Tag-team parenting refers to parents who work nonoverlapping or desynchronized schedules and is likely driven by parents' job demands as well as access to and preferences for nonparental childcare. Dual-earner parents with young children are more likely than other couples to work more desynchronized schedules. Yet little is known as to whether their propensity to work desynchronized schedules has changed over time given vast changes in maternal employment and the early care and education landscape over the past 30 years. Using a sample of dual-earner parents with young children from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, the authors describe and decompose trends in parents' work schedule synchronization to show whether, and why, tag-team parenting has changed over time in the United States. The results suggest that tag-team parenting declined by 17 percent to 26 percent between 1997 and 2019. However, these declines were concentrated among households with greater social and economic resources. Occupational upgrading among parents, increases in household income, and increases in the availability of publicly funded early education explained the greatest proportion of the decline in desynchronized schedules. These results point to the affordability of childcare and parental employment demands as key determinants of parents' work schedule synchronization.
Youth employment has long been posited to have a detrimental impact on educational outcomes and to potentially contribute to the intergenerational association of educational outcomes. The early 1980s in the United States constituted a time when high school employment was especially common, and the routes to gainful employment without a college education were especially more accessible than they are today. Leveraging rich educational data on a nationally representative cohort of 10th graders in 1980, the authors apply recently developed double machine learning-based causal decomposition methods to examine how working while in high school causally links parental educational attainment to children's educational attainment. The results indicate that working in high school plays little to no role in explaining the intergenerational transmission of educational attainment. Although the authors consistently find evidence that working in 10th grade, particularly working long hours, has a robust negative impact on educational outcomes, there is little variation in the prevalence of working. The authors do find significant heterogeneity in the effect of working on dropout rates for the children of dropouts compared with children whose parents completed high school, indicating that about 10 percent of the gap in dropout rates between these groups can be attributed to differences in the effect of working.
Since the turn of the century, sociologists and other scholars concerned about digital inequality have most often been concerned about disparities in the quality of Internet use, not necessarily the availability of Internet access itself. However, the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic laid bare the fact that the Internet’s potential benefits to mitigating the spread of the virus were available only to those with Internet access. In this visualization, the author uses household-level data from the American Community Survey from 2013 to 2023 ( n = 10,713,204 households) to estimate a linear probability model predicting Internet access by race/ethnicity, household educational attainment, and poverty status. The results suggest that household Internet access has increased over the past decade, but disparities still exist on all three dimensions.
Using the National Survey of American Life: Coping with Stress in the 21st Century, this study is guided by the following question: To what extent do family relationships (i.e., frequency of contact with, closeness to, and negative interactions with family) shape racial and ethnic identity among U.S.-born and foreign-born Afro-Caribbeans? The authors operationalize identity as closeness to Black Americans, closeness to Caribbean Blacks, and identity preference. The results indicate that closeness to family was associated with feeling close to Black Americans for U.S.- and foreign-born Caribbean Blacks. Second, closeness to family was associated with higher odds of closeness to other Caribbean Blacks, but only among foreign-born Afro-Caribbeans. Last, negative interactions with family was associated with adopting an ethnic identity instead of a racial identity for U.S.-born Caribbeans. For foreign-born Afro-Caribbeans, negative interactions with family was associated with lower likelihood of adopting an ethnic identity relative to an “other” identity. This study demonstrates the role of family relationships in understanding identity processes among U.S.- and foreign-born Afro-Caribbeans.
Geographic disparities in Alzheimer’s disease are often attributed to sociodemographic differences across communities or unequal access to opportunity structures whose use serves as protective mechanisms. Yet limited research considers the social dynamics between residents that are enabled by these opportunity structures. The authors adopt a population-level approach to evaluate how ethnoracial diversity and opportunity structures function jointly to facilitate the development of bridging social capital (i.e., mixing of dissimilar people) which is hypothesized to predict Alzhiemer’s disease mortality rates. Upon analyzing Alzheimer’s disease mortality records from 2,469 U.S. counties, the authors find that counties whose sociodemographic composition and opportunity structures combine to encourage bridging capital potential exhibit lower mortality rates than counties with fewer such opportunities. These findings consistently appear in environments whose composition and structure are conducive to social mixing (i.e., workhoods and civic organizations) but inconsistently in environments that are less conducive to social mixing (i.e., residential neighborhoods). The findings highlight the importance of structural factors that create opportunities for social capital.
