PopDigests

Country differences in intergenerational relationships are not only due to economic, policy or housing contexts but also to a cultural tendency towards closer intergenerational ties. In a recent study, Cornelia Mureşan and Paul-Teodor Hărăguş investigated how norms of filial responsibility influence adult children to provide support to their ageing parents in several Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries as compared to Western Europe.

A wide range of factors have been identified in influencing parents’ decisions on shared leave, including gender ideologies towards parenting and care work. Masculinity is one of the driving forces in changing gender relations within families, meaning how fathers are positioned and their practices inside a household or a relationship. In this context, little attention has been paid to the extent to which masculinity is jointly constructed by both fathers and mothers, and how these constructions are linked to the use of parental leave.

How does a child’s birth month affect their chances of success in primary school? And to what extent is their success dependent on their socioeconomic background? In this study, Fabrizio Bernardi explores the chances of students to be successfully promoted after every grade in primary school in France. The analysis is based on the concept of compensatory advantage, which states that the lives of individuals from privileged socioeconomic backgrounds are less dependent on prior negative events.

In how much do immigrants and their descendants in Sweden differ from native Swedes in their marriage formation, divorce and re-marriage? In their paper, Gunnar Andersson, Ognjen Obućina and Kirk Scott demonstrated that there is a big variation among immigrant groups and between migrants and Swedish-born individuals, and that the country of origin matters when explaining this heterogeneity.

What happens to views and ideas about gendered representations and practices of fatherhood if a company allows new fathers to take one month of paid leave in a country with no statutory paternity leave? Isabel Valarino and Jacques-Antoine Gauthier analysed the implementation and use of a one-month paid paternity leave in the urban French-speaking context in Switzerland.

It is widely recognised that children who experience parental separation during their childhood tend to achieve lower educational outcomes than those who come from intact families. However, the possible differentiation in the way in which such separation effects influence children from different socio-economic backgrounds is much less understood.

Traditionally, Dutch long-term care arrangements were mainly provided by the government. But to limit costs, during the past few decades the Netherlands has been reforming its historically generous, public long-term care services. The reforms aimed to encourage people to be more active in caring for dependent relatives. Researcher Thijs van den Broek and his colleagues now show that despite the new policies to promote family engagement in care, care ideals in the Netherlands have shifted away from, rather than towards, the family having a prominent caring role.

Many Spanish parents work with a split-shift schedule, which consists of a long lunch break, sometimes two hours, that extends working activities until late in the evening. Empirical evidence by researchers Pablo Gracia (European University Institute) and Matthijs Kalmijn (University of Amsterdam) suggests that this schedule has negative consequences on parents’ time in family and child-related activities.   Work Schedules and Family Time: The Case of Spain

Obesity levels have increased remarkably over the last thirty years throughout the globe. At the same time, there are considerable variations in the proportion of overweight adults across countries. So what are the factors behind this global divergence? Is economic development one of the drivers of such differences?

Do different ageing patterns exist in different European areas, and is there a difference between East and West? To study the distinctive patterns of ageing by gender, and education in 16 European countries, Warren C. Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov use prospective ages in place of chronological ages. Prospective ages take changes in life expectancy into account. Prospective ages are based on how many years people have ahead of them, while chronological age is the number of years people have already lived.