Research Reports and News Posted February
2002:
Fathers—Research | Children
& Families | Census
Data | Systemic Barriers
| Welfare Reform |
NCOFF Abstracts
Comparing Father and Mother Reports of Father Involvement among Low-Income Minority Families, Rebekah Levine Coley and Jodi Eileen Morris, JCPR Working Paper 240, Joint Center on Poverty Research, October, 2001.
Abstract:
Currently available data and concerns over the validity of mother reports significantly truncate the ability of researchers to address a myriad of research questions concerning father involvement. This study aims to inform this concern by examining predictors of father involvement and father-mother discrepancies in reports of involvement within a low-income, predominantly minority sample of families with both residential and nonresidential fathers (N = 228). Paired HLM models are used to control for the interrelation between pairs of reporters. Results indicate that although father and mother reports are similar, mothers consistently report lower levels of involvement than do fathers. Parental conflict, fathers- nonresidence, father age, as well as mother education and employment predicted greater discrepancy across father and mother reports. Implications for future research and policy are addressed.
For a copy of the complete report, visit the JCPR web site.
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Time for creative thinking about men's health, (Editorial) The Lancet,
Vol. 357, Issue 9271, Pg. 1813, June 9, 2001
Next week in the USA is National Men's Health Week, a result of the National
Men's Health Week Act, which was passed by Congress in 1994 and signed
into law by President Bill Clinton the same year. The stated aims of this
week, which is timed each year to coincide with Father's Day, are to heighten
awareness of preventable health problems and encourage early detection
and treatment among both men and boys. Governments of other countries
have also begun to express concerns about the specific health-care needs
of men, and in recent years, initiatives to improve men's health have
been launched, for example, in the UK and Australia.
Men die younger than women, and the reasons for this shorter life-span
are reasonably well known. Indeed, the frequently very different experiences
of women and men with regard to factors such as access to health information
and willingness to seek medical advice should be familiar to all physicians.
Despite these differences, the notion of there being an area of "men's
health" is less well defined than the female counterpart. This
lack of specialty is reflected in the paucity of conferences, books,
and even medical-journal reviews on the broader issues of men's health.
This striking difference is not necessarily a bad thing. There are many
examples in medicine's past, especially in the control of childbirth,
where the health-care provision for a female patient was not necessarily
in that woman's best interests. Indeed, many feminist scholars argue
that women's well-being continues to be overly "medicalised".
Nevertheless, men's health clearly suffers from lack of awareness
and treatment. On page 1853 of this week's issue, Fabio Levi and colleagues
describe a systematic analysis of trends in testicular cancer mortality
in Europe, the USA, and Japan. They report that, despite the availability
of platinum-based chemotherapy regimens since the 1970s, the expected
reduction in testicular cancer mortality has not been consistent worldwide.
The USA and countries of the European Union have witnessed earlier and
greater falls in death rates but there has been a substantial delay
in impact of effective treatment on mortality in central and eastern
Europe. "[A] few hundred potentially avoidable deaths every year
are occurring in eastern Europe for a disease that is largely curable
in young men", they note.
The investigators also suggest that both public and health-professional
education could explain part of these differences. Certainly, the extent
of men's ignorance of health matters is a cause for serious concern.
A mass survey sponsored by the Commonwealth Fund, a US non-profit organisation,
and published last year reported that "an alarming proportion of
American men have only limited contact with physicians and the health
care system generally. Many men fail to get routine check-ups, preventive
care, or health counseling, and they often ignore symptoms or delay
seeking medical attention when sick or in pain". The report, Out
of Touch: American Men and the Health Care System, provided more
evidence that men felt constrained by social taboos and embarrassment
from discussing their health openly with physicians. The report concluded
that there is a need for expanded efforts to address men's special health
concerns and risks, together with their attitudes towards health care.
Does it therefore follow that there should be a specialty of men's
health? For example, should men be targeted via special male-oriented
clinics? These questions are difficult to answer, since there is little
evidence for effective interventions to target male illnesses. Nor has
there been any rigorous testing of the efficacy of men-only health facilities.
In fact, we understand very little about how to approach male health
inequalities. Clearly there is need for a stronger evidence base, and
more creative thinking on the part of the health-care profession, to
help engage men of all ages in caring for their own health. Most importantly,
it is essential that men themselves take an active part in the process
of researching and developing their own care. The accomplishments of
the women's health movements in recent years should provide ample stimulus
and inspiration.
For further information contact The
Lancet.
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Technical Report: Coparent or Second-Parent Adoption by Same-Sex
Parents, Ellen C. Perrin, MD, American Academy of Pediatrics,
Pediatrics, Vol. 109, No. 2, February 2002, pp 341-344.
Report excerpt:
ABSTRACT. A growing body of scientific literature demonstrates
that children who grow up with 1 or 2 gay and/or lesbian parents fare
as well in emotional, cognitive, social, and sexual functioning as do
children whose parents are heterosexual. Children's optimal development
seems to be influenced more by the nature of the relationships and interactions
within the family unit than by the particular structural form it takes.
CURRENT SITUATION. Accurate statistics regarding the number
of parents who are gay or lesbian are impossible to obtain. The secrecy
resulting from the stigma still associated with homosexuality has
hampered even basic epidemiologic research. A broad estimate is that
between 1 and 9 million children in the United States have at least
1 parent who is lesbian or gay.
Most individuals who have a lesbian and/or gay parent were conceived
in the context of a heterosexual relationship. When a parent (or both
parents) in a heterosexual couple "comes out" as lesbian or gay, some
parents divorce and others continue to live as a couple. If they do
decide to live separately, either parent may be the residential parent
or children may live part-time in each home. Gay or lesbian parents
may remain single or they may have same-sex partners who may or may
not develop stepparenting relationships with the children. These families
closely resemble stepfamilies formed after heterosexual couples divorce,
and many of their parenting concerns and adjustments are similar.
An additional concern for these parents is that pervasively heterosexist
legal precedents have resulted in denial of custody and restriction
of visitation rights to many gay and lesbian parents.
For a copy of the complete report, visit the AAP
web site.
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The Right Start for America's Newborns: A Decade of City and
State Trends (1990-1999), Annie E. Casey Foundation and Child
Trends, Feb. 5, 2002.
Press Release Excerpt:
WASHINGTON - Even as prospects for a more promising start to life improved
for children born in the 1990s, high percentages of babies in the United
States continue to enter the world prematurely, at birthweights that
are below normal, and to mothers who are unmarried, according to a new
online report released today.
Two key measures of healthy births, low birthweights and preterm
births, showed small yet significant increases over the decade. Nationally,
the percentage of low-birthweight babies increased from 7 percent
to 7.6 percent, while the figure for preterm births rose from 10.6
percent to 11.8 percent. The report's researchers attribute these
results, in part, to an increase in multiple births.
The same measures also reveal a persistent gap between black babies
and both Hispanic and white babies. In 1999, black babies were nearly
twice as likely to be born at low birthweight (13 percent) and significantly
more likely to be born premature (18 percent) than babies who are
either Hispanic or white. Nearly 7 percent of both Hispanic and white
babies had low birthweights, and around 11 percent of them were born
prematurely.
Changes in a third key measure, the percentage of births to unmarried
women, suggest there was an important turning point in the mid-1990s.
The measure increased 5 percentage points (from 28 percent to 33 percent)
between 1990 and 1994, but was essentially level during the latter
half of the '90s.
One measure that improved consistently across the decade is the
percentage of women who smoked during pregnancy. It is the only measure
for which the nation's 50 largest cities had better results than the
nation as a whole, dropping from 17.7 percent in 1990 to 10.4 percent
in 1999, while the national figure declined from 18.4 percent to 12.6
percent during the same period. The report also shows that in 1999,
white women were four times as likely to smoke during pregnancy as
Hispanic women and had a rate that was nearly 70 percent higher than
that of black women. Overall, birth outcomes in large cities continue
to lag behind the rest of the nation but that gap is closing as cities
improved more than the rest of the country during the 1990s, according
to the online report, The Right Start for America's Newborns: A Decade
of City and State Trends (1990-1999), which can be seen at www.aecf.org/kidscount/rightstart2002.
(The online report allows viewers to create custom reports such as
state and city profiles, line graphs showing trends over time, color-coded
U.S. maps, and ranking tables, all generated dynamically from the
Right Start database.)
A joint project of Child Trends and KIDS COUNT, an initiative of
The Annie E. Casey Foundation, the online report presents a full decade
of data on eight measures of healthy births for each state and the
nation's 50 largest cities, and it identifies cities and states with
the best and worst performance on each measure. The report is based
on data from the National Center for Health Statistics.
For a copy of the complete press release, or to obtain the full
report and data access, visit The
Annie E. Casey Foundation web site.
Keeping Jobs and Raising Families in Low-Income America: It Just Doesn't Work,
Lisa Dodson, Tiffany Manuel, and Ellen Bravo, The Radcliffe Public Policy Center at Harvard University, and 9to5 National Association of Working Women, 2002.
Executive Summary:
In 2000, the Public Policy Center at the Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study and 9to5 National
Association of Working Women launched the Across
the Boundaries project, a two-year, multi-tiered study
of the work and family conflicts that confront low income
working parents, usually mothers.The fieldwork
took place in the cities of Milwaukee, Denver,
and Boston, where researchers gathered abundant
qualitative data from parents working in low-wage
jobs, teachers and child care providers working in
low-income neighborhoods, and employers who hire
and supervise entry-level employees. Over the course
of 18 months, researchers met with nearly 350 people
in interviews and focus groups conducted in homes,
workplaces, schools, churches, and community centers.
Complementing other national research on work
and welfare trends, this report synthesizes diverse narratives
of American lives, accounts that offer intimate
portraits of the nation's economic "bottom third,"
where millions work and raise their families. (The bottom
third is a term used to describe households
whose annual income is under 200 percent of the federal
poverty threshold.)
To varying degrees, all working parents confront
considerable challenges as they strive to pursue their
careers and advance in their chosen fields while nurturing
healthy and satisfying family relationships. But
for families in the bottom third of the economy, economic
pressures and lack of resources intensify the
ordinary challenges associated with maintaining a job
and raising a family, elevating these struggles to the
level of a daily crisis.These families are more likely to
have a family member with special needs and less likely
to have needed flexibility on the job or to be able
to afford substitute care.The results can be disastrous
for both families and for employers.
Key Findings
There are four major policy-oriented findings discussed
in this report. First, most respondents in all
three subject groups (low-wage parents, employers,
teachers and child care providers) expressed the opinion
that "It's just not working," identifying an
entrenched mismatch between the imperatives of raising
families and keeping jobs in low-income America
and describing intractable conflicts at the most basic
level between the safety, survival, and education of
children and their parents' ability to keep any kind of
employment.
Second, the majority of all three groups of
respondents agreed that current strategies for caring
for children in low-income families are fragile, fluid,
and patchwork, and that the upheaval associated with
this patchwork approach destroys many employment
efforts. Nearly half of all parents in this research
reported that they experienced some kind of job
sanction, including terminations, lost wages, denied
promotions, and written and verbal warnings as a
result of trying to meet family needs.
Third, respondents expressed concern that inadequate
parental time and attention-which is a concern
for all children in our society-may be especially
detrimental to children in low-income families
because their parents cannot afford to buy substitute
care. Furthermore, children in low-income families
have a well-documented higher prevalence of chronic
health issues and special learning needs (in this study,
more than two-thirds of the parents reported they
have at least one child with either a chronic health
issue or a special learning need). Children confronting
the challenge of a chronic illness or a learning disability
require significantly more time and attention from
parents and other adults than do children without
such challenges in order to stay healthy, do well in
school, and manage the obstacles associated with living
in poverty if they are to grow up into stable and
contributing citizens,workers, and parents.The parents
in this study, however, are often unable to devote
this time without jeopardizing their ability to support
their families.
Finally,working parents and employers agreed
that work schedule flexibility reduces the conflict
between jobs and family life, particularly by helping
parents attend to their children's health and educational
needs. However, many employers do not regard
such flexibility to be an option for low-wage workers
in today's workplace culture. Equally important, many
parents reported that flexibility alone would not be
enough to enable them to reconcile keeping a lowwage
job with raising a family. In addition, many families
reported that workplace flexibility translated to
being allowed to bring children to work, sometimes
regularly, though often not officially.
Beyond these policy-relevant findings, this
report paints a holistic picture of daily life in lowincome
America, describing respondents' day-to-day
feelings: their enthusiasm for their jobs, their hopes
for economic advancement, and their concerns-and,
in some cases, despair-about unstable family care situations,
job demands, housing instability, lonely children,
and troubled adolescents.
Above all else, researchers were impressed by
how frequently the three groups of respondents stood
on common ground. Encouragingly, on numerous
issues employers, parents, and teachers and child care
providers expressed a shared interest in the development
of alternative strategies to promote families,
jobs, and communities.
Policy Implications
The report details a number of policy initiatives on the
part of employers and public policymakers that would
help increase family and employment stability. Like
families everywhere, low-income families need three
inter-connected basics: time, not just to care for family
emergencies but time to be a family, to enjoy and nurture
each other, to be involved in their children's educations
and in their communities; sufficient income to
support their families and to afford time off from
work; and access to quality care-giving resources for
the times they cannot care for family members themselves.
Policies recommended include giving workers
more control over their schedules and time off when
needed for family illness, school activities, and relaxation.
A prohibition against mandatory overtime and
the right to some paid sick leave and vacation time
should fall among minimum labor standards. Public
policy should also include expansion of the Family
and Medical Leave Act to cover more people and more
care-giving situations and to provide a source of
income during leave. In order to allow reduced schedules
for those with greater care-giving responsibilities,
part-time work must receive equal hourly rates and at
least pro-rated benefits, and be covered by unemployment
insurance. Policies governing Temporary
Assistance to Needy Families must allow reduced work
hours for those with a family member who has special
health or educational needs with no effect on access
to benefits over a lifetime.
Government can help develop model employer
policies by directing tax and other public dollars to
reward workplaces that meet the family-friendly policies
listed here. Built into any such incentive programs
should be the provision that dollars go directly to
worker benefits.While the supply of child care needs
to be increased, including during nonstandard shifts,
public funds should especially be directed toward
development of family-supporting jobs where people
live and at hours that benefit child well-being.
The Across the Boundaries researchers hope
that the study's findings will illuminate the effects of
post-welfare policies on the social stability of the economic
bottom third of the nation and challenge the
notion that low-wage work sustains a family.This study
goes beyond the usual discussion of welfare reform-
which typically has focused on welfare rates, employment,
and changes in absolute poverty-to raise questions
about the health of family life, the feasibility of
low-wage workers' career and economic advancement,
and the impact of low-wage work patterns on children.
This report is presented with the intention of
integrating the projects' findings into national work
and family discussions, so that the particular needs of
this third of our nation's families will be central to all
future work and family policies and initiatives.
Pathbreaking CBO Study Shows Dramatic Increases in Income Disparities in 1980s and 1990s: An Analysis of the CBO Data, Isaac Shapiro, Robert Greenstein, and Wendell Primus, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, May 31, 2001.
Press Release excerpt:
A new pathbreaking Congressional Budget Office study(1), which includes the best data that any agency or institution has compiled on income and tax trends in recent decades, shows that the average after-tax income of the richest one percent of Americans grew by $414,000 between 1979 and 1997, after adjusting for inflation, while average after-tax income fell $100 for the poorest 20 percent of Americans and grew a modest $3,400 for those exactly in the middle of the income spectrum. In percentage terms, after-tax income grew an average of 157 percent over this period for the top one percent of the population, rose a modest 10 percent “ about one-half of one percent per year “ for the 20 percent of Americans in the middle of the income spectrum and was effectively unchanged for those in the bottom fifth.
The study shows that income gaps both between rich and poor and between the rich and the middle class widened in the 1980s and 1990s alike and reached their widest point on record in 1997. Income has grown for all groups since 1997, but while CBO does not yet have comprehensive data for more recent years, it did find that "information from tax returns suggests that the rapid rise in the share of income going to the top of the income distribution...continued in 1998 and 1999."
Data in the CBO report, which researchers at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analyzed, also show that the percentage of income Americans pay in federal taxes has declined since 1979 for every income group. By one key measure, the percentage of income paid in federal taxes fell the most for those with the highest incomes.
The CBO study blends Census and IRS data, counts non-cash benefits as income, and subtracts the taxes that households pay. Researchers and experts in the field regard the CBO data as providing the most comprehensive and reliable information on income trends. CBO developed the data in this study after consultation with many of the nation's leading experts on income measurement.
For Richer or for Poorer: Marriage as an Antipoverty Strategy, (Working Paper--Preliminary Draft), Isabel Sawhill and Adam Thomas, The Brookings Institution, November 5, 2001.
Author Abstract:
This study examines the effects of changes in family structure on children's economic well-being. An initial shift-share analysis indicates that, had the proportion of children living in female-headed families remained constant since 1970, the 1998 child poverty rate would have been 4.4 percentage points lower than its actual 1998 level of 18.3 percent. We then use the March 1999 Current Population Survey to conduct a second analysis in which marriages are simulated between single mothers and demographically-similar unrelated males. The microsimulation analysis addresses some of the shortcomings of the shift-share approach by allowing us to account for the possibility of a shortage of marriageable men, to control for unobservable differences between married men and women and their unmarried counterparts, and to measure directly the effects of increases in marriage on the economic well-being of children. Results from the microsimulation analysis suggest that, had the proportion of children living in female-headed families remained constant since 1970, the child poverty rate would have been 3.5 percentage points lower than its actual 1998 level. Among children whose mothers participated in a simulated marriage, the poverty rate would have fallen by almost two-thirds.
For a copy of the complete report, visit the Brookings Institution web site.
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