Media coverage of "Cash, cars, and condoms" paper in Journal of Adolescent Health

Our newest paper on women getting money from their sexual partners was just published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, and covered by
ABC News, the
Health Behavior News Service (by Laura Kennedy), the
Empowerher blog (by Susan Cody), and in Latvian (?).

Emerging adulthood and medical subject headings

Emerging adulthood has been recognized as a concept in sociology for over a decade, and is generally recognized as extending to age 30. Adolescent health research often extends up to age 25 because brain development continues until about that age. Last year I asked Alan Guttmacher, the head of the National Institute for Child Health and Development (NICHD), about the definition of adolescents for the purposes of NICHD funding, and he said that it's reasonable for research to go past age 18.

In view of that, I'm submitting a new manuscript today, and as I was choosing keywords, I was surprised to notice how they classify ages.

Adults are ages 19-44. Young adults, a term added in 2009, are ages 19-24.

My study is about the transition to adulthood --- how people get college degrees in early 20s and develop professionally in their late 20s and early 30s --- and it doesn't seem to fit into either of these categories. The study examines how the subjects are in the process of becoming adults, socially and economically, but according to the medical subject headers, they are already. It's striking to be reminded of how our systems of thought have changed in such a short time, and an indexing system naturally didn't catch up.

Jennifer Fox, the former foster child in Seattle who miscarried

There's a tragic story about a 19 year old formerly homeless young adult in the foster system who says that she miscarried after being kicked in the stomach repeatedly and pepper sprayed. That's excessive force regardless of gender and pregnancy, but another story says that she may have been lying about the miscarriage.

Reading the article, I don't see reason to doubt it given that it was documented by police earlier. She has no obligation to turn over her medical records to the press. And given that she has a foster mother who is abusive enough to call her names in the press, clearly she has little emotional support.

Regardless, I think she is an instructive case of the reason for the Occupy Protests. The research suggests that she'll have more chances in life if she waits a few years to get pregnant until she has attained a community college certificate and has a job and a husband. If she continued the pregnancy she would have higher chances of continued poverty and intimate partner violence.

Still, as a young adult in the foster system, which resources does she have to access higher education, and what chances does she believe she has to get a good job and find a worthwhile future other than as a mother? Most/all young adults who were in the foster system are eligible for Pell grants for community college to find a viable career, but few low SES young adults know that it's worthwhile to fill out the FAFSA or which classes to take in community college that will lead to a career in which they can have dignity and job security, and most community college guidance counselors have literally 500 students whom they're expected to advise so can't have help.

The current system gives disadvantaged young adults flimsy flip flops and then expects people to pull themselves up by the bootstraps.

Raising kids to deal with frustration

Interesting article by Lori Gottlieb about the neuroses of children with overly involved parents. Frustration and failure is a natural part of growing up, and parents who shield their kids from these negative feelings inhibit their children's abilities to deal with them later.

“'Happiness as a byproduct of living your life is a great thing,' Barry Schwartz, a professor of social theory at Swarthmore College, told me. 'But happiness as a goal is a recipe for disaster.' It’s precisely this goal, though, that many modern parents focus on obsessively—only to see it backfire. Observing this phenomenon, my colleagues and I began to wonder: Could it be that by protecting our kids from unhappiness as children, we’re depriving them of happiness as adults?"


Teaching offspring how to deal with negative feelings apparently occurs in other species as well, not just humans --- perhaps implying that modern parents' attention to happiness is even more maladaptive. I've read that mother cats will deny their kittens the chance to nurse or stop their kittens from nursing before the kittens are done to accustom their kittens to frustration, and kittens who didn't have this experience will grow up to be cats who get frustrated more easily (sharp exhales when something goes wrong.) Apparently, this inability to deal with frustration happens more with cats who grow up without mothers to teach them how to deal with negative emotions; I don't know whether there are overly indulgent mother cats.

This phenomenon of overly attentive parents coincides with the advent of emerging adulthood. Simultaneously, the research finds emerging adulthood is often positive with, for example, better marriage outcomes among those who waited to marry.

Emerging Adulthood in the Onion

According to the Onion, emerging adulthood never ends, and the country is down to its last 100 adults. The article does raise a serious point. When politicians cite emerging adulthood as a sign of the decline of civilization, do they wonder at what kind of model modern politics sets for adolescents and young adults?

In other Onion news, the Planned Parenthood Abortionplex in Kansas is finally open, offering movies, pedicures, shops, and a million abortions a month. I wonder how many people will think that this article is serious.

** UPDATE ***
Some people do think the Onion article about the abortionplex was literal, such as this person who says REPENT AMERICA.