Publications by authors named "Melissa A Milkie"

Article Synopsis
  • The study examines how different racial/ethnic mothering practices affect the time mothers spend with their children, using data from the American Time Use Survey between 2003 and 2019.
  • It reveals that while socioeconomic status influences maternal time spent with children, significant differences persist across racial/ethnic groups, reflecting unique cultural norms in mothering.
  • Findings highlight specific trends: Black mothers prioritize religious activities despite less overall time, Latina mothers focus on daily routines with elementary-aged children, and Asian mothers emphasize teaching and mealtime interactions with younger kids.
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Family scholars examining time spent on children's care focus heavily on mothers' allocations to a specific sphere of active caregiving activities But children's needs for care and supervision involve connection to others; and many others beyond mothers can and do provide care, especially as children grow. Using a "linked lives" approach that centers relationality, we show how time diaries can illuminate children's time spent in "socially connected" care. Using recent (2014-2019) time diary data from the American and the United Kingdom Time Use Surveys, we examine mothers', children's, and teenagers' days to assess two forms of connected care time.

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A sizeable portion of parents say they lack time with children-an important social problem given that time strains link to parental well-being. Extending perspectives on the demands and rewards of parenting beyond the individual level, we provide a contextual-level window onto mothers' and fathers' time strains. Based on data from the European Quality of Life Survey 2016/17 (n = 5,898), we analyze whether parents feel they spend enough time caring for their children using multilevel models.

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Parents' time with children has increased over the past several decades, according to many scholars. Yet, research predominantly focuses on childcare activities, overlooking the majority of time that parents spend with children. Using time diaries from the 1986-2015 Canadian General Social Survey, we examine trends in the quantity and distribution of parents' childcare time and total co-present time in the company of children, as well as the behavioral or compositional drivers of these trends.

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The COVID-19 pandemic created rapid, wide-ranging, and significant disruptions to work and family life. Accordingly, these dramatic changes may have reshaped parents' gendered division of labor in the short term. Using data from 1,234 Canadian parents in different-sex relationships, we compare retrospective reports of perceived sharing in how housework and childcare tasks were split prior to the declaration of the pandemic to assessments of equality afterward.

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Understanding social aspects of parental well-being is vital, because parents' welfare has implications not only for parents themselves but also for child development, fertility, and the overall health of a society. This article provides a critical review of scholarship on parenthood and well-being in advanced economies published from 2010 to 2019. It focuses on the role of social, economic, cultural, and institutional contexts of parenting in influencing adult well-being.

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Time spent with children has become a central concern in North American parenting culture. Using the 2011 Canadian Work, Stress, and Health study (N = 2,007), we examine employed parents' perceptions about having too little time with children and whether these relate to parents' mental and physical health. The "pernicious stressor" hypothesis posits that the demands of paid work combined with intensive mothering or involved fathering create unique time tensions that act as chronic stressors and that these are associated with poorer health and well-being.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates how American socialization values for children have shifted since the mid-1980s, focusing on whether hard work or self-expression has become more emphasized.
  • Analyzing data from General Social Surveys between 1986 and 2018, the findings show that the preference for hard work has increased due to economic uncertainty, while self-expression values like autonomy have declined.
  • Despite the focus on hard work, there's still a stable valuing of compassion, and the decline in valuing obedience suggests changing parenting approaches influenced by socioeconomic factors.
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Sociological research focuses on how poverty, family, and neighborhood dynamics shape children's problems, but knowledge about how school is related to children's mental health is underdeveloped, despite its central presence in children's lives. Using a social structure and personality-stress contagion perspective, the authors use a nationally representative sample of first graders (N = 10,700) to assess how the classroom learning environment affects children's emotional and behavior problems. Children in more negative environments-such as classrooms with fewer material resources and whose teachers receive less respect from colleagues-have more learning, externalizing, interpersonal, and internalizing problems.

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In this article, we aim to identify the sources of mastery--the understanding that individuals hold about their ability to control the circumstances of their lives. The sample for our inquiry was drawn from the Medicare beneficiary files of people 65 and older living in Washington, DC, and two adjoining Maryland counties. We find that past circumstances, particularly those reflecting status attainment and early exposure to intractable hardships, converge with stressors experienced in late life to influence elders' level of mastery.

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