Tag Archives: children

Are McMansions bad for children?

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I recently read how one family wanted to help their kids avoid McMansions:

No McMansions: Andrew Porter said that his family was drawn to Maywood by the idea of raising his two preschool-age daughters in a community full of homes that felt plucked from a bygone era.

“The historical designation really helps preserve the character of the neighborhood,” said Porter, a lawyer in his mid-30s who lives on 23rd Road. “You don’t have to deal with people tearing down the original structures and replacing them with huge McMansions on tiny lots.”

So here is one argument for how McMansions could be bad for kids: they get to experience older homes in a historic neighborhood. What might be other reasons?

  1. McMansions encourage consumption. They are big houses with room for lots of stuff.
  2. McMansions teach bad things about proper architecture and design.
  3. McMansions are often constructed in suburban neighborhoods where kids become dependent on cars, limiting their opportunities to explore, and have limited interactions with neighbors.
  4. McMansions are poorly constructed (not built to last, cheaper materials) and this could hurt kids in the long run.
  5. Fires work differently in McMansions.
  6. If the oft-criticized teardown McMansion is located on a small lot, there is little room for kids to play.

I imagine some McMansion critics could add to this list. Of course, the owners of such homes might argue McMansion could also be positive for kids – how many parents would move into a home that could hurt their children? I’m actually a little surprised neither side makes this case more strongly; claiming that their actions are best for their children or future generations is a common tactic of opinionated people in the United States.

Signs to slow down for children are not recommended

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Despite the well intentioned efforts of parents, posting signs instructing drivers to slow down for children do not help:

While Smith’s actions came from a protective place, his efforts may be fruitless, as there’s little evidence to support the effectiveness of advisory signs in regard to changing driver behavior or making children safer. In fact, the National Cooperative Highway Research Program firmly discourages the use of signs that read “Caution — children at play” or “Slow — Children.” One reason, points out Slate, is common sense. “If the driver does not notice the characteristics of a neighborhood as they drive down the street, why would they notice a sign as they pass it, or remember it for more than a few seconds once they have passed it?” an engineer from an online forum noted on the website.

There’s also the possibility that a sign emphasizing the presence of children in one location may imply that an absence of warning would mean no kids are present in another. And finally, such warnings could falsely convey that the street is a play area. The same principle applies to neighborhood stop signs, which encourage drivers to actually speed up in between them.

One proposed solution:

“It largely comes down to awareness,” Janette Fennell, founder and president of KidsAndCars, a nonprofit safety organization, tells Yahoo Parenting. “Drivers often have an ‘It can’t happen to me’ mindset when speeding, and most people overestimate their driving skills.” But lowering the speed limit even a little helps reduce the number of accidents and increase the survival rate of victims, according to research published by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. “I’d estimate that a person is about 74 percent more likely to be killed if they’re struck by vehicles traveling at 30 mph than at 25 mph,” study co-author Brian Tefft told Wired.

Here is a better solution as even speed limits can only do so much: more road diets. In many places, streets are far too wide for what is needed for typical traffic. This gives drivers the impression that they have a margin of error. And, having nothing in their path – ranging from speed bumps to stop signs to parked cars – only contributes to driving faster. If you really want people to slow down when driving through residential neighborhoods, we should: (1) narrow streets, (2) have regular street parking, and (3) plant trees closer to the roadway. All of these things would give drivers more consistent indicators that they can’t drive as fast. Drivers may not like this as it feels more closed in and they have to pay attention more (will someone open a car door? How far do I get over if a car is coming from the opposite direction?) but it will slow them down.

Making these changes would take a major effort as many streets have been built extra-wide for decades. Yet, we have often privileged the car when designing roads and one of the consequences is faster driving and increased risk for pedestrians and others utilizing roadways.

A more radical solution that wouldn’t require changing many roads? Promoting driverless cars that closely control how fast vehicles move.

DuPage County one of the best counties for poor kids to move up

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A recent study by two economists shows DuPage County is one of the best in United States for social mobility for those who start toward the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder:

On the other extreme, poor children raised in DuPage, Illinois, have the best shot at climbing the economic ladder. The Chicago suburb is home to several large corporations, including McDonald’s and Ace Hardware, and is one of the nation’s wealthiest counties. Children from poor families in DuPage grow up to earn 15%, or $3,900, more than the national average by the time they are 26.

To conduct the study, Professors Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren looked at tax records for more than 5 million children whose families moved from one county to another between 1996 and 2012. Their analysis showed that where children are raised does have an impact on their chances of moving up economically. In addition, the younger a child is when he or she moves to a neighborhood with more opportunity, the greater the income boost. Neighborhoods matter more for boys than for girls.

Chetty and Hendren did not say why neighborhoods have such an impact on children’s success. But it did find that counties with higher rates of upward mobility have five things in common: less segregation by race and income, lower levels of income inequality, better schools, lower crime rates and more two-parent households.

The duo, along with Harvard Professor Lawrence Katz, also released Monday a second study that examined the impact of a federal program from the mid-1990s to move low-income families to better neighborhoods. It found that children who relocated when they were younger than 13 made 31% more, on average, than their peers whose families were not given vouchers to move. The relocated children were also more likely to attend college and less likely to be single parents.

DuPage County is not the most diverse place  nor is the most integrated but it is pretty wealthy, has a number of good school districts, and has lots of jobs (across a range of sectors). It also has a reputation of being quite conservative and wasn’t that open to non-whites in the decades after World War II. Yet, I don’t find it too surprising that it would be a good place for social mobility though I imagine this might differ quite a bit across communities within the county.

The second study mentioned above looks at the Moving To Opportunity program which didn’t have immediate influence for adults who move but may just have good long-term impacts for kids. Read more about the latest findings here.

Summarizing 25 years of researching the lives of 790 Baltimore kids

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Three sociologists followed 790 Baltimore children over 25 years and published a book of their findings in 2014. Here is a quick summary of their results:

“The implication is where you start in life is where you end up in life,” Alexander said. “It’s very sobering to see how this all unfolds.”

Among the most striking findings:

  • Almost none of the children from low-income families made it through college. Of the children from low-income families, only 4 percent had a college degree at age 28, compared to 45 percent of the children from higher-income backgrounds. “That’s a shocking tenfold difference across social lines,” Alexander said.
  • Among those who did not attend college, white men from low-income backgrounds found the best-paying jobs. Although they had the lowest rate of college attendance and completion, white men from low-income backgrounds found high-paying jobs in what remained of Baltimore’s industrial economy. At age 28, 45 percent of them were working in construction trades and industrial crafts, compared with 15 percent of black men from similar backgrounds and virtually no women. In those trades, whites earned, on average, more than twice what blacks made. Those well-paying blue collar jobs are not as abundant as during the years after World War II, but they still exist, and a large issue today is who gets them: Among high school dropouts, at age 22, 89 percent of white dropouts were working compared with 40 percent of black dropouts.
  • White women from low-income backgrounds benefit financially from marriage and stable live-in partnerships. Though both white and black women who grew up in lower-income households earned less than white men, when you consider household income, white women reached parity with white men — because they were married to them. Black women not only had low earnings, they were less likely than whites to be in stable family unions and so were less likely to benefit from a spouse’s earnings. White and black women from low-income households also had similar teen birth rates, but white women more often had a spouse or partner, a relationship that helped mitigate the challenges. “It is access to good paying work that perpetuates the privilege of working class white men over working class black men,” Alexander said. “By partnering with these men, white working class women share in that privilege.”
  • Better-off white men were most likely to abuse drugs. Better-off white men had the highest self-reported rates of drug use, binge drinking, and chronic smoking, followed in each instance by white men of disadvantaged families; in addition, all these men reported high levels of arrest. At age 28, 41 percent of white men — and 49 percent of black men — from low-income backgrounds had a criminal conviction, but the white employment rate was much higher. The reason, Alexander says, is that blacks don’t have the social networks whites do to help them find jobs despite these roadblocks.

My quick interpretation: race and class still matter. White children could access jobs through social networks (a point also made in Deidre Royster’s Race and the Invisible Hand study of vocational students in Baltimore) and could still get jobs even with deviant behavior. White women partner with these white men and do better as a result. Starting in families with higher incomes leads to a higher likelihood of going to college. That these two social factors continue to matter should not be surprising – look at the life outcomes and changes by race/ethnicity and income for all American adults – but their presence can get drowned out.

Reactions “when your childhood home becomes a ‘teardown’”

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A reporter describes seeing her childhood home make way for a teardown:

I understand why the house is being torn down. The stairs aren’t up to today’s construction codes. The bathrooms and kitchen are small. When someone slams the door in the garage, you can feel the vibrations upstairs in my brother’s old bedroom. The plumbing, windows and electric wiring haven’t been touched in decades. The metallic wallpaper with blue flowers in the bathroom my brother and I once shared says it all: The house is clearly outdated.

Still, I dread its rendezvous with a wrecking ball. When my childhood BFF’s century-old house was bulldozed last spring (goodbye high ceilings and ornate mantelpieces), the teardown trend in our old neighborhood suddenly became personal. Was some nefarious force—McMansion mania? Voldemort?—out to destroy my childhood haunts?

And what might explain such emotions?

Irene Goldenberg, a family psychologist and professor emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles, says teardowns can be more traumatic for former owners, and their children, than sales in which a house survives.

For one thing, she says, it’s hard to escape the finality of a teardown, which makes it all the more obvious “that you can no longer go back to the safety and comfort” of childhood. “It’s in your face,” she says.

There is also an obvious analogy to my aging parents. With new construction springing up all over the neighborhood, the house suddenly looks like a relic of another era. Still, when I came across the property records in my parents’ files last spring, the comparison that immediately sprang to mind was to myself. Although I had always assumed the house was older, it was actually erected just a few years before I was born in 1964.

For many people, childhood homes function like a psychological safety net, says Gerald Davison, a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California. “Even if you don’t feel comfortable knocking on the door, it’s nice to know that it’s always possible to do so” and reconnect with childhood, he says.

Neighborhoods do change over time but homes often represent permanence. This hints at the broader ideology of the American Dream as well as childhood. The first refers to the emotional attachment to single-family homes on plots of land, places that people can call their own. The second involves the development of childhood as a sort of “golden age” in the lifecourses filled with good experiences and exploring the world.

It would be interesting to hear more about the expression of and limits to such emotions. Perhaps we can add “McMansion mania” to the list of childhood bogeymen…

How life stages affect decisions about housing

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Life stages, including cohabitation or kids leaving the house, can trigger different housing choices:

Unmarried. Singles are more likely to rent and live in locations that are closer to entertainment and employment, which is why these areas are more in demand today than usual.

Togetherness. Cohabitation has been on the rise in recent decades, but homeownership rates for these couples are much lower than rates for their married counterparts.

Marriage. Marriage often increases the desire to own a home; many location and housing choices depend on income and nearby family.

Children. The addition of little ones makes owning a home feel like a necessity for many, given the desire for yards, good schools and social circles for the kids.

Children moving out. An empty nest often results in lifestyle changes, including different home-size preferences, social circles and floor-plan needs. Locational preferences also begin to shift.

The first two stages suggest a decrease in homeownership, the next two based around marriage and kids involve the more traditional American Dream, and the last seems to revert to the first two when more options are available. Are we headed toward a housing market where owning a home is primarily about kids? This has always been a key factor in moving to and living in the suburbs, which is closely linked to homeownership.

The flip side of this is to ask how real estate agents and builders will respond to these life stages. Can they afford to target each stage with specialized housing? Are there ways to have more flexible housing that can transition as the lifecourse changes?

Fund the Squeezable Skyline toy

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Plush toys often involve animals but one set of guys have embarked on a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to make Squeezable Skyline toys:

Instead of creating an Etsy store to sell their adorable plush-sized versions of famous skyscrapers, these dudes are going the Kickstarter route and attempting to raise $25,000 to fund the production of its Squeezable Skyline toys. As a part of its first lineup, the Chicago-based company wants to sell plush versions of the Willis Sears Tower and the Empire State Building. Up next (if enough funding is raised) will be the John Hancock Center. The toys are definitely cute, and any architecture nerd would love to gift one to their toddler, but is this an idea worth $25,000? The team has nearly a month left and have already raised about $4,000 from 67 backers, so it’s looking like they’ll definitely have a shot.

It would be interesting to watch kids interact with these toys. Would they quickly anthropomorphize a building? What would they have the building do? Are buildings huggable (or is this more related to the softness than the form)?

The design also does some interesting things with the straight lines that often mark the tallest skyscrapers. As a plush toy, the buildings now have slightly skewed bearing, like they were drawn in a cartoon style.

Kids today: “emotionally priceless and economically worthless”

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Sociologist Dalton Conley talks about how the role of children has changed in recent centuries:

A child born in 2012 will cost his parents $241,080 in 2012 dollars, on average, over his lifetime. And children of higher-earning families drain the bank account more: Families earning more than $105,000 annually can expect to spend $399,780 per child.

The “price tag” is astounding, considering that until not long ago, kids were expected to contribute to the household and were not generally a financial drain on it. “From a young age, for much of human history, they would do household labor, whether gather berries or get water and bring it back. From ages 5 and up, kids had an economic role to play in the household,” says Dalton Conley, sociologist, NYU professor and author of “Parentology: Everything You Wanted to Know About the Science of Raising Children But Were Too Exhausted to Ask.”

“Today, as sociologist Viviana Zelizer says, kids are emotionally priceless and economically worthless. They’re just a big sinkhole of our time, attention and money, and yet at the same time, we think of them as our most important life project,” says Conley. This idea that parents must invest in their kids for years is now even codified into law. For instance, while traditional markers of adulthood were set at 18 or 21, the Affordable Care Act has now extended the age limit for children to be on their parents’ health insurance to 26.

Why the shift? It boils down to the fact the economy now requires more technical knowledge, so children need more education than before.

The rest of the article then goes on to describe how Dalton uses data to tackle 10 important parenting issues. But, this early part highlights the changing nature of childhood, from an age where children could contribute economically to the family (and many children did not survive because of poor health) to an era where wealthier families have fewer children and parents pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into each child.

“Who had richer parents, doctors or artists?”

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NPR looks at how the jobs and incomes of parents influence the same outcomes among their children:

After some poking around, we figured out how to settle the argument. It allowed us to look at the same group of people in 1979 and 2010 — from a time when most were teenagers to the time when they were middle-aged and, for the most part, gainfully employed…

Who's doing better than their parents?

Based on this chart, it looks like the jobs of parents that are linked to better outcomes for their children require more education and are higher-skilled. This would seem to line up with findings from the Pew Economic Mobility Project about what traits are linked to upward social mobility:

This research reveals:

  • College graduates were over 5 times more likely to leave the bottom rung than non-college graduates.
  • Dual-earner families were over 3 times more likely to leave the bottom rung than single-earner families.
  • Whites were 2 times more likely to leave the bottom rung than blacks.

Additionally, Pew’s analysis examined the intersection between income and wealth, and found that the health of family balance sheets—including accumulated savings and wealth—are related to income mobility prospects. Households with financial capital, such as liquid savings or other readily available assets such as stocks, were more likely to leave the bottom of the economic ladder. In other words, movement up the income and wealth ladders was connected, and economically secure families were also the most likely to be upwardly mobile.

So in addition to parental education and the type of job one’s parent has, going to college, having two-income families, race, and wealth matter quite a bit. Overcoming these factors is not necessarily easy: “In fact, 43 percent of Americans raised at the bottom of the income ladder remain stuck there as adults, and 70 percent never even make it to the middle.”

Illinois the first Midwest state to have majority of minority students in public schools

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New data shows that Illinois for the first time has a majority of minority students in the state’s public schools:

Whites fell to 49.76 percent of the student body this school year, the new data show, a demographic tipping point that came after years of sliding white enrollment and a rise in Latino, Asian and multiracial students.

The black student population also has declined, but it still makes up almost 18 percent of the state’s public school students…

If those numbers hold, Illinois would be one of a dozen states — and the first in the Midwest — to have a school system in which minority students are in the majority, according to the most recent federal education data. Included in that category are Western and Southern states with large Latino or black populations, as well as the District of Columbia, according to the National Center for Education Statistics…

Illinois’ diverse student population doesn’t match the diversity of its teaching staff. Based on 2012 state data, 83 percent of Illinois’ public school teachers are white.

This is a relatively common thing in the United States today though it is unusual for it to happen to a Midwestern state. Relative to whites, minority populations in the United States have been growing.

One way this happens is through immigration. This is a reminder that although certain states are associated with immigration – places like California, Texas, Florida – immigration is closely tied to big cities. Here are some bits from a 2012 Census report looking at foreign-born populations in the 2010 Census:

While the foreign born resided in every state in 2010, over half lived in just four states: California, New York, Texas, and Florida. Over one-fourth of the total foreign-born population lived in California…
In 14 states and the District of Columbia, the percentage of foreign born was equal to or greater than the national average of 13 percent. With the exception of Texas, Florida, and Illinois, these states were primarily in the western and northeastern parts of the country.
With the exception of Illinois (14 percent), the percentage of foreign born in all states of the Midwest region was below 8 percent, including North Dakota and South Dakota, each with about 3 percent.

The Chicago region draws a large amount of immigrants and drew a large number of black migrants during the early 1900s in the Great Migration. Without the draw of jobs and opportunities in Chicago, the demographics of Illinois children today might look much more like Iowa or Wisconsin.