Why Babies Today May Want to Choose Their Parents Wisely (So What Who Cares? vol 4 issue 4)
Hello!
You may or may not be alerted to this new edition of So What, Who Cares via Twitter. If so, you may or may not have noticed that I reduced my engagement on that platform considerably. I'm having a good, hard think about what it means to remain on a platform whose commitment to growth and engagement metrics seems almost entirely divorced from any acknowledgment of the impact its business has on people's lives.
I don't have any definitive answers yet, but I did want to point to two links: my recent appearance on Download, the Relay.FM weekly tech news podcast, where Jason Snell, Stephen Hackett and I all talked about the Twitter conundrum (and I may have referenced my experience as a forum mod for Television Without Pity); and this BoingBoing write-up of the #deactiday campaign, wherein people who are just Done with Twitter in the wake of their decisions qua Alex Jones will be deactivating their accounts on Friday, August 17, 2018.
I'm trying out Mastodon right now too, and I can be found over on the Mastodon.social server.
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My medical chart read "elderly primagravida." I considered the term simultaneously bizarre and charming. There are so few places -- outside of incel forums and Olympic commentator booths -- where a woman under 40 can be considered "elderly," but modern medicine is always good for reminding us of the occasionally disconcerting gap between newer societal norms and caveman-era biology.
I didn't consider myself a medical anomaly because I was so typical of my cohort: urban-dwelling, college-educated, partnered. But it's always useful to be reminded that there is no one definition of "normal," and so I cannot stop thinking about the Upshot piece last week, "The Age That Women Have Babies: How A Gap Divides America." The histogram at top is gee-whizzy -- and as Twitter's @drdrang pointed out to me, it's gone bimodal by 2016 -- but what I really found edifying were the maps showing two contrasting distributions for the average ages of a first-time mother.
One set contrasted unmarried versus married mothers: the average age of a first-time mother if she's unmarried is 23.1, compared to 28.8 for married women. The other set contrasted women without college degrees vs. those who had a bachelor's degree or higher: the average age of a first-time mother if she doesn't have a degree is 23.8, compared to 30.3 for degreed women.
So what? It is becoming impossible to ignore how a college education also codifies a set of cultural and financial behaviors. This piece on poverty, jobs and families in West Virginia notes a majority of young mothers will elect to remain unmarried, which sociologist Ann Tickamyer chalks up to "crappy economics and a lack of mates who present an opportunity for any kind of financial or emotional gain."
Contrast that with the assortative mating that's been taking place among the college educated, and how that affects family size; dual-career, dual-student-loan couples wait until they're established in their careers and have gnawed away at a chunk of college-induced debt before adding a child. And as a Freakonomics podcast from July 2017 notes, this pattern of waiting to get married and have children reaps some very real benefits:
MELISSA KEARNEY: It’s really hard for researchers to establish the causal effect of family structure or marriage on kids’ outcomes, of course, because we don’t randomly assign kids to married or unmarried parents. But there’s a lot of research that works really hard to isolate factors. That research consistently shows that kids who live with two married parents have lower rates of poverty, have higher cognitive test scores in childhood, have fewer behavioral problems. They seem to have better health outcomes. They’re less likely to live in poverty when they’re 25. They’re more likely to complete college and they’re less likely to become young, unmarried parents themselves.
In other words, college education, age and marriage all combine to give some children a very real boost.
Who cares? Anyone who's watching mobility in the U.S. A recent report on poverty in the United States found that a child growing up in a community with a low level of economic or social mobility can expect to earn up to 40% less during his or her lifetime than one who lives in a high-mobility neighborhood. In fact, only 16% of children raised in poverty become economically successful adults.
By the metric of intergenerational earnings elasticity (IGE), which measures how much of a child’s deviation from average income can be accounted for by the parents’ income, a value of zero means there is no connection whatsoever between a parent's earnings and their child's earning potential, while a value of one means you inherit your parents' economic position. In the U.S., the IGE has risen from less than 0.3 after World War II to 0.5 today.
In other words, American babies better choose good parents today if they want to bolster their prospects for economic mobility tomorrow.
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Your pop culture recommendation of the day: Read Outside magazine's interview with Melissa Cristina Márquez, the shark scientist who was bitten by a crocodile while working on a documentary for Shark Week. I adore this quote:
When I got picked up out of the water, the first thing that came out of my mouth was, “It was an exploratory bite, it was an exploratory bite!”
May we all handle exploratory bites with such aplomb.
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