Refusing to have kids with your spouse, the decline of hanging out in the street, giving thanks at Thanksgiving Dinner (and why my British friends think that's weird).
It’s weird that they consider thanking someone else as talking about yourself. To me it was always a part of the holiday that was focused on other people. Often people were specifically thanking other people around the table.
Yeah fair point--I think it was the distinction between sharing something that you personally feel grateful for vs. just kind of toasting to something more broadly as a group. The personal element of the ask is the thing that they found a little weird (also, this is literally one British couple, so who knows if it's universal haha I just thought it was a funny anecdote).
It takes some conscious and/or serendipitous design elements to make streets into places. People feeling safe and welcome to transit a thoroughfare is a minimal starting point, not a successful conclusion.
I know a divorced guy who had shared custody without disrupting the kids' social lives. Both him and his ex-wife had their own apartment and kids stayed living in their old house. Him and the ex switched off weeks at the house with the kids, spending the rest of the time in their own apartment. They did that for about two years and are selling the house now that the youngest kid is in college. Obviously it wouldn't be financially feasible for many families, but it made a lot of sense.
I wouldn't know how to answer the question about refusing kids. Desire for kids seems like a conversation about compatibility that happens before the wedding, right? In that case, it seems wrong to refuse to have kids if you indicated earlier that you wanted them. And wrong to pressure your spouse to have kids if you agreed earlier to not have them. Without that context, it's hard to answer whether it'd be wrong to refuse to have kids with your partner.
I was surprised by how many kids are in sole physical custody arrangements, and I wonder how it compares to the US and also to whether the parents ever married. Anecdotally, the parents I know who married and then divorced seem to have more equal/near-equal parenting time arrangements, while the never married single moms I know are more likely to be the sole or primary parenting time parent.
Numeracy skills as a measure of potential job impact versus earnings is also interesting. I read new research recently from Nordic countries that found women were more likely to start trying to have kids as earnings flattened (using IVF records), but the drop in numeracy skills for both sexes seems more immediately caused-by birth/infant care because I wouldn’t expect noticeable cognitive changes otherwise among people in their 20s and 30s. Anecdotally again, I wonder how perceptions of mothers’ work skills after birth/employment gap varies by both the perceivers’ demographics as well as the mother’s
The research on shared custody is fascinating. I do think the teen years introduce a range of factors that exacerbate the challenges of shared custody, including friction over differing parental approaches to independence (driving, curfews, parties, sex and birth control, drug and alcohol use) and the increased likelihood of “big” problems that divorced parents may handle differently (unplanned pregnancy, academic struggles, getting arrested, getting caught drinking), plus the natural developmental separation from parents that starts to happen.
I’m an American married to Brit and living in the UK - I’ve discovered that any “forced” personal sharing (what my husband sometimes refers to as my penchant for “organized fun”) in groups is usually a no-go, with the exception of- very occasionally!- Christians in a small group faith context. We had a “Thankful tree” our first Thanksgiving and if there hadn’t been children around, I don’t think any of the adults would have written their blessings on the leaves. 😅
Very interesting! Yes I definitely sensed that the "being put on the spot" aspect was integral to the discomfort haha. (Also, hello! Nice to meet a fellow American-in-the-UK!)
Thanks for this! Re: the child penalty, what are some other studies you'd recommend that look at the factors that contribute to it? I imagine that it depends on the industry, but aside from the obvious explanation (the decline in women's ability to spend as much time at work post-kids), I wonder how much of it has to do with networking and women's ability to keep up with professional relationships.
Great question! Just a heads up: this is an absolutely massive body of research with surprisingly few "answers." We know that the child penalty emerges pretty universally as countries develop (https://www.nber.org/papers/w31649). But while there is massive variation in child penalties across countries, it's very hard to pin down what actually explains such variation beyond "culture" (https://www.nber.org/reporter/2022number4/child-penalties-and-gender-inequality). And nobody's really figured out how to reliably *reduce* child penalties. Family policies don't seem to have much of an effect, at least not in the short term. Though some would say that family policies *do* have an effect, mainly by helping to shift the culture, but that's very hard to measure and takes a long time. (Funnily enough, another study I was thinking of including in this week's round-up found that women with more education than their spouses have smaller child penalties, which maybe isn't surprising (https://docs.iza.org/dp17380.pdf)).
I think you are probably onto something with the networking issue! I also think the lack of visibility of work performance--the ability to say, hey, look I'm doing all this stuff to manage my children's lives and I'm doing it well--is a reason that the skills we build and refine doing unpaid domestic labor don't "count" in the labor market.
It’s weird that they consider thanking someone else as talking about yourself. To me it was always a part of the holiday that was focused on other people. Often people were specifically thanking other people around the table.
Yeah fair point--I think it was the distinction between sharing something that you personally feel grateful for vs. just kind of toasting to something more broadly as a group. The personal element of the ask is the thing that they found a little weird (also, this is literally one British couple, so who knows if it's universal haha I just thought it was a funny anecdote).
It takes some conscious and/or serendipitous design elements to make streets into places. People feeling safe and welcome to transit a thoroughfare is a minimal starting point, not a successful conclusion.
www.iwritewordsgood.com/apl/patterns/apl124.htm
I know a divorced guy who had shared custody without disrupting the kids' social lives. Both him and his ex-wife had their own apartment and kids stayed living in their old house. Him and the ex switched off weeks at the house with the kids, spending the rest of the time in their own apartment. They did that for about two years and are selling the house now that the youngest kid is in college. Obviously it wouldn't be financially feasible for many families, but it made a lot of sense.
I wouldn't know how to answer the question about refusing kids. Desire for kids seems like a conversation about compatibility that happens before the wedding, right? In that case, it seems wrong to refuse to have kids if you indicated earlier that you wanted them. And wrong to pressure your spouse to have kids if you agreed earlier to not have them. Without that context, it's hard to answer whether it'd be wrong to refuse to have kids with your partner.
Yeah I agree with you on the refusing to have kids thing! Hard to say either way without more context.
I was surprised by how many kids are in sole physical custody arrangements, and I wonder how it compares to the US and also to whether the parents ever married. Anecdotally, the parents I know who married and then divorced seem to have more equal/near-equal parenting time arrangements, while the never married single moms I know are more likely to be the sole or primary parenting time parent.
Numeracy skills as a measure of potential job impact versus earnings is also interesting. I read new research recently from Nordic countries that found women were more likely to start trying to have kids as earnings flattened (using IVF records), but the drop in numeracy skills for both sexes seems more immediately caused-by birth/infant care because I wouldn’t expect noticeable cognitive changes otherwise among people in their 20s and 30s. Anecdotally again, I wonder how perceptions of mothers’ work skills after birth/employment gap varies by both the perceivers’ demographics as well as the mother’s
The research on shared custody is fascinating. I do think the teen years introduce a range of factors that exacerbate the challenges of shared custody, including friction over differing parental approaches to independence (driving, curfews, parties, sex and birth control, drug and alcohol use) and the increased likelihood of “big” problems that divorced parents may handle differently (unplanned pregnancy, academic struggles, getting arrested, getting caught drinking), plus the natural developmental separation from parents that starts to happen.
I’m an American married to Brit and living in the UK - I’ve discovered that any “forced” personal sharing (what my husband sometimes refers to as my penchant for “organized fun”) in groups is usually a no-go, with the exception of- very occasionally!- Christians in a small group faith context. We had a “Thankful tree” our first Thanksgiving and if there hadn’t been children around, I don’t think any of the adults would have written their blessings on the leaves. 😅
Very interesting! Yes I definitely sensed that the "being put on the spot" aspect was integral to the discomfort haha. (Also, hello! Nice to meet a fellow American-in-the-UK!)
Thanks for this! Re: the child penalty, what are some other studies you'd recommend that look at the factors that contribute to it? I imagine that it depends on the industry, but aside from the obvious explanation (the decline in women's ability to spend as much time at work post-kids), I wonder how much of it has to do with networking and women's ability to keep up with professional relationships.
Great question! Just a heads up: this is an absolutely massive body of research with surprisingly few "answers." We know that the child penalty emerges pretty universally as countries develop (https://www.nber.org/papers/w31649). But while there is massive variation in child penalties across countries, it's very hard to pin down what actually explains such variation beyond "culture" (https://www.nber.org/reporter/2022number4/child-penalties-and-gender-inequality). And nobody's really figured out how to reliably *reduce* child penalties. Family policies don't seem to have much of an effect, at least not in the short term. Though some would say that family policies *do* have an effect, mainly by helping to shift the culture, but that's very hard to measure and takes a long time. (Funnily enough, another study I was thinking of including in this week's round-up found that women with more education than their spouses have smaller child penalties, which maybe isn't surprising (https://docs.iza.org/dp17380.pdf)).
I think you are probably onto something with the networking issue! I also think the lack of visibility of work performance--the ability to say, hey, look I'm doing all this stuff to manage my children's lives and I'm doing it well--is a reason that the skills we build and refine doing unpaid domestic labor don't "count" in the labor market.