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c-ptsdrecovery · 4 years

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If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.

...Extended families have two great strengths. The first is resilience. An extended family is one or more families in a supporting web. Your spouse and children come first, but there are also cousins, in-laws, grandparents—a complex web of relationships among, say, seven, 10, or 20 people. If a mother dies, siblings, uncles, aunts, and grandparents are there to step in. If a relationship between a father and a child ruptures, others can fill the breach. Extended families have more people to share the unexpected burdens—when a kid gets sick in the middle of the day or when an adult unexpectedly loses a job.

A detached nuclear family, by contrast, is an intense set of relationships among, say, four people. If one relationship breaks, there are no shock absorbers. In a nuclear family, the end of the marriage means the end of the family as it was previously understood.

... But while extended families have strengths, they can also be exhausting and stifling. They allow little privacy; you are forced to be in daily intimate contact with people you didn’t choose. There’s more stability but less mobility. Family bonds are thicker, but individual choice is diminished. You have less space to make your own way in life.

... The period from 1950 to 1965 demonstrated that a stable society can be built around nuclear families—so long as women are relegated to the household, nuclear families are so intertwined that they are basically extended families by another name, and every economic and sociological condition in society is working together to support the institution.

But these conditions did not last. The constellation of forces that had briefly shored up the nuclear family began to fall away, and the sheltered family of the 1950s was supplanted by the stressed family of every decade since. Some of the strains were economic. Starting in the mid-’70s, young men’s wages declined, putting pressure on working-class families in particular. The major strains were cultural. Society became more individualistic and more self-oriented. People put greater value on privacy and autonomy. A rising feminist movement helped endow women with greater freedom to live and work as they chose.

...Finally, over the past two generations, families have grown more unequal. America now has two entirely different family regimes. Among the highly educated, family patterns are almost as stable as they were in the 1950s; among the less fortunate, family life is often utter chaos. There’s a reason for that divide: Affluent people have the resources to effectively buy extended family, in order to shore themselves up. Think of all the child-rearing labor affluent parents now buy that used to be done by extended kin: babysitting, professional child care, tutoring, coaching, therapy, expensive after-school programs. (For that matter, think of how the affluent can hire therapists and life coaches for themselves, as replacement for kin or close friends.) These expensive tools and services not only support children’s development and help prepare them to compete in the meritocracy; by reducing stress and time commitments for parents, they preserve the amity of marriage. Affluent conservatives often pat themselves on the back for having stable nuclear families. They preach that everybody else should build stable families too. But then they ignore one of the main reasons their own families are stable: They can afford to purchase the support that extended family used to provide—and that the people they preach at, further down the income scale, cannot.

... When you put everything together, we’re likely living through the most rapid change in family structure in human history. The causes are economic, cultural, and institutional all at once. People who grow up in a nuclear family tend to have a more individualistic mind-set than people who grow up in a multigenerational extended clan. People with an individualistic mind-set tend to be less willing to sacrifice self for the sake of the family, and the result is more family disruption. People who grow up in disrupted families have more trouble getting the education they need to have prosperous careers. People who don’t have prosperous careers have trouble building stable families, because of financial challenges and other stressors. The children in those families become more isolated and more traumatized.

Many people growing up in this era have no secure base from which to launch themselves and no well-defined pathway to adulthood. For those who have the human capital to explore, fall down, and have their fall cushioned, that means great freedom and opportunity—and for those who lack those resources, it tends to mean great confusion, drift, and pain.

... The people who suffer the most from the decline in family support are the vulnerable—especially children. ... We all know stable and loving single-parent families. But on average, children of single parents or unmarried cohabiting parents tend to have worse health outcomes, worse mental-health outcomes, less academic success, more behavioral problems, and higher truancy rates than do children living with their two married biological parents. According to work by Richard V. Reeves, a co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, if you are born into poverty and raised by your married parents, you have an 80 percent chance of climbing out of it. If you are born into poverty and raised by an unmarried mother, you have a 50 percent chance of remaining stuck.

... Consider single men. Extended families provided men with the fortifying influences of male bonding and female companionship. Today many American males spend the first 20 years of their life without a father and the next 15 without a spouse. Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute has spent a good chunk of her career examining the wreckage caused by the decline of the American family, and cites evidence showing that, in the absence of the connection and meaning that family provides, unmarried men are less healthy—alcohol and drug abuse are common—earn less, and die sooner than married men.

For women, the nuclear-family structure imposes different pressures. Though women have benefited greatly from the loosening of traditional family structures—they have more freedom to choose the lives they want—many mothers who decide to raise their young children without extended family nearby find that they have chosen a lifestyle that is brutally hard and isolating. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that women still spend significantly more time on housework and child care than men do, according to recent data. Thus, the reality we see around us: stressed, tired mothers trying to balance work and parenting, and having to reschedule work when family life gets messy.

Without extended families, older Americans have also suffered. According to the AARP, 35 percent of Americans over 45 say they are chronically lonely. Many older people are now “elder orphans,” with no close relatives or friends to take care of them.

Finally, because groups that have endured greater levels of discrimination tend to have more fragile families, African Americans have suffered disproportionately in the era of the detached nuclear family. Nearly half of black families are led by an unmarried single woman, compared with less than one-sixth of white families. (The high rate of black incarceration guarantees a shortage of available men to be husbands or caretakers of children.) ... Research by John Iceland, a professor of sociology and demography at Penn State, suggests that the differences between white and black family structure explain 30 percent of the affluence gap between the two groups.

... We can’t go back, of course. Western individualists are no longer the kind of people who live in prehistoric bands. ...We value privacy and individual freedom too much.

...Yet recent signs suggest at least the possibility that a new family paradigm is emerging. Many of the statistics I’ve cited are dire. But they describe the past—what got us to where we are now. In reaction to family chaos, accumulating evidence suggests, the prioritization of family is beginning to make a comeback. Americans are experimenting with new forms of kinship and extended family in search of stability.

... In 1980, only 12 percent of Americans lived in multigenerational households. But the financial crisis of 2008 prompted a sharp rise in multigenerational homes. Today 20 percent of Americans—64 million people, an all-time high—live in multigenerational homes.

...T he most interesting extended families are those that stretch across kinship lines. The past several years have seen the rise of new living arrangements that bring nonbiological kin into family or familylike relationships. On the website CoAbode, single mothers can find other single mothers interested in sharing a home. All across the country, you can find co-housing projects, in which groups of adults live as members of an extended family, with separate sleeping quarters and shared communal areas. Common, a real-estate-development company that launched in 2015, operates more than 25 co-housing communities, in six cities, where young singles can live this way.

#trauma #childhood trauma #found family

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lado-direito-da-equidade · 6 years

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— Kay Hymowitz, autora de ‘Virando Homem: Como a Ascenção das Mulheres está Transformando os Homens em Garotos (2012), 2013.

A temporada de outono em notícias sobre a diferença salarial entre homens e mulheres começou cedo e com um estrondo. Um estudo divulgado ontem no Journal of the American Medical Association mostra que os médicos do sexo masculino ganhar mais de 25% a mais do que os médicos do sexo feminino. Por que não estou surpreso? Há um fluxo constante de histórias que mostram disparidades de gênero como este: que Obama deu apenas 35% dos de nível Gabinete mensagens para as mulheres, que os homens ainda escrever 87% do Wikipedia entradas, que são cerca de 80% dos locais de notícias em televisão e rádio gerentes, e mais de 75% dos filósofos.

Depois de décadas de leis anti-discriminação, iniciativas de diversidade e defesa feminista, esses dados leva a uma pergunta incômoda: que as mulheres realmente querem igualdade? A resposta parece transparente, cegamente, óbvio. As mulheres querem respirar ar fresco? Será que eles querem evitar cascavéis e fatais ataques cardíacos ?

Mas de outra perspectiva, a resposta não é nada clara. Na verdade, há uma boa razão para pensar que as mulheres não querem o tipo de igualdade imaginado por burocratas do governo, acadêmicos e muitos defensores feministas, um imaginado estritamente pelos números, com o objetivo de um 50-50 quebra de homens e mulheres em C -suites, escritórios dean lei-escolares, conselhos editoriais e departamentos-ciência da computação; rendimentos iguais, igualdade de horas de trabalho, ativos iguais, o mesmo tempo trocar fraldas e lavar a roupa. “Um mundo verdadeiramente iguais”, Sheryl Sandberg escreveu em Em Lean, que ainda está no best-seller lista meses após a sua publicação primavera, “seria aquele em que as mulheres correu metade dos nossos países e empresas e homens correram metade de nossas casas.” É uma visão do progresso que só pode ser calculada através das planilhas de economistas do trabalho, demógrafos e grupos ativistas.

Seria tolo negar que a igualdade-pelos-números que pesquisadores podem entregar estatísticas que poderiam alarme mesmo um Ann Romney. Há o insignificante 4,2% do sexo feminino Fortune 500 CEOs, a mera 23,7% dos legisladores estaduais do sexo feminino, o reles 19% das mulheres em Congresso. Mas, enquanto “os números não mentem”, eles podem criar miragens que nos convencer que vemos algo que não fazer. Tomemos, por exemplo, o estudo do JAMA sobre as disparidades salariais entre médicos do sexo masculino e feminino. O estudo parece capturar mais um exemplo de discriminação contra as mulheres. Mas porque ele deixa de considerar as diferenças de especialidade médica ou tipo de local de trabalho, que a aparência pode muito bem ser uma ilusão. Os cirurgiões e cardiologistas, que há muito sido nas fileiras das especialidades mais bem pagas, continuam a ser predominantemente do sexo masculino. Enquanto isso, as mulheres inundou a profissão, que desproporcionalmente escolheu tornar-se psiquiatras e pediatras, especialidades que sempre estiveram entre os menos lucrativo.

Há razões para esta diferença salarial particular, que são cegas a gênero. Os cirurgiões precisam de mais anos de formação, realizar um trabalho mais arriscados (pelo menos é assim que abusiva seguradoras vê-lo) e colocar em horas mais imprevisíveis. Não é novidade que, de acordo com pesquisas, as mulheres que se tornam médicos abordam seu trabalho de forma diferente do que os homens. Eles passam mais tempo com cada paciente; ao escolher empregos, eles são muito mais propensos a citar tempo para a família e horários flexíveis como “muito importante” e preferir responsabilidades de gestão limitados. médicos do sexo masculino, por outro lado, são mais propensos a pensar sobre o avanço da carreira e potencial de renda.

Isto aponta para o problema com a abordagem de igualdade-pelos-números: presume mulheres querem paridade absoluta em todas as coisas mensuráveis, e que a mulher média quer trabalhar tantas horas como o homem médio, que quer ser CEOs, chefes de estado, cirurgiões e chefes de gabinete, tanto quanto os homens. Mas uma maioria consistente de mulheres, incluindo aqueles que trabalham a tempo inteiro, dizem eles preferem trabalhar a tempo parcial ou não em todos; entre os homens, o número é de 19%. E não estamos falando apenas; na prática, 27% das mulheres que trabalham estão no trabalho apenas a tempo parcial, em comparação com 11% dos homens.

Agora, um monte de gente poderia dizer que as mulheres americanas são frustrados de perseguir suas ambições por causa das nossas políticas de licença maternidade, cuidados de dia e local de trabalho de flexibilidade miseráveis. Mas mesmo as mulheres nos países mais favoráveis à família do mundo demonstram pouco interesse na igualdade-pelos-números ideal. Na Islândia, Noruega, Suécia e Finlândia, de acordo com a OCDE, as mulheres continuam a trabalhar menos horas e ganhar menos dinheiro do que os homens; eles também continuam a ser uma visão rara em escritórios executivos, salas de aula de ciência da computação e, embora a OCDE não diz que eu estou disposto a apostar, conferências de filosofia. Suécia, o padrão ouro da igualdade de gênero em muitas mentes, tem uma das percentagens mais elevadas de mulheres que trabalham a tempo parcial em qualquer lugar do mundo. Defensores da igualdade-por-números deveriam estar pensando sobre o progresso das mulheres em termos do que as mulheres mostram que eles querem, não o que as planilhas dizer que eles deveriam querer.

— Kay Hymowitz, “Do Women Really Want Equality?”, TIME, 4 de Setembro de 2013. http://ideas.time.com/2013/09/04/do-women-really-want-equality/

Olha essas também:

• “O rebaixamento dos homens tem uma longa história cultural.” « Canadá ocontraditorio.com/ladodireitodaequidade/?p=34854

• Homens têm menos emprego, menos educação e 4,5 menos anos de vida que mulheres « Irlanda ocontraditorio.com/ladodireitodaequidade/?p=1703

• “No Dia dos Pais, celebremos os feministos!” « Natasha Lamoreux ocontraditorio.com/ladodireitodaequidade/?p=14596

#Kay Hymowitz #feminismo não é hipocrisia?

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koherston · 3 years

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The Aftermath of Gray Divorce for Men, Women, and Their Adult Children

Gray divorce, whose rates have doubled since 1990 and now represents a quarter of all divorces in the U.S., does have individual and social costs worth pondering, especially in an aging society.

This article by Kay Hymowitz at the Institute for Family Studies summarizes the latest research on how divorce impacts those over 50 and their adult children. The Aftermath of Gray Divorce for Men, Women, and Their Adult Children From certain angles, “gray divorce,” usually defined as divorces involving couples over 50, doesn’t seem like such a big deal. Unlike divorce involving…

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#Divorce #Family law

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cabiba · 4 years

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Our Conjugal Class Divide

Marriage has evolved to meet the ideals of the well-educated and left too many Americans unwed and insecure.

Kay Hymowitz | Feb 10, 2021

“Is marriage obsolete?” may have become a hackneyed headline in recent years, but it’s an understandable question. Marriage rates have plunged to an all-time low. Americans are more likely to rate an enjoyable career as essential to a fulfilling life than marriage. Still, the query also signals a widespread misunderstanding about the reality of family life in the United States. Marriage remains a defining landmark in the lives of more well-to-do, college-educated Americans. But it is well on the path to obsolescence only among the less educated poor and working class. Marriage is, in other words, another dimension of the nation’s inequality, one that both explains and perpetuates America’s divisions.

The most well-trod explanation for the marriage gap, and an indisputably correct one, is that trade shocks and automation have devoured the stable, breadwinner jobs that sustained marriages in the past. Joe Lunchbox and his mates clocked in every morning at a local auto parts factory, played on their weekend baseball team, and retired with a comfortable pension. Now their sons spend their working hours at an Amazon warehouse where low pay, an empty savings account, and rumors of imminent automation darken their mood. Whereas their fathers found meaning in supporting their wives and children, their younger sisters and girlfriends now work alongside them earning paychecks that are nearing parity to their own. That would be unambiguously exciting news if it weren’t for the fact that working women who can manage on their own continue to want men who can be financial providers and preferably ones who earn more than they do.

Nevertheless, the precarity of the postindustrial working-class labor market is far from the whole story of the country’s toxic marriage gap. Just as important are the radical changes in our understanding of the age-old institution of marriage, changes that have played to the strengths and aspirations of the well-educated while leaving most Americans stumbling along dead-end paths.

To understand how we got to this point of polarization, it’s best to appreciate why marriage became a universal institution. Early in human history, it became apparent that children were more likely to survive when a mother and father had some kind of quasi-stable union. It was also clear that male competition for mates was a predictable source of conflict within groups. It was in the general interest to have norms that encourage predictable unions. Since the hunter-gatherers, that’s what human groups have done. Marriage customs have varied enormously, of course: polygamy or monogamy, child marriage or adult, arranged or chosen, dowries or bridewealth, and so on. The rules could be harsh. Most societies treated children born outside of socially recognized unions as “illegitimate,” fatherless outsiders with no claim on their paternal name or property. The point was not to “control women’s sexuality” as we sometimes hear, but to insist on the bond between marriage and childbearing by heavily stigmatizing those who strayed from it.

Marriage is, in other words, another dimension of the nation’s inequality, one that both explains and perpetuates America’s divisions.

The decoupling of marriage and childbearing that began in the 1960s in the United States and Western Europe, what scholars refer to as the “de-institutionalization of marriage,” represented a radical break with the human past. In 1960, a negligible 5% of American children were born to unmarried mothers, a disproportionate number of them to African Americans. The number for the general population doubled within a decade and continued to climb until plateauing at the beginning of the new century at around 40%. Divorce rates skyrocketed in the mid 1960s and 70s. “Shotgun” marriages started gathering dust in Western culture’s curio cabinet along with bundling boards. Educated feminists and campus radicals were the first to openly rebel against the old matrimonial order. Middle-class boomers were not far behind. By the 1980s, the working class was on board. Inevitably, the number of children living with only one parent mushroomed.

Still marriage didn’t become obsolete. It was re-engineered as a vehicle for the self-expression and lifestyle of individuals rather than the perpetuation and order of societies. More married couples stayed “childfree;” those that didn’t, were more likely to limit their number of offspring. The “only child” family became commonplace. All in all, the number of births to married couples fell by half between 1960 and 1996. As children became less central to the meaning of marriage, couples developed higher expectations for their own relationships. Now a spouse was supposed to be a soulmate, a Platonic missing half, equal and simpatico in every way. Most cultures have rules about the circumstances in which a union may be dissolved; soulmates decide entirely for themselves. When Ronald Reagan signed the nation’s first no-fault divorce into law as governor of California in 1969, he didn’t simply make it easier for couples to split up. He made ending a marriage the purely personal decision of two individuals—or at least one of them—whose emotional connection had frayed.

Now, the soulmate revolution had obvious advantages. The relaxing of traditional rules made it easier for a woman to leave a violent husband or for a husband to leave an adulterous wife, and for both to relax rigid gender roles. Empowered by the pill and legal abortion, unmarried couples could enjoy sexual relations fearing neither shame, judgment, nor an unwanted child. If a child was born to unmarried parents, he was no longer branded filius nullius (son of nobody) and had the same social and legal privileges as the son or daughter of a married father. Same-sex couples eventually entered officially recognized unions. It’s a reasonable guess that the revolution furthered individual agency and, for many people, a sense of control over their lives; some social scientists believe that these correlate with human happiness. True or not, it’s hard to imagine Americans ever going back.

But these gains didn’t prevent the law of unintended consequences that haunts every revolution from leaving its mark. No one anticipated that either freedom from seemingly outdated mating norms or the soulmate ideal would deepen economic and social inequality, but perhaps they should have. Humans being the communal meaning-makers that they are, it was inevitable that Americans would create norms to replace what they had jettisoned, and equally inevitable that those norms would be designed by the more advantaged members of society. Just as elites had been the trendsetters for the de-institutionalization of marriage, they were the ones to coalesce around the new order.

As children became less central to the meaning of marriage, couples developed higher expectations for their own relationships.

That new order did not entirely thrown out tradition, but it tweaked it in ways ill-suited to less educated Americans. It asked both men and women to put off marriage and children until they had completed their education and headed down career paths; these days that means staying single until one’s late twenties or thirties. During the single years, people date and party—though the ultimate goal is to find a “serious” relationship. They cohabit for a year or two, followed by an engagement, a lavish wedding and then, only then, start a family (assuming they want to). Instead of marriage being a transition into adulthood defined in large measure by childbearing, it is now a personal “capstone,” to repeat sociologist Andrew Cherlin’s useful term. Extravagant weddings complete with catered dinners, flowers, photographers, videographers, champagne, and limousines are the objective correlative of the couple’s capstone economic and soulmate success. The wedding planning website “The Knot” reports that between the engagement ring (a compulsory purchase by the soon-to-be groom) and the event itself, the average wedding costs just shy of $34,000.

Clearly the capstone model of marriage, with its posh wedding and late childbearing, is a poor fit for lower-income couples. For one thing, they don’t spend their twenties going to graduate school or trudging their way up the first steps of the career ladder. Nor do they see why marriage has anything to do with the timing of motherhood. The capstone ideal has taught them that getting married is about making it, being financially set, and they’re far from that goal. A number of the unmarried mothers interviewed by Kathy Edin and Maria Kefalas in Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage announced that they expected to own a home and a car and to have saved enough money for a “big” wedding with all “the works” before considering marriage.

Because marriage is not in the picture and they are not searching for “the one,” the romantic lives of these couples are more aimless. Cohabitation Nation, the most extensive study of the class divide in cohabitation, finds that unlike more advantaged women who date a year or more before living together, less educated women move in with their partners only a few months after meeting them. Sometimes moving in together is a solution to one of them facing reduced hours or a rent hike. Other times, it’s just that they are having a good time together and why not? Pregnancy often follows; lower-income women tend to use birth control more erratically than their more educated sisters. They tend to describe pregnancy as “something that just happened,” unplanned in public health terms, though not necessarily unwanted. “Wait till you’re thirty or forty to have children?” one woman asks Edin and Kefalas. “I don’t think so!”

The educated middle class has emerged from the 1960s family revolution with a cultural script that keeps marriage and childbearing linked, thereby giving their children a better shot at a stable two-parent home. Working-class men and women, on the other hand, have landed up fully embracing unmarried motherhood. Of course, many mothers and fathers are living together when their babies are born, but cohabiting unions break up at far higher rates. Working-class women don’t appear to have deep concerns about their sons and daughters growing up without their fathers in the house. In fact, they look down on women who marry because they’re expecting a baby as taking a sure path to divorce. “The harshest condemnation is reserved for those who marry because of pregnancy,” Edin and Kefalas write. Divorce rates remain higher among lower-income than higher-income couples, but overall rates have declined markedly since 1980. Strikingly, while nonmarital childbearing has become far more acceptable to younger generations, divorce has become less so.

Less educated couples face additional headwinds because of the de-institutionalization of marriage. Older marriage customs and traditions may have been patriarchal and confining, but their requirements were easily grasped by everyone from a chemistry professor to a janitor. Rather than following a gendered script written sometime in an oppressive benighted past, soulmate couples draft their own roles: who should work outside the home and how much, whether to have a joint bank account or keep their earnings separate, whether to take his name, hers, or hyphenate, as well as how to distribute the never-ending tasks of domestic life.

Humans being the communal meaning-makers that they are, it was inevitable that Americans would create norms to replace what they had jettisoned, and equally inevitable that those norms would be designed by the more advantaged members of society.

Most highly educated young men and women have had the advantage of growing up in homes that prepare them for these negotiations. As Annette Lareau showed in her landmark Unequal Childhoods, a comparative study of middle-class and low-income parents, middle-class kids spend their childhood years in highly organized environments. Weeks are plotted ahead on large calendars or kitchen blackboards so everyone in the family can keep track of the soccer games, dance lessons, doctor’s appointments, and family vacations. Lower-income parents don’t see much point in these activities, according to Lareau. They subscribe to a philosophy of “natural growth” where children need little teaching and molding. Moreover, while affluent parents view their children as “conversation partners” who can discuss and opine, lower-income parents are more pragmatic, direct, often giving one-word answers. Middle-class kids argue and explain themselves. If told they can’t play video games for two days after getting in trouble with a teacher, they bargain for one day, and promise to never ever do it again. By contrast, when lower-income children are scolded, “the adult talks; the child listens.” Working-class parents are not as strict as they once were, but it’s still possible that if you question authority, you’ll feel a hard slap across the bottom.

The habits of planning ahead and of “using your words” learned in a middle-class home are power tools in a world where gender relations are largely unscripted. Educated couples are more likely to discuss the timetable for getting serious, living together, getting engaged, and getting married. They “plan, deliberate, mull over and organize their resources, their children and their daily lives,” writes Jessi Streib in The Power of the Past, a study of mixed-class marriages. As we saw, while working-class men and women tend to cohabitate early, with little consideration for what happens next or where their relationship is going, middle-class couples wait a year or more before living together and have a clearer understanding of what their partner expects.

It would be a mistake to ignore the ways economics reinforces these cultural differences. One reason lower-income couples are more laissez-faire may be that their work lives and those of the people around them are more unpredictable. Schedules change, layoffs disrupt planned budgets, overtime possibilities wax and wane, older cars break down, etc. Money anxieties add to stress and conflict. Brad Wilcox and Wendy Wang speculate that because working-class and poor Americans are less likely to own a home or share other assets, there are fewer reasons to avoid a breakup.

But it’s worth remembering that once cash-strapped couples married despite the unpredictable hardships to come. No one thought of a diamond wedding ring as an entrance fee to the institution. Most people assumed that two people together could better withstand the hard knocks life would bring—whether closed factories, injuries, or droughts. That kind of thinking seems to have melted into the thin air of the soulmate revolution.

So here we are in unforeseen territory. The women who can least afford to raise a child are the most likely to be single mothers, and the children who stand to benefit the most from stable homes and reliable fathers are the least likely to have them.

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liberty1776 · 4 years

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Prospects for Black America: The Moynihan Report Turns 50 - Part III

Restoring the Family Speakers: Ron Haskins, Co-Director, Center on Children and Families, Brookings Institution; Bob Woodson, President, Center for Neighborhood Enterprise; Glenn Loury, Professor of Economics, Brown University Moderator: Kay Hymowitz, Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute Show more

#Moynihan Report Families

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auntcookieposts · 5 years

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#gentrification talk draws huge audience w Prof. James Rodriguez, Guttman, CUNY re: Racial Inequality in New York City Since 1965 & authors Matthew Schuerman, Kay Hymowitz; @JarrettMurphy, City Limits editor! (at Brooklyn Historical Society) https://www.instagram.com/p/B7ZAm-shgBcWjd6nyXkjp_e9u4h8q7hvHpEv2A0/?igshid=1920kj76p2uiq

#gentrification

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giancarlonicoli · 5 years

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OPINION

UPWARD MOBILITY

Culture Explains Asians’ Educational Success

Black enrollment at New York’s elite public high schools was far higher in the 1930s than today.

By Jason L. RileyMarch 26, 2019 6:45 p.m. ET

New York City’s most selective public high schools released demographic data last week on students who were offered admission to the 2019 fall freshman class. The results were as predictable as the subsequent griping.

These eight schools admit kids based on a single standardized exam, and again Asian students, who comprise only 16.1% of the city’s public school system, were awarded a majority of the openings, 51.1%. By comparison, whites, who are 15% of public-school students, and blacks, who are 26%, were offered 28.5% and 4% of the seats, respectively. At Stuyvesant High, the most selective school, a mere seven of the 895 seats were offered to black students. In recent years, Asians who attend Stuyvesant and the city’s other two super-elite high schools, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech, have regularly outnumbered their white peers by 2 to 1.

Mayor Bill de Blasio wants to scrap the admissions test to achieve more racial balance in the classroom. He has decried the outcomes as evidence of “massive segregation.” The Washington Post’s education writer likened the low black acceptance rates at New York’s top schools to the recently exposed college bribery scandal, calling it “an admissions scandal of a different sort.” Apparently, when black students demonstrate academic excellence, it’s celebrated. When Asian students do so, it’s scandalous.

The notion that these schools aren’t diverse enough tells you something about the politicization of terms like “diversity.” Asians not only enrich these schools racially and ethnically but also bring economic diversity. The Manhattan Institute’s Kay Hymowitz has reported in City Journal that a disproportionate number of Asians admitted to these schools come from a low-income neighborhood in Brooklyn where Chinese immigrant parents “have crammed themselves into dorm-like quarters, working brutally long hours waiting tables, washing dishes, and cleaning hotel rooms.”

The Asian student outcomes we see year after year aren’t the result of luck or “privilege.” They stem from hard work and a culture that prioritizes learning. Research shows that Asian kids read more books, watch less television, and study longer. In poorer families, money goes toward test-prep instead of $200 sneakers. The results are obvious at elite schools nationwide, where even low-income Asian students have outperformed middle- and upper-income students from other groups. “For Chinese immigrants,” Ms. Hymowitz writes, “education for the next generation is close to a religion. It opens the path to a good life.”

Mr. de Blasio wants to replace the exam with an admissions scheme that would reserve slots at the specialized high schools for the top 7% of graduates from every city middle school. According to one report cited by the New York Times, the mayor’s plan would cut Asian enrollment at the elite schools by half, but Asian parents aren’t the only ones complaining. At a town-hall meeting in December, black parents also expressed concern that tinkering with the admissions process will increase racial tensions and set up their own children to fail. “We know that middle schools are not all created the same,” said one mother, according to a report in the New York Post. She added that black students are concentrated in the lowest-performing schools.

Mr. de Blasio is a progressive Democrat, and like many on the left he is quick to equate racial disparities with racial bias. But black and Hispanic students of previous generations were accepted to the city’s exam schools at significantly higher rates than today. In 1989, Brooklyn Tech’s student body was 51% black and Hispanic. Today, it’s less than 12%.

Stuyvesant’s enrollment history tells a similar story, according to Stanford economist Thomas Sowell, who attended the school in the 1940s while growing up in Harlem. The proportion of blacks attending Stuyvesant as far back as the 1930s approximated the proportion of blacks living in the city at the time. That began to change in the latter part of the 20th century, when the socioeconomic status of blacks was rising and segregation was decreasing. Between 1979 and 1995, the school’s black enrollment dropped to 4.8% from 12.9%, and by 2012 it had fallen to 1.2%.

“In short, over a period of 33 years, the proportion of blacks gaining admission to Stuyvesant High School fell to just under one-tenth of what it had been before,” Mr. Sowell writes in “Wealth, Poverty and Politics.” “None of the usual explanations of racial disparities—racism, poverty or ‘a legacy of slavery’—can explain this major retrogression over time.”

It is not systemic racism but changes in black cultural behaviors in recent decades that offer the more plausible explanation for widening racial gaps in education and other areas. Telling blacks that white prejudice or Asian overachievement or some other external factor is primarily to blame for these outcomes may help the mayor and his party politically, but we shouldn’t pretend that lowering standards helps blacks or any group advance.

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bloojayoolie · 6 years

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America, Belgium, and Books: THE MISLEADING IMPLICATION: . The benefit is split between both parents and redeemed over 8 years (not just 1), meaning it's actually a fraction of what people claim ít to be. I live in Sweden. .The glass ceiling is worse in Sweden, where only 1.5% of senior management are women, compared to 1 1% in the US. We have one year of maternity leave. Lower gender wage gaps don't correlate with generous maternity leave. U.S. female executives earn closer to their male peers than Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian and Danish women." Private sector job offers dried up for Our freedoms are not Inhibited Swedish women, 75% of Swedish women are working in the public sector, while 75% of men arè working in the private sector. THIS POLICY HAS FAILED SWEDISH WOMEN! WE SHOULD NOT TRY IT HERE IN THE U.S .. WAC- THE MISLEADING IMPLICATION: Sweden gives maternity leave for a year, which is such a successful and generous policy that we should adopt it in the U.S. THE REALITY: It's a benefit split between both parents and redeemed over 8 years (not just 1), meaning it's a fraction of what people claim it to be. But more importantly, it hasn't closed their gender wage gap and has actually pushed women out of the private sector, meaning it's not working as intended. ▫️FALSE IMPLICATION: As other fact checkers have clarified, "This is not quite right. ...Parents of a newly born or adopted child are entitled to 480 combined days of parental leave, which they can split between themselves in whatever way they choose regardless of gender. ...The parental leave doesn’t need to be taken right away, either. Parents in Sweden can continue to take days off until their child turns eight years old." [a] Therefore, if divided evenly between both parents and into each of the 8 eligible years, maternity leave could end up being only 30 days a year. So while it's certainly true that the benefit DOES allow more time off than maternity leave in the U.S., the picture of a woman taking leave for an entire year at once - and somehow not having that negatively affect her career - isn't accurate. ▫️INDIRECT EFFECTS: So what about the unintended consequences of such a policy? Per The Guardian, "Swedish women don't have it made - they still end up paying a price in terms of their career or employment. What you find, if you look closely at the figures, is that there is a pay threshold in Nordic countries below which are 80% of all women, and above which are 80% of all men. [b] Furthermore, "the glass ceiling problem is larger in family-friendly Sweden than it is in the hire-and-fire-at-will U.S., and it has also grown as family-friendly policies have expanded. In Sweden 1.5% of senior management are women, compared with 11% in the US." [b] So while women may have greater access to time off in Sweden, they actually have better career opportunities here in the U.S. "Take another barometer of equality - the gap between men's and women's pay - and Sweden puts on another poor show. ...Swedish women are paid around 20% less than Swedish men - a similar pay difference to the one that exists in the UK. [and not that much different than the U.S.] Interestingly, other EU countries with a lower pay gap don't show a correlation with better family-friendly packages: Italy has a 15% pay gap, Spain a 12% gap and Belgium and Portugal an 8% gap. None of these countries is held up as providers of great family-friendly packages - indeed, some of them, including Portugal, have systems in place that are not only a great deal less generous than that of Sweden, but also a lot less accessible." [b] Also noteworthy, "female executives and professionals in America earn closer to their male peers than Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian and Danish women." [c] What's alarming is how the private sector reacted to this policy. Overtime, it appears private sector career opportunities for Swedish women dried up, leaving the public sector as their primary option. The breakdown is quite remarkable. According to Dr. Catherine Hakim, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, "75% of Swedish women are working in the public sector - traditionally the lower-paid, lower-qualified end of the employment market - while 75% of men are working in the racier, more demanding private sector. What has happened through the years of family-friendly policies ...is that private companies have reduced their number of female employees because they can't afford the cost of the generous maternity packages." [b] And this should be of no surprise. As Kay Hymowitz from TIME magazine explains, "Almost all public policies have unintended consequences, and maternity leave is no exception. Rather than offering a route to equality between the sexes, the data shows, extended maternity leave actually throws up roadblocks in a woman’s career — the very roadblocks that such policies are meant to prevent. Women who take a year off from work with a new baby — not to mention mothers of a second child who take a total of two years — experience what economists call human-capital depreciation, meaning their skills get rusty. Their work-social networks also fray. Unsurprisingly, their income and careers take a hit." [c] “Women who make full use of their maternity or parental leave entitlements receive, on average, lower wages in the years following their resumption of work than those who return before leave expires.” And per a review of studies on the topic of maternity leave, conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, "the effect can continue for years after leave takers return to their jobs" and can "permanently damage" a mother's ability to achieve their labor market potential. [c] ▫️CONCLUSION: The unfortunate conclusion is that "generous maternity-leave policies have a tendency to harden a country’s glass ceiling, and women in the Nordic countries are actually less likely to reach career heights than women in the U.S." [c] No, we should NOT adopt Sweden's policy. ---------------- Sources: [a] https://ift.tt/2r5sX11 [b] https://ift.tt/2zo4DyV [c] https://ift.tt/16YdAVH Note: the graphic we are arguing against has been modified to reduce confusion. The original version of the graphic mentioned maternity leave, but also mentioned several other Swedish policies which each require their own rebuttals. This essay was only seeking to address the issue of maternity leave.

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