She tracks social changes within the American family
For three decades, UCLA sociologist Suzanne Bianchi has been documenting and tracking the powerful social forces that have reshaped the American family in the latter part of the 20th century, when vast numbers of women entered the workforce as a result of the gender revolution — leaving in their wake a number of provocative questions about the future of the family.
While parents these days are spending more and more time with their children, there are a greater proportion of women who are exiting their childbearing years without having had any children. Some social scientists believe many deliberately opted out of motherhood.
How will the American family change? Will childrearing roles reverse among men and women? Will working mothers spend less time caring for the needs of their children? Will fathers take on a greater role in child care?
With data from surveys and the results of other studies and time-use diaries to guide her, Bianchi, the Dorothy Mier Chair in Social Equities and Distinguished Professor of Sociology, has been able to tease out some interesting facts about the changes in families and how parents are balancing child care and careers. Bianchi recently presented some of her findings at Focus on Workplace Flexibility, a conference co-sponsored by Georgetown University Law Center and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
For one thing, more American women are exiting their childbearing years today without having had any children. This is especially true of highly educated women, Bianchi said. If they do have children, highly educated women tend to have fewer than they said they wanted when they were younger, researchers have found.
Sociologist Suzanne Bianchi
Currently in the U.S. among women ages 40 to 44, 20 percent have never had a child. That’s double the percentage for this same age group 30 years ago. The trend is even stronger — the percentage rises to 27 percent — for women in this age group with graduate or professional degrees.
So, asks Bianchi, are women foregoing motherhood because they want to devote more time to their careers rather than take on the heavy demands of being both a mother and career woman?
Social scientists have suggested that this is happening in other countries where fertility rates have rapidly declined — in Southern and Eastern Europe, for example, as well as some Asian countries, such as Japan. In these societies, women are being offered expanded opportunities in the workplace while still being expected by social convention to do most of the housework and child care with little help from men.
“Many women exercise the only choice available; they remain childless when work and family roles are too difficult to reconcile,” said Bianchi in her paper.
So are U.S. population experts worried that the U.S. fertility rate is dropping? In fact, the fertility rate has remained relatively stable, said Bianchi, who served for 16 years at the U.S. Census Bureau, beginning as a demographic statistician and rising to become assistant chief for social and demographic statistics. The rate has basically remained at two children (each woman having two children to replace herself and her partner). While greater numbers of highly educated women are not having children, taking up the slack are other women who are having more than two. Immigration also is a factor, since immigrant families tend to have a higher fertility rate, Bianchi said.
Although Bianchi said she doesn’t know exactly why childlessness has risen for 40-to-44-year-old American women — is this by choice or by an act of nature? — “it’s probably not a major concern if women and men are realizing the kind of life they want without children,” Bianchi said. “But if it’s an indicator that the stresses of parenthood and the work world have become too much to bear, then that is a greater concern that policymakers would want to think about.”
By studying time-use diaries, what Bianchi has been able to discover about American families is that parents today — fathers as well as mothers who are employed and moms who stay at home — are spending more time directly tending to the needs of their children than their counterparts did in 1975. “Over time, everybody’s time with their children has ratcheted up,” she said.
Moms who work outside the home are spending less time doing housework, sleeping, grooming, relaxing and in other pursuits and spending more time with their children. “Fathers are participating more as well,” Bianchi said, and not just in the fun aspects of parenting like coaching soccer, but in doing the grunt work of routine child care.
Despite the stresses of holding a job, working moms are spending less of their time at home doing other things in order to spend time with their children.
Bianchi also looked at the total number of hours that women and men spend in the labor force and in doing unpaid work at home. For employed moms and dads, the total time spent working outside and at home was approximately the same. Moms who stay at home clocked in fewer total work hours, she said. “They spend tons of time — more than anyone else —taking care of the kids and doing housework. But because they have no labor-market hours, they’re the group with the shortest overall hours.”
And while everyone feels time-pressed, women — no matter whether they work outside the home or not — feel it the most, she said.
The amount of time parents think their children need from them has intensified, reflected in the fact that kids today are involved in an array of activities to which parents must take them. “So why,” Bianchi asks, “has childrearing become such an intensified activity?” — especially among highly educated men and women.
“We argue that there might be several reasons,” she said. “If you delayed having children, you have probably done all the things you wanted to — like traveled. You’ve decided, ‘Hey, this is the time in my life when I want to do kids. You’re a high achiever already, and you may want to do kids in a big way. You become the Super Mom or Dad.”
Another reason is parents’ concern for their children’s well-being and safety, heightened by the fact that neighborhoods and playgrounds are no longer perceived as safe havens for children out on their own, Bianchi pointed out.
Other social scientists believe parents feel more insecurity about the future of their children as adults and have become increasingly concerned about getting their kids into the “right schools” early on and pushing them in the “right” direction.
Bianchi and her UCLA colleague, Sociology Professor Judith Seltzer, are currently at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York, where they are working on a book that will explore intergenerational family relationships at a time when the large generation of Baby Boomers heads into retirement. This shift is leaving increasing numbers of parents caught in the middle, caring for older parents, their own young children and older children still in need of parental support well into their 20s and 30s.
Bianchi and Seltzer will be returning to UCLA in the fall.
