by the marriage of a man and a woman, a unit available

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to provide succor to its adults and effective socialization to its young. Studies that measured family quality in terms of sentiments and emotions even gave the urban family an edge because middle-class families, at least, relieved of the problems of precarious economics, seemed to be providing their children with far more emotional sustenance than either the rural family or the more hardpressed urban working-class family. In the early 1930s, the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection (commissioned by Herbert Hoover before the depression) discovered that urban families had a more effective form of emotional integration: children confided more readily in their parents, and parents were able to guide and induce their children toward behavioral regularity through positive emotions, rather than by using stricter methods of discipline and control. Ogburn and many others, including a new generation of Chicago sociologists such as Ernest Burgess, defined families as groups organized around affective relationships, bound together through emotion rather than economic obligation. Burgess30 was even led to question whether the family was a social institution at all: ‘‘Historically, as other institutions have evolved, the family has lost one by one its original collective activities until the question may be raised whether the modern family is any longer an institution: Is it now anything more than a mere unity of interacting personalities?’’ This question still echoed with the anxiety of the Chicago School perspective on families, but it also facilitated the new emphasis on the importance of stable personalities nurtured in good family relations, which developed during the 1930s and especially the 1940s as new psychologically attuned views focused on the problems of children in wartime.31 The childrearing literature had also been turning its attention from judging children’s well-being in terms of physical health toward measures of emotional health and psychological well-being. This was especially notable in Spock’s psychodynamic viewpoint and his unquestioned position as the dominant post– World War II children’s expert. Also beginning in the 1930s, the new turn to emotional and affective issues resulted in efforts to prepare young people for their roles as parents in a modern world. Popular sociologist Ernest Groves was especially well known for these efforts as a founder of the parent-education movement, which sought to establish special curricula to train youth for their roles in fulfilling family lives.32 A new family required members more fully aware of and better prepared for the demands of marriage and child rearing. This redefinition of the family as an emotion-based unit never entirely replaced the earlier fears about modern urban families as fragile institutions, but it opened another realm of action, as the monitoring of affection became a concern to family specialists. If the new family order was dependent on warm feelings and positive affect, this did not remove the onus from families or lessen their need for stability, though it did redirect the conversation. While social workers had once been able to deem families who abused or neglected their children untrustworthy, this new definition, with its focus on the quality of family relations, made even the middle class—once imagined to be largely

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immune to the destabilizing forces of poverty and disorder—subject to scrutiny and concern. As Ernest Groves’s attempts to instruct elite college students in the fine art of family harmony suggest, the anxiety over family life was now moving steadily toward the evaluation of middle-class family dynamics, where fragile relationships between husbands and wives and unpredictable childrearing practices were demanding new attention and becoming the source of new worries.32

A House in the Suburbs The movement to the suburbs is not a recent phenomenon. Since the nineteenth century, those who could afford the carfare moved to the outskirts of cities, where the air was fresher and the trees and grass created an illusion of country life. Suburban life became a staple of the early twentieth century, and by the 1920s it was firmly part of the American imagination.33 Not the least of its enticements by that time was the possibility of carefully nurturing personalities in a private domestic unit not buffeted by urban turmoil. In fact, well before that time the ideal of a life in the country had been part of family policy in regard to orphans and waifs, who were transported to life outside the city as workers, foster children, and summer campers.34 After World War II, this American romance became a fundamental social process, as suburban migration was magnified by an increasingly prosperous society with an expanding middle class eager to raise its larger post-Depression and post-war families away from the disintegrative forces of urban life. The suburbs became part of the American dream, and the individual single-family house became an expression of family harmony and autonomy. One should not discount the degree to which the beliefs about the corrosive influences of city life had penetrated into the popular imagination; Americans intent on raising their Baby Boom–inflated families fled from environments they associated with dangers to family life. But the suburbanization of American families was above all the result of policy decisions by federal agencies now willing to support singlefamily home ownership through veterans’ benefits, federally insured home loans, and various taxing policies.35 The suburbanization of America in the 1950s was a public response to a view of families as needing not only an escape from the city but also a locale for effecting positive interpersonal relations. Even the suburbs could not insulate families from a new set of fears, or quell the anxieties of family analysts about the future of the family. In fact, in the second half of the twentieth century, observers of the family added the suburbs to their list of areas with potential for disintegration and deep disturbance. If the assault on the families on the margins—immigrants, the poor, and racial minorities—resulted from the belief that such families were inadequate to the challenges of moving to cities, middle-class families seemed to be imploding from within as the family became a new battleground of emotion. The initial detonator came not from economics but from unhappiness, and it came be-

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cause in families now defined by affection instead of function, lack of emotional fulfillment and harmony was a trigger for divorce. Burgess’s proposal of the 1940s—that families would likely stay together just because of elective affinity—seemed not to be holding up. Divorce was already well recognized on the public radar by the early twentieth century, when some observers, especially Protestant ministers, began to watch the up-tick in the divorce rates with gloom.36 Indeed, divorce was often looked to as a primary indicator of widespread family trouble, a signal of the disintegration that academic sociologists most feared. After World War II and into the 1950s, the divorce rate continued to rise, so that by the end of the 1950s about one-quarter of all marriages ended in divorce. After the 1960s, however, the American divorce rate seemed to run out of control, shattering family unity, as the lack of personal fulfillment became sufficient grounds for dissolution. By the last third of the twentieth century, as the level of divorce reached 50% and stayed there (more or less), the family— in the suburbs, the city, and the countryside—seemed once again to be visibly in peril. Some, such as feminist spokeswoman Betty Friedan,37 saw this as the necessary result of the shattering of 1950s suburban dystopias. Others blamed new sexual mores brought about by the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the feminist revolution that Friedan had helped to midwife. By the 1970s and 1980s, economics and ideology together had created a growing population of two-career or two-job households in which the pressures of jobs and emotions created a volatile mixture that seemed to destabilize previous gender roles and other family dynamics. Today, these pressures are often at the heart of concerns about family life and the welfare of children. Thus, seven decades after the original images of urban working youth out of control in inner cities had been enshrined as a basis for family policies by progressive reformers, a new portrait of youth—now suburban, leisured, and middle class—has become another stimulus for addressing the need for action regarding families. Starting in the late 1970s, our image of young people being victimized or inadequately supervised by their harried or unhappy parents began to fill popular magazines and books. This time the families could be of any class: the perceptions of family trouble had spread to all parts of the society. No place was immune, and everyone was vulnerable. Even prosperity became a culprit, as goods became suspect as a substitute for the affection that was supposed to serve as the glue of family life. Whether it was single mothers trying to hold tight to middle-class status and working two jobs while neglecting their children, or divorced fathers kidnapping their own children in custody disputes, middle-class family life seemed to be in disarray.38 And the American media heightened our obsessive concern with family failure by focusing on young people who ran away; who were strung out on alcohol, music, and video games; or who were having sex by age 15 and being bullied into selfloathing by peers. Today, the children of Columbine as seen on NBC, not the children of Chicago as portrayed by Jane Addams, have become the signal of family inadequacy.

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The image of children out of control with which we like to berate ourselves as a society is as old as the tradition of the Puritan Jeremiad, where each new generation of ministers agonized about a falling-away from a golden age of piety and rectitude by decrying the misbehavior of the young. In fact, our society is very different, and our families are very different, from those of those early, anxious Puritans. Unlike them, we no longer live in small, coherent communities where we watch each other’s children (and each other’s morals). The family is a private terrain, and our families no longer provide every kind of social resource, from nourishment, education, and religion through the sinews of law enforcement. Our twenty-first-century families are also very different from those who caused such anxiety when they first moved to cities and adjusted to industry a century ago. Having adapted to a long century of new technologies involving reproduction and household maintenance, as well as myriad other social changes, our families are no longer patriarchal units in which wives obey and children serve the larger good of the household. Today, we have families of all kinds, even in the suburbs. Some are composed of the traditional husband and wife with their children, others of second or third spouses and their blended children; still others are unmarried single parents or same-sex couples with children. These households still provide various social goods, although their varied constitutions may not fit everyone’s image of a family. So, the family has changed a great deal. But our view of the family as a basic joist of social order has not been much revised, and as a result we still worry endlessly about whether it can be depended on. In the early twentieth century, many of those who diagnosed the problems of the cities were surely looking back to a golden age that might have still comforted the Puritans, a world of cohesive communities with responsible, hierarchical families. Our own recent past is neither rural nor based in such tight-knit communities, although we still seek a golden age. Today, the golden age is likely to be sought in some version of the mid-twentieth-century dream of a stable, two-parent, singlewage-earner, domestic family that was itself first created by nineteenthcentury Victorians, and we tend to reify this model as the only one that can provide social stability and personal satisfaction. Because this family now approximates a kind of golden historical ideal, it has recently reappeared in the press as former career women ‘‘opt out’’ to return to domestic duties that approximate the tone of this earlier family form.39 As we contemplate the multiple kinds of families today, it is tempting to apply older standards as a way of escaping contemporary difficulties. But these standards were themselves never more than historical inventions. I do not want to give the wrong impression. Our fears about family have not stayed exactly the same as even this brief review has suggested, and the new anxieties about the middle classes have certainly not entirely displaced our worries about the poor, the immigrant, and the nonwhite. Nor do I think that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Our families and our children have lots of problems, and problems of many kinds, and there is much that could be

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done to help family life and individuals within it. Still, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that worrying about families is both an American tradition and contagious. But a number of matters can be clarified simply by recognizing how much our current perspectives participate in a long historical tradition and then using that historical understanding to inform our approach to policy. First, American families have been changing since the nation’s first founding, and they will continue to change. Worrying about families is also likely to continue—it is in our national genes. But worrying about keeping them just as they were before is hardly a good basis for policy or an effective response to change. Americans need families, and they need to implement policies that make families better at what they do, but these policies need to be realistic and socially responsive. There are a number of quite positive lessons that this history also yields. Americans worry about their families because they assume they are important, and while they disagree about approved forms of family life, they have long been accustomed to making families the basis for social welfare policies. Unlike other societies, such as those of Germany and Britain, which introduced social welfare policies largely to protect workers, Americans created values of social welfare around families and children. Americans also seek out the best possible expert advice about their children when they can, and while the inconsistency and excess of that advice can sometimes overwhelm and frustrate them, they can be expected to view thoughtful and flexible policies that look to their children’s best interests with favor. Even individualistic Americans understand their stake in their own children’s future. Today, our children seem to be surrounded by risks, and much of the heightened concern we experience is related to our perception of these risks and the feeling that families are not quite up to dealing with them. Drugs, bad schooling, obesity, sexually transmitted diseases, popular culture, and popular media are among the things that parents seem to need to deal with. At the same time, parents are overwhelmed and overworked. As the essays in this volume suggest, different families and different individuals have responded in various ways to these challenges, just as families have responded in the past to the challenges of their day. In seeking ways to assist in the creation of better families and better parents, it is the task of academics and policy makers to recognize not only that family life itself has a history but also that the improvement of families is something in which we have historically had a deep stake as Americans have sought a better future.

Notes 1. Guggenheim, M. (2005). What’s wrong with children’s rights? New York: Harvard University Press. 2. For the invention of the modern family, see Gillis, J. (1996). A world of their own making: Myth, ritual, and the quest for family values. New York: Basic Books.

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3. Rothman, D. J. (1971). The discovery of the asylum: Social order and disorder in the new republic. Boston: Little, Brown. 4. Friedman, L. M. (2004). Private lives: Families, individuals, and the law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 5. Coontz, S. (1992). The way we never were: American families and the nostalgia trap. New York: Basic Books. 6. For a history of the Children’s Bureau, see Lindenmeyer, K. (1996). A right to childhood: The U.S. Children’s Bureau and Child Welfare, 1912– 46. Urbana= Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 7. Hulbert, A. (2003). Raising America: Experts, parents, and a century of advice about children (p. 99). New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 8. For information on Watson, see Fass, P. S. (1977). The damned and the beautiful: American youth in the 1920s (pp. 100–107). New York: Oxford University Press; Hulbert, A. (2004). Raising America: Experts, parents, and a century of advice about children (Chapter 3). New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 9. Grossberg, M. (1985). Governing the hearth: Law and the family in nineteenthcentury America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 10. For a similar view, see Cohen, M. (2005). Reconsidering schools and the American welfare state. History of Education Quarterly, 45, 511–537. 11. Cutler, W. W., III (2000). Parents and schools: The 150-year struggle for control in American education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Schultz, S. K. (1973). The culture factory: Boston public schools, 1789–1860. New York: Oxford University Press; Kaestle, C. F. (1983). Pillars of the republic: Common schools and American society, 1780–1860. New York: Hill and Wang; Cohen, M. (2006). Children’s rights, mother’s rights, labor rights. Paper presented at The Century of the Child: Children’s Rights and the Nation-State in the U. S., France and Sweden, 1900– 2000. Columbia University, New York, May 24–26, 2006. 12. Fass, P. S. (1989). Outside in: Minorities and the transformation of American education. New York: Oxford University Press. 13. ‘‘Few doubt the family’s capacity to survive; it has withstood the challenges of a changing society since the Industrial Revolution first took people from the isolation and self-sufficiency of the farm. It will no doubt, do so again. . . . Still, as American men and women attempt to shape new relationships, the family is being challenged as never before, from within and from without. Experts intensely debate the social implications of this dual challenge, with some envisioning the dawn of an enlightened, creative society while others are deeply disturbed by what they see as a loss of values, a burgeoning instability that may have dire consequences for democratic institutions. . . . The new challenge and the new relationships that have spawned it have made this the age of the fragile family, the family in transition.’’ Nordheimer, J. (1977). The family in transition: A challenge from within. New York Times, November 27, p. 1. 14. ‘‘No problem in modern life so challenges the attention of thoughtful students of society as does the family crisis, if we may interpret the tenor of recent writings upon the subject. One group heralds the present situation as the beginning of a new day in which all the old restraints of family mores will be thrown aside, and the other group is alarmed lest the most treasured of institutions may disappear and bring havoc upon modern civilization. Both, however, agree that the family is at a turning of the way.’’ Mowrer, E. (1932). The family: Its organization and disorganization. Chicago: University of Chicago.

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15. Rodgers, D. T. (1998). Atlantic crossings: Social politics in a progressive era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 16. Hunter, R. (1904). Poverty. New York: Macmillan. 17. Thomas, W. I., & Znaniecki, F. The Polish peasant in Europe and America. First published in five volumes between 1918 and 1920. Boston: Badger. The book is best known in its two-volume edition, published in 1927 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf). 18. Quoted in Hulbert, A. (2003), Raising America: Experts, parents and a century of advice about children (p. 34). New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 19. Even as sophisticated a modern historian as John Gillis still adopts some of this picture when he portrays preindustrial pre-nineteenth-century families. See A world of their own making (Gillis2). 20. Addams, J. (1909; reprinted 1972). The spirit of youth in the city’s streets. Champagne-Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 21. For Dewey, see Fass,12 1989. 22. Handlin, O. (1951). The uprooted: The epic story of the great migrations that made the American people. Boston: Little, Brown. 23. On the subject of the industrial family, see Anderson, M. (1971). Family structure in nineteenth century Lancashire. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press; Hareven, T. (1982), Family time and industrial time: The relationship between the family and work in a New England industrial community. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 24. Jones, J. (1992). The dispossessed: America’s underclasses from the Civil War to the present. New York: Basic Books. 25. Harrington, M. (1993). The other America: Poverty in the United States. New York: Simon and Schuster (originally published in 1962); Fass, P. S. (2005). Children in global migrations. Journal of Social History, 38, 937–954. 26. Gordon, L. (1988). Heroes of their own lives: The politics and history of family violence. New York: Penguin Books. 27. Komorovsky, M. (1940). The unemployed man and his family: The effect of unemployment upon the status of the man in fifty-nine families. New York: Dryden Press for the Institute of Social Research. 28. This is in sharp contrast with Sweden, where the individualistic ideal has led to distinctly non-family-based policies, such as separate taxes for husbands and wives. 29. Ogburn, W. F. (1928). The social heritage and the family. In M. E. Rich (Ed.), Family life today (pp. 38–39). New York=Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 30. Burgess, E. (1928). The family and the person. Publications of the American Sociological Society, 22, 133. 31. Tuttle, W. M. (1993). ‘‘Daddy’s gone to war’’: The Second World War in the lives of America’s children. New York: Oxford University Press. 32. Ernest Groves was one of the main proponents of parenting education, and he set up the first course of its kind at the University of North Carolina. He also summarized the state of education for parenting regularly in the American Journal of Sociology. See, for example, Groves, E. (1929). The family (changes in 1928). American Journal of Sociology, 34, 1099–1107. Others also followed this trend, such as Helen Merrill Lynd ([1960]. Parent education and the colleges. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 160, 197–204) and Laura Winslow Drummond ([1942]. Youth and instruction in marriage and family living. New York: Bureau of Publication, Teachers College, Columbia University).

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33. Peter Stearns notes the close relationship between a newly intensive emphasis on child rearing and carefully nurtured personalities and suburban life in his 2003 book, Anxious parents: A history of modern childrearing in America (p. 10) (New York: New York University Press). 34. For camps and camping as an escape from the city, see Paris, L. (2008). Children’s nature: The rise of the American summer camp. New York: NYU Press. This did not occur only in the United States but also in France and other societies where poverty was associated with industrialization. 35. Jackson, K. T. (1985). Crabgrass frontier: The suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press. 36. O’Neill, W. (1967). Divorce in the progressive era. New Haven: Yale University Press. 37. Friedan, B. (1963). The feminine mystique. New York: W. W. Norton. 38. For information on parental kidnapping, see Fass, P. (1997). Kidnapped: Child abduction in America (Chap. 5). New York: Oxford University Press. 39. Flanigan, C. (2006). To hell with all that: Loving and loathing our inner housewife. Boston: Little, Brown.

2 From Private to Public: Paying Grandparents as Caregivers Jill Duerr Berrick

The 1990 U.S. Census revealed a 44% increase over the previous decade in the number of children living with their grandparents in the United States.1 In one-third of these families, neither of the parents was present.2 The trend has continued, and today more children are living in grandparent-headed households than ever before; in fact, grandparent-headed households appear to be the fastest growing demographic group in the United States. The most recent figures suggest that in 2001, about 9% of all U.S. children lived with at least one grandparent—almost double the number and percentage from just 5 years earlier. About 1.4 million of these children were living in grandparent-headed households with no parent present.3 The majority of children in no-parent households are poor, and African-American and Hispanic children are overrepresented.3,4 About half of the relative caregivers are two-grandparent families, and the other 45% of families are headed by a grandmother.5 Some of these grandparents are quite elderly, dealing with their own health complications and other challenges, but as of 1997 over half (55%) were under age 55, and 19% were younger than 45.6 The family constellation of grandparent or other relative and child has been referred to by various authors as kinship care, relative care, and skipped-generation care. It refers to the full-time parenting of children by individuals related by blood, law, or marriage. In some contexts, it also includes care provided by ‘‘members of [a] tribe or clan, godparents, stepparents, or other adults who have a kinship bond with a child,’’7 although these caregivers are more widely referred to as ‘‘kith.’’ While gaining increasing contemporary attention in 27

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social-policy circles, the practice of rearing a relative’s child is ancient and global. In early Hawaiian cultures, for example, paternal grandparents typically claimed the first-born son, and maternal grandparents the first-born daughter, as their own.8 In many African nations, kinship care has been widely practiced for decades,9 and in colonial America children who lost their parents to death or incapacity were typically reared by grandparents or other relatives.10 Today, kinship arrangements largely occur within the private context of the family. These intensely personal decisions are made to promote the safety, security, and well-being of children,11 and they usually come about as a result of significant problems in a parent’s capacity to care for a child, such as economic disruptions or parental health problems including HIV=AIDS, substance abuse, incarceration, or maltreatment.12 Sometimes the arrangements are temporary; other times they are permanent.4 While the large majority of kinship arrangements are private and voluntary,13 an increasing number of children are now cared for by relatives with financial support from government sources. Shifting public policies promoting the use of kin as substitute and=or supportive caregivers have blurred the lines between private and public, and they raise questions about the future of the American family and children’s care. In this chapter, I examine four domains of social policy where kin care dominates: foster care, welfare, guardianship, and child care. Taking a critical perspective on current developments in these areas, I analyze the limits and benefits of the shifts from private to public involvement. The final section raises questions about the appropriate role for government in supporting extended families.

The Case of Foster Care Foster care is designed to serve children who can no longer live in their parents’ homes, usually due to problems associated with child maltreatment. The care offered is often temporary while parents attempt to resolve the problems that resulted in the child’s removal from the home.14 The long history of foster care has sometimes favored children’s placements in institutions, sometimes in free boarding homes, and, in the past century, in the homes of foster parents— strangers to the children who elect to provide care with modest subsidies offered by the state.15 Since the mid-1980s, the foster-care census in the United States has risen dramatically. In 1985 there were 276,000 children living in out-of-home care, but after the turn of the century that number doubled to over 560,000 children.16 At the same time that foster care caseloads were rising, the number of foster parents available to serve children declined precipitously. Some estimates suggest that nearly one-third of foster parents left the field in the decade from 1980 to 1990.17 The imbalance in supply and demand and the pressing need for care providers left state officials with few choices: expand care provided in institutional settings (an alternative that would raise costs

Paying Grandparents as Caregivers

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considerably and clash with philosophical sentiments about the best interests of children) or develop alternative placement settings. As relatives had long provided care to children outside of the auspices of the child welfare system,18 they were turned to as a potential placement resource. Parallel to these developments, legal precedent changed. In 1979, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that kin could receive federally funded foster care payments under specified conditions.19 Although various states interpreted the decision to different effects, many states opened opportunities for kin to become kinship foster parents, albeit without many of the same training requirements and licensing standards associated with regular foster care.14 In fact, in California and many other states, kin were required to pass a criminal background check only; the suitability of others in the home was not necessarily considered, and other health and safety concerns were often passed over.20 The inclusion of kin into the foster-care system has had profound effects on the child welfare system overall. In the 1990s, kinship foster care became the fastest growing service funded by the child welfare system.21 From 1986 to 1990, the proportion of children served in kinship foster care grew from 18% to 31% of the total foster care caseload,22 and in some states the rapid expansion of kinship foster care continued thereafter. In California, the utilization of kin peeked in 1998, with 45% of all children placed in kinship foster care23; Illinois showed similar trends, with approximately half of their child welfare population placed with kin.24 Since the late 1990s, utilization of kin has declined somewhat and stabilized. In 1997, the federal government introduced the Adoption and Safe Families Act,25 recommending kinship foster care whenever possible but limiting federal funding to those kin meeting state licensing requirements for foster care.13 Today, kinship foster care accounts for roughly one-fifth of all placements nationwide, although it still predominates in many large states.26 Prior to placement, a kin caregiver is assessed for suitability as a care provider, and the home is reviewed to ensure that it meets basic health and safety standards for licensure. Those who qualify receive a modest monthly subsidy to pay for the child’s care, ranging nationally from approximately $200 to $700 per child per month. In California, the average foster-care payment is approximately $500 per child per month, and the payment is graduated based on the age of the child.27 If the child has special needs, monthly rates may vary from about $800 to $1200 per month.28 Children in kinship foster care qualify for federally supported health insurance (Medicaid), mental health services, and other services as needed, although some evidence suggests that kin-care children actually receive fewer services and fewer contacts with social workers than do children in regular foster care.29,30 Some caregivers eventually adopt the children in their care, and others may elect for legal guardianship, but many children placed with kin remain in foster care for extended periods of time. Some evidence suggests that while the likelihood of reunification with birth parents is similar for children placed with

30

Children in Families

kin as it is for those placed with foster parents, the speed with which reunification is achieved is slower for children living in kinship foster care. Further, it appears that the amount of the foster care payment may effect reunification, with higher payments resulting in a lower likelihood of reunification and a higher probability of the child’s remaining in kinship foster care in the long term.31 One can only speculate as to what would be the circumstances of children and their families if government supports were withdrawn from kin caregivers. Federal and state funding for kinship foster parents has allowed large numbers of children who would otherwise have been cared for by strangers to remain in their family of origin; to preserve cultural, religious, community, and linguistic ties; and to maintain more frequent and more informal contact with other family members, including birth parents and siblings.32 Although it would be difficult to argue that the availability of kinship foster care has acted as an incentive to move children from the homes of parents into the homes of grandparents (as there are a number of formidable gatekeepers to the child welfare system, such as social workers, lawyers, and judges, who presumably act to separate children from their parents only in severe circumstances), it appears, nevertheless, that subsidized kinship foster care, in some circumstances, may dampen the likelihood that children will be reunited with their birth parents, or at least that they will do so in a timely fashion.

The Case of Welfare If foster care has fundamentally changed with the inclusion of kin into the child welfare system, changes in welfare have been just as significant. Welfare, or cash assistance, is available to low-income parents and their children. Most frequently, the head of household is a single mother with two children.27 In 1996, the federal government overhauled the cash-assistance system in the United States, developing the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program.33 TANF diverges from its predecessor program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), in several important respects. Most notably, TANF is time limited (varying by state from 21 months to 60 months),34 work requirements are imposed in exchange for the continuation of benefits, and a variety of financial sanctions can be imposed by the state if parents do not comply with program regulations. Although these rules apply to most birth parents, the law is variable with regard to others who may be caring for a child under the welfare program. Specifically, when relatives designated as the head of household provide care to low-income children, TANF requirements in some states are relaxed.35 For example, in nine states, heads of household aged 60 or older are exempt from time limits.34 Twenty-nine states exempt grandparents from work requirements, although the exemption applies only for older grandparents ranging in age from 55 to 65 years, depending on the state.36 In California, grandparents

Paying Grandparents as Caregivers

31

aged 60 and older are exempt from both time limits and work requirements; others can be excused from these requirements at worker discretion based on their ‘‘caregiving burden.’’37 Grandparents caring for child relatives may collect public aid via one of two routes: a family grant or a child-only grant. Grandparents who themselves meet income-eligibility requirements can collect a family grant.38 As mentioned, some work- and time-limit restrictions may apply. Family grant amounts range from $96 to $551 for a family of two, depending on the state.39 As family size increases, the grant amount rises incrementally.40 Families are eligible for health insurance (Medicaid) and may be eligible for Food Stamps, assistance with heating, and assistance with housing. Grandparents whose income and=or assets are too high may collect a ‘‘child-only’’ grant, again with variation across states.41 Like family grants, child-only grants are incremental relative to family size, children are eligible for Medicaid, and the family may be eligible for Food Stamps. Neither time limits nor work requirements apply. Most research suggests that growth in grandparent-headed TANF households is high. In a study conducted by Berrick, Needell, and Minkler,37 California’s welfare caseload was examined using state data. Due to limitations in the dataset, the researchers could consider the characteristics of the ‘‘head of household’’ but could not determine the relationship of the head to the child. Using an age cutoff of 50 years or older, they found growth in the welfare caseload among older caregivers was considerable in the years prior to reform. From 1990 through 1996, for example, while the AFDC caseload grew among all age groups, households headed by older caregivers more than doubled. The study has yet to be replicated since welfare reform was implemented. Nationwide, the proportion of TANF children who live with a grandparent who serves as head of household climbed from 6.2% of the total caseload in 1998 to 8.4% in 2001, and the share living in a parent’s household declined from 90.3% to 85.7%.27 Growth in the child-only caseload also has been pronounced, particularly as a proportion of the total caseload. From 1969 to 2001, the proportion of child-only families more than tripled to 37.2% of all aid cases.42 The childonly caseload is made up of two major groups: (1) children living with parents who are not counted in the assistance unit (because the parent has been sanctioned off of TANF, the parent is collecting Supplemental Security Income, or the parent is ineligible for TANF due to immigration status43) or (2) children living with an adult other than the parent. Today, about half of the child-only TANF caseload comprises children living with their relatives,44 and of these relatives about two-thirds of adults are grandparents to the children. Although there are few differences between parents and grandparents collecting child-only grants, there are more subtle differences between parents and grandparents collecting full family grants. Among grandparents eligible for a TANF grant, monthly subsidies are similar to those allocated to parents. However, the TANF policy environment, including work requirements, time

32

Children in Families

limits, and behavioral regulations, may make relative-headed households more economically secure for children than parent-headed households. The workand time-limit exemptions were designed to shelter older caregivers from a labor market that is reluctant to embrace older workers.45 But they were also intended to honor relatives for fulfilling a social obligation toward family members. Indeed, as an alternative to foster care, relative care is desirable both economically and socially. However, as an alternative to parental care, kinship caregiving has its limits. The welfare-policy landscape that makes kinship care more economically secure for children may also unintentionally serve as an incentive for parents to move their children into their relatives’ homes.

The Case of Subsidized Guardianship As policymakers begin to recognize the needs of relative caregivers and their increasing role in child welfare and welfare programs, new initiatives have been developed in some states that resemble a hybrid between foster care and welfare. Some kinship programs are designed for children who previously lived with their parents but who have been deemed at risk for maltreatment; others are designed for non-needy relatives (regardless of the reason for the child’s living arrangement), with grant amounts about midway between foster-care and welfare payments.44 Another handful of states have developed subsidized guardianship programs as a means of encouraging relatives to assume a legal custodial relationship with the child for whom they are caring. Up until recently, grandparents or other relatives were free to petition the courts to assume custody of their relative children when parents were unable or unwilling to care for a child. Custody was a private, family matter, and courts were involved only to the extent that the legal change in relationship needed state sanction. Following the change in custody, however, the role of the state faded. The new subsidized guardianship programs are funded with Federal IV-E funds (through state waiver requests), through TANF, or with state funding46 and are designed principally as a diversion from foster care or as an exit alternative for children who have been living in foster care with their relatives. Some states limit guardianship based upon the age of the child (e.g., age 10 or older),47 while other states restrict the program only to those caregivers who have provided foster care to their relative child for some period of time (e.g., 12 months or longer). Depending on the state, payments are made at or near the basic foster-care rate and Medicaid services are continued. Other services, including case management, are terminated, and court oversight of the case is withdrawn. Subsidized guardianship allows children to experience the security of a legal relationship with their kin caregivers in addition to the affective relationship they likely enjoy. It gives children living in kinship foster care a way out of the child welfare system, as many kin are reluctant to adopt their relative chil-

Paying Grandparents as Caregivers

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dren,48 and it allows relatives to continue caring for children into adulthood without the intrusion of social workers and others monitoring their parenting and their children’s well-being. Once legal guardianship has been established, however, it is unlikely most parents will see their children return to their care. Parents can petition the courts to have their children returned, but they have to show significant improvement in their behaviors and=or living conditions for a guardianship to be overturned. Court and legal fees can be substantial44 and may mitigate low-income parents’ opportunities to assert themselves in the judicial system. Further, children who do return to low-income, welfare-reliant households will see their assistance income fall (from the basic foster-care rate to the TANF rate) and their income insecurity rise. The economic incentive for grandparents to return children to these economically unstable households is thus slim.

The Case of Child Care Social-policy changes relating to kin have largely centered on substitute-care arrangements when parents are unable or unwilling to provide for their children. Yet kin have also played an increasing role as supportive-care providers during daytime, evening, and weekend hours, when mothers have been called to work. With the advent of welfare reform, an increasing number of children now need care while mothers work part and full time. In most states, parents collecting public assistance are required to enter the labor market shortly after the birth of their child. In 44 states, no exemptions are given for the birth of a baby, while in the other states mothers can stay home for up to 12 months before they are required to return to work.34 While mothers work or look for work, someone must care for their child, and government funds for subsidizing care are now more plentiful than ever before. Prior to welfare reform, federal funding for all child care programs combined equaled about $10 million. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA)33 ushered in a substantial increase in child care funding, with a $15 million block grant and an additional $7 million discretionary fund. Federal funding for child care was also streamlined from several categorical child care programs into a single Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF).49 Federal subsidies are available to help pay for care,50 and parents are given significant latitude to choose the type of care that best meets their child’s and family’s needs. Although child care funding and availability have expanded since welfare reform, low-income women moving from welfare to work must make child care decisions within tight time constraints, often with little knowledge about the formal child care system51; many parents choose relatives or close friends to care for their child. Relatives have always been the caregivers of choice for low-income women with young children,52 yet these informal child care arrangements were

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Children in Families

previously made and paid for privately among family members.53 In 1990, however, federal law changed with the introduction of the Child Care and Development Block grant, ushering in a new perspective on public funding for child care services that aligned with parents’ priorities. License-exempt care— unlicensed child care provided by a relative or close friend—was thus included in the subsidized child care delivery system, with discretion given to the states to determine regulations for allowing public funds to flow to these caregivers. But policies surrounding license-exempt care were not developed based only on parental preference. Cost for license-exempt care is significantly lower compared with formal child care, and with the large-scale entrance of lowincome women into the labor market following welfare reform, the supply of formal child care was recognized as wholly inadequate for meeting demand.54 The benefits of license-exempt care are clear: care provided by a relative is likely to be culturally and linguistically consonant with the needs of the child; it is likely to be more accessible than center-based care (particularly for families living in rural communities); and it is more often available during odd hours, weekends, and evenings, when TANF recipients returning to the labor market are more likely to work.55,56 But license-exempt care is not without limitations. Because it is exempt from licensure, care providers need not abide by any standards typically set for daycare environments. Health, safety, and quality concerns prevail, particularly among child care researchers who point to the social, interactional, educational, and structural benefits afforded by center-based care.57 Safety concerns may indeed be an issue: license-exempt care providers in California who are not relatives to the child (kith care) are required to submit to criminal background checks, but, as with kinship foster care a decade previously, no other requirements or standards for care are imposed. Relatives providing license-exempt care have no requirements imposed at all except for age requirements (at least 18 years old)—even their relative status is self-reported.54 Since the introduction of subsidies to license-exempt care, growth in this sector has been dramatic. A decade after its introduction, 44% of all children receiving subsidized care in California were cared for in license-exempt care.54 Today, more than half of all children in subsidized care in that state are with kith or kin.58 Nationwide, the numbers are somewhat smaller, but grandparents are still the predominant child care providers for preschoolers receiving subsidized care.59 Relatives receiving these subsidies are paid hourly, weekly, or monthly based on regional market rates set annually by the government. In California, monthly rates for full-time care range from about $425 in rural counties to $680 in urban counties, with care for younger children set at a higher rate.58 Subsidized license-exempt child care has made public what was once private. As in other aspects of children’s care, grandparents have taken on a large role in supporting low-income families and have won public trust at a time when public support for parental care for children has waned. Indeed, prior to welfare reform, parents in California received an AFDC payment of about

Paying Grandparents as Caregivers

35

$500 per month to provide care for their children. Since welfare reform, these same women have been urged to enter the labor market while their welfare checks have been essentially transferred to grandparents who watch over their children.

A Policy Approach to Soften Incentive Effects In foster care, welfare, guardianship, and child care, recently developed public policy has favored grandparent-headed households, sometimes to the disadvantage of parents. Table 2.1 reviews these four major programs and outlines the financial and service supports offered kin, the standards for care, and restrictions on aid. For example, in kinship foster care, financial support is generous compared with welfare payments for low-income parents, services are rich compared with the few services available for parents, and standards for care are relatively high compared with the practical absence of standards of care for parents.60 Once children are placed in kinship foster care, incentives to return them to resource-poor, unsupported care environments may not be strong. In the case of TANF family grants, financial support and standards for care are similar for both parents and grandparents, yet parents face more restrictive policies in terms of work and time requirements, making grandparent-headed households more financially secure for children whose mothers do not succeed in a welfare-to-work environment. In the case of subsidized guardianship, financial support may be more generous to grandparents than to low-income parents, and parents must petition the court to regain custody of the child. Similar to kinship foster care, once legal guardianship is established, incentives to return children to parents do not prevail. The case of child care is somewhat different because there is no incentive for a full-scale transfer of children from parents to grandparents; yet low-income parents on welfare are largely compelled to place their children in others’ care as they enter the labor market, and the care they often select is that provided by grandparents or other relatives. In this instance, the incentive is to place children with grandparents rather than in center-based settings, even though the quality of care children receive may be highly variable. The incentive effects described here are speculative in some cases; information from parents and grandparents about their personal lives and decisions would be necessary to answer the question qualitatively, and large-scale administrative data necessary to answer the question empirically.61 But modest adjustments to policy in each of these areas would likely have a neutralizing effect on the current implicit incentives (described briefly in the final column of Table 2.1). Development of services and supports for children, regardless of their living arrangements, and additional supports to parents upon reunification with their children following kinship foster care would allow families to feel more comfortable about children’s transitions back to the birth-parent’s home when mothers were ready to assume full-time care. In the case of welfare,

Table 2.1. Financial and Service Incentives for Grandparent Care Financial Support

Services to Grandparent

Kinship Foster Care

Varies by state from $200 to $700 per child per month

Child and family assessment Service plan= case plan Medicaid Clothing and school supplies

TANF— Family Grant

EmploymentVaries by state based services from $170 for adult(s); to $923 per no services month for a for child family of three; Medicaid. incremental

36

Type of Care=Support

Policies or Programs to Mute the Incentive Effect

Standards Imposed on Grandparent

Restrictions Placed on Grandparent or Parent

Foster care licensure Criminal background check Home-suitability assessment

Disincentive Visitation with to return birth parent may child to parent be supervised or restricted Parent must show compliance with case plan Grandparent may be encouraged to adopt or assume guardianship after 18 months

Provide services to child that follow child, whether placed in or out of care Offer family stabilization grants to parents when children return home Offer clothing and school-supply allowances to parents

Income and assets test

Work and time restrictions may apply

Eliminate time limits

Incentive Toward No-Parent Care

Incentive to move child to relative when parents face time limits

TANF— Child Only

$60 to $513 per month; incremental

Subsidized Varies by state; Guardianship may be set at TANF child-only rate or at basic foster care rate

No services for adult or child Medicaid Medicaid

37 Child Care

$425 to $680 per child per month

None

Show relationship to child (self-report)

No restrictions Aid available until child turns 18

Neutral

None

Aid available Varies by state; until child for children turns 18 already in kinship foster care, Parent must petition the the suitability court to return of the home must child match that assessed previously through foster care for children ‘‘at risk’’ of maltreatment

Disincentive to return child to parent

Periodic monitoring to ensure child still resides with relative and home situation is safe Do not provide subsidized guardianship as a diversion to foster care

None

Incentive toward daily (not full-time) relative care

Require ‘‘certification’’ including basic training, background checks, home inspections, etc.

Varies by state; available while mother works, until mother’s income rises, or based on time limits

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Children in Families

elimination of time limits would shift the focus away from parents and toward children’s needs for financial security, and it would allow children to remain with their parents except in dire circumstances. Subsidized guardianship should be retained for children exiting kinship foster care, although legal guardianship practice could be altered to include periodic, unannounced social-worker visits to verify that children are still living with the relative and to ensure the health and safety of the caregiving situation. As a diversion from foster care, however, subsidized guardianship should be reconsidered. During a child’s stay in kinship foster care, parents are given supports and services to promote their reunion with their child. If children are transferred directly to guardianship without the protection of the foster-care system, parents will lose an important opportunity to reunite with their children, and efforts to regain legal custody will fall entirely on the shoulders of parents who may not have the financial or other resources necessary to bring their children home. Finally, public funding for private child care will continue to promote informal relative care, but efforts to develop basic certification processes, similar to those devised in other, western European countries,62 will ensure that minimum standards for children’s care are met.

Policy Reforms to Support Parental Care Grandparents caring for children in skipped-generation households may be one of the poorest and therefore most disadvantaged groups in the United States.6 Yet much policy in the area of kinship care has been reactive and contradictory,63 in some cases restrictive and in others generous regarding kinship care standards, services, rights, and responsibilities. A new approach that focuses squarely on children’s needs, regardless of their living circumstances, would likely balance parents’ and grandparents’ opportunities and rights in addition to better safeguarding children’s well-being. It is clear that children in record numbers have left the home of their parents to live with or be cared for by their grandparents and other relatives. Although in previous years relatives offered such care to children through a private system of social obligation and reciprocity, their support likely placed severe financial pressures on these relatives, potentially jeopardizing the wellbeing of children. With the advent of public subsidies for foster care, welfare, guardianship, and child care, relatives have been able to extend themselves to their relative children, cushioned from the economic strains imposed by the exercising of their social obligations. But have the effects of public subsidies been entirely benign? Surely some children are now more economically secure living in the homes of their grandparents than they were with their parents. Yet is it possible that the availability of public payments has unwittingly contributed to the decline of the parent-child family and to the rise of the noparent family?

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While relatives have long played a role in supporting parents in their caregiving function, the significant rise in grandparent-headed households has paralleled the rise in public funding for such care. Have public-policy makers responded to an increasing demand for services and supports from relative caregivers, or have newly available supports instigated the transfer of more children from parents’ homes to relatives’? Ungerson’s62 theory of the commodification of care suggests that relatives—principally women—are influenced by market demands, and government-based payments for care serve to pressure women to act on their sentiments of obligation toward family members. Publicly available payments, therefore, serve the purpose of insuring a sufficient supply of caregiving settings for children, particularly when demand for caregiving services rises. One could argue, however, that as payments for care rise, the tipping point in each family’s consideration of their economic best interests must be reassessed, and in some cases public payments for informal care may actually increase demand. The result not only signifies a shift in children’s care arrangements but also yields a subtle, and important, message to low-income women: public support is greater for grandparents than for parents when it comes to providing protection and care to children. Public-policy makers generally appreciate the role of relatives in the lives of children; without their assistance, many children might otherwise be forced into the arms of the state and=or strangers for custody and support. Yet efforts to affirm grandparents’ labors in a no-strings-attached policy environment, where parents are tacitly discouraged from raising their children, may have unwittingly contributed to the development of social trends in family patterns and unregulated care for children that is less than ideal. Instead, acknowledgment of the role grandparents play in the lives of children can be balanced by a combination of social recognition, financial support, and modest bureaucratic regulation. The more generous the financial support, and the fewer obligations attached to the funding, the greater the concern that such assistance may create opportunities for and pressures on parents to move children into more economically stable environments in the homes of relatives. Further, the care that is provided at public request can assuredly be variable in quality if it operates entirely outside of basic standards and regulatory controls. The case of foster care is instructive in this regard. Although kinship foster care grew at an unprecedented rate prior to 1997, with the introduction of basic licensing requirements growth in kinship foster care leveled, and relatives offering low-quality care were screened out of the system. Public policies that support parents and extended family members in caring for children should be encouraged, but they should be introduced primarily to promote parents in their efforts to exercise their duties toward their children. Relatives, a critical safety net for children’s care and protection, can play an important role in children’s upbringing, but public policy should guard against their supplanting the role of parents, particularly with the tacit support of the welfare state.

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Acknowledgments The author thanks Chelsea Neel for her assistance with this chapter. This chapter was previously presented as a paper at the European Social Policy Analysis Network (September 22, 2005, Fribourg, Switzerland).

Notes 1. Saluter, A. F. (1992). Marital status and living arrangements: March 1991. Current Population reports (Series P-20 No. 461). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. 2. Please see Note 1. 3. Kreider, R. M., & Fields, J. (2005). Living arrangements of children: 2001. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Census Bureau. Retrieved August 25, 2007, from http:==www.census.gov=prod=2005pubs=p70–104 .pdf. 4. Simmons, T., & Dye, J. L. (2003). Grandparents living with grandchildren: 2000. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Census Bureau. 5. Kleiner, H. S., Hertzog, J., & Targ, D. B. (2005). Grandparents acting as parents. Washington, DC: Grandparents United. Retrieved August 25, 2007, from http:== www.uwex.edu=ces=gprg=article.html. 6. Casper, L. M., & Bryson, K. R. (1998). Co-resident grandparents and their grandchildren: Grandparent maintained families. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau. 7. Child Welfare League of America (CWLA). (1994). Kinship care: A natural bridge. Washington, DC: CWLA North American Kinship Care Policy and Practice Committee. 8. Luomala, K. (1987). Reality and fantasy: The foster child in Hawaiian myths and customs. Pacific Studies, 10(2), 1– 45. 9. Hegar, R. L. (1999). The cultural roots of kinship care. In R. L. Hegar & M. Scannapieco, Kinship foster care: Policy, practice, and research. New York: Oxford University Press. 10. Trattner, W. (1994). From poor law to welfare state: A history of social welfare in America, 5th ed. New York: Free Press. 11. Silk, J. B. (1987). Adoption and fosterage in human societies: Adaptations or enigmas? Cultural Anthropology, 2(1), 39– 49. 12. Caputo, R. K. (2001). Grandparents and coresident grandchildren in a youth cohort. Journal of Family Issues, 22(5), 541–556. 13. Geen, R. (2003). Kinship care: Making the most of a valuable resource. Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press. 14. Berrick, J. D. (1998). When children cannot remain home: Temporary foster care and kinship care. Future of Children, 8(1), 72–87. 15. Simmel, C., Lim-Brodowski, M., Goldberg, S., & Austin, M. J. (1997). Foster parent recruitment, retention, and rate setting. Berkeley: University of California at Berkeley, BASSC. 16. U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means. (2000). Green book 2000. Washington, DC: U.S. House of Representatives.

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17. National Commission on Foster Family Care. (1991). A blueprint for fostering infants, children, and youths in the 1990s. Washington, DC: Child Welfare League of America. 18. Burton, L. M., & Dilworth-Anderson, P. (1991). The intergenerational roles of aged black Americans. Marriage and Family Review, 16(3– 4), 311–330. 19. Miller v Youakim (1979). 440 U.S. 125. 20. Shlonsky, A. R., & Berrick, J. D. (2001). Assessing and promoting quality in kin and non-kin foster care. Social Service Review, 75(1), 60–83. 21. Gleeson, J., & Craig, L. (1994). Kinship care in child welfare: An analysis of states’ policies. Children and Youth Services Review, 16(1–2), 7–31. 22. Kusserow, R. P. (1992). State practices in using relatives for foster care. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General. (No. OEI-06–90– 02391). 23. Needell, B., Webster, D., Armijo, M., Lee, S., Cuccaro-Alamin, S., Shaw, T., et al. (2005). Child Welfare Services Reports for California. Retrieved August 11, 2005, from http:==cssr.berkeley.edu=CWSCMSreports=. 24. Wulczyn, F., & Hislop, K. B. (2001). Multi-state foster care data archive. Unpublished report. Chicago, IL: Chapin Hall Center for Children. 25. Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, Pub.L.No. 105–89, 111 Stat. 2115. (1997). 26. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Administration of Children, Youth and Families, Children’s Services Bureau. (2005). AFCARS Report #10. Retrieved August 11, 2005, from http:==www .acf.hhs.gov=programs=cb=publications=afcars=report10.htm. 27. U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means. (2004). Green book 2004. Washington, DC: U.S. House of Representatives. 28. Smith, C. (August 15, 2005). Personal communication. San Mateo County Children and Family Services. 29. Chipungu, S., Everett, J., Verduik, M., & Jones, J. (1998). Children placed in foster care with relatives: A multi-state study. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 30. Gebel, T. (1996). Kinship care and non-relative foster care: A comparison of caregiver attributes and attitudes. Child Welfare, 75(1), 5–18. 31. Berrick, J. D., & Needell, B. (1999). Recent trends in kinship care: Public policy, payments, and outcomes for children. In P. A. Curtis and G. Dale (Eds.), The foster care crisis: Translating research into practice and policy. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. 32. LeProhn, N. (1994). The role of the kinship foster parent: A comparison of the role conceptions of relative and non-relative foster parents. Children and Youth Services Review, 16(1–2), 65–81. 33. Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). P.L. 104–93. 34. Urban Institute. (2005). Welfare rules databook. Retrieved August 22, 2005, from http:==www.urban.org=UploadedPDF=411183_WRD_2003.pdf. 35. Mullen, F. (1998). Grandparents and the Welfare Reform Act. Washington, DC: American Association of Retired Persons. 36. Mullen, F., & Einhorn, M. (2000). The effect of state TANF choices on grandparentheaded households. Washington, DC: Public Policy Institute, AARP.

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37. Berrick, J. D., Needell, B., & Minkler, M. (1999). The policy implications of welfare reform for older caregivers, kinship care, and family configuration. Children and Youth Services Review, 21(9/10), 843–864. 38. This is true for all except three states (Alabama, South Dakota, and Wisconsin), where grandparents are excluded from the assistance unit.36 39. Figures reflect only the continental United States—aid payments are higher in Alaska and Hawaii. Figures are reflective of 1999. 36 40. Twenty-two states also impose a ‘‘family cap,’’ disallowing any incremental adjustments to the family grant for children born after the implementation of PRWORA. 41. Monthly payments range from $60 in Mississippi to $452 in California. 42. Although the proportion of child-only cases has increased, the absolute number has remained relatively constant in recent years (approximately 780,000). 43. Of parent-headed child-only cases, 10% include parents who have been sanctioned, 42% include parents who are receiving Supplemental Security Income, and 32% include parents whose citizenship status disqualifies them from aid (16% other). These figures vary significantly by state, depending on the size of the state’s immigration population.44 44. Gibbs, D., Kasten, J., Bir, A., Hoover, S., Duncan, D., & Mitchell, J. B. (2004). Children in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) child-only cases with relative caregivers. RTI Project No. 07147.018. Research Triangle Park, NC: Research Triangle International. 45. Minkler, M., Berrick, J. D., & Needell, B. (1999). Impacts of welfare reform on California grandparents raising grandchildren: Reflections from the field. Journal of Aging and Social Policy, 10(3), 45–64. 46. National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). (2000). A place to call home. Denver, CO: NCSL. 47. Cornerstone Consulting Group, Inc. (2001). Guardianship: Another place called home. Houston: Cornerstone Consulting. 48. Burnette, D. (1997). Grandparents raising grandchildren in the inner city. Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Human Services, 5, 489–501. 49. Meyers, M. K., & Heintze, T. (1999). The performance of the child-care subsidy system. Social Service Review, 73, 37–64. 50. In California, child care subsidies are available to women collecting TANF, who are required to attend assessment or training activities. Subsidies are also available for up to 24 months after exiting cash assistance, or until their family income reaches 75% of the median income. Subsidies are available for children under the age of 12, and not all families eligible for subsidies receive them due to funding limitations. 51. Knox, V. W., London, A. S., Scott, E. K., & Blank, S. (2003). Welfare reform, work, and child care: The role of informal care in the lives of low-income women and children. New York: MDRC. 52. Brown-Lyons, M., Robertson, A., & Layzer, J. (2001). Kith and kin—informal child care: Highlights from recent research. New York: Columbia University, National Center for Children in Poverty. 53. Galinsky, E., Howes, C., Kontos, S., & Shinn, M. (1994). The study of children in family child care and relative care. New York: Families and Work Institute.

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54. Whitebook, M., Phillips, D., Jo, J. Y., Crowell, N., Brooks, S., & Gerber, E. (2005). Change and stability among publicly subsidized license-exempt child care providers. Retrieved August 16, 2005, from http:==repositories.cdlib.org=iir=cscce=. 55. Henly, J. R., & Lyons, S. (2000). The negotiation of child care and employment demands among low-income parents. Journal of Social Issues, 56(4), 683–706. 56. Kisker, E. E., & Ross, C. M. (1997). Arranging child care. The Future of Children, 7(1), 99–109. 57. Fuller, B., Kagan, S. L., the Growing Up in Poverty Project. (2000). Remember the children: Mothers balance work and child care under welfare reform. Berkeley: University of California at Berkeley. 58. California Department of Social Services. (2005). Child care monthly report— CalWORKs families. Retrieved August 15, 2005, from http:==www.dss.cahwnet .gov=research=caldatatables=CW115.htm. 59. Smith, K. (2002). Who’s minding the kids? Child care arrangements, Spring 1997. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau. 60. Except for egregious lapses in parenting signaling a child abuse report. 61. Subsidized guardianship is still new where it is available, and federal data on relative-headed child-only cases were not collected before 2000. National data on license-exempt care is not available. 62. Ungerson, C. (1995). Gender, cash and informal care: European perspectives and dilemmas. Journal of Social Policy, 24(1), 31–52. 63. Geen, R., & Berrick, J. D. (2002). Kinship care: An evolving service delivery option. Children and Youth Services Review, 24(1–2), 1–14.

3 Supporting Fathers’ Engagement with Their Kids Philip A. Cowan, Carolyn Pape Cowan, Nancy Cohen, Marsha Kline Pruett, & Kyle Pruett

For the past two decades, some American politicians and conservative social commentators have been urging citizens to rediscover their ‘‘family values.’’ The core assumption is that many of the current problems with children, youth, and families could be solved if all of us would become less self-centered and more motivated to preserve family relationships. Because the problems are blamed on lack of motivation, the solutions involve each citizen’s resolve to change his or her family goals and behaviors. From a fiscally conservative point of view, this perspective is optimal because, if it worked, we would not need costly government programs for family support. Recently, both the U.S. Congress and the Bush Administration have concluded that more than a change in motivation may be required to strengthen families. In a surprising turn of events, the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families [TANF] reauthorization) provided funding of $150 million each year for programs to promote healthy marriage and responsible fatherhood. In response to the congressional mandate, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) launched the Promoting Responsible Fatherhood Initiative in 2006 with the goal of ‘‘funding programs that support healthy marriage activities, promote responsible parenting, and foster economic stability. The initiative will enable fathers to improve their relationships and reconnect with their children. It will help fathers overcome obstacles and barriers that often prevent them from being the most effective and nurturing parent possible.’’1

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The justifications for this new thrust in family policy targeting fathers can be summarized in five arguments: 1. Father involvement is a critical factor in the development and well-being of children. 2. Fathers today are less involved with their children than fathers used to be, and this is contributing to a decline in the quality of family life and an increase in problems for children and youth. 3. Points 1 and 2 support a need for programs to promote fathers’ becoming more involved in children’s lives. 4. Because the primary factor in men’s lack of involvement is self-centeredness and low motivation, policies and programs to promote father involvement ought to focus on changing men’s outlook and increasing their motivation to become more engaged with their children. 5. A secondary factor in men’s lack of involvement is to be found in family structure. Men are much more likely to be involved fathers if they are married. Therefore, programs and policies to promote involved fatherhood should encourage marriage.

This chapter examines some points of connection and disconnection between research on father involvement and the features of programs designed to enhance it. Our review of the literature suggests that only the first point above is clear and relatively free of controversy. Although the vast majority of children growing up in single-mother households fare quite well, it is also true that positive father involvement is generally beneficial for children and for the family as a whole. The second point has raised some controversy. We show that there is substantial disagreement about the direction of social change in fathers’ family roles, with some indications that father involvement is increasing rather than decreasing, especially for dads in intact-couple relationships. Despite the argument put forth in point 3, the need for programs to enhance fathers’ engagement in their children’s daily lives does not rest on the direction of historical trends: even if fathers were more involved than they used to be, we would need to be concerned about the sizeable proportion of fathers who were not engaged with their young children and=or at risk of becoming increasingly disengaged over time. In this chapter, we describe a number of existing programs designed to enhance father involvement. Most of these programs focus on men as individuals, and many attempt to persuade them to become ‘‘responsible fathers’’ or discourage them from becoming disengaged fathers by persuading them not to have children until they are ready, through abstinence, birth control, and abortion counseling. Other programs, sponsored primarily by government agencies, favor deterrents and punishments in the form of coercive child support policies. Still others seem to be based on the notion that exhorting men to be good fathers in small groups or mass meetings will produce the desired outcome. We also describe several programs that attempt to provide men with parenting and job skills so that they can become more effective in

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their parenting role. In addition to their focus on fathers as individuals, a similarity among these programs is that they have not been planned with reference to scientifically accepted research designs. With the exception of a handful of university-based experimental programs, we do not know whether most fatherhood programs are effective, because they have not been subjected to systematic evaluation research with a comparison or control group. Furthermore, many program designs ignore a large body of research on father involvement, which reveals systemic risk factors that lower the probability of father involvement and positive factors that increase the likelihood that fathers will play a central, positive role in their children’s daily lives. This chapter attempts to bridge the disconnect between research studies and intervention studies focusing on fathers’ family engagement. We summarize a five-domain systemic model that includes the characteristics of fathers as individuals, the quality of their relationships with their children, the quality of their relationship with the child’s mother, their family-of-origin relationships, and stresses and supports from outside the family, all of which affect whether fathers become positively engaged with their children. The central lesson to be learned from this research is that simply addressing men’s motivation to behave responsibly or punishing fathers for failure to provide child support are not likely to be the most effective approaches to encouraging fathers’ involvement with their children. Research on risk factors that affect father involvement leads us to conclude that improving the quality of the relationship between fathers and mothers can go a long way to helping men to become and stay engaged with their children. We describe two new approaches to father involvement that focus on the relationship between the parents. One involves attempts to develop policies that encourage couples with children to marry, with the hope that this will result in increases in father involvement and children’s well-being. This approach, with new programs funded through the Deficit Reduction Act, remains to be tested. The second approach, focusing on strengthening the relationship between the parents, offers interventions for groups of couples— both married and unmarried—that are designed to strengthen their relationships in ways that will foster fathers’ engagement with the children and provide benefits for the children as well. The question is whether it is the state of being married or the quality of the relationship between the parents, married or not, that holds most promise for affecting the well-being of children. Finally, we present a set of recommendations for programs directed toward fathers, based on current research. Our aim is to bring the research and intervention literatures together, with a view to formulating a more differentiated and effective set of policies and programs for enhancing fathers’ engagement with their children.

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Father Engagement: Definitions, Benefits for Children, and Social Trends The Diversity of Fathering Arrangements

It is impossible to summarize the meaning of fatherhood in a single example, picture, or definition. Some fathers live with their children (co-resident), whereas others live in different households (nonresident). Some fathers are married to their child’s mother, some are divorced, and others have never been married to the child’s mother. Among never-married, nonresident fathers, some are romantically involved with the mothers and some are not. In addition to biological fathers, there are stepfathers, adoptive fathers, foster fathers, grandfathers, and family friends, all of whom may function as ‘‘psychological fathers’’ living with or separate from their children. The literature on father involvement makes further distinctions between low-income and middle-income fathers and between fathers of different ethnic=racial groups. Despite the fact that each of these distinctions may affect the conclusions drawn, it is not possible in a brief review of the literature to take all of these variables into account. We focus on some of the major differences among fathers: married, divorced, and never married; resident and nonresident; European American, African American, and Hispanic. We mention the diversity of fatherhood here to highlight the fact that there is an inherent tension in the fatherhood-research field, where diversity reigns, and the fatherhood-policy field, in which politicians make laws that apply to entire populations and design services for large constituencies. Involvement versus Engagement

Until relatively recently, the issue of whether fathers have contact with their children was summarized under the heading of ‘‘father involvement,’’ with authors focusing on whether or not fathers are in the home and married to the child’s mother. From our point of view, involvement that refers primarily to fathers’ presence or absence leaves out some of the most important ingredients of the relationship between a father and his child. Fathers are involved with children in many ways. They provide direct care, such as dressing younger children or helping older children complete homework; play=recreation activities, such as roughhousing or going to the movies with children; indirect care=responsibility, such as preparing meals, arranging for medical care, and keeping an eye on children; and financial support, including child support from divorced or separated fathers and cash or in-kind contributions toward children’s food, clothing, shelter, education, and other needs.2,3 These activities represent the traditional approach to defining fathers’ involvement with children—in essence, a quantitative account of the amount of the time fathers spend with children, the number of activities they engage in, or the resources they provide.

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Critics of the ‘‘time and activities’’ approach to studying fathers make several important points. For example, Parke4 and Lamb5 argue that traditional research definitions are restrictive, are narrow, and underestimate the amount of time in which fathers are actually involved in child rearing. Palkovitz6 suggests that by focusing on only behavioral, ‘‘task-related’’ activities, researchers have ignored central internal aspects of fatherhood such as ‘‘thinking, planning, feeling, caring, monitoring, evaluating and praying.’’ Because the research on trends in father involvement almost never takes this multidimensional view of father involvement into account, we do not know, for example, whether contemporary fathers are more active in some specific domains and less active in others than fathers used to be. In this chapter, we emphasize the term ‘‘engagement’’ to convey the broad view rather than the narrow view of how fathers are involved in their children’s lives. The Benefits of Fathers’ Engagement

It is usually assumed that a high level of father engagement is better for children than a low level or total absence. From countless studies, it is clear that the quality of fathers’ engagement is associated with negative or positive outcomes for children.7 Positive paternal engagement8—fathers’ warmth, closeness, and responsiveness to their children—is consistently associated with the children’s advanced cognitive skills, academic achievement, and emotional adjustment.9–12 Similarly, when the father-child relationship is positive, children are less likely to engage in maladaptive, problematic behaviors or to receive diagnoses of serious mental health problems as defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV ).13–18 Fathers’ maladjustment, including depression, personality disorder, and psychosis, is consistently correlated with a variety of negative outcomes for children that include learning problems, aggression, shyness, low self-esteem, and depression.19–21 Links between fathers’ poor adjustment and children’s outcomes appear to come from the fact that fathers’ psychological problems interfere with the quality of parenting rather than with the amount of engagement. Fathers with high scores on psychological symptoms on standardized questionnaires22 or formal psychiatric diagnoses23 tend to have more laissez-faire or harsh and intrusive parenting styles, which, in turn, are related to children’s poorer adaptation; the Fendrich et al.23 study found that parental depression had a more negative impact on children than did schizophrenia. Because primary physical custody of the child almost always remains with the mother after marital dissolution,24 the long-term negative consequences of divorce are often attributed largely to fathers’ absence, but there are problems with this interpretation. Until recently, investigations of divorced parents and children’s development began after parents separated or divorced. It is reasonable to assume, and there is some evidence to suggest, that there may be a selection factor operating, in that parents who eventually divorce have been experiencing serious relationship difficulty prior to the divorce.25 Because we

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know that couple conflict often affects parent-child relationships as well,26,27 it may be the cumulative impact of the parents’ conflict rather than the divorce itself that has negative effects on the children’s development.28 Studies of children of divorce tend to pose an undifferentiated research question: ‘‘Does divorce hurt children—yes or no?’’ Amato suggests a more differentiated approach: ‘‘Divorce benefits some individuals, leads others to experience temporary decrements in well-being, and forces others on a downward trajectory from which they might never recover fully. Understanding the contingencies under which divorce leads to these diverse outcomes is a priority for future research.’’29 Are there benefits for children of having a man in the home who is not the biological father? On this question, the evidence is mixed. McLanahan and Sandefur30 argue that the presence of stepfathers or live-in boyfriends may raise income levels but does not increase positive outcomes for children. Several authors point to the increased risk of physical and sexual abuse for children in households with these arrangements.31 On the other hand, there is some evidence that the engagement of stepfathers and ‘‘social fathers’’ may be positive for African American children.32,33 Based on our reading of relevant studies, we cannot draw general, definitive conclusions about this from current evidence. Studies of father absence are open to two important methodological criticisms. First, too many studies equate nonresident fathers with father absence. We believe that it does an injustice to nonresident fathers to describe them as ‘‘absent’’ when some are a clear presence in their children’s lives. Second, the problem in drawing conclusions about the impact of fathers’ engagement in all of these studies is that it is impossible to trace children’s adaptation directly to the father. For example, whether children do well may be explained by whether the parents are in conflict or collaborative34 or by the life circumstances surrounding the particular family arrangements (e.g., whether declining income associated with divorce is responsible for the negative effects on children). Is Father Engagement Increasing or Decreasing?

One view of the current state of affairs in the United States with regard to father engagement is apparent in the title of a book by Blankenhorn, 35 Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem. Blankenhorn’s review of family-demography research led him to the conclusion that fatherlessness is a growing trend in America: a ‘‘good family man’’ is a vanishing figure, men’s motivation to focus on families is waning, and children are suffering. Popenoe36 surveyed similar research studies and came to similar conclusions. Both authors use these social-trend data as the foundation of their argument in support of new programs to encourage father engagement. In contrast with the view that fathers are disappearing from the family, other scholars assert that today’s fathers are more actively involved with their

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children than ever before, especially in the earliest months of their children’s lives.6,9,37Fathers are typically in the delivery room when their babies are born. A small but substantial number of married fathers are caring for children while mothers are at work. Thousands of men meet in stadiums to affirm their commitment to their families, while other men meet in small groups to address their concerns about parenting. An increasing number of single fathers have asked for and been granted custody of their children. Large-scale survey data suggest that the proportion of time fathers spend with their children relative to mothers increased sharply from the 1960s to the 1990s. For every hour fathers spent with their children in the 1960s, mothers spent 5 hours. In the 1990s, for every hour that fathers spent with their children, mothers spent 2 hours.38 It was not that mothers were doing less, on average, but that fathers were more involved than they used to be. From a comprehensive review of research findings, we believe that several differentiated statements can be made about trends in the quantity of father engagement. First, not surprisingly, the amount of father engagement varies with the structure of the family and the household: fathers are more involved when they live with their children,39 and incarceration rather than lack of commitment separates many fathers and children, particularly in African American families.40 Second, compared with mid-century fathers, fewer contemporary fathers live with their children, but those who do are more actively involved in children’s daily care than fathers used to be.9,41 Third, the findings are open to wide differences in interpretation: some observers take a ‘‘glass is half empty’’ approach, while others see the glass as half full. Some view it as deplorable that only 20% to 33% of never-married fathers have regular contact with their 5-year-olds, while others find it remarkable that up to onethird of these fathers see their children regularly.42 Fourth, and most important, substantial numbers of divorced fathers43 and never-married fathers44 not only maintain regular contact with their children but also provide consistent financial support for them. Finally, there are methodological reasons to think that the quantity of engagement of nonresident fathers has been underestimated. Most data concerning fathers’ presence and frequency of visitation are obtained from mothers. Surveys of ‘‘single mother’’ households rarely obtain accurate information about whether there is a father or father figure in the home. Not surprisingly, divorced fathers report more frequent contact with their children than their ex-spouses report.45 Several longitudinal studies tracking nonresident fathers’ engagement with their children over time find that more fathers are involved over the course of their children’s lives than are captured by the vast majority of studies asking about father engagement at one point in time.43,46 This may be because some fathers who are initially involved with their children become less involved over time, whereas others with low early levels of engagement become more involved. Taken together, the findings suggest that in a large proportion of families, nonresident fathers are involved with their children at some point in the children’s lives. We need to learn

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more about individual differences to understand (a) the conditions that increase the probability of fathers becoming engaged with their children and (b) the barriers that keep them from remaining engaged; we explore both of these issues next. The Case for Fatherhood Interventions

If this evidence of increasing father engagement with children represents a valid historical trend, why are large-scale interventions to encourage fathers’ family involvement needed? Our answer, to be elaborated upon in this chapter, is that both the fathers-are-disappearing and fathers-are-increasinglyinvolved views miss the mark when it comes to discussing the need for new policies and new programs. Blankenhorn and Popenoe are rightly concerned, we believe, about the need for programs and policies to foster fathers’ family engagement, but they are seriously limited in their analysis of why substantial numbers of men fail to play an active role in their children’s lives. They argue that the issue is primarily that men lack motivation to be ‘‘responsible fathers’’ and that what we need are programs addressed at increasing their motivation. Blankenhorn’s36 recommendations include a pledge signed by men that they will live their lives according to the principle that every child deserves a father; an annual report by government agencies on the state of fatherhood; and consideration of all domestic policies in terms of whether they strengthen or weaken the institution of marriage, actively promote marriage, and give preferences to married families (e.g., in housing). Faith-based and community agencies are urged to promote marriage and responsible fatherhood through information and persuasion programs. All of these recommendations are consistent with the assumption that the state of marriage encourages active fatherhood and that men need to change their priorities and motivations to become involved fathers. So far, there is little or no evidence for these positions. Rather, a survey of a substantial body of research on the factors associated with both low and high levels of father engagement reveals that there are multiple, systemic barriers to father engagement independent of men’s motivation, and that active interventions at various levels of the social system may be needed to overcome them. In recent years, public discussions of hot-button family issues have become polarized, with a tendency to assume that those who advocate a particular position necessarily endorse it in its extreme form. We refer here to the assumption that those who argue for the importance of fathers and the desirability of programs to facilitate their engagement with their children are espousing the view that fathers are essential for children’s development—that children who grow up without the direct engagement of a father in their lives are necessarily at risk for a number of economic and emotional difficulties. Ample research demonstrates that this is not the case.47– 49 What we discuss in this chapter is the proposition that when a father is available to take an active, positive role in his child’s life, the child and the family as a whole can reap the benefits.

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Existing Programs to Promote Positive Father Engagement Before we move to a discussion of how to think about new programs to promote positive father engagement, we present a brief description of the kinds of programs already available. Our survey is not exhaustive, but it does provide a sample of the current array by describing three types of programs with very different goals: preventing premature parenthood; supporting the father’s role as economic provider; and encouraging men to take an active, positive role in their children’s lives. Programs to Prevent Early Parenthood

One way of promoting positive approaches to fatherhood is to persuade men not to become fathers until they are ready to become involved. Some intervention programs directed primarily toward young men attempt to reduce the risks of uninvolved fatherhood by encouraging unmarried teens to abstain from sex or use birth control. Most of these programs recruit female participants, and few direct attention to the women’s partners. One exception is the Teen Fathers Collaborative Project,50 initially designed to prevent teen pregnancies by changing young men’s perception of responsible fatherhood and increasing their social capital, especially their job skills. Data from 10 years ago show that teen pregnancy has been declining in recent years.51 While the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has attributed this decline to their pregnancy-prevention programs,52 there is no direct evidence to suggest that men’s or women’s participation in any specific program contributed to these national trends. Programs to Buttress the Father’s Role as Economic Provider Child Support Programs: Sticks and Carrots from the Government

The initial focus of many government programs to encourage fathers’ engagement was an effort to get nonresident fathers to pay child support. Mincy and Pouncy53 point out that these programs were originally designed to punish ‘‘deadbeat’’ dads who were usually middle class, divorced, and unwilling to pay. For this population, the programs showed a small but significant effect in increased contributions to the support of the child. Child-supportenforcement programs were also applied to ‘‘dead-broke,’’ usually never-married fathers who were unable to pay for the support of their children and then were denied access to them. Some of the men were imprisoned for failure to follow new laws and regulations that set payment requirements far beyond their ability to pay. To the extent that the programs were interested in encouraging fathers’

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engagement with their children, the outcomes appeared to have had the opposite effect, because they reduced men’s motivation to provide, and incarceration physically prevented them from being involved directly in their children’s lives. By and large, these programs have been focused on a single outcome criterion (payment of child support), with a narrow range of content and a mild to extreme level of coerciveness. With the notable exception of strategies such as child support being paid automatically from nonresident parents’ paychecks, most of the Office of Child Support Enforcement’s efforts are ‘‘downstream’’ interventions, instituted after problems with payment of child support have surfaced, rather than preventive programs designed to capitalize on unmarried fathers’ early investment in their relationships with the mother and the child.54 Economic Programs to Increase the Social Capital of Low-Income Fathers

A more positive preventive approach to father engagement was stimulated after the U.S. Congress passed the Family Support Act in 1988 and began to fund father access and visitation projects—to provide mediation between contentious divorced parents, monitor visitation orders, and offer classes for fathers. Some programs attempt to increase low-income, nonresident fathers’ participation in the labor force, based on the idea that unemployed nonresident fathers have less money and fewer personal resources to contribute to their children’s maintenance.55 These programs have proved challenging to implement56 and, based on the evaluations currently available, they have had small, if any, effects on fathers’ employment or payment of child support.57–60 Programs to Nurture Father Engagement

A number of quite different programs to encourage fathers to become engaged and stay involved with their children can be summarized as having one of two basic orientations. The first type of program directs efforts at increasing men’s motivation to take an active role in their children’s lives (to be ‘‘responsible fathers’’), and the second attempts to provide men with interpersonal and job skills to enable them to become more effective and satisfied parents and partners. Motivation Enhancement

There are a number of national programs attempting to change institutional and societal values, policies, and programs in order to promote, encourage, and support active father engagement for men at all levels of income and all stages of family development. These programs are less likely to be professionally run or to be evaluated than the university-based experimental interventions described below. Some of the programs provide direct services to fathers, whereas others reach out to service providers to help them become more sensitive to fathers and their concerns.

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The Fatherhood Project,61 one of the oldest national fatherhood programs in the United States, works with businesses, government, and community organizations to promote policies and practices that encourage fathers to become more involved with their children. The primary clients are not the fathers themselves but the institutions in which fathers live and work and service providers who work with fathers. The National Center for Fathering (NCF), the National Center on Fathers and Families (NCOFF), the National Center for Strategic Nonprofit Planning and Community Leadership (NPCL), and the National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI) are examples of organizations that provide technical assistance to states, communities, and occasionally individuals to help men become more involved, responsible fathers. The NCF62 began with faith-based institutions but extended its work to venues similar to those in the Fatherhood Project.62 Some programs in the field of father engagement function as social movements. Faith-based organizations, such as The Promise Keepers, a Christian organization that holds large conferences and rallies in American cities, and the 1995 Million Man March on Washington, D.C., are designed to raise men’s consciousness about father engagement and family responsibility. The program examples cited in this section attempt to promote a change in cultural values about the role of fathers, even though they differ on the specifics of fathers’ ideal role. Further, some programs focus on obstacles to father engagement, such as workplace policies or how child care center staff treat fathers, whereas others focus on fathers’ personal values and motivations. It is remarkable that so much time, effort, and money have been spent on these programs without systematic research using control or comparison groups to evaluate whether they work and whether the central assumptions about the importance of motivational change are warranted. Skills Enhancement

Several experimental efforts have attempted to teach fathers about parenting young children or encourage men’s direct participation in child rearing and children’s early education.63,64 These programs provide group or individual interventions for fathers on a one-time or short-term basis. For example, a few parenting programs offered fathers with newborns65 or new fathers and mothers66 the opportunity to watch as the Brazelton Neonatal Assessment Scale67 was performed on their babies. The control groups received either no intervention or verbal feedback on the Brazelton results but no opportunity to watch the procedure. Observations made 1 to 3 months later showed that, compared to control-group parents, intervention fathers’ behavior with their infants was more positive, and the men perceived their infants as less difficult temperamentally. Other small pilot programs, most with an information– education approach that attempt to increase fathers’ knowledge and skills as parents, are described in an edited volume by Fagan and Hawkins,63 but as yet we have very little evidence about whether and how these programs work.

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Supported by funds from various government agencies and private foundations, Fair Share68 was a well-worked-out example of a program to promote nonresident fathers’ engagement with their children. This program offered men assistance in securing and improving employment and negotiating the child-support system, group sessions for peer support, and mediation for fathers and mothers about visitation. A multisite experimental evaluation, using random assignment to different conditions, found that participation in the program increased men’s employment and earnings but achieved mixed results in terms of fathers’ visitation and engagement. Although there were no overall differences between the experimental and control groups, fathers who were initially least involved with their children and who participated in the program increased their engagement significantly. There were also some increases in parental conflict over child-rearing decisions, and some restrictions on fathers’ access to the children by mothers. It seems that the relative lack of positive effects on family relationships may stem from the decision to recruit fathers some years after they had ceased to be involved with the children—by which time the mothers were less likely to welcome them back into the family. A number of father-involvement programs have been sponsored by community organizations (e.g., Joe Jones’ Center for Fathers, Families and Workforce development in Baltimore), states (e.g., Connecticut’s Department of Social Services Fatherhood Initiative [[email protected] .ct.us]), and the National Early Head Start program.69 All of these programs focus on men and attempt to provide education about fathering, and most also address issues of employment or unemployment. Because many of these programs include men who are long estranged from the mothers of the children, they fight an uphill battle in trying to help men take a more active role in their children’s daily lives. The array of pregnancy prevention, economic programs, motivation enhancement, and fathering-skills programs we have described here represents only a small proportion of those that exist now, but it would be wrong to conclude that what is needed is already available. First, we know very little about whether any of these programs are effective in producing the results they seek because there is almost no well-designed evaluation research. In the few cases where empirical studies have been done, the results are not encouraging, and there is a suggestion that coercive child support programs may turn fathers off rather than draw them into the family. Second, it seems clear that most fatherhood programs recruit men long after they have drifted away from their families. Even the most skilled caseworkers are in a position of trying to offer too little too late. Third, as we have seen, current programs tend to focus almost entirely on men as individuals.36,37 The president’s 2002 budget proposal,70 in justifying the need for more ‘‘responsible fatherhood programs,’’ asserted that men who are self-involved and do not value family life are absent or less involved with their children, whereas men who value children and family life are more involved. This view places the blame for

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father absence and disengagement on the men themselves. Because we found no systematic studies that tested this hypothesis, we cannot conclude that men’s level of motivation is the primary source of their level of engagement. After more than three decades of studying families and reading the literature, we are more inclined to take a family-systems approach to understand why some men become highly involved with their children, while others do not.71

What Facilitates or Interferes With Father Engagement? A key tenet of prevention science72 is that interventions to prevent distress and promote well-being are more likely to be effective when they are directed at risk factors known to be associated with distress and maladjustment and at positive factors known to be associated with competence and adaptation. We need to pay attention to what is known about naturally occurring factors that lead some men to be more involved with their children than others. Based on our reading of the research, we believe that father engagement is an outcome of a dynamic set of interrelated factors in five central aspects of fathers’ lives: (1) individual characteristics of fathers and children that might influence men’s engagement, including fathers’ demographic characteristics (age, resources, race, and location), personal adjustment, self-concept, and beliefs, as well as the children’s sex and age; (2) father–child relationship quality, including fathers’ parenting skills, the father–child bond, and the types of activities fathers engage in with their children; (3) father–mother relationship quality, including the status of the relationship, the extent to which pregnancies are welcomed, and the quality of the parents’ interaction as a couple; (4) three-generational factors—fathers’ early and current experiences with their families of origin; and (5) outside-the-family factors, including stress and support from extended family, friends, neighborhood, workplace policies, child custody procedures, and child support policies and enforcement. This multidomain model posits five types of risk and protective factors that increase or decrease the likelihood that fathers will become positively involved with their children. Our assumption is that the relationship between a father and his child is a dynamic product of all five dimensions. That is, father engagement affects, and is affected by, the context of other key relationships in which the father–child relationship is embedded. The connections are bidirectional, consistent with the family-systems assumption that causality is interactive and circular rather than linear. Thus, we are not claiming that the quantity or quality of fathers’ engagement is necessarily the primary engine driving the system that shapes children’s development. Individual Characteristics of Fathers

Studies of whether fathers with certain demographic characteristics, such as older or younger age, are more or less involved have not emerged with clear-

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cut conclusions.73 Married fathers who earn less, work fewer hours, or have incomes that constitute a smaller proportion of total family income appear to spend more time in caregiving activities.42,74,75 By contrast with the literature on married fathers, studies find that divorced fathers with higher education, employment, and income provide more financial support for their children and have more contact with them.76–78 Research on fathers from different ethnic groups is beginning to yield interesting findings. African American fathers appear to be more involved with children than their white and Hispanic counterparts,79,80 even when controlling for whether mothers work outside the home. In two-parent families, Hispanic fathers monitor their children less than African American and European American fathers do, but both Hispanic and African American fathers describe having more responsibility for child rearing than European American fathers do.81 Although parents in all ethnic groups regard family as important, there is a cultural focus on the centrality of family life in African American and Hispanic communities82 that appears to encourage men to spend more time with their children. Nevertheless, we are far from being able to make firmly grounded generalizations, and even if the data seem to support such generalizations, we know that there is substantial variability within each ethnic group. Father–Child Relationship Qualities

There is a circularity to the father–child relationship factors that predict father engagement: the more fathers are involved, and the earlier they become involved with their children, the more they stay involved.55,83 Researchers and clinicians have focused on children’s emotional bonds with their mothers, but it is clear that children make primary attachments to their fathers as well.84,85 Although secure attachment—defined as the child’s tendency to use the parent as a secure base in times of threat or stress—is often thought of as a characteristic of the child, it is actually an assessment of the quality of relationship between the adult and child. The clearest evidence for this assertion is the fact that the same child can show a secure attachment to one parent and an insecure attachment to the other, so that attachments to mother and father are uncorrelated or independent.86 For our purposes here, it is important to note that secure attachments do not appear to be a product of the amount of time fathers spend with their children87 or are engaged in hands-on caretaking.88 When there is high conflict between the parents, the more time the father spends with the child, the less likely the child is to have a secure attachment.89 There is mixed evidence about whether the quality of father-child relationships prior to divorce is linked with fathers’ maintenance of engagement after divorce. Some studies find that fathers who were more closely involved with their children prior to divorce are more likely to pay post-divorce child support and maintain contact with the children.90 Furstenberg and Harris91 found that the older children are when parents separate, and presumably the

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more time fathers and children have had to develop emotional connections, the slower the rate of decline in fathers’ contact over time. The question of whether there is continuity between predivorce and post-divorce father–child relationships is difficult to answer because studies begin after the divorce has occurred, when it is difficult to get accurate information about fathers’ engagement prior to the divorce. The Couple Relationship

It has become clear over the last two decades that whether and how a father is involved with his child depend in large part on the quality of his engagement with the child’s mother.92,93 Among ethnically and socioeconomically diverse samples of married, divorced, and never-married men, fathers’ engagement with children is consistently associated with the quality of the couple relationship9,45,55,94,95—the more satisfying the couple relationship, the greater the father’s engagement. This is true as well in the relatively few studies of never-married but cohabiting parents’ relationship satisfaction and interaction: the closer and more harmonious the relationship between the parents, the greater the father’s engagement.96,97 Whether fathers become involved and stay involved with their infants depends in part on how couples make the decision to become pregnant or carry the pregnancy forward. Consistent findings from studies of ethnically diverse populations of both married and never-married couples suggest that when pregnancies are unplanned and not welcomed, fathers are less likely to be involved.61,98 Married, never-married, and divorced mothers often play a ‘‘gate-keeping’’ role in facilitating or discouraging fathers’ engagement with their children.99 Mothers define the times and conditions under which fathers will be engaged in children’s care when the mothers are not present, and in some cases they determine whether a father will spend any time with the child. Despite the claims of many married women that they wish their partners would be more involved in taking care of the children, about half the mothers in one study of first-time parents did not want their husbands to be more involved with their preschool-age children than they currently were.100 Are there some families in which the couple relationships are so strained or violent that father engagement can be detrimental to children? There is no question that exposure to domestic violence constitutes a risk factor for children.32,101,102 An estimated 10% of divorced couples experience conflict that is sufficiently severe and intractable that it may not be beneficial for the children to have contact with their noncustodial parent.103 Three-Generational Factors

Fathers’ early experiences with their own parents and families can have consequences for the amount and quality of engagement they have with their

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children. Two contrasting possibilities exist. The first is consistent with the continuity hypothesis from social learning theory,104 which suggests that patterns observed in one generation tend to be repeated in the next. The second is consistent with a compensation hypothesis, which suggests that men who feel deprived of a positive relationship with their fathers strive to create more positive relationships with their children. Some researchers and clinicians have observed that family-of-origin relationships provide a template of what to expect in family relationships, so parents tend to repeat their experiences of being parented in raising their own children.105,106 Highly involved fathers are more likely to have sons who become highly involved fathers.107 There is also some evidence for the compensation hypothesis, in which married and never-married fathers who report having been dissatisfied with the quality of their relationship with their own father while growing up become relatively more involved with their children.61,108,109 Still other studies find no link between fathers’ childhood relationships with their own fathers and engagement with their children.45,110,111 These contradictory findings may reflect different ways of assessing earlier relationships or the presence of different mechanisms in different families—social learning and compensation—which might lead to an overall finding of no clearly significant patterns. Factors Outside the Family

Although fathers’ social support has not been well studied, there is some evidence that men’s social networks—extended families, friends, workmates, acquaintances, and society in general—affect their engagement with their children.112 One study found that among married, two-earner couples, fathers having supportive ‘‘non-kin allies’’—mostly friends who also had children— participated in significantly more of the direct and indirect care of their children.113 Several other studies found that men’s social networks tend to encourage fathers to be involved with children in stereotypical and limited ways, and some friendship networks actively discourage fathers from spending time with their children.8,9,114–116 The workplace environment may play a major role in men’s level of engagement with their children. First, the atmosphere at work can spill over into home life; the level of stress117,118 or enjoyable experiences at work74 affect the quality of interactions between fathers and children at home. Second, workplace policies have an impact on the extent of fathers’ engagement in family life. Although utilization is on the rise, few fathers take advantage of formal parental-leave policies.8 The more generous the employers’ familyleave policies, the more days fathers take off for family duties or events.119 More liberal family-leave policies seem to communicate to fathers that their workplace has positive attitudes about fathers’ engagement in the family, leaving men more comfortable about taking time off to care for newborns and young children. The results of these work and family studies seem to suggest

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that, when given the opportunity, both fathers and mothers act to spend more time with their children, although in countries with substantial provisions for family leave around the birth of a child mothers are more likely to stay home than are fathers.120 In divorced families, agreements concerning paternity, child support, custody, and visitation are not always negotiated at the same time or as part of the same legal document. The types of agreements governing how nonresident parents care for their children, and the processes by which parents come to these agreements, are associated with nonresident fathers’ engagement with their children in both the short and long run.121 There is some evidence that when divorced or never-married parents’ agreements about how to care for children are reached voluntarily and by mutual consent rather than being court-ordered, fathers provide more financial support,122 and children’s interests are best served.123

Programs Based on a Couple or Family Model In sum, ample evidence exists that each aspect or domain of fathers’ lives— individual, parent-child, couple, three-generational, and outside-the-family factors—contains both supports and barriers to fathers becoming and staying engaged in their children’s lives. Factors that support men’s engagement with children include their mental health and psychological characteristics; their ability to establish a positive relationship with their child; the child’s mother; and their parents, kin, peers, and social institutions outside the family. Conversely, pressures or difficulties in any of these domains act as barriers to fathers becoming and staying involved with their children in positive ways. The fatherhood interventions we have described tend to focus on the men as individuals, or on the connection between fathers and large-scale institutions. There has been very limited focus on changing intergenerational patterns, and until very recently almost none of these programs have focused on strengthening the relationship between father and mother.124,125 Two kinds of programs that do place the couple relationship at the center of the intervention have emerged recently. The first, embodied in the TANF reauthorization mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, provides money for programs promoting marriage on the assumption that married families are more stable and keep fathers involved. Studies to test this assumption are in progress. The second approach involves interventions to strengthen couple relationships, based on the assumption that healthier couple relationships will be more satisfying to both parents, encourage more nurturant father–child relationships, and foster children’s well-being. The examples that we are aware of involve university-based programs or, in one case, a state program (California) with substantial university faculty involvement in both intervention planning and evaluation.

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Hawkins and colleagues126 conducted a five-session couples group in which participants discussed their family roles in attempts to encourage fathers to take a more active role in both household and child care tasks. The program did lead to significantly more participation by fathers, and satisfaction with the arrangements increased for mothers. Although the authors were aware of the evaluation issues in not having a control group for comparison, they chose not to include one on the basis of values about denying services to untreated controls. A program directed to divorced fathers was mounted by Braver and colleagues.125,127 An 8-week program with behavioral-skills training focused not only on parenting skills but also on the co-parenting relationship that the divorced fathers continued to have with their ex-wives. Using a random-assignment design, the investigators found that in comparison with nontreated fathers in the control group, the fathers who had participated in the intervention engaged in more positive parenting and less conflictual communication with the mothers. Pruett and colleagues34 also focused on divorced fathers, using a group for men along with individual and couple meetings. Compared to families in the control group, those in the intervention showed greater cooperation, less conflict around custody and visitations, and more frequent and positive involvement of fathers with their children. Results of two intervention studies of working- and middle-class families at two different family transition points support the hypothesis that strengthening the relationship between the father and mother fosters fathers’ positive engagement with their children and has benefits for the couples, the children, and the fathers themselves. In the first study, couples making the transition to first-time parenthood were randomly chosen to participate in a couples group led by male-female pairs of mental health professionals meeting for 24 weeks or a no-treatment control condition.128 Longitudinal follow-up results revealed that the intervention prevented the typical slide in fathers’ and mothers’ marital satisfaction documented in many other longitudinal studies without interventions.129 Compared to fathers in the control group, men participating in the couples-group intervention became more psychologically engaged in their role as fathers in the early years of parenthood, and they and their partners maintained their level of satisfaction with their couple relationships over the next 5 years as their children made the transition to school. The second study focused on couples whose first child was making the transition to elementary school26 and used a similar random assignment design: parents were invited to participate in either a couples-group meeting for 16 weeks before their first child entered elementary school or a control group, which involved an optional short consultation with the same clinically trained staff. The curriculum was similar in all the couples groups and focused on the five aspects of life we described above. In addition, during the open-ended part of each evening, when group members discussed their own issues and dilemmas, the leaders of half of the groups helped parents pay particular attention to issues in the parent–child relationships, and in the other half of the groups they focused more on issues in couple relationships.

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The groups that paid particular attention to parent–child issues produced a significant increase over a 1-year period in the warmth fathers showed to their children, as observed during a 40-minute visit to the project playroom. Groups that focused more on couple-relationship issues stimulated increases in the quality of both father–child and mother–child relationships in the following year—and those couples maintained their marital satisfaction for 5 years, until the children had completed fourth grade. The promising results of these programs led to a new intervention project focused specifically on father engagement in 300 low-income Mexican American and European American families. Now in progress in four California counties,130 the Supporting Father Involvement project design contrasts a one-time information session for couples (the control condition) with a 16week couples group or a 16-week fathers group focusing on all five domains in our family risk model. Preliminary analyses suggest that, compared with the single-session control condition, the 16-week intervention groups are producing significant positive effects on both couple and father–child relationships. Participants in both variations of the 16-week groups (for couples and for fathers only) maintained their relationship satisfaction from before to 2 months after the 16-week intervention, whereas the marital satisfaction of the parents from the control group declined over the same period. Fathers who had participated in a fathers-only or couples group had increased their engagement with their children—by their own and their partners’ descriptions— whereas fathers and mothers from the control group described no change in the fathers’ involvement in the care of their children. Even more preliminary findings at a third assessment almost a year after the intervention ended suggest that the positive effects of the intensive group interventions are holding up, whereas reports from the parents assigned to the control group show no change or more negative change. All the study families are being followed for an additional year to assess any longer-term effects of this work with fathers and mothers. In sum, a small couples group with the goal of discussing more shared family roles, post-divorce interventions that address co-parenting conflict, and group-based interventions for low-income fathers and couples provide evidence that addressing issues in the quality of couple relationships, for both married and divorced couples, may help to create more positive engagement of fathers with their children. At the time of this chapter’s writing, the fathers’ project had just recruited a fifth site in which the two group interventions would be randomly offered to parents in primarily African American families, hoping to foster the fathers’ engagement with their young children and strengthen the relationships between fathers and mothers.

Recommendations for Father Engagement Programs The programs we have described above are relatively new. Based on the results so far, and on the more voluminous research on father engagement, we sum-

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marize some lessons learned about programs designed to enhance fathers’ role in the family. Doherty and colleagues2,131 suggested that father-engagement interventions should focus on multiple family domains. This Minnesota group based their recommendations on a family-systems model similar in many respects to the one we present here and suggested that interventions focused on fathers should include mothers and pay attention to intergenerational issues. From our experience in conducting several of these intervention studies, we agree that focusing on the multiple factors that contribute to fathers’ engagement in their families makes most sense. What follows are some specific suggestions for translating the multidomain family risk model into effective father-engagement programs. Orienting Principles

Adopt a prevention perspective. Our approach to designing interventions to promote father engagement is guided by the central principles and strategies of prevention science,73,132 and we feel it is best to intervene at early stages of fathers’ relationships with their children, before problems have surfaced or become intractable. Focus on normative and nonnormative transitions. Because transitions involve changes in family members’ sense of self, roles, and relationships,133 periods of major life change are likely to be times when old ways of coping are not sufficient and new strategies are necessary. Fathers and their partners may be more motivated to seek information and assistance, or to accept it when offered, when faced with significant feelings of vulnerability around family transitions. Becoming a parent for the first time, having a preschooler enter the larger world of the school, or dealing with the challenges of adolescence or children ‘‘leaving the nest’’ are optimal times to consider interventions to maintain and enhance fathers’ engagement with children. In addition to thinking about these normative developmental and family transitions, times when families are undergoing stressful change, such as during the illness of a child or parent, the loss of a job, or the parents’ divorce, provide conditions when fathers are more open to interventions focused on helping their children maintain healthy development. Provide systematic evaluations of programs. The lack of program evaluation is pervasive. The Fatherhood Web site of the ACF (http:==fatherhood .hhs.gov) includes an eloquent document about the importance of evaluating fatherhood programs and a report by The Lewin Group134 describing the desiderata in such programs. But neither in that report nor in any other document on the Web site is there an example of a program that goes beyond collecting data on participation, qualitative interviews with clients and staff, and a discussion of the benefits provided. Standardized questionnaires are rare; observational data are rarer still. With the exception of a handful of university-based programs, control groups are not included, so we cannot tell whether any of the changes described for the intervention group might also have occurred in fathers not involved in the program. From the point of view

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of those who deliver family services, we understand the feeling that it is difficult, if not unethical, to deny services to a control group. But we believe that it is important to raise the issue of whether it is reasonable or ethical to devote extensive public funds to untested programs that may not have the desired effects. Programs with adequate research-evaluation designs might consider offering a ‘‘low-dose’’ intervention rather than a no-treatment control condition as a way of providing some service to people who might need help while providing a rigorous test of program effectiveness. Note the physical environment of family agencies. As we have become more involved in the father engagement field, we have observed a pervasive barrier to father engagement at the level of community institutions—a barrier that seems invisible to most service providers. Family-service agencies are rarely ‘‘father friendly.’’ A quick visit to an agency typically reveals waiting rooms with pastel-colored walls, pictures of mothers and children, women’s magazines, and brochures describing programs for mothers. Appointments are typically offered during the day, when fathers and many mothers are at work. The staff— almost all women—rarely ask if the father will participate, or they readily accept the mother’s declaration that he’s not interested or not willing to come to discuss family matters. Home visitors rarely invite fathers into conversations about the child and the family even when they are home. In this way, the climate of the agency can create a self-fulfilling prophecy in which men are not invited to participate in major decisions or interventions affecting the child or family, and are then referred to by agency staff as uninvolved.

Addressing Each of the Five Domains of the Family Systems Model Although one cannot draw definitive conclusions based on correlational research, it is reasonable to assume that interventions are more likely to have an effect on positive father engagement when they target multiple risk factors associated with father disengagement and multiple positive factors associated with father involvement. We propose that interventions to enhance fathers’ family engagement address each of the aspects of life in our family systems model. Build on Men’s Strengths as Individuals

Include intervention modules that support fathers’ employment and education, regardless of the intervention focus. Because nonresident fathers’ personal resources are linked to engagement with their children, it makes sense to help men take steps to increase their incomes. This approach has been more challenging to implement than expected with low-income fathers. Working with child support systems to develop reasonable options for lowincome fathers will be necessary to father-engagement efforts because lowincome fathers who owe large amounts of child support face incarceration. It is

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worth noting that evidence from longitudinal studies indicates that when nonresident fathers become more involved with their children, they also become more involved in the labor market.135 That is, men’s engagement in their children’s lives may increase their motivation to provide for children in financial as well as emotional terms. This sequence suggests that some interventions could begin with a father-engagement emphasis and shift to employment, rather than the more usual, reverse direction. Consider integrating brief treatment for fathers suffering from depression. We noted earlier that parental depression is associated with ineffective parenting and negative child outcomes. Most interventions to promote father engagement could integrate components to identify and treat fathers’ depression, or refer them for treatment, thereby increasing the potential for more effective relationships with the children’s mother and more positive engagement with their children. We emphasize depression because it is both ubiquitous136 and treatable in the context of individual and couple treatment.137 We are not as optimistic about reaching out to men with antisocial personalities, who are difficult to treat and whose engagement with children is less likely to be beneficial.137 Focus on the Couple Relationship and Co-Parenting

Help couples make pregnancies intended and wanted. Planned and welcome pregnancies are associated with greater father engagement, both because fathers are more positively involved with babies they wanted and because fathers are more likely to live with them. Consequently, efforts to ensure that pregnancies are intended and welcomed can also serve as father-engagement efforts. Improve the quality of the relationships between fathers and mothers. One consistent finding from research is that better-functioning couple relationships are linked to, and more likely to lead to, greater and more positive father engagement—for parents who are married, divorced, or have never married. We recommend that programs to enhance couple relationships be designed for (a) married couples, (b) unmarried couples in romantic relationships, and (c) unmarried couples parenting children together. We have noted that the ACF has begun to fund large-scale programs with elaborate research designs to accomplish these goals. Interventions for couples who are separating and divorcing also show promise. Often, nonresident fathers’ engagement with their children is at a high point as the couple relationship dissolves; they are going through a complex process of learning to parent from a separate residence or to co-parent with mothers with whom they are no longer romantically involved, sometimes in the context of a romantic relationship with a new partner. The formats would have to be different from the interventions for married and cohabiting couples, but it has been shown that separate group meetings for fathers or mothers have a good chance of helping to improve the children’s well-being after divorce.139,140

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Consider and address couple violence. Intervention work must proceed with caution in cases of families in which the parents are experiencing high levels of conflict or domestic violence. Program staff must be clinically skilled in recognizing these relationship dangers and able to refer parents for additional professional help. At the very least, they should be prepared to make decisions about screening for such information before interventions begin, in order to proceed cautiously with everyone’s safety in mind. Help parents identify and adjust mothers’ gate-keeping and fathers’ helper roles. Mothers often play a gate-keeping role with their children by controlling their children’s experiences and dictating who has access to them. Fathers often play a more passive helper role, assisting with children’s care as directed or allowed by mothers. Gate-keeping can often be seen clearly when children and mothers live apart from fathers, but many parents who live together follow these patterns, too. Given evidence that fathers are competent caretakers of children when given the opportunity, interventions to foster father engagement might encourage parents to experiment with fathers providing some solo care for children so that they can develop their own effective ways of caring and share the burden of children’s care with mothers. Focus on the Quality of Father–Child Relationships

Promote both direct and indirect engagement in children’s care. When fathers provide considerable amounts of direct and indirect care for their children, from helping with homework to getting them up, dressed, and fed in the mornings, the engagement is more meaningful for fathers and children alike, which makes their involvement more likely to continue over time. It may be particularly important for nonresident fathers to be involved in at least some of children’s everyday routines.141,142 Father-engagement interventions can help fathers and mothers think about the range of care that children require, help parents plan which parent will do what, and work toward a division of labor that is effective and satisfying to both parents. We know that satisfaction with ‘‘who does what’’ is linked with satisfaction with the overall couple relationship, and that both are linked with children’s well-being.128 Take Intergenerational Relationships Into Account

Help fathers reflect on and, as necessary, make up for their own less-thanideal experiences of being fathered. Fathers’ experiences of being fathered are related to their level of engagement with their children. Although interventions cannot change fathers’ childhood experiences, they can encourage men to consider how their own early experiences may be influencing their behavior with their children and help them consider how to create more positive experiences for their children. They can be helped to identify positive examples of fathering from their fathers or other men they know, who can teach them about the skills to sustain engagement with children. Sensitive male

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staff in some of the interventions we described have proven very important to fathers who lacked successful male models as they were growing up.128,143 Address parents’ relationships with extended family. It is important for fatherhood interventions to recognize that extended-family members help shape fathers’ engagement with children—supporting or hindering it through their expectations, attitudes, and offers of help. Interventions can choose to address parents’ current relationships with extended-family members directly, for example, by working with parents to consider how their parents (the grandparents) may facilitate or hinder fathers’ efforts to be involved with children. Fathers and mothers can be encouraged to talk with each other and the grandparents in ways that will gather support for handling their family relationships in more nurturant and supportive ways. When parents are relatively dependent on the grandparents for their children’s care, interventions might involve extended family members in the program to facilitate fathers’ engagement. For example, grandparents may be part of teen parents’ agreements about fathers’ visitation by receiving or delivering children when the parents cannot act civilly in front of the children, or by giving single parents the concrete support, confidence, and motivation they need to care for their children. Address Stresses and Supports Outside the Family

Consider fathers’ choice of social networks. Family members, friends, acquaintances, and coworkers in fathers’ social networks have beliefs and attitudes about how involved fathers should be with their children—some that are supportive and others that can hinder men’s actual engagement. Interventions can take these patterns into account in their work with fathers, for example, by helping men identify their perceptions of how various groups expect them to act as fathers, consider how those expectations fit with their own desires, and explore how to develop new social connections that might be more supportive of their family goals. Help parents and employers increase work and family compatibility. Many fathers struggle with meeting the twin demands of their jobs and being involved with their children. Father-engagement efforts might help parents identify ways in which stress from work spills over into their family lives and suggest approaches for easing that strain. More family-friendly workplace policies, such as time off around children’s births and flextime to care for a child who is ill, seem to allow fathers to become more involved with their children. Some father-engagement efforts might facilitate the identification by both workers and employers of workplace changes that would make it easier for parents to be involved with their children. Reorient agencies to make them more ‘‘father friendly.’’ Although it is important to consider the physical characteristics of agencies serving families with a view to making fathers feel welcome, it is necessary to go beyond changing the pictures on the walls. Agency staff often need help to reorient their perceptions

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and attitudes in ways that allow them reach out to fathers to acknowledge their role in the family rather than lament the fact that men are not involved. Promote nonresident parents’ legal agreements about children, including visitation and involving fathers as more equal partners. There are indications that nonresident fathers are more involved with their children when there are formal rather than informal legal agreements in place, when agreements address visitation specifically, and when agreements are more egalitarian—such as specifying joint rather than sole legal custody. Fatherengagement efforts can work to shape the systems, rules, and laws that facilitate divorced and never-married couples’ separation, in order to increase the likelihood that couples will have formal agreements that specify parents’ responsibilities for financial support, visitation schedules, and ways for nonresident fathers to be more equal partners. Promote mediation for nonresident couples attempting to develop and adjust agreements about children. Mediation for both parents can help some couples resolve their differences and promote fathers’ engagement over the long run.144 Efforts to promote mediation may need to involve the development of strategies for packaging mediation as a desirable service. Relatively few never-married parents have legal agreements about caring for their children, and low-income and ethnic-minority communities may not view the legal system or any of its variants, such as mediation, as useful. Offering or mandating mediation when couples are splitting up might be more effective than trying to include it in father-engagement interventions later on. Try to deal with the institutional complexities of collecting child support. It is true that some middle- and upper-income fathers do not contribute adequately to the financial support of their child, and that some systematic procedures have been developed that result in increased child support payments—wage withholding, revocation of licenses, and interception of tax refunds, for example. Such efforts need to be carefully monitored to assess the quality of father–mother and father–child relationships and the ultimate implications of those relationship qualities for the children. Increased child support payments accompanied by more strained family relationships may have a net negative effect on the children. Efforts to increase fathers’ child support payments that are accompanied by interventions to support and improve men’s relationships with the mother and child might be more successful on both counts. Another alternative would be for father-engagement efforts to explore whether increasing nonresident fathers’ contact with children might result in fathers’ voluntarily increasing their financial support—perhaps without the increases in contact between the parents that now accompany efforts to compel fathers to pay child support. It is important to recognize the disincentives to child support payments that are embedded in some regulations of the welfare system. Some fatherengagement efforts might focus on changing the child support system to (a) increase the incentives for low-income fathers to participate, such as increasing

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the amount of the payments that get passed on to the children, even when mothers receive or have received public benefits, and (b) make the amount that low-income fathers pay more equitable and tied to their actual earnings.56

Conclusion It seems odd to us, writing in the year 2007, to be summarizing evidence that positive father engagement is important for children’s development and to be recommending that some fathers may need encouragement and assistance to be the kind of father they want to be. What is clear from our survey of both the research and intervention literatures is that the factors affecting whether and how fathers become involved in their children’s lives are complex and systemic, and are not simply a matter of men’s motivation to fulfill their father role. Our central argument is that paying close attention to what is already known from father-engagement research could result in more comprehensive and effective interventions to support fathers. At the same time, we see that there are a great many unanswered questions. First, as we have stated repeatedly, there has not been sufficient evaluation of interventions to identify the dimensions of programs that lead to positive outcomes. Most fatherhood interventions involve single-time gatherings of men in small or large groups. Can single meetings produce lasting change? There is some evidence that suggests that they can not, but this needs fuller exploration. If meetings are ongoing, what is the optimal number of sessions for producing a specific kind of family change? This question is key to those concerned with policy decisions and funding of intervention efforts. Most fatherhood interventions outside university settings do not have clinically trained staff as leaders. Does the level of training or other characteristics of intervention leaders (e.g., age, sex, race, experience) affect the outcomes programs are aiming for? The answer to this question is essential for the development and funding of responsible intervention efforts. Second, we have not identified all of the central risk and protective factors that affect father engagement, so we do not yet have a solid map of the potentially modifiable factors that father-engagement interventions might focus on. At the top of the list of unknowns is the extent to which programs need to be tailored to fit subpopulations of fathers (defined by marital status, living arrangements, age, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and so on) or whether a generic intervention program is adequate to help different kinds of fathers become and stay involved in their children’s lives. Finally, we return to the issue of diversity that we raised at the beginning of the chapter. There is wide diversity in terms of kinds of fathers—defined by race, ethnicity, national origin, and income. And there is diversity in the kinds of legal connections between fathers and their children, based on whether they are married to or living with the child’s mother. Because it is improbable that ‘‘one size fits all,’’ it is essential to find out which kinds of programs produce

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what kinds of effects on which fathers. Research to address these unknowns creates its own level of complexity. For example, if investigators were to examine the impact of any intervention on the variety of arrangements between two biological parents (married, divorced, not married but cohabiting, not cohabiting but romantically involved, not married or cohabiting or romantically involved) and low- versus high-income levels, each study would require 10 separate groups of participants. As we have seen, contemporary familymaking is even more complex than this, with some couples having children they share, others having children from one or the other’s previous or subsequent relationships, and so on. If we multiply those combinations by the number of racial or ethnic groups to be considered, the number of samples we would need to understand any significant differences grows exponentially. Our hope is simply that each program consider some of this complexity, and that all program efforts attempt to evaluate the effects of the intervention systematically, so that in the aggregate we can begin to gather the kind of information needed by both intervention designers and policy makers to provide a more differentiated approach to encouraging fathers to become and remain positively involved with their children. It is important for us to acknowledge that our proposal to focus on the relationship between parents addresses the issues of only one segment of the diversity of fatherhood. This approach has little chance of working when the relationship between the parents has ended not only in separation but in termination, so that the father has not been involved with the mother or child for some time. In these families, a couple-focused approach may not be appropriate, but the lessons learned from our systemic model may still apply— addressing individual, familial, and outside-the-family factors that reduce chances that the father would seek out his child from the past or become involved with children in a newly established relationship. Two issues concerning the political context of establishing fatherengagement programs require further consideration. First, in our experience, despite the generally accepted ideology that father engagement is a ‘‘good thing,’’ there are two constituencies that express skepticism or opposition. In presenting ideas about the importance of father engagement, the authors of this chapter inevitably face questions from some mothers who fear that an emphasis on fathers downgrades the importance of their role in child rearing. It is always necessary to frame the inclusion of fathers as an additional central resource for fostering children’s healthy development and strengthening family relationships. Even more opposition is expressed by health and social service workers most centrally involved in dealing with the serious effects of domestic violence. We need to make clear that these programs are not for violent men but rather the majority of men whose increased presence in the family holds the potential to enhance relationship quality and children’s healthy development. Second, although we have been building an argument for creating interventions to foster fathers’ engagement, it is important to give thoughtful consideration to the question of whether the government should provide

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funding for such programs. Could the money be better spent in other ways? The most common suggestion is that income-supplementation programs could reduce family stress and increase family well-being. We are aware of no income-intervention program that has actually increased the quality of family relationships, although it is possible that such a program could be designed. The number of possible alternative uses of government funds is as large as the number of different policy initiatives designed to benefit children and families. By definition, then, this debate is central to the realm of family policy— how government should allocate priorities in the spending of limited resources. We believe that there are sufficient grounds in the literature we have reviewed about fathers’ importance to children’s development to give fatherengagement programs a serious try. At the time of this writing, the question of whether the government should be involved in promoting father engagement is moot. As we stated at the beginning of this chapter, based on the budget- and welfare-reform proposals by the Bush Administration, passed by Congress, the ACF at the federal level has embarked on funding programs to encourage fathers’ positive engagement with their children. We are encouraged that these plans include several ambitious studies that will randomly assign participants to one of several interventions in order to systematically establish the effectiveness of well-designed and thoughtfully staffed programs for low-income families, many based on the kinds of research findings we have described here. The results of these intervention studies will be some time in coming, but they should provide more systematic information about what works, and for whom, in terms of fathers’ engagement and the development and well-being of both parents and children. What we have described here is a field in the process of formation and growth. Under most circumstances, fathers’ active engagement in their children’s daily lives can provide identifiable benefits for children, mothers, and fathers themselves. We actually know a good deal about how to think about facilitating men’s positive involvement in their families, but important questions remain about whether we can do this successfully in the ‘‘real world.’’

Acknowledgments The writing of this chapter was supported by the Department of Social Services, Office of Child Abuse Prevention, Sacramento, California. The authors are grateful to Linda Hockman and Frank Furstenberg for comments on an earlier draft.

Notes 1. Health and Human Services Web site (n.d.). Retrieved September 13, 2007, from http:==fatherhood.hhs.gov=2006Initiative=index.shtml.

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115. Russell, G. (1982). Shared-caregiving families: An Australian study. In M. E. Lamb (Ed.), Nontraditional families: Parenting and child development. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Press. 116. Russell, G. (1986). Shared parenting: A new childrearing trend? Early Child Development & Care, 24(3– 4), 139–153. 117. Repetti, R. L. (1994). Short-term and long-term processes linking job stressors to father-child interaction. Social Development, 3(1), 1–15. 118. Schulz, M. S., Cowan, P. A., Cowan, C. P., & Brennan, R. T. (2004). Coming home upset: Gender, marital satisfaction, and the daily spillover of workday experience into couple interactions. Journal of Family Psychology, 18(1), 250–263. 119. Hyde, J. S., Essex, M. J., & Horton, F. (1993). Fathers and parental leave: Attitudes and experiences. Journal of Family Issues, 14(4), 616–638. 120. Wisensale, S. K. (2001). Family leave policy: The political economy of work and family in America. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. 121. Mercer, D., & Pruett, M. K. (2001). Your divorce advisor. New York: Simon and Schuster. 122. Nord, C. W., & Zill, N. (1996). Non-custodial parents participation in their children’s lives: Evidence from the survey of income and program participation. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 123. Lamb, M. E., Sternberg, K. J., & Thompson, R. A. (1997). The effects of divorce and custody arrangements on children’s behavior, development, and adjustment. Family & Conciliation Courts Review, 35(4), 393– 404. 124. Cookston, J. T., Braver, S. L., Griffin, W. A., De Luse, S. R., & Jonathan, M. (2007). Effects of the dads for life intervention on interparental conflict and coparenting in the two years after divorce. Family Process, 46(1), 123–137. 125. Doherty, W. J., Erickson, M., & La Rossa, R. (2003). Parenting together: An intervention for the transition to fatherhood. Paper presented at the National Council on Family Relations, Vancouver, BC, Canada. 126. Hawkins, A. J., Roberts, T.-A., Christiansen, S. L., & Marshall, C. M. (1994). An evaluation of a program to help dual-earner couples share the second shift. Family Relations: Interdisciplinary Journal of Applied Family Studies, 43(2), 213–220. 127. Braver, S. L., Griffin, W. A., & Cookston, J. T. (2005). Prevention programs for divorced nonresident fathers. Family Court Review. Special Issue on Prevention: Research, Policy, and Evidence-Based Practice, 43(1), 81–96. 128. Cowan, C. P., & Cowan, P. A. (2000). When partners become parents: The big life change for couples. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 129. Schulz, M. S., Cowan, C. P., & Cowan, P. A. (2006). Promoting healthy beginnings: A randomized controlled trial of a preventive intervention to preserve marital quality during the transition to parenthood. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 74(1), 20–31. 130. Cowan, P. A., Cowan, C. P., Pruett, M. K., & Pruett, K. D. (2007). An approach to preventing co-parenting conflict and divorce in low-income families: Strengthening couple relationships and fostering fathers’ involvement. Family Process, 46(1), 109–121. 131. Doherty, W. J., & Erickson, M. (2000). Responsible fathering: An overview, conceptual framework, and recommendations for policies and programs. In M. K. Whyte (Ed.), Marriage in America: Communitarian perspectives. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.

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132. Mrazek, P. J., & Haggerty, R. J. (1994). Reducing risks for mental disorders: Frontiers for preventive intervention research. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. 133. Cowan, P. A. (1991). Individual and family life transitions: A proposal for a new definition. In P. A. Cowan and E. M. Hetherington (Eds.), Family transitions (pp. 3–30). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 134. The Lewin Group. (1997). An evaluability assessment of responsible fatherhood programs: Final report. Washington, DC: Administration for Children and Families. 135. Lerman, R., & Sorensen, E. (2000). Father involvement with their nonmarital children: Patterns, determinants, and effects on their earnings. Marriage & Family Review, 29(2–3), 137–158. 136. Kessler, R. C. (2003). Epidemiology of women and depression. Journal of Affective Disorders Special Issue: Women and Depression, 74(1), 5–13. 137. Anderson, P., Beach, S. R. H., & Kaslow, N. J. (1999). Marital discord and depression: The potential of attachment theory to guide integrative clinical intervention. In T. Joiner and J. C. Coyne (Eds.), The interactional nature of depression: Advances in interpersonal approaches (pp. 271–297). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. 138. Fals-Stewart, W., Kelley, M. L., Cooke, C. G., & Golden, J. C. (2003). Predictors of the psychosocial adjustment of children living in households of parents in which fathers abuse drugs. The effects of postnatal parental exposure. Addictive Behaviors, 28(6), 1013–1031. 139. Cookston, J. T. (1999). Parental supervision and family structure: Effects on adolescent problem behaviors. Journal of Divorce & Remarriage, 32(1–2), 107– 122. 140. Pruett, M. K., & Hoganbruen, K. (1998). Joint custody and shared parenting: Research and interventions. Child & Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 7(2), 273–294. 141. Lamb, M. E. (2002). Nonresidential fathers and their children. In C. S. TamisLeMonda & N. Cabrera (Eds.), Handbook of father involvement: Multidisciplinary perspectives (pp. 169–194). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 142. Pruett, M. K., & Pruett, K. D. (1998). Fathers, divorce, and their children. Child & Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 7(2), 389– 407. 143. Cowan, P. A., Cowan, C. P., Pruett, M. K., & Pruett, K. D. (2007). An approach to preventing co-parenting conflict and divorce in low-income families: Strengthening couple relationships and fostering fathers’ involvement. Family Process, 46(1), 109–121. 144. Kelly, J. B. (2004). Family mediation research: Is there empirical support for the field? Conflict Resolution Quarterly. Special Issue: Conflict Resolution in the Field: Assessing the Past, Charting the Future, 22(1–2), 3–35.

4 Can Women Have Careers and Babies Too? Mary Ann Mason

Recently, I spoke at a university reception where I was approached by a young woman who introduced herself as a graduate student in art history. She said she had followed our ‘‘Do Babies Matter?’’ research over the years in academic journals. ‘‘I read every new article,’’ she said, ‘‘and then I discussed it with my mom and dad. They both started out as professors, but my mother gave up her career to take care of us. I think she is unhappy,’’ explained the student. ‘‘What really surprises me is that my dad is pretty conservative, but he is beginning to understand that it’s not fair that men can have families and careers and women can’t; he thinks maybe we should change the tenure clock.’’ Clearly she felt her father was making progress, but then she added in a slightly apologetic tone, ‘‘As for myself, I’m still not sure how to make it work. I don’t think you’ve suggested when is the good time to have babies.’’ Young women today grow up in a culture that offers seriously mixed messages—you must aim high, you can be anything you choose, you can do anything that men can do, but you must be able to support yourself and help support your family for your working life—and, somehow, you have to fit in motherhood. Women face a continuing series of decisions about family and work over the course of their lives. Men and women start out on their career path in law, medicine, academia, or the corporate world nearly toe to toe, but soon their tracks begin to diverge. The general rule across the male-dominated professions is that men who marry and have children are the most successful, while women who marry and have children are the least successful during their professional careers.1 Our 81

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research shows that this holds true in law, business, medicine, engineering, politics, science, and academia. Despite the growing numbers of women entering these professions, the same general pattern has held. Of course, other factors, especially persistent gender discrimination still deeply embedded in many male-dominated professions, influence women’s career trajectories. However, with the removal or reduction of most legal and official discrimination barriers, our research shows that family issues are a more prominent factor in career success, particularly in the early period of career formation. Differences in the lives of professional men and women extend beyond just career success—these men and women also develop different family patterns. Among highly educated, highly skilled professionals, men are more likely than women to marry, less likely to divorce, and more likely to have children. This raises a different and important question about how to define gender equity. Is equity just the ability to excel in the profession, or is equity the ability to excel in the profession without sacrificing the ability to have a family?2 The divergences occur not at a single stage but rather at key points along a career path. Fast-track professions present three distinct life stages, each with different demands: an extended training period—the student and apprentice years—which begin in late adolescence and may last until about age 30; a long probationary period of the critical ‘‘make or break’’ years that fall roughly between ages 30 and 40; and the long career climb until retirement, where some, more often men than women, reach the highest pinnacles of their profession. Mothers who drop out of the most competitive tracks, usually during the ‘‘make or break’’ years, rarely leave their profession entirely. They often find a place in the growing second tier, a female-dominated stratum in each profession that offers a more flexible time commitment. This second tier is the fastest growing segment of, and most noteworthy consequence of the feminization of, graduate and professional education. It is changing, and will continue to change, the structure of the professions. Most undergraduate courses today are taught by lecturers, not professors; most primary medical care is provided by physicians who receive lower pay than in previous eras and who often work part time. These positions are disproportionately held by mothers because they can provide a more comfortable working schedule. But they are also characterized by stagnancy—there is little room for advancement in the second tier. Our ‘‘Do Babies Matter?’’ research project tracks the effect of family formation and child raising on both men and women across these life stages. Conversely, it also examines the impact of careers on family formation and tracks points at which careers help or hinder marriage and child rearing. We used a wide variety of sources: longitudinal databases developed by the National Science Foundation; the 2000 U.S. Census; and vital statistics provided by the American Bar Association, the American Medical Association, Catalyst, and others. We also interviewed dozens of women, mostly mothers, at all stages of professional life: mothers beginning their career, mothers who dropped out

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of their career, and mothers who made it to the very top of their profession. The story of how, when, and why families and careers interact is told through our scientific findings, and also through the experiences of the women grappling with these questions. It’s a complicated tale. Just as there is not one easy answer to the question ‘‘When is a good time to have a baby?,’’ there is not an easy answer to why some women succeed and others drop down or drop out. Following is the basic framework of what we know about babies and the life course of men’s and women’s careers.

The Student and Apprentice Years: Ages 18 to 30 Undergraduate Degrees

One of the most remarkable events of the twentieth century was the massive entrance of women into higher education. In 1900, women accounted for 19% of U.S. bachelor’s degree recipients. The percentage rose and fell in subsequent decades; by 1960 35% of bachelor’s degrees were received by women. But in 2000, women received 57% of undergraduate college degrees.3 (Some observers believe that the balance has tipped too far in the female direction.4) Even today, however, gender variations significantly affect future career paths. Female recipients of bachelor’s degrees in engineering remain a small minority, despite a leap from 0.4% in 1966 to 17.9% in 1996. Even more telling is their stagnant underrepresentation in mathematics and computer sciences—33%, unchanged over three decades.5 These basic degrees provide the training that has driven the computer revolution; without them, women are prevented from entering the critical arenas of research and industry. One of the rare female faculty members in a department of mechanical engineering believes the male-dominated culture in such departments continues to deter prospective female applicants: ‘‘There is a perception that mechanical engineering is for ‘gear heads.’ The field is not set up for women and looks unattractive to women, and I think it is a problem. The field needs to look more humanistic to entice further participation from women.’’ Some areas of science, particularly biology, have opened up to women. Soaring from 25% to 50% of all degree recipients, women are well positioned to enter medical fields and to participate in the biotech revolution. Women also now represent 50% of the social sciences, a 16% increase from 1996. Female students dominate psychology (73%) and are overrepresented in most of the arts and humanities.5 During undergraduate college years, students are still in late adolescence— their formative years. But students who plan to be physicians, lawyers, or academics make career decisions early because they have many more years of training ahead of them and must lay the foundation for these future studies.

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Mentors and role models play an important role in the career direction they will take, particularly for women. Some have postulated that one of the reasons so few women enter engineering is because nearly all the professors are men. That is no longer true for most other fields. At the early point of career choice, the question of a future family is a factor but, for most young women, it is largely a distant and abstract concern. The age at which women college graduates have their first baby has risen dramatically. In 1970, 73% of college-educated women had their first baby by the time they were 30; in 2000, only 36% did so in that time frame.6 This remarkable shift reflects, in large part, greater opportunities—as well as a greater necessity—for women to participate in the workforce. However, these impressive numbers also point to a trend identified by younger women interviewed for this book: the postponement of family decisions for career priorities. One young law student discussed why ambitious women who are focused on career success are afraid to pursue motherhood: Mommy lawyers are usually not partners; however, daddy lawyers excel. This disconnect is so common, it is like an accepted norm. For a law firm, losing a lawyer to maternity leave or a part-time track is a serious liability. Now when I hear the word ‘‘kids,’’ I think ‘‘death to my career’’—and that is sad.

Graduate and Professional Training

More remarkable than women’s high enrollment in undergraduate education is their massive entry over the past 40 years into the tough graduate training programs in law, medicine, business, science, and the academic disciplines. Inspired by the doors opened by the women’s movement and the resulting federal legislation—and sobered by the economic realities that impel women to work—women have flocked to these formerly male-dominated enclaves. The numbers are stunning. Nearly 10 times as many women are entering professional schools, and 5 times as many women are entering doctoral programs, as were 40 years ago. There are, again, variations within this impressive story. Only 12% of engineering doctorates and 21% of computer and mathematics doctorates are awarded to women, reflecting continuing marginalization of women in these important fields.7 Overall, however, the story is one of triumph. The First Cut

In the flush of graduation from professional training, a new story begins to emerge. The ‘‘first cut’’ in career paths occurs around graduation from medical school, law school, or doctoral programs. At this point, many women veer away from their original career plans. Varying somewhat among the professional fields, graduation occurs in women’s late 20s or early 30s. Most MBA

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graduates work for several years before pursuing that degree. The average age for PhD completion is 335; medical residencies and postdoctoral appointments add years to the basic training. At some time in their late 20s, around the time they are completing their professional training, most women begin to consider children, and many have found a life partner. By the time they are in their early 30s, about 54% of men with a doctorate and 49% of women with a doctorate are married.6 Women are more likely than men to marry a fellow student, which later creates particular strains on these two-career families. They must negotiate difficult career choices, such as where to locate after graduation, whose career takes precedence, and who will seek to earn more money. The prospect of future children can play an important role in this bargaining process. A significant number of women will have their first child while they are still students. This is particularly true for medical and science students, where the added years of residencies and postdoctoral training make women students into their 30s, the primary childbearing decade. Fifty percent of women doctors who choose to have children have their first child while they are residents, and 25% have their second child during these years.7 Most women, however, defer childbearing during their student years. They do this because they fear they will not be taken seriously if they become pregnant and that, if they have children, their professors, mentors, and future employers will discourage them from continuing in their chosen profession. Childbirth may delay the completion of a degree and decrease access to important professional opportunities, summer internships, and appearances at professional conferences. The rigidly male model of graduate and professional education is relentlessly lockstep; one enters with a cohort and is expected to graduate with it. Any deviation from this norm is frowned on by colleagues and professors, who play a critical role in determining students’ career opportunities. Women who have their first child near or shortly after graduation often decide to take a break. They may make compromises that they believe are temporary, but too often the compromises become permanent. For all competitors in this fast-track world, the window of opportunity closes quickly. Delaying professional advancement for more than a year or two often results in a longer-term career lag. Working part time or shifting to a low-key environment may appear to be a good choice for these women at the time because it allows them to broker a compromise between work and family and to spend time with their infant. But what they do not fully realize is that for the institution—the university, law firm, or corporation—these women’s professional degrees count for little; the gap their resume´ following their degree signals to potential employers that they are not dedicated to professional success.8 Those new mothers who do not initially take a break from their career retain the option to change direction later on to a less demanding track, usually in the second tier.

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A recent law graduate currently working as a public-interest law activist in San Francisco says the demands of work and family pull working women in many directions: I used to think I would want to start my own organization, but I am not as interested anymore. I am already so involved in my work and have such a hard time saying no to every activity I want to participate in: to drive day laborers to Sacramento for a rally or attend a workshop. Saying no is so hard because I want to do it all, but I know I really want a family and a life outside of work. The fulltime life of the activist can be a singular activity.

A divergence between men and women occurs at this juncture, based on present or future family considerations. In science and engineering, more women than men are likely to seek support jobs in industry rather than research careers at universities.9 In medicine, only a small percentage of women as compared to men pursue careers in academic medicine or the demanding surgical specialties.10 In business, women are more likely than men to start a small business rather than pursue a climb up the corporate ladder.11 In the university world, a huge leak in the pipeline occurs between graduation from doctoral programs and the successful attainment of a university position. Women who are married and women who have children are far less likely to pursue an academic research career. In contrast, single women compete toe to toe with men in getting that first job.11 A Berkeley doctoral graduate who waited until after graduation to have children but did so before beginning her academic career says that her priorities changed after experiencing parenthood: After completing my PhD, I decided to try to get pregnant and try to have a child but keep my foot in the door; it took me longer than I thought to get pregnant, more than a year. I was lecturing and doing research and publishing, and I was only working half time. I began to think that I did not want to have a 60-hour-a-week job for the next 7 years and not be able to be part of raising my child. I think I went into it all so naively—into graduate school thinking a faculty position would be a great way to have kids, that there is flexibility and open summers. As I began to see professors who had kids totally strung out and stressed out, I began to realize ‘‘Wait, I am not going to do that!’’

The Make-or-Break Years: Ages 30 to 40 For all young careerists, their 30s are their make-or-break years, but for women these are the decisive years for motherhood as well. The vast majority of women will have their children during this period if they have children at all— very few women have children after age 40. Sixty-four percent of all first babies born to college-educated women in 2000 occurred in this critical decade.12 These are the years when women’s biological clocks collide with their

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career clocks. During this critical decade, men and women seriously diverge on their respective career tracks and family tracks—the result of the events of marriage, divorce, childbearing, and child rearing. The demands of a first job in the fast-track, male-dominated professions are daunting. These professions are structured on a nineteenth-century competitive male model and are designed to weed out the less capable early on, during the probationary years. This model emphasizes endurance above all else, and a major measure is grossly quantitative: time spent on the job. In the legal world, the race to partnership, a track stretching from 5 to 10 years, defines the probationary period for most ambitious young lawyers. The new associate, under the supervision of a partner, must put in a workweek of specified billable hours plus an unspecified number of hours of networking with clients and partners to prove he or she is partnership material. The university world supports an arcane but enduring procedure for achieving tenure, a status that offers lifetime security. A new assistant professor must prove that she is a good teacher, that she is a good citizen in the department, and, most of all, that she is a rising star in the research world. When the time comes for deciding the fate of the acolyte, usually after 6 years, a semitransparent process occurs in which her publications, which must be numerous, are meticulously scrutinized at several anonymous levels within the university. Finally, a thumbs-up or thumbs-down is issued from on high. Medicine is different. The residency following medical school is both a continuation of the training period and a first job. Residencies stretch from 3 to 7 years or longer, depending on the specialization, and they are famously grueling, though they may be improving somewhat. A recently enacted national regulation limits residents’ hours to 80 per week; this standard was put in effect following the death of a legislator’s child at the hand of a sleepdeprived ‘‘zombie’’ resident.16,17 Residents who perform well on this proving ground are recommended for the plum positions. Joining the faculty of top medical schools, the centers of cutting edge research, is considered by most to be the pinnacle of the profession. But a resident who takes an academic position starts as an assistant professor and, like all new faculty, must endure another 6 or 7 years on the tenure track. These hardy physicians are enduring, in effect, their second probationary period. In the corporate world, an MBA has some weight in the assessment of an individual but is not a requirement for entry or for success. In the financial world, a broker’s success is measured by the bottom line of the portfolio he or she manages. There is no prescribed number of years to reach the next level as there are in the professions. But these dynamic meritocracies do not offer ultimate security of employment as do the professions. There is no tenure or partnership, and increasingly even venerable corporations do not honor lifetime loyalty—20-year employees can be dismissed alongside 6-month employees. In some important ways, the probationary period never ends.

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Make-or-Break Motherhood

What all of these professions have in common is that their probationary years are extremely demanding in terms of time. But these demands affect men’s and women’s personal lives differently. Simply put, the more hours a woman works, the less likely she is to have children, while the more hours a man works, the more likely he is to have children. The U.S. Census Bureau’s 2000 sample18 includes roughly 5% of American households, or about 14 million people. Survey questions included how many hours each respondent worked each week and whether there were children in their household (up to age 18). The data were striking. Among those men and women professionals who worked the fewest hours (1 to 29 hours per week), about 82% of the women had children, but only 55% of the men. At the other end of the spectrum, of those who worked 60 or more hours a week, 74% of the men had children in the household but only 49% of the women did. It is easy to understand why women who work longer hours are less likely to have children, but what about men? Why does their fertility increase with the number of hours they work? Part of the answer may be that men are still perceived as the primary breadwinners. In the professions, hours worked translate into economic benefits. These benefits allow men to support not only their children but also wives or partners who do not work full time. The evidence that this occurs is stunning. In the university world in 1999, 52% of male professors in the sciences and social sciences had wives who worked parttime or not at all, while only 9% of women professors had partners who worked less than full-time.19 These findings dovetail closely with the largest study of global executives, which revealed that 75% of men surveyed have a spouse=partner who is not employed at all.20 There are occasional exceptions. One young female associate lawyer reversed the roles and is the breadwinner while her husband stays home: If we had both kept working at law firms, our schedules would not have been very flexible, especially if we were both in a crunch time where we had to work late. The childcare is expensive and one of our salaries would have to go directly towards it. My family is the priority, and if that means I am not going to make partner, then that means I am not going to make partner. If it came down to it I would choose family. When I first went back to work I had a little pang of guilt, which I do not think men feel. But my sister asked me whether I harbor resentment toward our dad for working and I thought, no, I never did.

Marriage rates reveal the same paradox. The more hours a man works, the more likely he is to marry, and the less likely he is to divorce. By age 40, the end of the ‘‘make-or-break’’ years, roughly 80% to 90% of men who work 40 or more hours a week are married. Chief executives officers are most likely to be married, and professors, least. Conversely, over age 40, only 54% to 72% of women are married, with female chief executive officers and physicians leading the pack and female professors and lawyers trailing. Over the next 20

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years, into middle age, more men remain or become married, while women experience a higher divorce rate and more become unmarried.18 Probably few women who begin their probationary years in law, medicine, academia, and other fast-track professions have examined the 2000 Census results, but they can look around in their work setting and realize that the playing field is not level. Because they are not the primary caretaker, men can have children and still work full-time at their careers. Some women seem able to do this as well—but they are fewer in number. So long as part-time tracks are generally seen as career graveyards, there can be little middle ground between career success and full-time devotion. Women in their make-or-break years make major life decisions with limited choices. Four main paths are available to them: they can defer or forego motherhood, they can drop out of their profession entirely, they can drop into a second tier, or they can stay the course and struggle to balance work with family life. One survey of female Stanford University MBA graduates from 1975 to the present provides a glimpse into the fastest track of businesswomen. Stanford MBAs are the young elite, groomed for the top corporate positions. These students have already shown early promise as future corporate leaders. For these women MBA holders, 60-hour weeks and frequent work-related travel are the norm. During the 1970s, there were few women in this prestigious graduate program; the number of female students climbed to nearly 40% in the 1990s. Of the women who had children in this group (about half ), 47% worked full time, 46% worked part time, and only 7% labeled themselves as ‘‘stay at home’’ (what some now refer to as ‘‘opt out’’) mothers.21 The full-time working mothers, many of them on the fastest track, expressed the highest level of contentment. They worked long hours but had little ambivalence about their career course. A mother who is a partner in a major law firm expressed her feelings about achieving success in both arenas: I don’t make the most money, but my life is my whole life. My life is my children and my work and my relationship with my husband, and all of that is fine. You come to some realization of that and then it is all right and you have to stop killing yourself and beating yourself up if you are not the most this, if you are also partly that.

Mothers who professionally survive the make-or-break years—and roughly half do—are generally ambitious and diligent, and they tend to go on to full careers. But the most striking commonalities that seem to predict their longterm success are supportive partners, confidence, time management skills, and a realistic understanding that they cannot ‘‘have it all.’’ Senator Diane Feinstein described for us the key role marriage security plays in career success: My personal life early on was not in order at all. I had a marriage that was not a good marriage and then I was divorced with a small child. I had very little money and I had to make my way with great difficulty. It really was not until I met my

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Children in Families husband, Bruce Feinstein, that I could work on my ambitions. In 1969 I ran for the board of supervisors. My family life was secure, and I had a financial base— my husband. I do not believe I could have done it without the stability and support. I think the most important thing for a woman who wants to combine her career and family is the man she marries—that he is secure in his own right and he is proud of what she does.

Recently, the media has put across critiques of successful career mothers who ‘‘opt out.’’22 The thrust of certain coverage is that successful professional women, married to affluent men, have made the choice to abandon their professions in order to stay at home with their children. This is often mentioned alongside ‘‘new momism,’’ said to be a cultural swing toward an intense focus on full-time parental participation in child rearing—and that parent is usually Mom. While the ‘‘opting out’’ story has been the focus of media attention, the larger and perhaps more important story is that many more women drop into the amorphous second tier of their profession or move into a marginalized part-time track. The Second Tier

For many women, the second tier has become the default ‘‘mommy track.’’ The second tier includes a wide range of jobs, from well-compensated positions with reduced hours in health-maintenance organizations or biotechnology firms to part-time lecturer positions that carry no security or benefits. There are many virtues of a less time-consuming alternative, but in the current workplace, many of these jobs are insecure, underpaid, undervalued, and dead-end. What second-tier jobs have in common is that mothers are overrepresented in them and there is no track to the top. There is little opportunity for significant career advancement and almost no chance to return to a fast track. The second tier is the fastest growing sector of all the fast-track professions and reflects larger shifts toward a more flexible, less permanent work force. Recently, the American Association of University Professors declared that for the first time the majority of undergraduate courses were being taught by parttime or adjunct faculty. The university world, following the lead of corporations, has moved toward a ‘‘flexible’’ workforce with fewer tenured positions and a reliance on part-time or contract workers, who are likely to be mothers with doctorates. Many workers, both men and women, are not interested in the frantic pace that usually characterizes rising to the top of the profession. But the disproportionate number of mothers in the second tier suggests that it is not always a matter of personal ‘‘choice,’’ even when the worker believes it is. And some who ‘‘choose’’ the second tier do not always realize that there is rarely a way back. Still, for some women it is a happy compromise. One family-practice physician with a small child took a part-time teaching position and is pleased with her more limited schedule:

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Most choices I made about my career in terms of part time and being a family doctor had less to do with family and more to do with having a life outside of work. I want to do other things with my life. All my friends were overworked and over-stressed in the residency program. A good friend had two children and it was brutal. Her kids were angry at her and she was tired at work; she could do neither well.

In some cases, falling off the fast track can be creative and liberating. Some mothers take advantage of their skills and their relative freedom to create new businesses, to start new nonprofit organizations, or to write the books they could not undertake as media executives. ‘‘Second tier’’ does not adequately describe these innovative creators, even if they no longer garner the institutional status and income they once commanded. ‘‘Second tier’’ also does not do justice to those who choose to use their skills to create a better world in the nonprofit or volunteer sectors. Women in business are more likely than men to leave the larger corporate world to start or join a new business; this can be anything from a bookstore to a software company to a new line of clothing products. Perhaps the best-known woman entrepreneur, Martha Stewart, broke away from traditional publishing to start her own line of products. Women leave traditional corporate jobs for many reasons, such as a belief they are stuck in middle management limbo with no prospects for advancement, a hostile or uncaring boss or workplace, and, most prominently, ‘‘family responsibilities,’’ which may include relocating for a spouse with a corporate position. A Catalyst study of women entrepreneurs found, not surprisingly, that 82% of the group had children.14 Still, for many mothers, a part-time, adjunct, or less-than-full-partner status does not continue to be satisfying. When their children are older and they are freer, they often want to become full participants once again. One long-term adjunct faculty member described her frustration in trying to return to the fast track after she had raised her children: What was very clear to me was that for an older woman applying for a tenuretrack job, I put myself forward saying, ‘‘I know that I haven’t published, I also know that it is easy for me to do it, that I am at a time when I am not taking care of kids anymore, and that I would point myself in that direction.’’ It was also clear that they would not see me that way; they saw someone who has been in the system a long time and has not produced. It is very clear to many of us as part-time people in the academic system that it is not a good route to a tenure track position. They hire out.

Most law firms have created categories called ‘‘special counsel,’’ or nonequity partners, where lawyers work on an hourly basis but do not share in the firm’s profits.23 Few find these career options acceptable. One senior partner commented, It is a very unsatisfied group, holding a low status in the firm and with a confused presentation to the world. They do not have the perks of being a shareholder, but

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Why do these alternative tracks—‘‘mommy tracks,’’ as they are frequently referred to with derision—fail to provide the respected and desired choice fervently wished for by those who fought for them in the early, heady days of the women’s movement? In part, it is because they are not well supported. In one study, 60% of all respondents who worked part time reported that no one at their firm worked with them to develop their part-time work arrangement. They also reported that they were usually excluded from decision-making committees and social events. Not every ‘‘side-track’’ experience is rated negatively, but the overwhelming majority of respondents believe that the transformation of the workplace in this respect is still a distant goal.23

Beyond the Glass Ceiling: Ages 40 to 65 and Over Mothers who persevere through the ‘‘make or break’’ years arrive at the heart of their career, the 25 or more years of service before retirement. They have prepared for this stretch for nearly 20 years, through graduate school, apprenticeships, and the fierce competition of the probationary period. During their ‘‘make or break’’ years, they have balanced childbirth and infant care with high-pressure career demands. By this time, most have the relative security of a good position with seniority—for example, tenured professor, chief of staff, law partner, or senior editor. Most will live out their career lives in a productive, satisfactory mode, rising in their professions to take on more responsibility and achieve greater recognition. But those women who achieve satisfying careers are far less likely than their male counterparts to have children. Roughly 60% of women at this level have children; this holds true for top women executives, tenured professors, law partners, and elite women members of the National Academy of Sciences.24 By contrast, around 75% to 85% of men in these top positions will have children. The census does not provide any data that would allow you to differentiate between individuals who have made it through the glass ceiling. Our pie charts for tenured professors included in our ‘‘Do Babies Matter? II’’ article are the closest to this.2,18,19,25 The disparity in parenthood is largely a result of the decisions made during the ‘‘make or break’’ years, when women left or were forced off the fast track. Still, this fact seriously tips the equity balance.25 The balance tips further in favor of men at the top. Some of these mothers will continue their trajectory to the very pinnacle of their profession: senator in the U.S. Congress, president of a university, dean of a medical school, chief executive officer of a major company, member of the National Academy of Sciences. But women are far less likely to reach these top positions than are their male peers.

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What happens after those ‘‘make or break’’ years? Why do women, mothers or not, continue to lag behind men in terms of career success? And why, when they achieve a degree of success, are they not rewarded equally? In all of these professions, in addition to the lonely numbers at the very top, there is a well-documented disparity between the pay that senior men and senior women receive. Women executives receive 72 cents on the male dollar in corporate America,26 women partners in law firms take home 68 cents,24 and women physicians earn 65 cents on the dollar compared with men.27 Twenty years ago, the Wall Street Journal coined the phrase ‘‘glass ceiling’’ to describe the apparent barriers that prevent women from reaching the top of the corporate hierarchy. In 1995, the federal government’s Glass Ceiling Commission reported that women held more than half of the master’s degrees awarded in the United States and 45.7% of America’s jobs. Yet 95% of senior managers were men, and female managers’ earnings were, on average, a mere 68% of their male counterparts’ earnings. Ten years later, in 2005, women accounted for 46.5% of America’s workforce and for less than 8% of its top managers, although at large Fortune 500 companies the figure is a bit higher. Female managers’ earnings now average 72% of their male colleagues’ earnings. Since 1998, the figures have stagnated, and, overall, the trajectory is not promising.24 It is not as clear who is included among those at the very top in other professions as it is with the definitive pecking order of chief executive officer, chief financial officer, and chairman of the board of a Fortune 500 company— titles that reflect known salary scales. Is the heart surgeon who invents new techniques and earns a large salary above the dean of the medical school? Is a Nobel Prize winner more powerful than a university president? No matter which criteria you use—fame, fortune, or power—there are relatively few women in these top positions. Only 5% of managing partners in large law firms are women28; women account for less than 10% of deans of medical schools,29 and about 10% of National Academy of Science members, the elite group that represents the pinnacle of prestige for scientists. And those women who hold respectable ranks slightly below these top positions—law partner, full professor, and chief of staff—are still a minority compared with men, and are significantly less well paid. The usual explanation for why there are not many women at the very top focuses on the exclusionary style of the ‘‘old boys’’ network. But our research, and the research of others, reveals that family issues continue to play an important role in determining whether women rise through the ‘‘second glass ceiling’’ to the jobs at the very top. Family considerations also have a strong influence on the salary a woman commands. Keeping up with teenagers, care of aging parents, and a higher likelihood of divorce—twice as high among university professors—are significant family issues faced by women later in their careers. Family responsibilities do not end once the children are in preschool. Many women interviewed for our study expressed a desire and need to be involved with parenting throughout the life course.

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Mobility is still a major concern at this stage, as it is for two-career couples just starting out in their professions. Advancement to the very top in the corporate world, in academia, and in science and engineering is often a question of taking advantage of the best offer. Even if the professional ultimately chooses to stay where he or she is, the threat of a move is a strategic weapon used to force the institution to make a better offer. Women are notably less inclined to negotiate on their own behalf; recent books, such as Babcock and Laschever’s Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide,30 have endeavored to teach women this valuable skill. Career advancement depends on a mix of many factors, including merit, strategy, and negotiation. The consequences for mothers are both immediate and incremental. They do not move to a better opportunity, nor do they receive credit for remaining at their positions, and, over the years, the missed opportunities and deferred negotiations cost working mothers dearly. A major factor in the gender disparity in salaries, even at the highest levels, is women’s reluctance to play ‘‘the moving game.’’ Also, the confidence to say no is a critical tool in creating more flexible time management and enabling working mothers to handle both careers and family life. Saying no to evening meetings and business trips is a difficult but important need. Sometimes working mothers are able to handle these commitments when their employer accommodates them. The University of California is planning to offer a policy to offer travel allowances for small children whose mothers or caretaker fathers deliver papers at conferences. Such accommodations are not always available, however, and mothers must find other ways to keep up with work. Although ‘‘gender discrimination’’ is often blamed for women’s inability to get promoted in male-dominated fields, this factor is often confused with ‘‘maternal discrimination.’’ Mothers are not expected to give first priority to their job, and therefore they are often simply not considered for promotions. And women who adopt an aggressive, ‘‘male’’ behavior pattern are sometimes rejected because they do not fit the nurturing ‘‘motherly’’ stereotype. Maternal discrimination is the basis for a new line of lawsuits brought under federal sex discrimination statutes.31 Despite some new ‘‘family-friendly’’ employment initiatives, the increased pace of work in many fields has put new strain on mothers, even when they are at the top. One long-time senior executive in the corporate world, a major player with large Fortune 500 companies such as Mobil and Phillip Morris, says increasing work pressures led her to retire early in 2002 after her children were grown: There were extraordinary dynamic changes in culture that made life very difficult; the digital revolution happened in 1995, e-mail came along, and with that came a pick-up in the work. When I left in 2002 I became convinced that the pace of work was so grindingly tough with the late nights and weekends that it would be impossible to have the sort of quality of family life I had experienced

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with my kids. The prime reason for me taking early retirement was family related—I had never walked out of a work-related situation before—because I knew I would probably barely make it to my daughter’s wedding or son’s graduation if I had not done something dramatic.

The percentage of women at the very top has grown in recent years but it is by no means proportional to the numbers pouring into the fields. This is not just a time lag. As we have seen, women—mostly mothers who have been waylaid at all steps—continue to be stuck in the second tier. Nonetheless, the increase in women at the top encourages a new perspective and new initiatives regarding the structure of the workplace. The first woman president of Princeton University, Shirley Tilghman, appointed in 2004, famously argued that the tenure system should be dropped because it is ‘‘no friend to women.’’ It makes huge demands on women at a time when many of them are already stressed out with young families.32 Generations

A striking discovery from our interviews is the strength of the generational differences. ‘‘The Pioneers’’ were the first generation to take advantage of the opening of the professional gates to women, and they entered in great numbers. The subsequent generations, now in their 20s, 30s, and early 40s, believe their choices are unique to them and determined by personal circumstances. They have little sense of being part of a movement or of the battles that women have fought to open doors for them. The older generation, now in their late 40s, 50s, and 60s, are more aware of the cultural and economic forces that controlled, and continue to control, women’s choices. Most of the older professional women realize that they had the support of a collective movement of women who were struggling for more opportunities. A second striking discovery is that across the generations, the strategies used by successful mothers to climb to the top of their profession, whether or not they believed they were lone rangers or part of a movement, are impressively similar; so are the roads taken by mothers who drop out of the race. An interesting new trend is that the newer generation is decidedly less willing to sacrifice family time for work time. A recent national study by the Families and Work Institute33 reported that younger workers, both men and women, are more likely to be ‘‘family-centric’’ or ‘‘dual-centric’’ (with equal priorities on both career and family) and less ‘‘work-centric’’ (putting higher priority on their jobs than family) compared to members of the Baby Boomer generation. Both women and men have become more conscious of the personal tradeoffs they have to make in order to advance their careers. An increasing number are instead choosing to tread water in their careers, rather than continue moving up the career ladder. Young fathers are spending more time with their children than they did in 1977—more than an hour more per day than Boomer fathers.33 They are not,

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however, taking over Mom’s second shift; mothers are spending the same number of hours doing childcare and domestic duty as they always have. This may be the generation that changes the workplace by voting with their feet, insisting that the workplace accommodate families, rather than that families accommodate the workplace. This may be the generation who decides that any time is, and should be, a good time to have a baby.

Notes 1. Mason, M. A., & Goulden, M. (2002). Do babies matter? The effect of family formation on the lifelong careers of academic men and women. Academe, 88(6), 21–27. 2. Mason, M. A., & Goulden, M. (2004). Do babies matter? (part II): Closing the baby gap. Academe, 90(6), 3–7. 3. National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). (2001). The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) completion survey. Washington, DC: NCES. 4. Hoff Somers, C. (2000). The war against boys: How misguided feminism is harming our young men. New York: Simon & Schuster. 5. Hill, S. T. (1999). Science and Engineering Degrees: 1966–96 (NSF 99–330), tables 11, 18, 25. Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation, Division of Science Resources Studies. 6. National Center for Health Statistics. (2002). Vital statistics of the United States: Natality 1970, births: Final data for 2000. Retrieved September 13, 2007, from http:==www.cdc.gov=nchs=births.htm. 7. Babco, E. L., & Jesse, J. K. (2003) What does the future of the scientific labor market look like? Looking back and looking forward. Retrieved September 13, 2007, from http:==www.cpst.org=STEM=Future.pdf 8. National Science Foundation (NSF). (2003). Doctorate recipients from United States universities: Summary report 2003. Arlington, VA: NSF. 9. Hoffer, T. B., Welch, V., Jr., Webber, K., Lisek, B., Hess, M., Loew, D., et al. (2005). Doctorate recipients from United States universities: Summary report 2005. Chicago: NORC at the University of Chicago. 10. American Women’s Medical Association. (1996). Maternity leave during training. Retrieved September 13, 2007, from http:==www.amwa-doc.org=index.cfm? objectId¼0F379CED-D567-0B25-543D6436BB879B90. 11. Wolfinger, N. H., Mason, M. A., &, Goulden, M. (2004). Problems in the pipeline: Gender, marriage, and fertility in the ivory tower. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco. 12. Etzkowitz, H. (1994). Barriers to women in academic science and engineering. In W. Pearson, Jr., and I. Fechter (Eds.), Who will do science? Educating the next generation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 13. Brundtland, G. H. (2000). The woman physician in the year 2000. JAMWA, 55(1), 3– 4. 14. Catalyst. (1998). Women entrepreneurs: Why companies lose female talent and what they can do about it. New York: Catalyst. 15. National Center for Health Statistics. (2002). Vital statistics of the United States: Births: Final data for 2000. Retrieved September 13, 2007, from http:==www.cdc .gov=nchs=births.htm.

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16. Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). (2007). ACGME duty hours standards fact sheet. Retrieved September 13, 2007, from http:== www.acgme.org=acWebsite=newsRoom=newsRm_dutyHours.asp. 17. Hoffman, J. (1995). Jurors find shared blame in ’84 death. New York Times, February 7, B1. 18. U.S. Census Bureau. (2003). Census 2000. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau. Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS), United States. 19. Mason, M. A., & Goulden, M. (November, 2004). Marriage and baby blues: Redefining gender equity in the academy. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 596, 86–103. 20. Galinksy, E., Salmond, K., Bond, J. T., Kropf, M. B., Moore, M., & Harrington, B. (2003) Leaders in a global economy: A study of executive women and men. New York: Families and Work Institute. 21. Zappert, L. T. (2002) Getting it right: How working mothers successfully take up the challenge of life, family and career. New York: Simon & Schuster. 22. Belkin, L. (2003). The opt out revolution. New York Times Magazine, October 26. 23. Employment Issues Committee of the Women’s Bar Association of Massachusetts. (2000). More than part time: The effect of reduced-hours arrangements on the retention, recruitment, and success of women attorneys in law firms. Retrieved August 27, 2007, from http:==womenlaw.stanford.edu=mass.rpt.html. 24. Wasserman, E. (2000). The door and the dream: Conversations with eminent women in science. Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press. 25. [Anonymous]. (2005). The conundrum of the glass ceiling. The Economist, July 21. 26. Noonan, M. C., & Corcoran, M. E. (2004). The mommy track and partnership: Temporary delay or dead end? The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 596, 130–150. 27. Boulis, M. (2004). The evolution of gender and motherhood in contemporary medicine. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 596, 172–206. 28. Rhode, D. L. (2001). The unfinished agenda: Women and the legal profession (p. 14). Retrieved September 13, 2007, from http:==www.abanet.org=ftp=pub= women=unfinishedagenda.pdf. 29. Coffman, D. (2005). Women deans optimistic about increasing their numbers. AAMC Reporter. Retrieved September 13, 2007, from http:==www.aamc.org= newsroom=reporter=feb05/deans.htm. 30. Babcock, L., & Laschever, S. (2003). Women don’t ask: Negotiation and the gender divide. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 31. Williams, J., & Segal, N. Beyond the maternal wall: Relief for family caregivers who are discriminated against on the job. Harvard Women’s Law Journal, 26, 77, 95. 32. Marshal, E. (2001). Shirley Tilghman: Princeton’s unconventional new chief. Science, 292(5520), 1288. 33. Families and Work Institute. (2003). 25-year trend data facts. Retrieved August 27, 2007, from http:==familiesandwork.org=site=comparedata.html.

5 Motherhood, Work, and Family Policy Neil Gilbert

During the past 30 years, the role of motherhood has contracted throughout the advanced industrialized world on three planes—(1) fewer women are having any children; (2) among women having children, more are having just one child; and (3) women having children are spending more time working outside the home.1 This trend extends well beyond the borders of the United States. Indeed, contrary to what one might expect, the birth rates in western European countries have fallen even lower than those in the United States—despite Europe’s more powerful arsenal of family-friendly policies. In this chapter, I analyze the most recent developments in the realignment of work and family life, the broader trends since the mid- 1970s, some of the reasons advanced for these trends, and several interpretations of how family-friendly policies designed to harmonize work and child rearing may have impacted these developments.

Who Is Opting Out of What? Not too long ago, caring for their children was unquestionably the most important activity that women performed in society. Prior to the 1960s, it was customary for mothers not to work outside the home—a convention acknowledged and reinforced by social policy. Thus, the Aid to Dependent Children’s (ADC) program, under the Social Security Act of 1935, gave cash grants to women who were single parents so they could stay home and care for their children.2 All this began to change after the 1960s, as normative views and 98

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policies concerning the role of motherhood shifted in response to feminist demands for social and economic equality—and, some might add, labor-force needs. By the late 1990s, women were having fewer children, and mothers were increasingly delegating child care responsibilities to others as they entered the paid workforce in historic proportions for peaceful times. Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, however, word has been spreading that a revival of home care is underway, with women returning in droves to domestic life, leaving lucrative careers to give birth and raise their children. Reports of this trend have received considerable media attention, which crystallized in 2003 into news of an ‘‘opt-out revolution.’’ Lisa Belkin’s New York Times Magazine article3 about accomplished professional women leaving highpowered jobs to stay home with their kids foreshadowed the coming of a new era—and raised quite a commotion in the feminist community. The accounts of an opt-out revolution cite some empirical signs of a trend, such as the fact that 22% of mothers with graduate degrees are at home with their children, one in three women with an MBA does not work full time, and 26% of women approaching the most senior levels of management do not want to be promoted. Yet cross-sectional data that provide a snapshot of facts at one point in time do not tell us about how things may be changing— whether there is a revolution afoot or, if so, the direction in which it might be headed. With cross-sectional snapshots of this sort, one would need a Ouija board to detect a social trend. To what extent has the proportion of mothers with college and graduate degrees who stay home with their children varied since 1970? Belkin3 notes that 57% of mothers from the Stanford University class of 1981 stayed home with their young children for at least 1 year in the first decade after graduation. There is no indication, however, of whether that high percentage of mothers at home has increased, decreased, or remained the same over time. And even if there has been an increase since 1970 in the percentage of women who stay home after obtaining graduate degrees from elite universities, one must bear in mind that the proportion of women with graduate degrees in 1970 was significantly lower than it is today. The most serious evidence of change over time, as shown in Figure 5.1, is the leveling off of female labor-force participation in 1998, which turned into a slight decline of 0.8% between 2000 and 2004. Women aged 25 to 54 accounted for 69% of the female labor force in 2004. Among women in this age group, the decline in labor-force participation was 2 percentage points—much of it attributed to changing behavior of college-educated, married women with children under the age of 3.4 (The rate of decline for college-educated women with young children was 8%.) The reasons for this decline are not clear. A fraction of the change is attributed to the slightly higher unemployment rate in 2004. After carefully estimating the impact of changes in measurable characteristics such as educational attainment, marriage, childbearing, race, income, and unemployment rates, Julie Hotchkiss5 concludes that factors that economists usually rely on simply do not explain the decline in women’s laborforce participation between 2000 and 2004.

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Figure 5.1. Labor force participation rates over time. Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.

At the moment, predictions of an opt-out revolution in the next generation lean on thin data over a limited period of time. Viewed in a broader context, the more compelling story of change illustrated in Figure 5.1 involves the long-term trends of a steady increase in the labor-force participation of women alongside the equally steady decline in the percentage of men in the labor force. Not only has there been a significant increase in the percentage of women joining the labor force over the last generation, but these women are coming with more powerful credentials. The main difference between women in the 1970s and today is that a substantially higher percentage are currently obtaining high-status professional degrees and completing graduate education in general. Between 1970 and 2002, the proportion of all medical, law, dentistry, and business administration degrees awarded to women increased by almost 529% for medical degrees, 888% for law, 4,277% for dentistry, and over 1,000% for business.6,7As women have entered the labor force with more educational preparation, they have increasingly expressed a bent for entrepreneurial activity. Between 1997 and 2004, the number of companies owned by women climbed by 20%—twice the growth rate in the total number of U.S. businesses. Similar to most businesses, the vast majority owned by women were single-person enterprises.8 From a longitudinal perspective, the women currently opting out of jobs and professional careers in order to stay home with their children are nibbling at the margins of a profound lifestyle trend that has extended over the past several decades—a development deftly portrayed (some might say celebrated)

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in the media. After a 6-year run, the popular HBO series Sex and the City ended in 2004 with what was widely regarded as a happy ending. Each of the four heroines, in their late 30s or early 40s, found love and commitment while pursing a gratifying career. The series finale was a paean to love and individual fulfillment. But as for family life, these four vibrant, successful women approaching the terminus of their childbearing years ended up with only two marriages and one child between them. As a mirror of society, the media shift from kids bouncing off the walls in The Brady Bunch to the 25% fertility rate in Sex and the City several decades later clearly reflects the cultural and demographic trends over this period. Today, almost one in five women in their early 40s is childless. As shown in Table 5.1, that is close to double the proportion of childless women in 1976. Compared to the relatively few Ivy League law graduates who have traded the bar for rocking the cradle, the abdication of motherhood poses an alternative and somewhat more compelling answer to the question, ‘‘Who is opting out of what?’’ Women are increasingly having fewer children, and a growing proportion is choosing not to have any children at all. The increasing rate of childlessness is not unique to the United States. The proportions of childless women aged 40 in Britain, Austria, Switzerland, and Sweden are about the same as that in the United States.9 Family size is shrinking amid declining fertility rates in the advanced industrial democracies. Although the U.S. fertility rate fell from 2.48 in 1970 to 2.06 in 2000, it remains higher than those of all of the European Union countries, among which Italy and Spain have the lowest birth rates (about 1.3).10 Norway, with one of the highest fertility rates (1.8) in Europe, comes closest to the United States.11 Not only are women having fewer children, but mothers are increasingly delegating child care responsibilities to others. Both poor and nonpoor mothers

Table 5.1. Percent Distribution of Women 40 to 44 Years Old by Number of Children Year

0

1

1976 1980 1985 1990 1995 1998 2000 2002

10.2

9.6

17.9

Number of Children 2 3 or more 21.7

17.4

58.6

35.4

29.3

Source: Downs, B. (2003, Oct.). Fertility rate of American women: June 2002. Current Population Reports. U.S. Census Bureau, Table 2.

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are leaving the daily care of their preschool children to other people. Between 1991 and 2001, the proportion 3- to 5-year-old children supervised by caregivers other than their parents increased from 69% to 74%.7 A significant number of these children spent the better part of their days in out-of-home care. According to estimates from the Urban Institute,12 41% of all children under 5 years of age whose mothers are employed are in daycare for 35 hours a week or longer (the figure rises to 52% for those whose mothers work full time.) Do the dramatic increase in childlessness—from 1 in 10 to almost 1 in 5 women—and the rise in out-of-home care for young children qualify as a social ‘‘revolution?’’ It could be said that if women have been ‘‘opting out’’ of anything, it’s reproduction. The revolt against motherhood appears to be more deep-seated than the recent decline in labor-force participation brought to the public’s attention by the media reports about professional women trading high-powered careers for child-rearing activities. Still, the ebb in labor-force participation should not be dismissed too readily—it might be the first ripple in a sea change.

Family=Work Lifestyle Alternatives Talk of social revolutions conveys a sense of fundamental change in people’s values—a new awakening that is compelling women to substitute one type of life for another. Claims of an ‘‘opt-out revolution’’ from motherhood to the labor market, or the other way around, imply that whatever it is women really want, they all pretty much want the same thing when it comes to career and family. It may have looked that way in earlier times. Although the question of what women want has plagued men for ages, it became a serious matter for women only in modern times, and then only in the advanced, industrialized countries. Before the contraceptive revolution of the mid-1960s, biology may not have been destiny, but it certainly contributed to the childbearing fate of women engaging in sexual activity.13 Most women needed men for their economic survival before the equal-opportunity movement of the 1960s, which opened access to virtually all careers. Moreover, the expansion of white collar jobs and jobs for secondary earners since the 1960s has presented women with a viable range of employment alternatives to traditional domestic life. Taken together, these advances in contraceptive technology and civil rights, along with labor market changes, have transformed women’s opportunities to control and shape their personal lives.14 In today’s advanced industrialized world, decisions about the course of women’s lives—especially whether or not to have children and whether or not to seek paid employment—are governed less by biology and necessity than at any time in history. Thus, modern women can partake in a range of lifestyle alternatives heretofore unknown to all but a privileged few.

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What are these lifestyles? Taking family size as a powerful indicator of lifestyle alternatives, I can distinguish at least four general categories that form a continuum of work=family choices (Table 5.2). This classification is an ideal type in the Weberian sense—an analytic frame, which encapsulates a set of essential characteristics that distinguish women’s family=work lifestyle choices. The categories are logical but by no means exhaustive,15 and, as with any typology of this sort, there are exceptions within every category. It helps to think of the categories as ‘‘usually, but not always.’’ At one end of the continuum are women with three or more children. Most of these women derive most of their sense of personal identity and achievement from traditional child-rearing responsibilities and from practicing the domestic arts. While their approaches to child rearing may differ, the constant that traditional mothers share is an abiding belief that the daily care and socialization of their children represent the most meaningful job in life—a job to which they are devoted full time and from which they draw a deep sense of personal accomplishment. Even if they do not all perform the job the same way, the time and value they attribute to it and the satisfactions derived place this work at center of their daily lives. There was a pronounced tilt away from the traditional side of the continuum as the proportion of women with three children at the end of their childbearing years sank from about 59% in 1976 to 29% in 2002. At the other end of the continuum, the number of women who are childless climbed to historic proportions, increasing almost 80% during the same period.16 In the past, high rates of childlessness have been attributed to intense poverty, poor nutrition, and the absence of men due to wars, but those conditions do not apply today, nor do modern rates of infertility explain the decline.17 Table 5.2. Family\Work Lifestyles: U.S. Women Aged 40 to 44 in 2002 Post-Modern

Modern

NeoTraditional

Family Size

Childless (17.9 %)

One child (17.4 %)

Two children (35.4%)

Three or more children (29.3 %)

Identity

Workcentered

Workoriented

Childoriented

Child-centered

Achievement

Professional and economic success

Career and socialization

Socialization and employment

Socialization, care, and household management

Policy-Oriented Interests

Employment opportunity

Employment opportunity and child care

Part-time work and caring benefit

Supports for in-home care

Traditional

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This group is characterized by individualistic, work-centered women engaged in what might be called the ‘‘postmodern’’ lifestyle. Here, personal success tends to be measured by achievements in business, political, and intellectual life rather than in the traditional realms of motherhood and child rearing. Many of these women are among the high achievers in Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s book Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, among whom 42% were childless after age 40 (a figure that climbed to 49% among the women in her sample who earned $100,000 or more).18 The ‘‘postmoderns’’ are disproportionately well educated. An analysis of the women who graduated college in the late 1960s and early 1970s showed that 28% were childless by the time they reached 37 to 47 years of age in 1991, a rate that climbed to 50% among the women in that cohort of graduates who had active careers.19 In the middle categories, about 53% of women currently over age 40 have either one or two children. These women are interested in paid work but not so thoroughly committed to a career that they would forego motherhood. Although a bare majority, this group is often seen as representative of all women—and of the women who ‘‘want it all.’’ In balancing the demands of employment and family, women with one child normally tip the scales in favor of their careers, while the group with two children leans more toward domestic life. Thus, the women clustered around the center of the continuum are divided into two basic categories—‘‘neotraditional’’ and ‘‘modern’’—that vary in degrees from the traditional and the postmodern lifestyles. The neotraditional group contains families with two children whose working mothers are physically and emotionally invested more in their home life than in their jobs, which are often part time. Since 1976, the proportion of women over age 40 with two children has increased by 75% and currently amounts to about 35% of the women in that cohort. The modern family usually involves a working mother with one child; these women are more career oriented and devote greater time and energy to their paid employment than do neotraditional women. The proportion of women over 40 with one child has climbed by almost 90% since 1976, and currently amounts to 17% of the women in that cohort. As general types, the traditional, neotraditional, modern, and postmodern categories help draw attention to both the diversity of work and family choices and to how the size of these groups has shifted over the past three decades. Ideal types are like impressionist paintings. They portray sufficient dimensions of a category to evoke meaning, but the borders are fuzzy and porous. So, let me repeat: in each group there are women who do not fit the ‘‘ideal’’ type— childless women who do not work and women employed full-time with three or more children at home. Also, there are women in each group who would have wanted to be in another category, with more or fewer children than they have. Accident, illness, divorce, poor timing, and plain bad luck may have hampered lifestyle choices for some.

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Certainly some women would rather not go to work, and some would prefer to have additional children, but many of these women are compelled out of dire economic necessity to participate in the labor force and to have fewer children. For most people in the United States, however, I argue that what is often considered economic ‘‘necessity’’ amounts to a preferred level of material comfort—home ownership, automobiles, vacations, cell phones, DVDs, and the like. Poor people on public assistance tend to have as many children as the national average. Still, I grant that this point, of course, is debatable and requires more than a bald assertion to carry the case.20 For the sake of argument, however, let us accept that the tradeoff between higher levels of material consumption and a more traditional domestic life is more (although not entirely) a matter of individual choice rather than of economic survival. As noted, since the 1960s, women’s capacity to exercise choice in regard to family size was dramatically advanced by opportunities to control procreation through modern contraception, legalized abortion, and assisted reproductive technology. At the same time, their options regarding labor-force participation increased, which were followed by changes in family size and patterns of employment. This realignment of family=work lifestyles raises a question: Why does it at least appear that many women are opting out of or reducing their involvement in the role of motherhood? There are various ideas and hypotheses about the decline of motherhood.














It may be a matter of purely personal preference: Hakim14 argues that now that women are actually free to choose, there is a ‘‘normal distribution’’ among women in their preferences for motherhood—a small percentage do not want children, a medium-sized percentage want one or two children, and a small percentage want three or more children. With divorce rates high and people feeling vulnerable to unemployment and to global competition, women are increasingly insecure about the future and reluctant to start a family. Women want children as much as ever but have postponed getting pregnant in order to invest in increasing their human capital, which then makes it more costly to have a family—they wait too long and risk infertility or not being able to have more than one child. Normative expectations about what constitutes ‘‘the good life’’ are changing— with more emphasis being given to materialism and individual pleasures and less to the emotional joys and sacrifices of having children. The struggle to harmonize work and family life makes it difficult to have children.

These possibilities are not mutually exclusive and may contribute in varying degrees to the realignment in family lifestyles. Although much could be said about each of these ideas, for now I would like to focus on the last one—efforts to harmonize work and family life—because it relates most directly to developments in social policy. In considering the struggle to harmonize work and

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family life, I will focus particularly on what we might learn from the European experience in using family-friendly policies.

Family-Friendly Policies: European Experiences Western European countries are well known for having a powerful arsenal of daycare and other family-friendly benefits. For example, over 70% of the children from 3 years to school age in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden are in publicly financed child care.21 In contrast, the United States is considered a laggard in dispensing parental leave, daycare, and other public subsidies to reduce the friction between raising a family and holding a job. Since the early 1990s, however, the United States has been increasing public expenditures in child care programs. One estimate shows, for example, that between 1994 and 1999 public spending on child care climbed by almost 60%.22 Given the general direction of U.S. policy, it may be instructive to examine how motherhood and family life have fared in light of the changing levels of family-friendly benefits available in the industrialized countries of the European Union. As female labor-force participation rates rose, public efforts were made in many European countries to reduce the friction between work and family life. One way to estimate the effects of these efforts is to ask, how did patterns of public spending on family-friendly services such as daycare, household services, and other family benefits in kind vary with marriage and fertility rates? Although the pattern of spending on family-friendly benefits rises and falls, overall the average rates of public expenditure on these benefits as a percentage of gross domestic product increased from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. The average rates of spending had an inverse relationship with average fertility rates and showed a similar relation to marriage rates23 (Figure 5.2). Analyses conducted separately on each country show some variance from the overall pattern that emerges when averaging their results, particularly with regard to fertility rates, which had positive correlations with spending on family benefits in 5 (4 of which were significant) of the 15 countries. Family-friendly policies, of course, involve more than what is captured by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) data on family benefit expenditures. For example, over 70% of the employed women in the Netherlands work in part-time jobs that have benefits similar to those of full-time employment, and Dutch children spend more days per year in school than do most elementary school students in the European Union. A thorough assessment of measures that weigh into efforts to balance work and family life would include parental leave, flexible work schedules, number and length of school days, paid vacation time, and family allowances.22 Some of these benefits are reflected in the OECD data on total public expenditures, analyses of which reveal patterns that parallel the findings noted above. That is, rates of total public expenditure between 1987 and 1997 are inversely

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Figure 5.2. Average fertility rates and family service expenditures as a percentage of gross domestic product of 15 European countries (1987 to 1997). Source: Eurostat. (1999). Eurostat Yearbook: A statistical eye on Europe (1987–1997). Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Community; OECD Social Expenditure Database 1980 to 1997. (2000). Paris: OECD.

related to both fertility (Figure 5.3) and marriage rates. Still, even when total public expenditures are considered, there are many distinctions in the variety of measures that operate in different countries—which is to say that the findings that fertility and marriage rates generally declined as spending on family benefits and total public expenditure have increased can only be taken as suggestive. But what do they suggest?

Believers, Skeptics, and Disbelievers Overall, these findings lend themselves to at least three broad interpretations— representing those who believe in the salutary effects of family-friendly policies, those who are skeptical, and disbelievers. It is clear in regard to the general direction of change that the increasing levels of family-friendly services did not reverse whatever forces—economic, normative, social=psychological preferences, etc.—were driving down fertility and marriage rates. Believers would argue, however, that although family-friendly policies did not appear to strengthen the formation of family life (by increasing the presence of children and marriage), in the absence of these benefits the declines would have been even sharper—that is, these benefits acted as a brake, slowing things up. As

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Figure 5.3. Average fertility rates and average public expenditure as percentage of gross domestic product of 15 European countries (1987–1997). Source: Eurostat. (1999). Eurostat yearbook: A statistical eye on Europe (1987–1997). Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Community; OECD Social Expenditure Database 1980 to 1997 (2000). Paris: OECD.

evidence, one might point to the fact that in three of the countries—Denmark, Sweden, and Finland—that showed significant positive correlations between fertility rates and public expenditure on family benefits, the rates of expenditure were proportionately more than twice as high as that of most of the other countries. This suggests that the decline can be diminished if significant resources are invested in family services. (One might add that Sweden also had the highest cohabitation rates, and some observers find a general relationship between cohabitation and fertility rates.24) Invoking the mantra ‘‘Correlation is not causality,’’ skeptics find little reason to assume that these policies are either friendly or unfriendly to families— and read the results as confirming that family-friendly policies make no palpable difference. They point out that if indeed these benefits served as a brake on declining rates of fertility and marriage, then one would expect to find the lowest marriage and fertility rates in countries that lagged behind in the family-friendly benefits, of which the United States is a prime example— except that the U.S. rates are higher than those of the European Union. Skeptics would no doubt refer to the history of children’s allowances in France, which were initiated under the Family Code of 1939 with the explicit goal of increasing the birthrate. Although the French birthrate increased considerably in the decades after World War II, during the same period the

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United States—with no children’s allowance—also experienced a dramatic rise in the birthrate, while the birthrate in Sweden declined despite its allowance system.25 The skeptic argues that decisions concerning marriage and family size address fundamental conditions of human existence and social expectations, which do not yield readily to the lubrications of social policy. Finally, disbelievers conclude that so-called family-friendly policies are not really friendly to family life. Rather, they argue that although the inverse correlations between expenditures on public benefits offered to harmonize work and family life and fertility=marriage rates do not represent definitive explanations, they are indicative of two firm underlying realities. The first is an unyielding tension between a life centered on family— meeting the continuous demands of marriage, child rearing, and household management—and a life centered on paid employment and meeting the continuous demands of a full-time career. As any woman who has tried it can testify, balancing paid work and family life demands extraordinary physical exertion and personal sacrifices on the part of most mothers during the early childhood years. Caring for young children is immensely labor intensive and relentless. A two-earner family with two children under 5 years of age hits the ground running between 6:00 and 6:30 AM; the kids have to be washed, fed, dressed, and out the door in time to get to the daycare providers well before the parents are due at their jobs. At 5:00 PM, the parents leave work and rush to pick up the kids and take them home to be fed, undressed, and put to bed. This tight daily routine can be further squeezed by jobs that require evening meetings, out-of-town travel, overtime, and take-home work. On top of the daily routine there is weekly shopping for the household, buying children’s clothes, cleaning, laundry, doctors’ appointments, haircuts, and coping with pinkeye, strep throat, and ear infections that regularly strike without warning. It does not take much for things to spin out of control—a dead car battery, a broken washing machine, or a leaky roof will do it. Although many men have increased their involvement in domestic life (whether due to genetic indisposition, poor socialization, ineptitude, or some combination thereof), their participation in traditional female duties has fallen far short of a fair share. The empirical reality is that most working mothers continue to assume the brunt of household and child care responsibilities. And with all the working mothers’ efforts, at the end of each week, their young children have spent the majority of their waking hours with their physical needs being met and their personalities being shaped by other people. The second reality is that the main threads of family-friendly policies are tied to and reinforce female labor-force participation—and would more aptly be labeled ‘‘market friendly.’’ These policies are largely, though not entirely, associated with publicly provided care for children and supports for periods of parental leave. To qualify for parental-leave benefits, it is necessary to have a job before having children. The incentive for early attachment to the labor force is bolstered by publicly subsidized daycare. Child care services both compensate for the absence of parental child care in families with working

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mothers and generate an economic spur for mothers to shift their labor from the home to the market. In Sweden, for example, free daycare services are state subsidized by as much as $11,900 per child.26 They are free at the point of consumption but paid for dearly by direct and indirect taxes—in 1990, Swedish taxes absorbed the highest proportion of the gross domestic product of all the OECD countries. Paying in advance for the ‘‘ free’’ daycare service tends to squeeze mothers into the labor force, because the crushing tax rates make it difficult for the average family to get by on the salary of one wage earner. State-sponsored social welfare activities accounted for about threequarters of the net job creation in Sweden between 1970 and 1990, with almost all of these public-service positions being filled by women.27 Thus much of the voluntary labor animated by a sense of family commitment and invested in care for children, disabled kin, and elderly relatives was redirected to providing social care to strangers for pay. In sum, the disbeliever argues that the quality of family life suffers when mothers with young children go to work; hence, policies that create incentives to shift informal labor invested in child care and domestic production to the realm of paid employment are not ‘‘family friendly.’’ From this perspective, there is a meaningful connection between the decline in marriage and fertility that has accompanied increasing investments in family benefits in recent decades. Seen in the context of women’s diverse interests in work and family life, each of the interpretations outlined above frames a slice of reality. That is, the consequences of family-friendly policies vary in strength and direction for women who may be drawn toward different lifestyle preferences. The skeptic is correct in the sense that these policies probably have little effect on women at the two ends of the work=family continuum—those who prefer the traditional or postmodern lifestyles. Just as the availability of subsidized child care services is unlikely to redirect women who are career centered and not interested in having children, it is doubtful that most women disposed toward rearing three or more children would be seriously influenced by the prospect of having their children cared for on a daily basis by other people. Although there is a degree of elasticity within each lifestyle category, the largest potential for movement is among the lifestyles in the center. On one hand, the believer probably has a point in that child care and other family benefits facilitate the lifestyle objectives of the modern group: the left-of-center along the work=lifestyle continuum—which is most work oriented and inclined to limit family size. In the absence of family benefits, the increased difficulty of rearing children while actively pursuing a career might have a dampening effect on fertility and marriage rates among these women—some of whom might move into the postmodern lifestyle. On the other hand, the disbelievers’ view that most family-friendly policies undermine the institution they are purported to support probably resonates with many women in the neotraditional group for whom work is secondary to child care. In the absence of family benefits that create incentives to work and lend impetus to the normative devaluation of

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childrearing and the domestic arts, fertility rates might rise, as some of the women disposed toward a neotraditional lifestyle would gravitate into the traditional category.

Policy Implications: Balancing Public Incentives The analysis of diverse preferences underscores the reality that family policies can be friendlier to some types of lifestyle choices than to others. Recognition of this diversity also invites us to explore alternatives to the conventional perspective on family policies designed to harmonize work and family life. The conventional approach is implicitly oriented toward helping mothers to work while raising children. It is informed by the traditional experience of men, which basically involves a seamless transition from school to the paid labor force, along with a drive to rise as high as possible in the given line of work. This male model of an early start and a continuous work history imposes a temporal frame on policies to harmonize work and family life, which stresses the idea of ‘‘balancing’’ the concurrent performance of labor-force participation and child-rearing activities. Child care services and even periods of parental leave facilitate an ongoing and relatively stable work history—a lifestyle preferred by many, although clearly not all, women. But the male model creates a narrow perspective on lifestyle choices. Viewing the issue from a life-course perspective reframes and extends the choices by including the possibility that a ‘‘balance’’ between motherhood and employment might be achieved by sequential as well as concurrent patterns of paid and domestic work. From a life-course perspective, the conventional continuum of family=work lifestyle choices is reframed to encompass not only women who want to combine work and family life at the same time but also those who might envision investing all their resources in child care and domestic activities for 5 to 10 years and then spending the next 25 to 30 years in paid employment. There are good reasons why some women, particularly among those in the traditional and neotraditional categories, might prefer the tradeoffs of the sequential approach to balancing motherhood and employment. The contributions of full-time homemakers to their families and to society vary according to different stages of the family life cycle. The early years of childhood are critical for social and cognitive development; some mothers want to invest more heavily in shaping this development than in advancing their employment prospects. Home care during the early childhood years is labor intensive, which heightens the economic value of the homemaker’s contribution during that period. Finally, as the span of life has lengthened, even after 10 years at home, most women would have more than 25 years to invest in paid employment—enough time to extinguish the alleged joys of work for many people.28 Of course, choosing to invest 5 to 10 years in child care and household management would cut off a few career options that require early training, many years of preparation, or the athletic prowess of youth, and a later start lessens the

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likelihood of rising to the very top of the ladder in many career lines. Those are the tradeoffs for the choice to enjoy two callings in life. Various measures could be initiated to support the choice of a sequential approach to balancing family and work. For example, we have seen that the federal government already provides about $16 billion in subsidies for a variety of cash and in-kind benefits to working parents who place their children in daycare. The provision of similar supports through tax credits and home-care allowances to full-time homemakers with children under 5 years of age would afford parents greater freedom to choose between caring for children at home and consuming state-subsidized daycare benefits. To guard against home-care benefits that would end up disproportionately subsidizing wealthy families, these schemes could be progressively indexed. The home-care allowance would create a time limit that is potentially longer (if there is more than one child in the family) than the period of welfare coverage under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, but not as open-ended as in the socialassistance benefits previously available in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. Some might object that this allowance would create an incentive for low-income mothers to stay at home during the early years of child rearing. However, on balance, it is not necessarily the case that this outcome would be detrimental to most of their children or to society. In 1998, Norway initiated a policy to pay cash benefits to all families with children up to 3 years old as long as the child was not enrolled in a statesubsidized daycare center. Finland employs a similar policy, which was fully implemented in 1989. Between 1989 and 1995, labor-force participation of Finnish women with children under 3 years old declined from 68% to 55%.29 Direct child-rearing benefits are not the only way that public benefits can be redesigned to balance incentives for lifestyle choices involving both out-ofhome employment and home care during the early childhood years. Several countries provide varying amounts of pension credits toward retirement to parents who stay home to care for young children. Family-friendly policies might even award ‘‘social’’ credits for each year at home with young children, which could be exchanged for benefits that would assist parents in making the transition from homemaker to paid employment; such benefits could include tuition for academic and technical training and preferential points on federal civil service examinations.30 The social credit scheme would be somewhat akin to certain veterans’ benefits, which were granted in recognition of people who sacrificed career opportunities while serving the nation. In shaping the moral and physical stock of future citizens, the homemaker’s contribution to national well-being is obviously quite different from that of veterans. By recognizing this contribution, the family social credit scheme would elevate the sagging status of domestic activities and child-rearing functions as well as reinforce the thinning fabric of informal social support networks. The case for rethinking what we mean by ‘‘family-friendly’’ policies is put forth not to advance the sequential pattern of motherhood and employment but to give equal consideration to the diverse values and lifestyle preferences

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that influence how women respond to the conflicting demands of work and family life. As things now stand, public policies are far from neutral in offering incentives that support either caring for young children at home or joining the paid labor force and outsourcing a large part of the daily job of motherhood.

Notes 1 This chapter is a revised and expanded version of my article ‘‘What Do Women Really Want,’’ published in The Public Interest (Winter 2005). 2. The monthly ADC grants—$18 for the first child and $12 for each additional child— were based roughly on the amount received by families of soldiers who lost their lives in World War I. In Leiby, J. (1978). History of social welfare and social work in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press. 3. Belkin, L. (2003) The opt-out revolution. The New York Times Magazine, October 26. 4. Bradbury, K., & Katz, J. (2005). Women’s rise: A work in progress. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Regional Review, 14(3), 58–67. 5. Hotchkiss, J. (August, 2005). What’s up with the decline in female labor force participation? Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Working Paper 2005–18. 6. U.S. Census Bureau. (2000). Statistical abstract of the United States: 2000 (pp. 195– 196). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. 7. U.S. Census Bureau. (2006). Statistical abstract of the United States: 2006 (p. 378). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. 8. U.S. Census Bureau. ( January, 2006). Women-owned firms: 2002. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. 9. Coleman, D. (1996). New patterns and trends in European fertility: International and sub-national comparisons. In D. Coleman (Ed.), Europe’s population in 1990. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 10. Eurostat. (2002). Eurostat Yearbook 2002: The statistical guide to Europe. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Community. 11. Here we find a similar pattern of change in family size. Although the rate (12.3%) of women without children at age 40 is smaller than that in the United States, the cohort of Norwegian women aged 40 in 1998 had a 25% higher rate of childlessness and a 35% higher rate of having one child than did women at the age of 40 in 1975. During that period, the number of Norwegian women with two children increased by 33%, and the number with three or more children at the age of 40 declined by 33%. In 1998, Norwegian women aged 40 with the most education had the highest rate (19%) of childlessness (Lappegard, T. [2000]. New fertility trends in Norway. Demographic Research, 2[3]; electronic version available at www.demographic-research.org=Volumes=V012=3). Hakim14 reports a somewhat higher rate of 14% to 15% of Norwegian women being childless at age 40 (p. 51). 12. Capizzano, J., & Adams, G. (March, 2000). The hours that children under five spend in child care: Variations across states. New Federalism National Survey of American Families. Series B, No. B-8. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute. 13. Up until 1972, it was illegal in Massachusetts to provide contraceptives to single people to prevent pregnancy. See Eisenstadt v. Baird (405 U.S. 438). The distri-

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14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

Children in Families bution of contraceptives to minors was legalized in 1977 in the case of Carey v. Population Services International (431 U.S. 678). Hakim, C. (2000). Work life-style choices in the 21st century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weber’s ‘‘ideal-types’’ were not ideal in the sense of achieving perfection or representing exemplary values; they were constructs that captured the central tendencies of a phenomenon but were by no means exhaustive. Expanding the frame to include marital status, sexual orientation, and income might generate additional categories. There were, as Weber put it, ‘‘ideal-types of brothels as well as religions.’’ See Miller, S. M. (Ed.) (1963). Max Weber: Selections from his work (p. 31). New York: Thomas Crowell. Although there were high rates of childlessness during earlier periods of the twentieth century, the rates in 2002 are historic in the sense that they have never been this high in such prosperous and relatively peaceful times. Citing the findings of the United Nations–supported World Fertility Survey in the 1970s, which revealed that primary infertility affects only 2% to 3% of women aged 25 to 50, Hakim14 notes that infertility does not account for the sharp rise in childlessness after mid-1970s (p. 54). Hewlett, S. A. (2002). Creating a life: Professional women and the quest for children. New York: Talk Miramax Books. Goldin, C. ( July, 1995). Career and families: College women look to the past. Working paper No. 5188. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. A more detailed argument is developed in Gilbert, N. (2008). A mother’s work: How feminism, the market and policy shape family life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gornick, J., Meyers, M., & Ross, K. (1997). Supporting the employment of mothers: Policy variations across fourteen welfare states. Journal of European Social Policy, 7(1), 45–70. Besharov, D., & Samuri, N. (2000). Child care after welfare reform. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute. For fertility rates r ¼ 0.568 (p < 0.10) and for marriages r ¼ 0.767 (p < 0.01). Because we cannot assume that the data in these analyses (average rates of the same group of countries at different time periods) involve independent observations, Pearson’s r cannot be used to test hypotheses or predict future relationships. It is reported here only as a way to summarize the observed relationship between two variables. Billari, F. C., & Kohler, H. P. (2004). Patterns of low and lowest-low fertility in Europe. Population Studies, 58(2), 161–176. Schorr, A. (1965). Income maintenance and the birth rate. Social Security Bulletin, 28(12), 2–10. Swedish Institute. (1992). Child care in Sweden. Stockholm: Swedish Institute. Esping-Andersen, G. (1991). The welfare state in the reorganization of working life. In P. Sanders and D. Encel (Eds.), Social policy in Australia: Options for the 1990s (Vol. 1). New South Wales: Social Policy Research Center, University of New South Wales. For an analysis of early retirement trends and reasons given for leaving work, see Gilbert, N. (2005). Family life: Sold on work. Society, 42(3), 12–17.

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29. The home-care allowances were cut back substantially in 1995, followed by a 3% decline in the Finnish birthrate the next year. See Sipila, J., and Korpinin, J. (1998). Cash versus child care services in Finland. Social Policy and Administration, 32(3), 263–277. 30. For a more detailed discussion of an earlier social credit proposal, see Gilbert, N. (1983). Capitalism and the welfare state. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

6 Child Support: How Much Is Just Right? Ira Ellman & Tara Ellman

Most of the attention given to the subject of child support in the popular press focuses on its enforcement. But improved enforcement makes the content of support orders more important. This chapter looks at the rules for setting the dollar amount of the support order: what are they, and do they make sense?1 At one time, child support orders were determined case by case. Trial judges exercised discretion under statutes that left them largely free to set the award for the dollar amount they thought appropriate. Not surprisingly, the result was wide variation in the amount of child support ordered among cases whose essential facts seemed quite similar.2 It was often said that the law required support amounts based on the standard of living maintained in the intact family, but that principle was illusory. The greater expense of maintaining two post-divorce households typically requires that at least one of them experience a living-standard decline, which means the real question is the proper allocation of this shortfall. Trial judges necessarily answered that question implicitly as they set support levels in individual cases, but they rarely had to explain their choice. That is why the governing rules could seem to vary between cases. Some commentators argued that orders were often too low to meet a child’s minimum needs, much less maintain the prior standard of living.3 Even if this were not true, the burden of making out a case for support was itself an important barrier to establishing an order, and thus to enforcement of the support obligation.

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Reforming this discretionary system thus became part of the federal effort in the 1980s to improve the collection of child support. Congress conditioned federal funding for each state’s welfare program on the state’s creation of child support guidelines. Under rules still in effect, the Family Support Act of 1988 required that these guidelines establish, in every case, a dollar figure that is presumed by law to be the correct amount of child support. States must bind their courts to set the support order for this presumed amount, unless the judge writes an opinion to explain why that amount was inappropriate in the particular case in question.4 Although federal law requires child support guidelines, it leaves states free to fashion them as they wish. One’s first thought might be to base the guidelines on the cost of children, but that cannot work. A rule that guidelines should cover the children’s ‘‘cost’’ would tell us nothing, because one cannot measure what children cost without first deciding what living standard to provide for them. That choice of living standard is a value judgment the guideline writer must make. It is a difficult judgment because the child and the custodial parent share the same living standard when they share a home— the custodial parent cannot be expected to eat noodles while feeding the child steak—and unless the two parents have infinite resources, the higher the living standard enjoyed by the custodial household, the lower the living standard enjoyed by the support obligor. So child support awards inevitably transfer resources from the support obligor to both the child and the custodial parent. Formally, however, the law ignores this reality. It pretends that dollars are true to their label: that child support dollars go only to children, and alimony dollars go only to the parent. A sensible analysis of child support policy requires abandoning that pretense. Much of this chapter, therefore, discusses the relative situations of the custodial and noncustodial households, rather than the relative situations of the individuals within them, on the assumption that the members of a family household share a common living standard and financial fate. Indeed, increasing proportions of separated parents enter new households in which they live with a new spouse or partner as well as additional children who are not the children of their former partner. The fact that these persons were not members of the pre-separation family does not shield them from the living-standard impact, positive or negative, of a child support award that may be calculated without consideration of their presence. Just as significantly, the additional adults often have income that contributes to the well-being of other members of their new household. For example, the income of a custodial mother’s new husband will almost always improve his stepchild’s living standard, and the income of the support obligor’s new spouse may improve to the obligor’s living standard, and thus the obligor’s capacity to pay support. Existing law usually ignores these realities as well. For now we too will ignore the complications of new household members, but we will return to them in the final section of this chapter.

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Current Practice Overview

What principles do current state guidelines reflect? One cannot tell from the aspirational statements contained in state statutes or regulations. Most are so vague as to be practically contentless. California, for example, specifies that the parents should support their child ‘‘in a manner suitable to the child’s circumstances.’’5 Perhaps because any principle requires potentially politically contentious tradeoffs between the parties, policymakers usually avoid clear statements of principle, or offer inconsistent statements that they do not reconcile.6 A disinclination to confront the inevitable tradeoffs was facilitated by two studies funded by the Department of Health and Human Services in the late 1980s. Meant to assist states in complying with the forthcoming guideline requirements, the studies focused on estimating how much parents in intact families spend on their children, as a substitute for estimating how much children ‘‘cost.’’ The first (the Williams7 study), conceding that ‘‘there is no absolute standard for the ‘cost’ of rearing a child,’’ concluded that ‘‘economic studies are able to infer the ‘cost’ . . . at a given income level only by observing the actual expenditures allocated to a child in existing households.’’ The second (the Betson8 study) simply conflated the concepts of cost and expenditure. While offering a method for estimating expenditures on children in intact families, using parental income and family size, the study’s title and text both refer repeatedly to the costs of children, as if costs and expenditures were the same. Of course they are not. But as the quote from Williams suggests, the shift from cost to expenditure (Williams endorsed Betson’s method) is offered as a way to avoid the value judgments (about the appropriate living standard) necessary if one is seeking to estimate costs. It seems to get the guideline writer off the policy hook, because the amounts set in the guidelines are determined by the consultant’s estimate of the average spending behavior of parents in intact families, not by the policy judgments of the guideline writers. Essential to this illusion is the assumption that the task of estimating parental expenditures on children is purely a technical exercise requiring no policy choices. Perhaps at least in part because of the appeal of a ‘‘value-neutral’’ methodology, the Williams-Betson method is employed by the great majority of states, and we will refer to it as the conventional methodology.9 Yet once one pierces the method, it becomes clear that value judgments are not avoided by it; they are simply hidden from view. One cannot tally what parents spend on their children without first deciding what counts as a child expenditure. More than arithmetic is involved. If a couple spends the same amount on rent after having a child as they did before, does that mean that none of their postbirth rent is an expenditure on their child? What if they move to a different rental unit, perhaps in a different location, and pay the same price? How much of the family’s utility bill is an expenditure on children? Different answers to such

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questions will yield different expenditure estimates, with a corresponding effect on any support guideline based on them. There are in fact competing methods for estimating expenditures on children that yield different results because they assume, implicitly or explicitly, different answers to questions like these. So the conventional method requires preliminary judgments about what counts as a child expenditure—and thus what expenditures are included in the tally that forms the basis of the support guidelines. If expenditures on gas, electricity, telephones, or a car are not counted as child expenditures, then their cost will not be reflected in the support payment specified in the resulting guideline.10 The ‘‘income shares’’ guidelines that most states employ use the conventional method for estimating total child expenditures, and then allocate responsibility for those expenditures between the two parents in proportion to their incomes. The noncustodial parent pays his share to the custodial parent as the support order. But, of course, items that are not counted as child expenditures are not part of the estimate and are thus not allocated. In that case, the custodial parent needs other income to pay for these items. What if the custodial parent does not have much other income? Does that mean we should count utilities as child expenditures? Or should we say the utility bill is the custodial parent’s responsibility because it is not much affected by the child’s presence in the household? Or should we make an adjustment depending on the parent’s relative income? How we resolve this is a question of child support policy, not cost accounting. Equivalent questions can be repeated with most other expenditure categories, and the answers will determine the shape of the support guideline grid. But the child support policy choices implicit in these expenditure classifications are typically inaccessible to the state officials charged with formulating support guidelines, who usually have neither the skills nor the inclination to pierce the cloud of technical jargon in order to reveal them. The result is that policy decisions are not avoided by the shift in focus from cost to expenditure; they are simply made opaque, often hidden from the view of the policymakers themselves. Nevertheless, they are there. Policy Consequences

What is in fact the policy result of the conventional method? Consider Table 6.1, which sets out examples of three cases, all involving a custodial parent (CP) who lives with the couple’s one child and earns $1,000 monthly. The cases differ only in the income earned by the noncustodial parent (NCP), who lives alone and earns either $500 (Case 1), $2,500 (Case 2), or $6,000 (Case 3) monthly. The table shows the support payments called for in each case under the child support schedule currently in effect in Arizona. Arizona is an income-shares state with guidelines based on the conventional methodology, and it revised its guidelines in 2004. The required payment is shown both in dollars and as a percentage of the noncustodial parent’s income. Finally, the

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Table 6.1. Low-Income Custodial Parent in Three Situations

Case Number 1 2 3

NCP Income (Before Support Payment)

Support Payment (Under Arizona Guideline)

Payment as Percent NCP Income

CP Income After Payment, as Percent Poverty

NCP Income After Payment, as Percent Poverty

$ 500 $ 2500 $ 6000

$110 $471 $781

22% 19% 13%

107% 142% 173%

50% 260% 668%

CP: custodial parent; NCP: noncustodial parent. For the purposes of this table, CP earns $1,000 monthly and lives with one child. All income figures are gross incomes (before tax calculations); poverty threshold calculations based on 2002 data.

last two columns of the table show the incomes of the custodial and noncustodial households after the support transfer payment as a percentage of the federal government’s poverty threshold for a household of that composition.11 For ease of exposition, I will refer to the custodial parent in these examples as the mother and the noncustodial parent as the father, which conforms to the actual facts in the great majority of such cases. Case 1 is the all too common problem in which both parents are poor, with the father earning even less than the mother. Their combined monthly income of $1,500 cannot possibly support two households above the poverty line, and in fact it does not. The fifth column shows that after the child support payment of $110, the child’s household income barely exceeds the official federal estimate of the amount this household requires to avoid poverty, their aftertransfer income of $1,110 being equal to 107% of that poverty threshold. The child’s household is thus in relatively desperate straits. The father is even worse off, however, as the $390 left after the support payment leaves him with an income that is half the poverty threshold for a single individual. In fact, Arizona would probably excuse this father from making more than a nominal support payment. Like most states, the Arizona guidelines provide for a ‘‘selfsupport reserve.’’ The details of these provisions vary among the states, but their general purpose is to shield obligors from support orders that would impoverish them. In Arizona, the trial court is authorized to reduce the support payment to zero if the obligor has less than $775 in monthly gross income.12 This father qualifies for that reduction, which is left to the court’s discretion. Of course, if the court orders no support, then the child’s household will also fall below the poverty threshold of $1,037. The Arizona guidelines rightly observe that in such cases it is ‘‘evident that both parents have insufficient income to be self-supporting.’’ It is also evident that the guidelines’ allocation of this shortfall is not based exclusively on the child’s well-being. There is

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another principle also operating here, which we can call the earner’s priority principle (EPP). It is the simple idea that everyone, including parents, ordinarily has first call on his or her own income. That priority is not absolute—if it were, no support could ever be ordered—but it appears to have special force in the case of the poor obligor. That is at least the apparent message of the selfsupport reserve. We will return to this observation later when we consider the EPP in more detail. For now, the self-support reserve provides an early example of the tradeoffs in child well-being and fairness that must take place in setting child support amounts. In Case 1, the child support system is arguably unimportant. If neither party has much money, the child’s well-being depends on finding a third source of funds, whether a new spouse, private charity, or a public income support system. Moving money around among desperately poor families cannot contribute much to social welfare. For our purposes, therefore, Cases 2 and 3 are more interesting. While the mother’s income is no different in these cases, the father has much more money and can therefore pay amounts that would make an impact on child well-being. Yet the current child support schedule may do less for the custodial household in Cases 2 and 3 than one might expect. In Case 2, the larger support payment lifts the living standard of the custodial household from 107% of the poverty threshold to 142%. Yet the father’s situation improves much more, from half the poverty level to more than 2.5 times. The father is hardly rich, but he has some degree of financial security, especially compared with the child, who is still in a financially precarious state. It seems the child in Case 2 could benefit substantially from a larger support payment, and the father is capable of providing that. Case 3 makes the same point more dramatically. This father is earning 12 times the amount earned by the father in Case 1—a solidly middle-class income that leaves a single individual comfortably circumstanced. But the relatively modest increase in his child support payment still leaves the child’s household at less than twice the poverty threshold. The father, by contrast, is at nearly seven times the poverty threshold after making the support payment, and thus enjoys a leap in his financial well-being compared with Case 1. It seems unlikely that the EPP can justify this large disparity between the child’s living standard and the father’s, and it is equally unlikely that this disparity would seem appropriate to most people asked to balance the interests of the child and each of the parents. No such balancing exercise was ever undertaken by the various committees responsible for these guidelines, however, because that question was never presented to them. The operating assumption of the current system in Arizona, as in most states, is that a guideline grid based on the consultant’s estimates of child expenditures yields generally appropriate support payments without the need to ask such questions. Table 6.1 shows that this operating assumption is probably not correct. In fact, the surprising results shown in Table 6.1 are inevitable under the conventional methodology employed for estimating child expenditures to generate support guidelines, not only in Arizona but in most states. The next section explains why.

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How the Conventional Methodology Produces These Results

As noted earlier, the conventional method assumes that support guidelines should be based on the expenditures on children in intact families. It measures such expenditures by attempting to look at childless-couple households, at various expenditure levels, and asking how much more an intact, two-parent household with children must spend for the parents to enjoy the same living standard as the childless couple.13 (Expenditure levels are then converted to equivalent income levels to actually create the guideline grid.) Put another way, the method seeks to estimate the additional expenditures—marginal expenditures, in economic terms—required to maintain the same living standard when children are added to the household.14 The assumption that marginal expenditures are the correct measure of expenditures on children is the main reason for the results we have just observed. The impact of that conceptual assumption is then enlarged by problems in the data on which this method must rely. The data problems are straightforward. The only source of comprehensive data that ties expenditures to household income is the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CES), which consists largely of interviews with consumers in which they are asked to recall their expenditures on each item in a list that the survey designers hope is a comprehensive inventory of all the categories of expenditures that consumers make. As documented elsewhere,15 these expenditure data systematically undercount actual consumer expenditures in higherincome families—the higher the household income, the higher the proportion of the household’s expenditures that is erroneously omitted from the expenditure tabulation. The conventional method effectively translates this CES undercount into an undercount of expenditures on children, so that as household income goes up, the percentage of household income that the method treats as spent on children declines precipitiously.16 That is one important reason that most states’ guidelines call for support payments that fall, as a percentage of parental income, as the income rises. In the three cases in Table 6.1, for example, the support order ranges from 22% of obligor income, for the lowest-income family, to 13%, for the highest-income family. Support payments therefore do not rise proportionately with income—far from it. But this data problem is only a subplot; the conventional method’s focus on marginal expenditures is the main story.17 Imagine a couple who move from a one-bedroom apartment to a two-bedroom apartment when they have a child. Their rent increases from $1,000 a month to $1,200. A marginal-expenditure analysis would find that the housing expenditure on the child is the rental difference, or $200. A support guideline for rent, based on a marginalexpenditure methodology, will therefore allocate only that $200 between the parents. The actual method does not examine individual expenditures in this way but attempts to gauge the aggregate marginal expenditures through

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the household comparison explained in the first paragraph of this section. The principle, however, is the same, and the method’s impact is most easily understood if one imagines how it would work in the context of particular expenditure categories such as rent. In the incomes-shares model used by most states, the $200 marginal housing expenditure in this example would be allocated between the parents in proportion to their incomes. So if Mom, the custodial parent, earns $1,000, and Dad, the noncustodial parent, earns $3,000, Dad earns 75% of the parental income, and his share of this marginal housing expenditure is 75% of $200, or $150. He pays this to Mom as his share of the child’s $200 housing expenditure. Yet Mom now has only $1,150. She cannot possibly rent an apartment anything like the one that the couple rented when they were together, because she does not have the base income that allowed the couple to rent their prechild one-bedroom apartment in the first place. The quality of housing enjoyed by the child—and the parents—when they were together assumed that base, and the child necessarily benefited from it, but only the marginal expenditure of $200 is allocated between the parents when support payments are based on this method, not the $1,000 base to which the marginal expenditure was added. As previously noted, the conventional method does not really look at expenditures by category in this way. It instead compares expenditures in different size households of equal living standards to generate estimates of the aggregate marginal expenditures on the child in all expenditure categories simultaneously, at various income levels and for various numbers of children. But the impact is the same as in this more easily understood example focused on housing. The example shows how the consequence of this method is that the economic welfare of the child after separation is left dependent primarily on the pre-support-payment income of the custodial parent. If it is high, and the base is present, the child’s well-being will not be endangered. If it is low, the child will suffer a serious economic decline. The impact of the noncustodial parent’s income on the outcome is, by comparison, much smaller. The main reason is that the child support system is allocating only marginal parental expenditures on children. Table 6.1 has given us a window into this reality. To appreciate it over a wider range of situations, look at Figure 6.1. It compares 10 custodial households consisting of one parent and one child. The combined income of the child’s parents is the same in all 10 households—$3,550 per month. That is 300% of the poverty threshold for the intact household of two parents and one child. While these 10 sets of parents all have the same total income, they differ in the proportion of income earned by the custodial parent, from zero at the left end of the horizontal axis to 100% at the right end. The two diagonal lines plot the custodial household income for each of these 10 households, not in dollars but as a percentage of the poverty threshold for a one-parent, onechild household. The solid diagonal line plots this percentage for the custodial household income after receipt of the support payment called for in the

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Figure 6.1. Range of custodial household outcomes; example of one-child family with $3,550 combined monthly income (measured as percent of poverty levels).

Arizona support guidelines, while the dashed diagonal line plots it for the income before the support payment’s receipt. Let us then compare the case in which the custodial mother earns 70% of the total parental income of $3,550—about $2,500 a month—with the more typical case in which she earns 30% of the total parental income, or about $1,050 a month. A custodial household earning $1,050 monthly is barely above the poverty threshold. Receipt of the child support payment raises it to 150% of poverty threshold, certainly a help. Now consider the other case, in which Mom earns $2,500, or 70% of the same total parental income. This household is at about 230% of the poverty threshold before receiving any child support payment, and over 250% after. One can see that the children in our two sample cases come out very differently after divorce despite the fact that their parents earn the same total income. This seeming discrepancy is an unavoidable consequence of the marginal-expenditure method. A support guideline that allocates only the marginal expenditures on children leaves most household expenditures out of the calculation and thus out of the support payment. And so, as Figure 6.1 shows, the child’s living standard will depend primarily on the share of the total parental income earned by the custodial parent. In the extreme cases, where the custodial mother earns either none or all of the parental income, the difference is enormous. The child living with a stayat-home mother—not an entirely fanciful example with very young children— sees the child’s household living standard decline from 300% of the poverty threshold when the family was intact to a catastrophic 70% after the sepa-

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ration. At the other extreme, where the custodial parent earns all the $3,550 of the parental income, at the right end of the chart, our two lines converge, because at that point her household income after the support payment is the same as her income before the payment—the full $3,550 of parental income. At this point the custodial household is better off, economically, than the intact, pre-separation household. This is what one should expect, because the custodial household is smaller but has the same income as the intact household. In sum, support guidelines produced using the conventional method will result in (a) children’s situations depending primarily on the income of the custodial parent with whom they live; (b) children with low-income custodial parents living poorly, no matter the income of their other parent; and (c) different living standards for children whose respective sets of parents earn the same total income, when one child lives with a parent who accounts for a small proportion of the total parental income and the other lives with the higherearning parent. These outcomes result primarily from two assumptions that underlie the conventional method used in most states: (1) that child support amounts should be based on expenditures in intact families, as tracked in the CES; and (2) that only the family’s marginal expenditures on children count as child expenditures, thus excluding many household expenditures that in fact confer benefits on children. Because these premises were adopted without considering whether they made sense in light of a central purpose of child support, protection of child well-being, guidelines based on them give no weight to this purpose. That is why the guidelines do not require payments that would substantially improve child well-being even when the support obligor has sufficient income to make them. Indeed, it seems fair to say that in most states the current support guidelines do not reflect any systematic policy judgment about the appropriate and inevitable tradeoffs between custodial and noncustodial households.18 They instead reflect the particular methodological choices their consultant made to generate the expenditure estimates.19 The choice is ostensibly made on ‘‘neutral’’ technical grounds, which means the consultant never directly faces the child support policy questions, nor directs the policymaker’s attention to them. Policymakers must consider a fundamental shift in the method employed for constructing support guidelines. The current method looks backward, basing support orders on marginal expenditures in the intact family that no longer exists—and which never existed in an increasing proportion of child support cases. It would be better to look forward, assessing the impact of the support guidelines on both the parents and their children, in the situation in which they find themselves at the time the support order is made. But that requires a systematic evaluation of the tradeoffs implicit in any set of guidelines, to facilitate a policy decision. But how would one know when the ‘‘right’’ tradeoff between the two post-separation households had been achieved? We now consider that question.

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Toward a New Approach to Constructing Support Guidelines Child support laws reflect the widespread belief that state support for children is only appropriate if parental support is impossible—what one might call the primacy of the parents’ support obligation.20 While this parental obligation explains why the law requires support at all, it does not help much in determining its amount. A principled and systematic approach to setting support levels requires closer examination of the support order’s purpose. In fact, support orders serve three distinct purposes: (1) to protect the well-being of the child who is the order’s intended beneficiary (the well-being component); (2) to enforce the social consensus that both parents have a support obligation, even if the child lives primarily with one parent (the dual-obligation component), and (3) to limit the size of the gap that will otherwise sometimes arise between the child’s living standard and the higher living standard of the support obligor (the gross disparity component). I elaborate below on each of these components, exploring their rationales and their contributions to determining the appropriate size of the support award. The gross-disparity component is treated last because it is more contested than the first two. But claims arising from all three components are also limited by a general idea we earlier labeled the EPP. We elaborate further on the EPP after fleshing out the three basic support components. The appropriate support amount depends on how we measure each of these three components, how we weight them in relation to one another, and how we balance them against the counterconsideration of the EPP. The goal of this discussion is not philosophical but sociological. The analysis is meant to identify the factors that influence people’s judgment about when a child support award is fair. This effort is necessarily tentative because the available social science data are limited. Indeed, a principal conclusion of this chapter is that policymakers need better data on how people think about this fairness question, because the setting of child support awards involves the kinds of tradeoffs among people’s interests that are ultimately political in nature. The discussion that follows makes two simplifying assumptions. First, we assume that the custodial household contains only the custodial parent and the children who are the intended beneficiaries of the support order and that the noncustodial parent lives alone in a household of one. This simplifying assumption is probably wrong in many if not most actual cases, yet it is the implicit assumption of existing law (which treats additional household members as largely irrelevant to the support calculation), and we initially take existing law on its own terms. We will later consider how the principles we develop in this simplified context apply to claims that the support amount should be altered to reflect the presence of additional persons in either household. Our second simplifying assumption is that the child lives primarily with one parent, and that the child’s well-being is therefore affected primarily by the environment in that custodial household and is not importantly affected

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by the environment in the other parent’s household. This assumption is also wrong in some cases. While the principles developed here could be extended to joint-custody cases, we defer that exercise to another day. The Child Well-being Component

As income is added to a household, does child well-being improve? We cannot offer an empirical answer to that question without first defining what we mean by child well-being. Physical health is certainly one component of child wellbeing, but there are others as well. We might measure the child’s academic success, by considering school performance or the child’s scores on various standardized tests. We might measure a child’s psychological well-being with standardized tests or through interviews with the child’s parents, counselors, teachers, or medical personnel. We might ask the child if he or she is happy. We might take these measures when the child is a toddler, a primary school student, or an adolescent. If we look at the child as an adolescent, we might want to add questions to our inquiry: Does the child smoke? Abuse alcohol or other drugs? Engage in antisocial or criminal activity or self-destructive behavior such as casual sex? Finally, we can decide that we care only, or primarily, about the long-term impact of money on children, so that our primary measure of the well-being of children should be their well-being as adults. We could look at outcomes as adults with many of the measures we consider for them as children, but we can also consider other measures: How much education did they finally achieve? What is their income and socioeconomic status? Have they established, as adults, a stable and satisfying family life? Not surprisingly, the answer we get depends on the question we ask: the impact of money on child well-being varies with the measure of well-being.21 The existing literature suggests that family income has a positive effect on children’s cognitive outcomes and educational attainment, and thus their eventual socioeconomic status as adults. There are many studies that find results consistent with this suggestion, whether they measure children’s scores on various tests of cognitive functioning, children’s school performance, the years of education they complete by adulthood, or their income as adults. While the effect is found across many studies, there is variation in the effect size. The overall impression is that the effect size is smaller than many people would assume, but not trivial or an artifact of the inquiry’s design or of chance fluctuation. The effect of income on children’s psychosocial well-being, in contrast to their cognitive functioning or ultimate socioeconomic status, is less clear. There is evidence that lower income increases parental stress, which is associated with parental conflict in two-parent families, which is in turn associated with less favorable psychosocial outcomes for children. The relevance of such data to single-parent families is, however, unclear. Finally, consider that any effort to relate income to some aggregate measure of well-being requires weighting the relative importance of these various well-being measures, an exercise involving value judgments with which people may not agree. The point is that the

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relationship between income and child well-being is necessarily a value judgment as well as an empirical question. Most methodologically sophisticated studies examine primarily lowincome families that fall close to the poverty line, and one cannot necessarily extend their findings about income’s effect to middle- or upper-class families. In general, however, there is stronger evidence for the positive impact of money on children’s well-being when the additional funds are added to low-income families than when they are added to families with higher incomes. There is also some evidence that child support dollars have a greater positive impact on children’s outcomes than dollars from other sources, although the methodological challenges are particularly great with studies of this kind. Figure 6.2 offers a schematic representation of relationships that might exist between an unidentified measure of child well-being and household income. (For this purpose, we assume that household income and household expenditures rise and fall together, and therefore use the terms interchangeably.) The dotted line represents the case in which child well-being is poor at very low income levels and remains unchanged until household income

Figure 6.2. Household income and child well-being (illustrative). The dotted line represents a linear relationship in which every increase in income (beyond a threshold level) leads to an equivalent increase in child well-being. Evidence suggests, however, that in actuality increases in income affect child well-being in a manner more consistent with the solid line. Point A represents the income level at which additional income begins to produce diminished returns on well-being, and point B represents the income level at which increases in well-being relative to additional income become negligible.

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reaches a threshold level. Above the threshold, additional income has a simple linear relationship with child well-being: every additional dollar of income yields an equivalent increase in child well-being. The solid line represents a different case in which the relationship above the threshold is not linear. Initial dollars above the threshold buy larger increases in child well-being than do later dollars. The higher the household income, the smaller the impact of any additional income on child well-being. Data limitations, as well as the conceptual complications involved in aggregating well-being measures into some overall index, make it impossible to offer a definitive description of the well-being=income function that relates specified dollar amounts to aggregate well-being. We nonetheless can say that the available evidence suggests that (a) there are aspects of child well-being that are affected by income and (b) data with respect to these measures are more consistent with a function that has the shape of the solid line in Figure 6.2 than the shape of the dotted line. The data are less helpful in locating Points A and B on the solid line—the income level at which returns to additional dollars begin to decline (Point A), and the income level at which returns to additional dollars become small enough to ignore, for policy purposes (Point B). One study of both cognitive functioning and behavior problems in 3-year-olds located Point A at the poverty threshold and Point B at five times the poverty threshold.22 For a family of four in 2002, the year in which these data were collected, the poverty threshold was $18,400, and five times that amount is $92,000. By way of comparison, the median income in the United States for a family of four in 2002 was $67,732, ranging from $87,000 in New Jersey to $46,000 in New Mexico.23 Clearly, given the quantity and quality of available data, as well as the conceptual problem of choosing measures of child well-being and of aggregating them into a single weighted measure, these numbers are at best suggestions. Nonetheless, child support guidelines are written and revised somewhere every year, reflecting explicit or implicit judgments about the importance of money to children. Given that reality, it is probably useful to offer policymakers information of this kind to supplement the intuitions which would otherwise form the sole basis of their judgments. What might reasonable policymakers conclude from these data? Perhaps that the goal of advancing child well-being can justify requiring support at least to the point at which the custodial household reaches the median family income, and probably somewhat higher, because nontrivial gains in well-being will result from the additional income within this range. The data also suggest that payments are especially important to child well-being at lower levels of custodial-household income. These conclusions may seem obvious. Yet it seems from the prior section that they are inconsistent with support guidelines currently in place, because those guidelines often set support payments to lowincome custodial households at lower levels than the other parent can pay. Are these features of most existing guidelines reasonable? The principles developed in this section of this chapter should help one decide.

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Consider Figure 6.2 again. Let us call Point B in Figure 6.2 the ‘‘well-being maximum’’—shorthand for the idea that when the custodial-household income reaches this level, the possible additional gains in child well-being are too small to justify imposing additional child support obligations. Child support guidelines unavoidably, even if only implicitly, must assume some value for the well-being maximum. A support guideline under which support payments continue to rise with income, no matter how high the income level, would seem to assume a much greater value for the well-being maximum than a guideline in which in which the required payments level off with rising income. Guideline committees, like policymakers generally, must usually act on imperfect information. For the purpose of this discussion, let us assume our best guess is that the well-being maximum is reached at about the 75th percentile in family household income. That means that whenever the custodial household income is below the 75th percentile, child well-being can offer some justification for requiring support. The power of the justification, however, will gradually decline as the 75th percentile is approached, so that countervailing policy factors (like the EPP, as we discuss later) become correspondingly more important. On the other hand, we will see that the gross disparity and dualobligation components may justify awards even when the well-being component does not. Data and intuition combine to suggest that the well-being component has compelling importance at lower levels of custodial-household income. Because child well-being falls off particularly steeply below Point A, the well-being component has its greatest force in this income range. Let us assume that Point A is located at 150% of the poverty threshold, an income characterized by the American Law Institute (ALI) as providing the ‘‘minimum decent standard of living.’’24 Given that all child support awards impose tradeoffs between the obligor and obligee households, it is especially important to distinguish cases in which additional support dollars are very important to child well-being from cases in which they are less important. Points A and B in our curve locate these boundaries. It is of course a tricky business to make interpersonal comparisons of well-being, and surveying the considerable literature on that question is beyond this chapter’s scope.25 So long as families have finite resources, however, such tradeoffs cannot be avoided in setting support levels. Principle 1 summarizes this discussion of the child well-being component: Principle 1. Protecting child well-being, an essential purpose of child support, has particular force when the income of the custodial household would otherwise deny the child a minimum decent living standard (located at Point A in Figure 6.2). The impact of additional dollars on child well-being then declines gradually as custodial household income increases, until income reaches a point at which additional dollars have too small an impact on measurable child wellbeing to be of public-policy importance. This upper income bound, Point B in Figure 6.2, can be called the well-being maximum. Policymakers cannot avoid judgments about the location of Points A and B, despite their inevitably im-

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perfect knowledge. It is suggested here that a reasonable dollar figure at which to place Point A is 150% of the poverty threshold for a family of the size and composition of the custodial household. Reasonable arguments can be offered to place Point B anywhere within a broad range between the median income and the 75th income percentile (for two-parent families with the same number of children as the custodial household).

The Dual-Obligation Component

A second function of child support laws is to enforce a societal consensus that both parents have a moral obligation to support their children, and, more specifically, that the noncustodial parent retains this obligation even if (a) the child primarily lives with the custodial parent and (b) the custodial parent has sufficient resources to ensure the child’s well-being. The dual-obligation component explains why states require support payments to custodial households whose income already exceeds plausible estimates of the value of the well-being maximum (Point B on our curve). In such cases the motivation is not preserving the child’s well-being, which will be ensured whether or not any support is paid. The explanation is instead society’s determination to make sure the noncustodial parent contributes his fair share to the child’s support. Who is entitled to receive the contribution? The custodial parent, who would otherwise shoulder all the cost of providing for the child. Public policy provides the basis of both support components we have thus far considered: ensuring the child’s wellbeing (the well-being component) and enforcing the support duty (the dualobligation component). But the private interest protected by each is different. The private interest protected by the well-being component is the child’s interest in maximizing his or her cognitive, psychological, and social development. The private interest protected by dual-obligation component is the custodial parent’s in not having to shoulder an unfairly disproportionate financial burden in order to provide for the child’s well-being. If the custodial household is above the well-being maximum before any support payment, then the entire support payment consists entirely of the dualobligation component (unless it also includes a gross disparity component, considered in the next section). If custodial-household income does not reach the well-being maximum even after the support payment is included, then the entire support payment consists of the well-being component. Where the custodial-household income alone approaches, but does not reach, the wellbeing maximum, the support award may consist of both a well-being component (equal to the additional custodial parent expenditures needed to bring the custodial household up to the well-being maximum) and a dual-obligation component (covering the noncustodial parent’s fair share of the custodial parent’s initial base expenditures to which the supplement must be added). The dual-obligation component of a child support award is important because it maintains the principle that both parents must contribute to the child’s

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support. It may also be essential to maintaining the noncustodial parent’s social status as parent. Certainly, excusing the noncustodial parent from any support obligation might cast doubt on his legitimacy as a parent. But neither this concern with parental legitimacy nor the principle of requiring parents to provide support helps to identify the appropriate amount of the dualobligation component. Even nominal awards may be sufficient to satisfy both concerns. Overall, then, the dual-obligation component’s underlying rationales are less compelling justifications for any particular amount of support than is the child well-being rationale. That means it may yield to counterconsiderations more easily than would the well-being component, at least insofar as the amount of support required to vindicate it. This point is explored more fully below when we consider the principal counterconsideration, the EPP. But some immediate discussion of how we may calculate its amount is necessary to give the dual-obligation component more substance. Our prior discussion implies that the dual-obligation component equals the noncustodial parent’s fair share of the expenditures the custodial parent would make to bring the custodial household to the well-being maximum. (The wealthy custodial parent may spend funds on the child in excess of the wellbeing maximum, but the other parent has no obligation to share in those expenditures.) In considering the noncustodial parent’s fair share, there is a crucial difference between the dual-obligation component and the well-being component itself. The well-being component arises only in cases in which the custodial household, by itself, does not have sufficient resources to reach the well-being maximum. The support payments are intended to bring the custodial household closer to that level. But because members of a household generally share a living standard, child support payments will necessarily confer benefits on the custodial parent (just as other sources of custodial parent income, including, e.g., alimony, will necessarily confer benefits on the child). In the case of the well-being component, this means the policymaker must determine the appropriate tradeoff in choosing between a higher award, which invites obligor objections to the benefits it will provide the custodial parent, and a lower award, which can compromise child well-being. No similar tradeoff arises, however, in determining the dual-obligation component. By definition, the dual-obligation component arises only in cases in which the income of the child’s household puts it at or above the well-being maximum, which means there is no well-being concern to trade off against the obligor objections to conferring benefits on the custodial parent. That means that the dual-obligation component should be sufficient to make the custodial parent wholly secure, considering the additional expenditures her household makes on account of the child’s presence, but no more. Put another way, the dual-obligation component should cover the noncustodial parent’s share of the additional (marginal) expenditures the custodial parent must make on account of the child’s presence in the household (but ignoring expenditures that exceed the well-being maximum, which high-income custodial households will likely meet). Of course, in basing estimates of the dual-obligation component on

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marginal expenditures on the child, we mimic the conception that lies behind the conventional method currently used to generate the entirety of support guidelines, which also uses marginal expenditures, and which was criticized on that account in the first part of this chapter. But marginal child expenditures are indeed exactly the appropriate measure when the question is reimbursement of the custodial parent, as opposed to child well-being.26 What we have not considered here is how to determine the noncustodial parent’s fair share of these marginal expenditures. The conventional incomeshares system of support would assume that the parental shares should be proportional to the parental incomes. We accept that assumption now but revisit it later when we consider the EPP. Principle 2 summarizes this discussion of the dual-obligation component. Principle 2. Where the custodial household has sufficient income to enjoy a living standard at or above the well-being maximum, a support award is justified to ensure that the other parent contributes his or her fair share to the expenditures required to bring the custodial household to (but not beyond) that level. The appropriate award is the obligor’s fair share of the marginal expenditures made necessary by the child’s presence in the custodial household, comparing the expenditures required for the custodial household to live at the wellbeing maximum, with the expenditures required to provide the same living standard to a household without the child. Where the custodial household has sufficient income to approach but not quite reach the well-being maximum, the support award may have both a well-being component and a dual-obligation component.

The Gross Disparity Component

The first two principles seek to ensure, respectively, that (1) the custodial household has the income necessary to ensure measurable child well-being and (2) the obligor contributes his proportionate share of these well-being expenses, even if the custodial household has sufficient income to meet them on its own. We now consider a third group of cases involving noncustodial parents whose income well exceeds what is required to provide for measurable well-being. For the purpose of this discussion, let us continue to assume that Point B in Figure 6.2—the well-being maximum—is reached at family incomes at the 75th percentile. Some states cap awards so they do not increase beyond specified income levels, while others allow judicial discretion above specified income levels. But many state guidelines call for awards that continue to rise with obligor income well beyond the point at which the custodial household reaches the 75th percentile of income.27 The question is, why? Evidence of popular views is largely unavailable. The few studies we have certainly find respondents favoring support awards that increase with obligor income, but they do not typically ask about incomes above the 75th percentile.28 The ALI recommends that once the custodial household has been assured a minimum decent living

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standard, additional support amounts are appropriate to provide the child ‘‘a standard of living not grossly inferior to that of either parent.’’29 This clause, which by its terms becomes applicable only when the support obligor’s income exceeds both the custodial parent’s and the level needed to ensure the child a minimum decent living standard, would also explain support awards that raise custodial household income above the well-being maximum. The ALI position could be described as a compromise between fully honoring the child’s claim to living as well as the financially comfortable noncustodial parent and fully honoring the support obligor’s objections to providing support beyond that needed to ensure measurable child well-being. But is such a claim for the child valid, and is such a compromise appropriate? The law does not require parents in intact families to provide a child with more than basic needs. That rule, however, is not based on a considered judgment that basic needs are all the child is entitled to. It is rather a particular instance of the law’s more general reluctance to intervene in intact families. The law therefore defers to a very wide range of parental choices concerning expenditures on their children: almost any parental choice that does not threaten the child’s health or safety is accepted. Similarly, the law never concerns itself with the parental choice about where the child should live, other than in rare and extreme cases in which the parents needlessly expose the child to a dangerous environment. In separated families, however, when the parents do not agree, the law cannot defer to parental choice, because the parents present competing choices. The law must therefore pick between the conflicting (and potentially self-interested) parental choices, even when both lie within the ordinary range of reasonableness. This can happen in the context of custody (should the child live with the competent and loving mother in California or the competent and loving father in New York?) or, here, in the context of support (should parental expenditures on the child be limited to those that have a demonstrated impact on measurable well-being, or should the child be more fully protected from avoidable reductions in living standard?). Embedded in this public-policy choice is a reasonable debate over whether additional household income beyond the well-being maximum can be justified as serving any interest of the child’s. Award proponents might argue that standard well-being measures simply fail to capture real well-being gains contributed by additional dollars in the higher-income range. Certainly, even affluent adults welcome additional income. The relationship between income and one’s subjective sense of well-being (SWB) is not linear, and research clearly suggests that additional income has more impact on SWB at lower income levels than at higher levels. But studies also find a positive correlation between income and happiness at higher income levels even after correcting for other factors, such as age, gender, and health, that also influence such selfreports.30 One likely reason for the income–SWB connection is that additional income promises greater choice and control in one’s life, and people like choice

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and control. Additional income may offer the same amenity to children, even if the increased choice is not entirely theirs to exercise but must be shared, or even controlled, by their parents (or the custodial parent). For example, people may see value in a wider choice about where the child lives or what school the child attends, even if the wider choice has no impact on measurable child wellbeing. That is one reason people may favor transfers to custodial households with income beyond the measurable well-being maximum. A second possible reason that people may favor such transfers is associated with the mounting evidence that, as economists have increasingly recognized, relative income is what people care about most of all.31,32 That is because income is important not only for the intrinsic value of the particular amenities that additional dollars may purchase but also for the improved social status that accompanies an advance in one’s position in the overall income distribution.32 People’s sense of how well off they are is strongly affected by their position relative to those immediately around them. Protecting this sense of relative well-being may not seem a very compelling social concern, as a general matter. It perhaps feels different, however, when the question is the child’s living standard relative to the noncustodial parent’s, especially when the child and the noncustodial parent previously lived in the same household and shared the higher living standard the noncustodial parent still enjoys. In that case, the noncustodial parent’s living standard is a more natural benchmark against which to judge the child’s. A living-standard decline is experienced as a decline in well-being, even if the new and reduced living standard is above the societal median. Those who have advanced to the median enjoy a greater sense of well-being than those who have fallen to it. Finally, the expected process of accommodation to new circumstances may not work as well for the child who experiences a living-standard decline as a result of divorce if the child is regularly reexposed to the gap between his current living standard and that of the noncustodial parent he or she visits. Indeed, if the noncustodial parent has new children living with him who share that parent’s superior living standard, the salience of the gap may be increased further. Some will be less persuaded than others by the foregoing arguments for a gross disparity component in support. All the components of a child support award are limited by the EPP, discussed more fully in the next section, but the gross disparity component is especially sensitive to this counterconsideration. The gross disparity component is easy to minimize or reject if one sees it as a claim to provide an already adequately circumstanced child with nonessential amenities, because the natural conclusion is that the support obligor is entitled to give himself priority in the use of his own earnings to provide such amenities. That conclusion is strengthened by the reality that it is not possible to ensure the child a living standard close to the support obligor’s without providing it as well to the custodial parent, who is an inevitable but unintended (and some would say undeserving) beneficiary of the support payment. The skeptic’s conclusion might then be that while this unavoidable diversion,

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so to speak, of some support dollars to confer benefit on the custodial parent must be tolerated if the child’s measurable well-being lies in the balance, it should not be tolerated to provide the child with nonessentials. People clearly vary in their resolution of these questions, and in the end the guideline writer must make a value judgment about it. That judgment could be aided considerably by systematic information about the public’s intuitions. They could reveal, for example, that the child’s claim to share the absent parent’s living standard is viewed sympathetically but is ultimately rejected because of strong objection to the custodial parent’s sharing the benefits of higher payments. One might then find wider support for the gross disparity component if all or some portion of it were required to be deposited into a segregated account that may only be applied to expenditures conferring benefit on the child alone, including perhaps expenditures we would not ordinarily require of the obligor, such as the cost of college or of private school.33 Principle 3 summarizes our discussion of the gross disparity component. Principle 3. Child support awards may include a component intended to protect children from declines in their living standard that leave them at a level below, and grossly disparate to, the living standard of the support obligor, even if the child’s household already enjoys an income above the well-being maximum. In determining the extent and nature of such awards, guideline writers should be assisted by scientifically valid surveys of public views about the appropriate way to balance the conflicting claims that arise in connection with this component.

The Earner’s Priority Principle

The earner’s priority principle is a pompous name for the entirely obvious idea that all individuals get to keep what they have in the absence of some very good reason to take it from them. While the EPP always applies, its power in the child support context varies with both the earner’s circumstances and the child’s, and is thus a factor to be accounted for. The EPP explains, among other things, why income-shares states sometimes depart from their usual rule of income-proportionality in allocating the support burden between the parents. Obligors Cannot Be Impoverished

The self-support reserve, included in most state guidelines, shields impoverished obligors from onerous support obligations. It is more than a child support analog to progressive taxation. Progressivity could explain the selfsupport reserve when the custodial household has adequate resources, because it then shifts most or all the support burden from the impoverished noncustodial parent to the financially comfortable custodial parent. But most states also allow application of a self-support reserve when both the custodial household and the support obligor are financially stressed. That practice cannot be

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explained by a progressivity principle. Concerns about the practicality of collecting support obligations from the impoverished may contribute to practice, but they are probably not the entire explanation. It may also reflect the view that while the law’s failure to alleviate custodial household poverty is bad, exacerbating the obligor’s poverty by taking funds from him is even worse. The poor should support their children if they can, but that duty does not justify taking money from them that they desperately need to buy basic necessities. The EPP is strongest when the earner has the least. Obligors Are Entitled to Retain Some Priority in the Use of Their Own Income

The EPP can matter even when the obligor is not impoverished. No state requires an obligor who is financially more comfortable than the custodial household to pay child support in amounts that would leave him worse off than the custodial parent, even if doing so would improve child well-being and would not impoverish the obligor. This is perhaps the minimal statement of the principle. A more aggressive version allows the earner to retain some of any living-standard advantage he may enjoy over the custodial household. The ALI supports this more ambitious version, once the custodial household is assured of a minimum decent living standard, when it requires only that the child’s living standard not be ‘‘grossly inferior’’ to the obligor’s. And, in fact, rules requiring awards that establish equal living standards in the custodial and noncustodial households, although long urged by some, have never knowingly been adopted, and the reason is surely, at least in part, objection to equalizing the living standard of the two parents under the child support rubric. Equity theory teaches that people believe that outcomes should be related to inputs, and they feel distress when they are not, even if they are the beneficiary of the inequity.34 The benefit to the custodial parent seems in this circumstance such an inequity. Some custodial parents will have claims in their own right to share the other parent’s post-separation income, but alimony is the rubric under which such claims are supposed to be considered. If the custodial parent has no valid claim under that legal regimen, realizing its equivalent from child support payments seems to many an unjustified windfall for the custodial parent and an unjustified injury to the child support obligor. Every child support award requires compromise between justified claims (a) on behalf of the child, certainly for the funds necessary to well-being but also to share the obligor’s living standard; and (b) on behalf of the obligor, to resist coerced contribution to the custodial parent’s living standard. The less compelling is the child’s claim, the more powerful is the obligor’s objection. The child’s claim is most compelling when there is evidence that the child’s wellbeing would be endangered by lower levels of support. But as we move from awards protecting child well-being to awards ensuring the child a living standard comparable to the support obligor’s, the EPP becomes relatively more weighty.

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The Questionable Dual-Obligation Exception

There is one group of cases in which most support guidelines seem to require results inconsistent with protecting obligors from support obligations that bring them below the custodial-household living standard. These are the cases in which the obligor’s living standard is near or below the custodial household’s before any support payment. The particularly striking cases involve obligors living far below the custodial household standard. So, for example, all support guidelines would require more than symbolic payments by a noncustodial parent earning $25,000 to a custodial parent earning $65,000, thus reducing the obligor’s living standard further below the custodial household’s. This result seems to conflict with the EPP and is especially difficult to defend when the custodial household is near or above the well-being maximum before any payment is made. Awards in these cases consist entirely of a dualobligation component, a less compelling rationale for overriding the EPP. A nominal award seems more appropriate in such cases, as sufficient to serve the symbolic purpose of confirming the legitimacy of the noncustodial parent’s status as parent, and to uphold the principle that both parents must contribute to the child’s support. In fact, actual practice appears to conform to this recommendation, even if the formal guidelines do not. Both family law practitioners and judges observe that when the proposed obligor earns significantly less than the custodial parent, the parties usually agree to reduce or even waive the award called for by the guidelines. Guidelines should probably be revised to conform to this practice, which is also consistent with the analysis here. Principles 4 and 5 state conclusions that follow from this discussion of the EPP. Principle 4. Child support awards should ask for no more than nominal amounts from impoverished obligors and should avoid reducing obligor income below poverty levels. Operationalizing this principle requires establishing the poverty level to employ. Guidelines should specify a gradual transition from nominal awards to more meaningful awards as obligor income rises above the specified poverty level. Principle 5. Where possible without sacrificing important interests of the child, support awards should leave the higher-earning obligor with some advantage in living standard over the custodial household. However, ensuring the impoverished custodial household a ‘‘minimum decent living standard’’ is a sufficiently important interest to override this usual preference, and in such cases the award may equalize the household living standards rather than leave the obligor with a living-standard advantage. Operationalizing this principle requires establishing a benchmark for the minimum decent living standard. No interest of the child is normally sufficient to justify an award reducing the obligor’s living standard below that of the custodial household. Where the obligor’s living standard is substantially below the custodial household before any child support transfer, the amount of the required support payment should be appropriately reduced from the level that would otherwise apply.

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Putting It Together: Constructing Guidelines Based on These Principles The combined impact of all five principles is summarized in Figure 6.3, which consists of a 16-cell matrix constructed by considering four levels of custodial parent income, going from low to high as one proceeds vertically downward through the rows, and four levels of noncustodial parent income, going from low to high as one proceeds to the right through the columns. One can imagine the support award consisting of a base amount and an adjustment to that base. The base amount is derived primarily from the custodial household income. At lower levels of custodial-parent income, represented in Figure 6.3 by cells 1 through 8, this base amount consists principally of the award necessary to raise the custodial household to the well-being maximum. At higher levels of custodial-parent income, represented by cells 9 through 16, the base amount consists primarily of the dual-contribution component, measured as the noncustodial parent’s fair share of the marginal expenditures required to bring the custodial household to the well-being maximum. The precise point at which the base amount shifts from having some well-being component to consisting entirely of a dual-obligation component depends on the income level at which one locates the well-being maximum. These base amounts are then adjusted, upward or downward, to respond to either the EPP or the inclusion of a gross disparity component. The EPP operates to reduce awards primarily at lower levels of noncustodial-parent income, represented here by the first two columns, while the gross disparity component adds to the award at the higher noncustodial-parent incomes represented in the two columns on the right-hand side. The construction of actual support guidelines could proceed by first choosing representative dollar amounts for these four income levels (low, low-median, high-median, and high), and then determining the base support level, based on these dollar figures, for each cell in the matrix. These base support levels would require the policymakers’ judgment, informed to the extent possible by available social science evidence, of the well-being maximum, and of the marginal expenditures on children in households at the well-being maximum. Base support levels would then be adjusted, upward or downward, to reflect the weight given by the policymaker to the EPP and the gross disparity component. Once a basic approach is decided on, using such a 16-cell matrix, one can expand to a fuller set of guidelines through interpolation. Such a matrix may also be a convenient tool for thinking about the necessary policy judgments. Two sets of cells are particularly useful for this purpose. The Equal-Earner Diagonal: Cells 1, 6, 11, and 16

These cells all involve parents who are equal earners. If the noncustodial parent pays support equal to his half-share of the marginal expenditures on the

Figure 6.3. Combined impact of all principles across incomes. As rows go from dark to light, the base award shifts from consisting primarily of the well-being component to consisting primarily of the dual-obligation component. Intermediate shades consist mostly of one, but may contain some of the other.

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child, the two post-separation households will have approximately the same living standard. That living standard is necessarily below the intact family standard, but the children and both parents share equally in the decline. This result is consistent with Principles 1, 2, and 5 because these noncustodial parents, earning no more than the custodial parents, are not entitled to a livingstandard advantage, but neither can we reduce their living standard below that of the noncustodial parent. In Cell 1, however, Principle 4 also applies and overrides this analysis, yielding a nominal award only. Cell Pairs: 2 and 5, 3 and 9, 4 and 13, 7 and 10, 8 and 14, and 12 and15

Total parental income, and thus the living standard of the intact family, is the same in both members of each of these cell pairs. What differs is the relative income contributions of the custodial and noncustodial parents. From the child’s perspective, that does not matter, and Principles 1 and 3 therefore lead to the conclusion that the support award should yield the same post-payment income for the custodial household in both cells of each pair. No child support system in the country produces this result, however, and the explanation is Principle 5. By focusing on these cell pairs, the policymakers can resolve the relative weights they wish to give Principles 1, 3, and 5. Some variation in the relative weights might be anticipated in a rationally designed system, because in some pairs the claims of the child in the lower-earning custodial household are stronger than in other pairs. The children in cells 5, 9, and 13 have stronger Principle 1 claims, for example, than the children in cell 15, whose claims are grounded more in Principle 3. Having resolved these weights across all these cell pairs would, however, permit reasonable interpolations to fill in the remaining cells in the grid.

Complicating Realities: Additional Household Members Remarriage of the Custodial Parent and Other Additions to the Custodial Household

Although the law usually excludes consideration of the custodial spouse’s remarriage and of the income of the new stepparent, it appears that many people believe the custodial spouse’s remarriage to an income earner does justify reducing the other spouse’s support payments.35 Our principles lead to the conclusion that reductions are sometimes warranted. Consider a custodial parent earning $2,500 a month and a noncustodial parent earning $5,000— cell 10 in Figure 6.3. The application of Principle 1 should yield a reasonably substantial award in this case; Principles 2 and 3 have little application. But now assume the custodial parent remarries a man earning $7,500 a month.

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Principle 1 ceases to seem applicable, as the child’s living standard is now likely to exceed the living standard in the original intact marriage without any support payment. Our reluctance to eliminate the support award entirely arises from Principle 2. What the remarriage has done is shift the basis of the support award from concern for the child’s well-being to concern for maintaining the principle that a parent, including an absent parent, should contribute to his child’s support. Along with that shift is an appropriate recalculation of the award’s amount, which can be reduced because Principle 2, the dual-obligation component, yields more easily to the EPP than Principle 1, the child’s well-being component. In this case, then, the obligor need pay no more than his proportionate share of the marginal expenditures on the child that would have been made by these two parents were they living together in an intact family with the child. We reach a different conclusion if the new member of the custodial household generates marginal expenditures greater than his or her income. No adjustment to the support award is justified in this case. The award certainly cannot be increased, because the obligor is not responsible for the custodial household shortfall created by additional members to whom the obligor has no legal or moral support obligation. But neither should his payments be reduced, even though they may confer benefits on these legal strangers as well as his child: their addition to the household cannot justify penalizing the child. Remarriage of the Obligor

A sense of symmetry might lead one to assume that the same rules should govern the remarriage of the support obligor as govern the remarriage of the custodial parent. But in the more common situation, in which the child lives primarily with one parent, symmetrical treatment is inappropriate. The support obligor’s remarriage has no direct impact on the financial well-being of the child who is the intended beneficiary of the support order, and the obligor’s new spouse has no obligation to the child. In most cases this is sufficient to conclude that the remarriage has no effect on the support order. The possible exception arises when the obligor was excused from more than nominal support because of his very low income, but now marries someone with an ample income. Especially where the custodial-household income is well below the well-being maximum, an upward revision of the support award may be appropriate. The obligor is no longer impoverished and will not become impoverished if the support obligation is increased, and this new fact weakens the force of the EPP that justified the initial choice of a nominal award.

Conclusion The conventional method used to generate child support guidelines conceals important policy choices from those charged with making them. A systematic

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analysis of the policy purposes for collecting child support reveals that most existing guidelines are inconsistent with them. Careful analysis of the policy issues suggests a superior alternative to the conventional methodology in current use, and also helps to resolve the difficult problems created by the increasing incidence of blended families containing both child support obligors and child support recipients.

Notes 1. A more detailed discussion can be found in the authors’ article ‘‘The Theory of Child Support,’’ published in the Harvard Journal of Legislation (2008, 45[1]), from which this chapter is adapted. 2. See Yee, L. M. (1979). What really happens in child support award cases: An empirical study of establishment and enforcement of child support orders in the Denver District Court. Denver Law Journal, 57, 21, 38– 42; White, K. R., & Stone, R. T., Jr. (1976). A study of alimony and child support rulings with some recommendations. Family Law Quarterly, 10, 75, 83. 3. Weitzman, L. J., & Dixon, R. B. (1979). Child custody awards: Legal standards and empirical patterns for child custody, support and visitation after divorce. University of California at Davis Law Review, 12, 473, 494–501; Hunter, N. D. (1983). Child support law and policy: The systematic imposition of costs on women. Harvard Women’s Law Journal, 6, 1. 4. Pub. L. 100– 485, 42 U.S.C. § 667(b) (2001). 5. Calif. Fam. Code § 3900. 6. See, e.g., descriptions of the purpose of New York’s child support law as contained in three different official documents described in Ellman, I. M. (2004). Fudging failure: The economic analysis used to construct child support guidelines. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 167, 179–180. As explained therin, the three descriptions are mutually inconsistent, and only one of them could possibly be interpreted in a manner consistent with New York’s actual guidelines. 7. See Williams, R. (1987). Development of guidelines for child support orders: Advisory panel recommendations and final report (p. II-ii). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Child Support Enforcement. This report was formally issued by an advisory panel assembled by the National Center for State Courts but was funded by the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement. 8. This second report, by David Betson, was prepared under a contract with the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Research on Poverty for a final report to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Alternative Estimates of the Cost of Children from the 1980–86 Consumer Expenditure Survey, Institute for Research on Poverty Special Report # 51, 1990. Even though the title, as well as the text, refers to the cost of children, the report describes itself as a response to a provision in § 128 of the Family Support Act of 1988 (PL 100– 485) that required the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to ‘‘detail the patterns of expenditures on children in two-parent families and single-parent families’’ (emphasis added). And, indeed, the methodology employed is offered as a way to estimate those expenditures.

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9. Williams founded a consulting company (Policy Studies, Inc., or PSI) as the guideline era began, and that company now prepares the guideline grid in the majority of states. Early on, PSI signed up Betson to provide the expenditure calculations that it uses. Even states that do not use PSI often use its methods. 10. This example is not fanciful. The marginal expenditure methodology employed in the Williams-Betson approach is in fact likely to lead to an estimate of expenditures on children that includes nothing, or next to nothing, for utilities, without regard to whether the custodial parent has other funds with which to pay utility bills. That is because the addition of a child to an intact household previously consisting of two adults may not increase utility bills by very much, if at all, and it is only such increases, not the base costs, that count as marginal expenditures on children. This is similar, for example, with costs for automobiles and for the largest proportion of housing costs (because, e.g., only the additional cost of the twobedroom apartment over the one-bedroom apartment would count as a marginal expenditure, with all the cost of the base apartment excluded). 11. The poverty threshold is set by determining the cost of the breadbasket necessary to provide a family of the specified size with a basic but nutritionally adequate diet. That amount is then multiplied by a standard constant, originally set at 3, to get the total household income required to maintain a family of that size above the poverty level. See Fisher, G. M. (1992). The development and history of the poverty thresholds. Social Security Bulletin, 55(4), 3–14. This very simple calculation has its critics; see Citro, C. F., & Michael, R. T. (Eds.). (1995). Measuring poverty: A new approach. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. There is no doubt that it is an inapt device for comparing the living standards of households in the upper half of the income distribution. It is nonetheless a standard measure that is easy to understand and provides a useful, if imperfect, way of comparing the living standards of households, especially those in the lower end of the income distribution. 12. Paragraph 15 of the 2004 Arizona Child Support Guidelines, at page 14, directs the court to subtract the self-support reserve of $775 from the obligor’s monthly income. Whenever the remainder, called the ‘‘resulting amount’’ in the guidelines, is less than the support order called for in the guidelines, the court is authorized to reduce the order to this ‘‘resulting amount.’’ In Case 1, the resulting amount is a negative number, which means the court would be authorized to reduce the order to zero. The guidelines allow the court discretion in these cases, observing that under such facts it is ‘‘evident that both parents have insufficient income to be selfsupporting.’’ The Arizona guidelines may be accessed at http:==www.supreme .state.az.us=dr=childsup=CSG2004.pdf. 13. Determining when households of different composition have the same living standard is fraught with difficulties, but we do not examine them here. For a full treatment of this problem, see Ellman, I. M. (2004). Fudging failure: The economic analysis used to construct child support guidelines. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 167, 199–215. 14. There are many methodological choices that must be made in generating estimates of marginal expenditures, and different choices lead to very different estimates. But not only are there competing methods for estimating marginal expenditures; it is far from obvious that marginal expenditures are the appropriate benchmark anyway, and there are alternatives to marginal-expenditure estimates. The best-

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15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

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known alternative is the annual report by Lino, M. (2002). Expenditures on children by families: 2001 Annual Report. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, Miscellaneous Publication No. 1528–2001. (For a published version of the prior year’s equivalent study, see Lino, M. [2001]. Expenditures on children by families: U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates and alternative estimators. Journal of Legal Economics, 11, 31.) Lino argues that the Department of Agriculture’s approach is a better basis for support guidelines than alternative approaches using a marginal-expenditure methodology (p. 35). While the debate among marginal expenditure methodologies is usually cast in technical terms, it is in fact a policy debate, as is also the choice between marginal expenditures and other methods such as Lino’s. For a more complete description of the technical issues involved, and their policy implications, see Note 13. See the article cited in Note 13. Of course, at very high incomes, savings rates will increase, and expenditures as a percent of income will thus indeed decline. The general trend is therefore not implausible. The CES figures, however, greatly exaggerate this reality because of the expenditure undercount at higher income levels. The CES figures could only be valid if one assumed savings rates among middle-class families that are far higher than anyone believes plausible. See the article cited in Note 13. The discussion that follows is a simplified schematic representation of the methodological points. For a more detailed and complete description, see Note 13. This is despite the fact that the inevitability of such tradeoffs was noted by Betson himself in an article he co-authored early in the guideline era: Betson, D., Evenhouse, E., Reilly, S., & Smolensky, E. (1992). Trade-offs implicit in child-support guidelines. Journal of Policy Analysis & Management, 11(2), 1–20. Perhaps surprisingly, given the widespread use of the Williams-Betson methodology, plugging any given set of family facts into the guidelines of the various states yields a remarkably wide range of outcomes. The variety of results yielded by various guidelines is easily seen in the reviews prepared periodically by Maureen Pirog and her co-authors. For a recent example, see Pirog, M., Grieshop, T., & Elliot, B. (Spring, 2003). Presumptive state child support guidelines: A decade of experience. Policy Currents, 12(1), 15. These differences appear to result from nonsystematic variations in the details of the methodology (as in the choice of equivalence scale used to determine the incomes at which families of different composition enjoy the same living standard) and varying patches to the methodology that states employ, reflecting perhaps some intuition that the conventional methods’ unadorned results do not seem right. The basis for identifying persons as parents of a particular child, obligated to support that child, is perhaps not as obvious, on close examination, as it might at first seem. The problem is highlighted when one considers that support obligations can result from involuntary parenthood (most clearly in the case of a support order for a child conceived as a result of rape, entered against the rape victim), while consent may alone be inadequate to justify a support order where conception took place without sex (as in the consensual use of sperm for artificial insemination). But these cases, while fascinating, are matters for a different work. The observations made here summarize the findings in George, P., & Ellman, I. M. (unpublished, 2005). A review of the literature on the relationship between income

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and child well-being. The studies examined in this literature review included Ackerman, B., Brown, E., & Izard, C. (2004). The relations between contextual risk, earned income, and the school adjustment of children from economically disadvantaged families. Developmental Psychology, 40(2), 204–216; Amato, P., & Gilbreth, J. (1999). Nonresidential fathers and children’s well-being: A metaanalysis. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 61, 557–573; Blau, D. M. (1999). The effect of income on child development. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 81(2), 261–276; Dearing, E., McCartney, K., & Taylor, B. (2001). Change in family income-to-needs matters more for children with less. Child Development, 72, 1779–1793; Dooley, M., & Stewar, J. (2004). Family income and child outcomes in Canada. Canadian Journal of Economics, 37(4), 898–917; Duncan, G. J., & Brooks-Gunn, J. (1997). Consequences of Growing Up Poor. New York: Russel Sage; Duncan, G. J., Brooks-Gunn, J., & Klebanov, P. K. (1994). Economic deprivation and early-childhood development. Childhood Development, 65, 296–318; Linver, M., Brooks-Gunn, J., & Kohen, D. (2002). Family processes as pathways from income to young children’s development. Developmental Psychology, 38(5), 719–734; Luthar, S. (1999). Poverty and children’s adjustment. Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE; McLanahan, S. S., Seltzer, J. A., Hanson, T. L., & Thomson, E. (1994). Child support enforcement and child well-being: greater security or greater conflict? In I. Garfinkel, S. McLanahan, & P. K. Robins (Eds.), Child support and child well-being Washington, DC: Urban Institute; McLoyd, V. (1998). Socioeconomic disadvantage and child development. American Psychologist, 53, 185–204; Mistry, R., Biesanz, J., Taylor, L., Burchinal, M., & Cox, M. (2004). Family income and its relation to preschool children’s adjustment for families in the NICHD study of early child care. Developmental Psychology, 40(5), 727–745; Morris, P., & Gennetian, L. (2003). Identifying the effects of income on children’s development using experimental data. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 65(3), 716–730; Sobolewski, J. M., & Amato, P. R. (2005). Economic hardship in the family of origin and children’s psychological well-being in adulthood. Journal of Marriage and Family, 67, 141–156; Yeung, W., Linver, M., & Brooks-Gunn, J. (2002). How money matters for young children’s development: Parental investment and family processes. Child Development, 73(6), 1861–1879; and Yoshikawa, H. (1999) Welfare dynamics, support services, mothers’ earnings, and child cognitive development: Implications for contemporary welfare reform. Child Development, 70(3), 779–801. 22. Mistry et al. (Mistry, R. S., Biesanz, J., Taylor, L., Burchinal, M., & Cox, M. [2004]. Family income and its relation to preschool children’s adjustment for families in the NICHD study of early child care. Developmental Psychology, 40[5], 727–745) found a relationship between cognitive functioning and household income in children who were 36 months old. They also found a relationship between household income and behavior problems, as reported by the mother, which appeared to result from the impact of income on maternal health and on the mother– child relationship. To compare the impact of income across households of different size and composition, Mistry et al. used a ‘‘needs’’ ratio for each of the 1,300 families in their sample by dividing the family’s actual household income by the appropriate poverty threshold for the family—essentially equivalent to reporting their income as percentage of the poverty threshold. Mistry et al. found that the impact of income on these well-being measures began to decline when household

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23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

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income rose above poverty level, and largely disappeared for families above 500% of the poverty threshold—about $92,000 for a family of four in 2002, the year in which Mistry et al.’s data were collected. Median household income that year for a family of four was $67,732. These numbers, provided by the U.S. Census Bureau (available at http://www .census.gov/hhes/income/4person.html), are used by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program and are published annually in the Federal Register. The ALI identifies two main claims of the child that the support system should take account of: (1) a minimum decent standard of living when the combined income of the parents is sufficient to achieve such result without impoverishing either parent and (2) a standard of living not grossly inferior to that of either parent. American Law Institute, Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution, § 3.04(1). For a collection of writings on this problem that includes leading commentators of various persuasions, see Elster, J., & Roember, J. (Eds.). (1991). Interpersonal comparisons of well-being. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The conventional method, of course, looks at marginal expenditures in the mythical intact family that does not exist at the time of the support order. The argument here suggests looking at the marginal expenditures the custodial parent will incur on the child’s behalf in the one-parent household that exists at the time of the order. For example, Arizona provides a statutory cap when ‘‘the combined adjusted gross income of the parties is greater than $20,000 per month, [in which case] the amount set forth for combined adjusted gross income of $20,000 shall be the presumptive basic child support obligation.’’ Ariz. Rev. Stat. § 25–320(8) (2005). The court may consider the parties’ arguments that a higher award is warranted, on a case-by-case basis. The Massachusetts statutory cap is set where the parties’ combined gross income is $135,000, or where the noncustodial parent’s income exceeds $100,000. In those cases, the minimum presumptive level of support for the $135,000 or $100,000 income group is to be awarded, although ‘‘[a]dditional amounts of child support may be awarded at the judge’s discretion.’’ Mass. C.S.G. II(c) (2005). In New York, where the combined parties’ income exceeds $80,000, the court is given discretion to order. A 1985 telephone survey of randomly chosen residents presented them with a variety of vignettes with varying incomes: the noncustodial fathers in their examples earned from $500 a month to $5,000, and the mothers from nothing to $1,500. The respondents favored support amounts that increased with the obligor-father’s income through this entire range (Schaeffer, N. [1990]. Principles of justice in judgments about child support. Social Forces, 69, 157–179). It appears that the same survey data are also presented in Corbett, T., Garfinkel, I., & Schaeffer, N. C. (1992). Public opinion about a child support assurance system. In I. Garfinkel, S. S. McLanahan, & P. K. Robins (Eds.). (1992). Child support assurance: Design issues, expected impacts, and political barriers as seen from Wisconsin (pp. 339–364). Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press. They indicate that some respondents were asked to identify the appropriate support amount in dollars, while others were asked to identify it as a percentage of the father’s income. The average response (for a one-child family, across all income amounts) of those who

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34. 35.

Children in Families answered in dollars, when converted to percentages, was 21.4%, while the average for those who answered directly in percentages was 24.7%. There was a drop-off in the percentage of the father’s income that respondents thought he should be required to pay in support, as paternal income reached the highest amounts respondents were asked about, but the dollar amount of the award continued to go up with paternal income. These surveys also found considerable dispersion in the answers given by respondents, making the group means less meaningful. American Law Institute, Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution, § 3.04(1). See the studies described in Frey, B., & Stutzer, A. (2002). Happiness and economics (pp. 81–85). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. See the studies described in Frey, B., & Stutzer, A. (2002). Happiness and economics (pp. 86–90). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Frank, R. (1999). Luxury fever: Why money fails to satisfy in an era of excess. New York: The Free Press. There is evidence that one consequence of divorce is a reduction in financial contributions of noncustodial parents to their children during their later adult years. See Furstenberg, F. F., Jr., Hoffman, S. D., & Shrestha, L. (1995). The effect of divorce on intergenerational transfers: New evidence. Demography, 32, 319– 333. This kind of program might be seen as an appropriate corrective to that tendency. Walster, E., Walster, G. W., & Berscheid, E. (1978). Equity: Theory and research. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Schaeffer, N. (1990). Principles of justice in judgments about child support. Social Forces, 69, 157, 167.

PART II OUTSIDE FORCES: SHAPING HEALTH AND EDUCATION

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7 Framing Public Interventions with Respect to Children as Parent-Empowering Stephen D. Sugarman

Parents need government assistance in order to promote their children’s best interests. Most parents try to protect their child from dangers, to nourish their child’s development, and to instill values and a sense of purpose in their child so that, as he or she matures, each child will be able to make sensible choices for his or her own life path. Yet not all parents always satisfactorily perform these jobs. A variety of personal conditions may undermine parental efforts, some of which may be blamed on the parents and others not. These conditions include ignorance, selfishness, personal crises, family poverty, bad judgment, inattention to the parenting role, and so on. Outside forces may also interfere and overwhelm parental efforts. These include the child’s peers, undesirable cultural and commercial influences, and so on. Further, parents may have a vision of what their child should be or become that does not best suit the sort of child they have, and as a result they may unduly narrow their child’s future opportunities. To me, these parental shortfalls most importantly demonstrate that parents often cannot do the child-raising work by themselves. The key message is that parents need help, not only from extended family members and the community at large but also from government. For example, public regulation can increase parental power and authority over their children by preventing others from tempting children into self-destructive behaviors.1 The state can also provide information (or require others to provide information) that parents need to enable them to make good decisions for their children. Moreover, government can provide resources that some parents lack. In all of these 151

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power-enhancing ways, government can help parents better fulfill their responsibilities to their children. Too often, however, the state’s role is framed in terms of reducing—rather than enhancing—parental power. In the name of ‘‘child protection,’’ government is called upon to step in where parents have failed by substituting collective or professional decisions as to what is best for children. Yet policymakers may be too quick to curtail parental power when further empowering parents would, overall, be best for children. Furthermore, sometimes public policies are framed as ‘‘child protection’’ measures that, on closer analysis, can be better understood as parent-empowering. Add to that this key point: it may often be politically easier to win the adoption of a policy when it is understood as helping people be good parents than when it is understood as overriding parental authority. Isn’t helping people be good parents something on which conservatives (the ‘‘family values’’ crowd) and liberals (who talk of ‘‘personal empowerment’’) agree? By contrast, the constituency may be narrower for ‘‘child protection’’ measures, especially those that are seen to push a large share of parents around because ‘‘legislators or experts know better.’’ All of this implies that not only the substance but also the framing of any specific policy initiative may be of great importance. Put differently, having a policy be understood as helping large numbers of parents might facilitate its adoption when it would fail if framed differently. In the next two sections, I offer some brief examples to illustrate various points I have just made. Later on, I will examine two particularly controversial topics—obesity in children and school vouchers—in order to more thoroughly explore the importance of framing in discussing policies that impact families.

Simple Framing Examples I believe that several existing policies that at first blush may seem very different from one another are all best framed as aimed at helping people be better parents. Consider, for example, policies that (a) require that all television sets come with a ‘‘V chip’’—that clever little technological device that is supposed to allow parents to prevent their children from viewing programs that the parents consider unsuitable2; (b) require that products sold in supermarkets and drug stores that could be unexpectedly dangerous to children contain warnings that they should be kept out of the hands of children3; and (c) provide food stamps to low-income families, enabling large numbers of parents to put food on the household table when they might not otherwise be able to do so.4 These policies respond to different needs parents have in order to better serve their children: (a) the V-chip gives parents more power over outside influences in order to help them better control their children’s behavior, (b) product warnings

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give parents more information in order to help them better protect their children from dangers at home, and (c) food stamps give parents more resources in order to help them better provide for their children’s needs (and leaves it to parents to decide which food to buy and serve to their children). Not every policy is sensibly framed as parent-enhancing, of course. Some policies clearly do take power away from families in order to help children, to protect others from harm children might cause, or to liberate children from their parents. For example, precluding children from marrying under the age of, say, 16, even if they have parental permission, is a child-protection measure. So, too, are laws requiring children to wear helmets while cycling and requiring parents to transport their young children in the family car only if the child is in the back and strapped into a special seat. Forbidding teenagers from driving cars before they are 16 years old and licensed by the Department of Motor Vehicles, regardless of what parents think about any particular child driving at a younger age, is perhaps best thought of as a protection of others on the road (and nearby sidewalks), although the young teen driver is also being protected against personal dangers arising from his or her own immaturity. And enabling mature teens under the age of 18 to obtain abortions if they so wish, without having to either notify their parents or gain their approval, is an example of a policy aimed at helping to emancipate the young girl from her family. In all of these latter examples, parental authority is diminished, and surely the reduction in parental power illustrated by these examples is sometimes well-justified. Yet, because restricting parental rights is sometimes resented, and because interventions of that sort may be difficult to enact in the face of complaints about the ‘‘nanny state,’’ I repeat one of my central points: children’s advocates might fare better if, when appropriate, they structured and argued for policies that could be viewed as parent-empowering.

More Complex Examples That May Be Framed as Empowering Parents In this section, I discuss policies that others might not frame as powerenhancing for parents but which I believe can be sensibly understood, and might wisely be framed, in this way. Vaccinations Against Disease

Take, for example, the policy of ‘‘requiring’’ children to be vaccinated. Some may instinctively think of this centrally as a child-protection strategy—forcing health-promoting measures on the child, regardless of the parent’s desires. I understand this point of view, and surely many who support mandatory vaccines see it this way.

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But, with a bit more thought, one realizes that vaccinations are centrally required for diseases that are communicable, and so the mandatory nature of this policy may just as easily be understood as protecting others (especially other children) from the harm that an unvaccinated child might cause them. Note that this policy is typically enforced by denying children access to school if they are not properly vaccinated—partially because of fears that they might become contagious and thus a menace to other children.5,6 Yet, if one looks still deeper, one might conclude that, in its details, our current vaccination policy may actually be best framed as parent-assisting. Notice first that by designating vaccines as ‘‘required,’’ the state conveys information to parents as to the great importance of seeking this benefit for their child. Second, along with the ‘‘required’’ feature of the policy typically comes the free provision of vaccines, at least for those parents with financial need— thereby enabling a subset of parents to obtain resources they want for their children anyway but might otherwise not be able to provide. And, finally, it turns out that those rare parents who actually have compelling reasons for not having their children vaccinated are allowed to exclude their children from what otherwise appears to be the mandatory feature of the rule—such as those parents whose religious beliefs preclude them from consenting to these vaccinations. In sum, by paying attention to these specific features, the plan overall may be best described as parent-empowering. Fluoride to Prevent Tooth Decay

Our evolving approach to tooth decay in children also suggests some ambiguity in the state role or roles being promoted, and hence the opportunity for framing. Initially, fluoride was added only to toothpaste, and I view this change as one that helps parents be better parents. Armed with information about the benefits of fluoride, all parents had to do was get their children to brush their teeth with the right material in order to provide them with greatly enhanced protection against cavities. What are we to make of the government putting fluoride in the drinking water? At first, one might say that this policy is best understood as a childprotection measure, forcing tooth-decay protection on pretty much everyone’s children, regardless of how parents act. I assume that this policy of fluoridation of the water only provides substantial benefits for children of parents who neglect to (or choose not to) have their children brush properly with the appropriate toothpaste, again emphasizing the state’s child-protection role. Yet, today, when our society is awash with ‘‘pure’’ bottled water that does not contain fluoride, the story is perhaps again different. Nowadays, parents can, in effect, choose how to provide dental protection for their children— with tap water, toothpaste, or both. As a result, fluoride in the regular drinking water can now be understood as a convenient way for most parents to get for free a resource they want for their children—in short, as a parent-empowering

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policy. After all, parents can resist by deliberately choosing to have their children consume water and use tooth cleaners that are fluoride free, an escape hatch that a true child-protection policy would not likely allow. Consistent with this theme, notice that some rural communities that do not have fluoride in their drinking water instead offer parents the option of having school personnel regularly provide their children with fluoride mouthwash without charge to the family. This offer of information and resources also seems parentempowering to me. Preventing Sales of Cigarettes to Minors

Consider next policies that may be best understood as providing the assistance that parents, as a group, want in order to help them protect their children from undesirable outside influences. I have especially in mind here parents’ desires to protect their children from temptations and risks they encounter away from the home, although to the extent that outside influences increasingly penetrate the home, those, too, are relevant. Think about the rule that precludes retailers from selling cigarettes to minors. I believe that this policy is an example of a state intervention that is best justified and defended as serving to enhance parental power. I say this because, as I see it, the real point of forbidding sales of tobacco to children is to keep cigarettes out of the hands of children whose parents do not want them to smoke. After all, this policy does not prevent parents from providing cigarettes to their own children, nor does it stop them from permitting their own children to smoke at home. Rather, it tries to assist parents who do not want their children to smoke by negating the enticements of tobacco sellers that confront children when they are out of the home and necessarily beyond parental supervision. Obviously, many junior and senior high school students go shopping and=or to and from school on their own. Parents understandably want help in preventing their children from making purchases of things they do not want their children to have. By enlisting retailers to the parental cause—that is, by threatening retailers with penalties if they violate the law—parents’ control over their children’s behavior is enhanced. If, by contrast, the law of child neglect actually threatened to remove children from their homes and place them in foster care if their parents permitted them to smoke at home, that measure would be properly understood as a true child-protection measure. But, at least for now, that is not the law. To be sure, some parents might be slightly inconvenienced by the rule forbidding sales of tobacco products to minors (e.g., the parents cannot send their children to the store to buy their cigarettes) and some parents may not care about having retailers barred from selling such products to their children (either because they are content to let their children smoke or because they are

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confident that their children would not buy them anyway). This shows that rules reflecting the wishes of most parents could have some minor costs. But the point remains that if enough parents seek this help from the state, then, on balance, this sort of parent-empowering measure may be well justified. R-Rated Movies

The practice of assigning certain movies an R-rating may be understood as similar to the ban on the sale of cigarettes to minors. That is, the R-rating is meant to help parents by denying their children access to such movies unless they are brought to the movies by their parents (or other adults who are parental designates). To be sure, just like the sale of cigarettes to minors, this policy is by no means always effectively enforced. But, as I see it, the sentiment behind both policies is the same—assisting parents who do not want their children to be tempted in settings where parents cannot reasonably be expected to personally supervise their children’s moment-to-moment behavior. Once more, this policy may create some inconvenience to those parents who are content (or even eager) to have their children see an R-rated movie but who do not want to bother joining their children at the cinema (and are too impatient to wait to have the child see the movie at home when it comes out on DVD). But, again, on balance, this small cost has been seen as worth paying for the benefits that so many other parents gain. Notice that if R-rated movies were treated like PG-13-rated movies and merely provided a warning as to content, and cinema operators were permitted to admit unaccompanied children, then R-rated movies would only serve to provide information to parents (and perhaps an extra temptation to children). To be sure, providing information can also help people be better parents. But it is the forbidden-sale feature of R-rated movies (as with cigarettes) that I want to emphasize as properly seen as giving greater power to parents. Curfews

Curfew laws that ban children under a certain age from being out in public (out on the streets) after certain hours may also be viewed as enhancing parental power. Do not lose sight of a key feature of curfew laws, which is that they help parents control their own children. First, parents can warn or threaten their children of the risk of being apprehended by police if they are out in violation of curfews, and, second, if need be, parents can actually call on police or other public officials to bring their wayward children home. Indeed, when children talk about having a ‘‘curfew,’’ they usually have in mind one that their own parents have set. To be sure, curfew laws can serve to protect children whose parents are neglectful, as well as to protect others from dangers that ‘‘teens on the loose’’ can create. But what I mean to emphasize here is that enforcing a curfew may

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be practically quite difficult for some parents without the help of the government. And, in the end, analogous to points I made about R-rated movies and cigarettes, curfew laws normally do not apply to children when they are out in the street in the company of their parents. Note, too, that our laws concerning ‘‘runaway’’ children and the like, at base, provide parents with help from government in retrieving their children. In this respect, such children are curfew violators.

Framing Controversial Issues With this overview in mind, I next explore two very contentious matters, seeking to show that advocates of particular policies might more effectively gain their adoption if they can convincingly frame their proposals as parentempowering. Childhood Obesity

Consider first the problem of childhood obesity. In the past, say, 30 years, the rate of childhood obesity in the United States has roughly doubled.7 Scientists and physicians are becoming increasingly aware of the serious long-term health problems that readily follow from obesity, including, most prominently, diabetes and high blood pressure.8 During the presidential terms of Johnson and Nixon, our nation was especially concerned about hunger, particularly childhood hunger; today, the focus is largely on the opposite problem. Admittedly, we have not eliminated hunger in America, and sadly some children who are obese also suffer from hunger. This can certainly happen in financially impoverished families that often run out of money (and food stamps) before the end of each month. I am talking about children who go hungry for part of the time, yet are substantially overweight, probably from eating much too much at times when food is (or has been) available.9 Alas, falling into this pattern seems quite understandable—if you think you may go without later on, you might well get into the habit of gorging when you can; indeed, this behavior may be a programmed holdover from the time we were hunter-gatherers. Yet, even though lower-income children are disproportionately obese, it is well understood that childhood obesity is a problem that runs through all economic classes. It is perhaps axiomatic to say that obesity is the result of taking in a lot more calories than are consumed through normal bodily functions and exercise. This leads to something of a ‘‘blame the other guy’’ mentality in which, for example, food and beverage makers point to the fact that kids today seem to spend so many hours in front of TVs, computers, and video games instead of riding their bikes or otherwise engaging in physical activity.10 For their part, too, public-health leaders often seem divided as to whether the problem is greater on the healthy-eating side or on the healthy-activity side.

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More important to me, however, is the seeming effort by the food and beverage industry to frame childhood obesity as a problem of parental failing.11 The perspective being promoted is that everyone knows that obesity is not good for children, so society should consider parents responsible for ‘‘allowing’’ children to become overweight. Clearly, this framing is pushed by food and beverage makers who are resisting being sued by parents on behalf of their obese children. Yet emphasizing that parents are responsible for childhood obesity also raises the possibility of a counterstrategy: framing proposed state interventions as intended to enhance parents’ ability actually to take responsibility for the obesity problem. So far, most people in the public-health community seem to respond narrowly within this ‘‘blame the parents’’ frame. For example, they respond that some parents actually do not realize how dangerous obesity is for their children (especially, perhaps, if the parents themselves are obese—although in some families that fact could cut the other way). Moreover, they argue that in order to take responsibility for preventing obesity in their children, parents need to know more about how to do that. Both of these arguments point toward providing parents with more information. This might call for at least two state interventions that could be framed as parent-empowering12: (1) parental-education campaigns designed to help parents recognize the signs of childhood obesity and the risks associated with it and (2) required disclosure policies that provide parents with knowledge about the calories and other features of the specific food they are considering feeding to their children. For example, many advocates are pushing to have fast-food outlets disclose the calories, fat content, and other dimensions of the foods they sell. Advocates have in mind here the sorts of labels that now are placed on nonprepared and packaged foods sold in grocery stores. Their main underlying assumption seems to be that too many parents simply do not appreciate that fast food, for example, is typically far less healthy than are fresh fruits and vegetables, lean meats, and so on. Food and beverage makers are not eager for mandatory-disclosure regulation of this sort. They are apt to argue that if parents demand this information, the market will produce it. And, indeed, we have recently seen some fast-food sellers come forward with increasingly accessible disclosures, even when those disclosures are not yet formally required by law. Whether this is a genuine market response or an effort to forestall tougher regulation is not clear. But it does seem clear to me that the food and beverage makers are eager to cabin regulation—if it occurs—to these sorts of informational measures. For example, they certainly do not want it made illegal to sell things like candy, potato chips, and sweetened carbonated beverages to minors—that is, to put ‘‘ junk’’ foods in the same category as cigarettes and R-rated movies. If a proposal as radical as this were to emerge, the food and beverage industry would likely try to frame it not as parental-power enhancing but as misguided child-protection advocacy by ‘‘public health fanatics’’—just as some regulatory controls over

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tobacco products have been attacked by the industry as the agenda of ‘‘antismoking Nazis.’’ Next, consider childhood-obesity interventions far stronger than merely requiring information disclosures that can also be framed as what parents (or most parents, or, better yet, nearly all parents) want. Think first of the now increasingly common call to ban the sale of sodas in schools.13 This initiative, it seems to me, can be readily framed as a policy aimed at helping parents be better parents. After all, surely the case can be made that most parents are not eager for their children to consume unlimited quantities of sweetened beverages. But the reality is that if schools have Coke, Pepsi, and the like in vending machines or in school cafeterias, then kids may well be tempted to drink much more of them than parents wish. Of course, parents can attempt to instruct their children as to what to drink at lunch and during the day, but in reality parents cannot effectively control how their children act at school. Hence, preventing sodas from being sold at school could help parents achieve what they wish. An even stronger policy initiative would bar students from drinking sodas at school regardless of their source. As this would block students from bringing sodas from home and drinking them at lunch, this no longer seems easily framed as a policy of empowering parents. After all, shouldn’t parents themselves control what their children take in their lunchboxes? By this way of thinking, a ban seems more a child-protection strategy pushed by those who do not want children to drink sodas at school regardless of parental views. Yet this latter line of analysis overlooks important realities. Suppose a ban on in-school sales mainly caused students (in defiance of their parents) to simply bring into school sodas they bought from stores en route to school. In that case, a ‘‘no inschool sales’’ rule could be rendered almost meaningless. Moreover, it would likely be unworkable to ask school officials to determine the source of the soda (i.e., home-provided or not). Given those realities, a ban on drinking sodas in school could indeed be framed as helping parents be better parents. Recently, the leading sweetened beverage companies agreed to pull drinks like Coke and Pepsi from schools, and this might be seen as a response to demands made by parents.14,15 Yet it appears that ‘‘sports drinks’’ will continue to be sold in schools, even though they are, in general, just as unhealthy as traditional sodas. Moreover, as already noted, bans on soda sales by themselves may not suffice to help parents prevent their children from drinking sodas during school hours if alternative sources are readily available. Think next about foods and beverages that are promoted in connection with children’s TV programs. Most of these promotions would clearly be understood by adults as ‘‘ads.’’ Yet studies suggest that many young viewers (certainly those under 8 years of age) do not appreciate the difference between an ad and a program. Other promotions may come as paid product placements in the shows themselves, a marketing strategy that younger children are very unlikely to understand on their own.

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Suppose, then, that parents as a group come forward and complain that these promotions are enticing their children to demand products to eat and drink that parents believe are bad for children. And suppose that parents argue that these commercial promotions are presented in a misleading way that undermines children’s abilities to separate hucksters from reliable information providers. And suppose parents then push to have these promotions banned, or limited in quantity, or regulated in various other respects. My central point here is that this sort of regulation of children’s TV advertising could be framed as a means for helping people be better parents. To be sure, TV advertisers would seek to reject this framing. They would likely argue that objecting parents already have within their power a clear solution to ads that are offensive to them: turn off the TV when objectionable ads or shows come on, or, if need be, make their entire home TV-free. Moreover, they could point out that, with a sophisticated V-chip, parents who are motivated to control their children’s access to programs with these ads could do so without being in the same room as the TV. Hence, if advocates complain about children’s TV advertising, in a context in which parents are failing to curtail their own children’s access to the ads, the proposed policies likely will be framed by food and beverage companies as ‘‘child-protection’’ measures to aid hapless parents, rather than ‘‘parentenhancing’’ measures desired by most parents. Of course, as I already noted, in many settings ‘‘child protection’’ itself can be a politically attractive cause. Yet, if responsible parents are perceived as not really in need of help, the government risks being framed as an officious nanny. In support of their framing, food and beverage companies are likely to offer testimony from parents who say that they are simply uninfluenced by their children’s pleas to serve them certain food and drink products based on what the children see on TV, that they watch TV with their kids and laugh with them at the ads (perhaps using the occasion as a teaching lesson), or that they reward their kids occasionally with things their kids want after seeing them on TV but are well able to control their children’s overall diet.16 Put differently, when parents already have considerable power, proposed state interventions may be effectively framed as paternalistic measures that are aimed at a small number of ‘‘other’’ parents and that are unneeded and unwanted by the majority. In short, it may be difficult to convincingly frame regulations of TV ads aimed at children as what ‘‘most parents’’ want. Nonetheless, even here creative framing from the other side may enable advocates to portray controls on children’s TV advertising as parent-enhancing after all. The strongest argument, in my view, starts with the idea that virtually all parents object to their children’s being taken advantage of. To frame this argument successfully, advocates must convince policy makers that (a) advertisers are promoting products that children themselves cannot possibly judge as good (or bad) for their health and (b) the sophisticated marketing strategies of the advertisers succeed in turning young children into

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‘‘whiners’’ today (begging parents for certain products) and from there into brand-loyal teenage and adult consumers. In support of these points, advocates should rhetorically ask, ‘‘Why else would so many millions of dollars be spent on ads aimed at children who currently have little or no money at their personal disposal?’’ My point is that if children’s TV advertising were successfully framed as misleading and unfair in terms of its impact on the child, then a convincing case might well be made for enabling parents to shield their kids from such ads (without having to force their children to give up TV altogether). Perhaps advocates could cast children’s TV ads as parallel to the problem presented when some children bully other children on the school playground. When playmates behave like this outside school hours, parents can perhaps be expected to intervene on their own—by keeping their children away from the bullies. But when this happens during recess or the school lunch hour, parents understandably believe that they have a right to call on public officials to step in on the parents’ behalf to protect the children. It is hardly sufficient for school officials to say that parents can take their children to a different school (although this is a last resort to which some parents may ultimately have to turn). Parents who do not want TV advertising to take advantage of their children may be able to frame their demand for help from governmental authorities in a similar way. And, as I have argued throughout, this framing may be the key to winning the controls over TV ads that advocates are seeking.

School Choice (Vouchers) Finally, I turn to the scho