Custodial Grandparent's Job Loss During the COVID-19 Pandemic and Its Relationship With Parenting Stress and Mental Health.

Involuntary job loss during the COVID-19 pandemic adds challenges, especially for custodial grandparents that are taking care of grandchildren. Grandparents are relatively vulnerable, and they need more attention and support when facing the negative impacts of COVID-19. This study analyzed cross-sectional survey data collected from 234 custodial grandparents via Qualtrics Panels in June 2020 in the United States. After using the propensity score weighting adjustment, results from logistic and ordinary least squares regression showed that compared with grandparents that did not lose their job during the pandemic, grandparents that did had more parenting stress and worse mental health. Moderation analysis also showed that social support was a significant moderator of the relationship between job loss and mental health, but not the relationship between job loss and parenting stress. The findings and implications are discussed.

Multipartner Fertility in Nicaragua: Complex Family Formation in a Low-Income Setting.

CONTEXT: Multipartner fertility (having children with more than one partner) is an important topic in demographic research, but little is known about its incidence and correlates in low-income settings, where rates may be high because of poverty, union instability and early childbearing. METHODS: Data from the 2011-2012 Encuesta Nicaragüense de Demografía y Salud were used to calculate the prevalence of multipartner fertility among 8,320 mothers and 2,141 fathers with two or more children. Logistic and multinomial regression were used to identify individual and family characteristics associated with multipartner fertility. RESULTS: Among those with multiple children, 33% of mothers and 41% of fathers had had children with more than one partner. The prevalence of multipartner fertility was elevated among less-educated women, nonreligious men, and women and men who had grown up in urban areas (odds ratios, 1.3-1.6). Multipartner fertility was associated with lower current household wealth among mothers, and with increased risk of single parenthood and higher fertility among mothers and fathers. Fathers who had had multiple fertility partners were six times as likely as fathers with one fertility partner to report not providing financial support to, or sharing their surname with, at least one of their biological children. CONCLUSION: Multipartner fertility is a critical demographic and social phenomenon that may contribute to and reflect important gender and family structure inequalities in Nicaragua. Mothers with multipartner fertility may be at especially high risk of raising children without the children's fathers and with low levels of economic support.

Joint physical custody and neighborhood friendships in middle childhood.

Almost half of first marriages end in divorce, which in turn may produce joint physical custody arrangements. Seen by many states to be in the best interest of the child, joint physical custody is increasingly common. Yet much is unknown about its consequences for children. This article considers how joint physical custody arrangements affect children's neighborhood friendships, an important component of child well-being because of their contributions to social and cognitive development. Thirteen parents and 17 children (aged 5­11) in 10 families, selected via convenience and snowball sampling, participated in semistructured interviews. The findings suggest that joint physical custody arrangements do not imperil children's neighborhood friendships; indeed, most children and parents interviewed voiced contentment in this area.

Growing up without parents: socialisation and gender relations in orphaned-child-headed households in rural Zimbabwe.

The most distressing consequences of the HIV/AIDS pandemic's impact on children has been the development of child-headed households (CHHs). Child 'only' households challenge notions of the ideal home, family, and 'normal' childhood, as well as undermining international attempts to institute children's rights. The development of these households raises practical questions about how the children will cope without parental guidance during their childhood and how this experience will affect their adulthood. Drawing on ethnographic research with five child heads and their siblings, this article explores how orphaned children living in 'child only' households organise themselves in terms of household domestic and paid work roles, explores the socialisation of children by children and the negotiation of teenage girls' movement. Further, it examines whether the orphaned children are in some way attempting to 'mimic' previously existing family/household gender relations after parental death. The study showed that all members in the CHHs irrespective of age and gender are an integral part of household labour including food production. Although there is masculinisation of domestic chores in boys 'only' households, roles are distributed by age. On the other hand, households with a gender mix tended to follow traditional gender norms. Conflict often arose when boys controlled teenage girls' movement and sexuality. There is a need for further research on CHHs to better understand orphans' experiences, and to inform policy interventions.

Welfare impact of a ban on child labor.

This article presents a new rationale for imposing restrictions on child labor. In a standard overlapping generation model where parental altruism results in transfers that children allocate to consumption and education, the Nash-Cournot equilibrium results in suboptimal levels of parental transfers and does not maximize the average level of utility of currently living agents. A ban on child labor decreases children's income and generates an increase in parental transfers bringing their levels closer to the optimum, raising children's welfare as well as average welfare in the short run and in the long run. Moreover, the inability to work allows children to allocate more time to education, and it leads to an increase in human capital. Besides, to increase transfers, parents decrease savings and hence physical capital accumulation. When prices are flexible, these effects diminish the positive welfare impact of the ban on child labor.

Abandoned in Brussels, delivered in Paris: long-distance transports of unwanted children in the eighteenth century.

The study uses examinations and other documents produced in the course of a large-scale investigation undertaken by the central authorities of the Austrian Netherlands in the 1760s on the transportation of about thirty children from Brussels to the Parisian foundling house by a Brussels shoemaker and his wife. It combines the rich archival evidence with sparse indications in the literature to demonstrate that long-distance transports of abandoned children were a common but historiographically neglected by-product of the ambiguities of foundling policies in eighteenth-century Europe and provides insight into the functioning of the associated networks and the motives of parents, doctors, midwives, transporters, and local officials involved.

Algerian orphans and colonial Christianity in Algeria, 1866-1939.

This article considers the exceptional fate of the orphan survivors of the great Algerian demographic crisis of the late 1860s who subsequently converted to Catholicism. Using a prosopographical approach, this study seeks to highlight the complexities of national identity in France and to explore some of the racial tensions emerging in Algeria in the late nineteenth century.

Child support and the postdivorce economic well-being of mothers, fathers, and children.

This article provides national estimates of the current and potential impact of private child support transfers on the economic well-being of custodial and noncustodial families following marital dissolution. Mothers and children fare dramatically worse than fathers after marital dissolution; these differences, however, would be much more pronounced in the absence of private child support. Simulations of four existing child support guidelines show that substantial increases in economic well-being among mother-custody families are possible within the structure of the existing child support system, with minimal impact on poverty among nonresident fathers. Under all of these guidelines, however, custodial-mother families would continue to fare substantially worse than nonresident fathers.

A survey of contact with offspring and assistance with child care among parents with psychotic disorders.

To help improve services for parents with psychotic disorders, patients with such disorders in three treatment agencies in Queensland, Australia, were surveyed about whether they were parents, how much contact they had with their offspring, and who provided assistance with child care. Of the 342 individuals with psychotic disorders who participated in the study, 124 were parents. Forty-eight parents in the study had children under age 16, and 20 of these parents (42 percent) had their children living with them. Most parents relied on relatives or friends for assistance with child care. Barriers to child care services identified by parents were inability to pay, lack of local services, and fear of losing custody of children.

Custodial grandparenting: stresses, coping skills, and relationships with grandchildren.

This cross-sectional study compared three groups of custodial grandparents, those raising problematic grandchildren, those raising "normal" grandchildren, and noncustodial grandparents to identify the unique challenges and expectations faced by custodial grandparents due to their nontraditional roles while attempting to disentangle grandparental role demands from child-specific problems as sources of distress. Those grandparents raising grandchildren demonstrating neurological, physical, emotional, or behavioral problems exhibited the most distress, the most disruption of roles, and the most deteriorated grandparent-grandchild relationships. Although custodial grandparents raising apparently normal grandchildren demonstrated less distress, less disruption of roles, and less deterioration of the grandparent-grandchild relationship than those grandparents raising grandchildren displaying problems, in these respects, they still demonstrated higher such levels than did traditional grandparents.