It can happen in the best of families that there is a bad egg. This seems to be the case with the American high school football star who became one of Mexico’s most feared and savage drug dealers, La Barbie.

Edgar Valdez Villarreal grew up in a middle-class suburb of Laredo where his father owned a shop and his family went to church. “Most of his siblings went to college and started businesses, becoming the sort of law-abiding people who are the mortar of society,” neighbours and friends told the New York Times. Other kids called him Barbie because of his square-jawed Ken look.

None of the clichéd roots of crime could be seen in his youth: no broken home, no abusive father, no poverty.

So how did he end up, at 37, a brutal and ruthless drug lord with the blood of others on his conscience if not on his hands? There seem to be two basic character flaws -- or perhaps two aspects of one flaw: self-indulgence and a desire for easy money.

Mr. Valdez got his start in crime as a petty marijuana dealer in Laredo in the early 1990s, but he was never arrested on drug charges, according to the Webb County Sheriff’s Office and the Laredo Police Department.

There were signs, however, that the affable linebacker on the United High School football team had a wild side: arrests for drunken driving and public drunkenness.

In 1992, near the end of his senior year, he was arrested on a charge of criminally negligent homicide after he drove his pickup down the wrong side of a road and collided head-on with a middle school guidance counselor, killing him. The charge was later dropped.

After graduation, Mr. Valdez turned down an offer from his father to attend college, saying he wanted to make money, his brother said. According to a federal indictment in Laredo, the next year he joined a group of smugglers who were moving hundreds of pounds of Mexican marijuana through Laredo to cities in Massachusetts and Missouri.

In Mexico he became sucked up into the drug conflict and, to the extent he rose in power, so he sank in virtue and humanity.

“He chose that road,” said his older brother, Abel Valdez Jr. “We are a good family.”

But was there something both at home and in the institutions -- education and law -- that his weaknesses could lead to such extremes? What if he had been arrested for drug dealing at the start? What if he had been held legally accountable for the death he caused as a high school senior?

There’s no guarantee, but being forced to suffer the consequences then might have saved him from a really dreadful career.

Younger working class people are drifting further away from middle class America and traditional values because they cannot find work in the changing job market. The social and political implications may be drastic.

That’s the gist of an article in the Wall Street Journal last week by sociologists Andrew J. Cherlin and W Bradford Wilcox. I am a week behind with this but the trends are not going to disappear any time soon.

Wilcox and others have drawn attention to the dilemmas of the working class before, noting for example how the “mancession” could increase the “divorce divide” between middle America and those further down the socio-economic scale.

(BTW, we are using “working class” here as shorthand. Cherlin and Wilcox say that that the real class divisions in society today are based on education.)

Now he and Cherlin point out that because younger members of this class can’t earn enough in the lower-skills jobs still available, they are not even getting married. That’s because, like most Americans, they believe that a couple isn’t ready to marry until they can count on a steady income.

Thus, in the early 1990s, 10 per cent of working class women were cohabiting when they gave birth; by the mid-2000s that figure had risen to 27 per cent -- the largest increase of any educational group. Since cohab relationships are more likely to break up, their children will pay the price.

Unmarried and without steady incomes, working class men and women are abandoning religion as well. The drop off has been greatest among whites. “In the 1970s, 35% of working-class whites aged 25-45 attended religious services nearly every week, the same percentage as college-educated whites in that age group. Today, the college-educated are the only group who attend services almost as frequently as they did in the 1970s.”

Some observers might say that there's nothing alarming about the working class's retreat from marriage and organized religion. It's true that not everyone wishes to marry or to worship, and that family and religious diversity can be valuable.

But the working class is not a cultural vanguard confidently leading the way toward a postmodern lifestyle. Rather, it is a group making constrained choices. For the most part, these are people who would like to marry before having kids but who don't think they are economically ready.

In contrast, college-educated Americans—the winners in our globalized economy—are now living more traditional family and religious lives than their working-class peers. More than 90% of college-educated women are married when they give birth.

What will be the effects of this working class drift?

Will their social disengagement leave them vulnerable to political appeals based on anger and fear? Will their multiple cohabiting unions and marriages prevent their children from developing a sense of attachment to others?

This, surely, is a gap that has to be bridged -- in other countries as well.

Remember the old riddle: Brothers and sisters have I none... But that man's father is my father's son. Who is that man? -- Well, the answer to that is easy compared with learning the names for one’s extended family in some languages.

And what does it all signify? asks The Economist’s language blogger, “Johnson”, after comparing English with Spanish and Russian -- and, in passing, Hebrew and Arabic.

Going, as usual, on the languages I know something of, in English every child of any of your parents' siblings is your cousin. But in European languages there are usually two ways to say cousin—male and female. In Hebrew there are four, since you also have to specify whether it's your aunt's or uncle's child. In Arabic, eight, because you also have to specify whether it's on your father's or mother's side. Russian has a host of terms, some of them archaic, not only for all some of these, but also for distinguishing a great uncle based on whether he's older or younger than your grandparent, or your niece or nephew depending on whether it's your sister's or brother's child. (Correction by the author.)

He goes on to note the multiplicity of names for in-laws in Spanish compared to English, both of which are outclassed by Russian, which distinguishes your spouse’s siblings and siblings’ spouses, depending on whether they are your wife’s or your husband’s siblings. Russians also have different names for a wife’s parents and husband’s parents, for the spouses of your aunts and uncles, for the parents of your children’s spouses…

Johnson guesses that this specialisation indicates that family concepts are very old. But why do they differ so much from one society to another, even within Europe? Do they tell us something about the structure of particular societies -- Spanish, as opposed to English, for example?

It will be interesting to see if any linguists can help him out.

Here is my guess. Extended family relationships are more important in pre-industrial societies where people are less mobile and where livelihood depends on inheritance (of land, especially) to a large extent. In such communities, which persisted longer in Spain and Russia than in England, with its early industrialisation, it would be necessary to identify all lines of inheritance, as well as degrees of consanguinity when considering marriage. Maybe English has shed some of these terms over the centuries…

PS -- If you don’t get the riddle, just ask below. Someone will certainly help out.

This post may provide a sort of commentary on the previous one about 20-somethings. German researchers have found that, given a choice, older people prefer to read bad news rather than good news about young adults.

In fact, reading about youths getting drunk and brawling in the streets is likely to give a small boost to their elders’ self esteem. As for young people, they just prefer not to read about the oldies at all.

The point of the study was to test the theory that people use the media to enhance their social identity, said lead author Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick of Ohio State University.

An earlier study using the same data had confirmed that people prefer media messages that portray people like themselves, but it also produced the unexpected result that older people (aged 50 to 65) seemed equally interested in stories about younger people.

“Now we know why older people liked reading about the younger people – they were looking for negative stories about them,” said Knobloch-Westerwick.

Oh, really? Might they not just have been concerned about their children and grandchildren and the dangers they face today?

Well, not entirely. There’s that bothersome boost in self esteem to contend with:

Results showed that younger people showed no differences in self-esteem based on what they had read. However, the more that older people read negative stories about younger individuals, the higher the older people’s levels of self-esteem tended to be.

Maybe this is the baby boomers’ defence mechanism against a youth-centred culture, as the researcher suggests. If so, it is not well founded. Surely the older generation should be feeling worse after reading about the trouble the kids they have raised are getting into.

Who created the youth-centred culture? Who funded it? Who tolerated its excesses for so long?

Responsibility, anyone?

More young people are reaching the end of their twenties without settling into careers and marriage. Is this because of passing social mores and economic conditions, or because we now have a new stage of human development called “emerging adulthood”?

I commented on this issue not so long ago when a report by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood examined the financial implications for family and society.

Now, a long article (like, 10 pages) by Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times looks into the psychological aspects of the trend, focusing on the work of Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a psychology professor at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Arnett is leading the movement to view the 20s as a distinct life stage, “analogous to what happened a century ago, when social and economic changes helped create adolescence”.

Not satisfied with the mess we made of that (pop culture, consumerism and teenage sex) Arnett and others want to add another decade of experimentation before people grow up. Its characteristics, he says, are “identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling in-between and a rather poetic characteristic he calls “a sense of possibilities.”

In this he seems to have the support of brain scientists who have been telling us for a few years now that the brain doesn’t take on its mature form until at least age 25. Maybe not even then.

And he certainly has some statistics on his side. Here are some from Henig’s article:

The 20s are a black box, and there is a lot of churning in there. One-third of people in their 20s move to a new residence every year. Forty percent move back home with their parents at least once. They go through an average of seven jobs in their 20s, more job changes than in any other stretch. Two-thirds spend at least some time living with a romantic partner without being married. And marriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, five years in a little more than a generation.

We’re in the thick of what one sociologist calls “the changing timetable for adulthood.” Sociologists traditionally define the “transition to adulthood” as marked by five milestones: completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child. In 1960, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men had, by the time they reached 30, passed all five milestones. Among 30-year-olds in 2000, according to data from the United States Census Bureau, fewer than half of the women and one-third of the men had done so. A Canadian study reported that a typical 30-year-old in 2001 had completed the same number of milestones as a 25-year-old in the early ’70s.

There is also the matter of where we currently set different maturity markers:

But what would it look like to extend some of the special status of adolescents to young people in their 20s? Our uncertainty about this question is reflected in our scattershot approach to markers of adulthood. People can vote at 18, but in some states they don’t age out of foster care until 21. They can join the military at 18, but they can’t drink until 21. They can drive at 16, but they can’t rent a car until 25 without some hefty surcharges. If they are full-time students, the Internal Revenue Service considers them dependents until 24; those without health insurance will soon be able to stay on their parents’ plans even if they’re not in school until age 26, or up to 30 in some states. Parents have no access to their child’s college records if the child is over 18, but parents’ income is taken into account when the child applies for financial aid up to age 24. We seem unable to agree when someone is old enough to take on adult responsibilities. But we’re pretty sure it’s not simply a matter of age.

Of course, there are still many who do not conform to the new patterns and who pass through the traditional milestones much as earlier generations did. Then there are all the young people in developing countries who can barely afford the luxury of being teenagers, let alone emerging adults. This diversity among 20-somethings is the main reason that some psychologists disagree with Arnett’s idea that humanity has acquired a new developmental stage.

The differences, even within a country such as the US, point more straightforwardly to cultural and economic factors that having changed, could change again.

In a riposte in The Atlantic Derek Thompson, apparently in the critical age group himself, puts a number of the Millennials habits (such as moving back home with their parents) down to some key factors: the jump in the number of women going to college (and therefore marrying later and having fewer children); student debt (average $17,250 in 2006); low-paying entry jobs and the growth of insecure self-employment and part-time jobs; and the recession, which has accentuated all the other trends.

I am inclined to agree that what is happening among 20-somethings has more to do with the economy than psychology. But it also has a lot to do with cultural attitudes, particularly towards sex and marriage.

It is all well and good for women to get a college education and have professional skills that they can use throughout their lives to earn a full-time or part-time income. It is good for women and men to share more in both paid work and domestic tasks, especially parenting. And if this means, for those who take the college path, delaying marriage until the mid to late 20s, so be it.

But these changes should not have come at the expense of marriage and the family itself -- in the form of years of experimental sexual relationships and abortion for the educated (mainly), and single parenthood and non-marriage (mainly) among the working (or non-working) class.

Is it just a coincidence that a bad economy has grown up alongside a bad sexual culture? And that both are making young adulthood somehow redundant? I don’t think so -- do you?

 

A high profile British homosexual activist wants the age of sexual consent lowered to 14, on the basis that currently underage sex “is mostly consenting, safe and fun”.

Peter Tatchell plugged for this change in America in one of a series of articles on “dangerous ideas” on the website Big Think recently.

Dangerous, certainly, but also just a little bit surprising in view of this year of paedophilia scandals and his campaign against Pope Benedict’s visit to the UK -- one of the reasons being the Pope’s alleged “cover up” of clerical sexual abuse of children?

By a tortured logic Tatchell claims that a lower age of consent is “the best way” to protect young people from abuse. His arguments boil down to three:

* The kids are doing it anyway.

* Current laws criminalise teenagers.

* Young people under 16 have the right to decide when to have sex.

Actually, in making the last claim Tatchell puts no lower age limit. This fits with his recipe for protecting kids from peer pressure and paedophiles: “giving them frank, high quality sex and relationship education from an early age”. As we have noted elsewhere on this site recently, for some people that means nursery school.

In the end, his case seems to rest on a view of sex as the driving force and highest achievement of human life -- from “an early age”. It is a view that some adults may find convenient but which common sense rejects as contrary to the good of children and society. Thus the editors of Big Think conclude:

Why We Should Reject This

Of course there will always be underage people who have sex, but that doesn’t mean the law should condone it. Sex is a very complicated part of human behavior that is too nuanced for young people to understand. In fact, studies have shown that people, especially girls, who have sex at a young age often regret it. One study in New Zealand found that 70% of girls who had sex before the age of 16 wished they hadn’t done so. In a column for Telegraph, writer David Lindsay argues, “sex is for people who can cope with the consequences, physical and otherwise. In a word, adults.”

Contrary to what might have been expected during an economic recession, child abuse declined in the United States in 2008 compared to 2007, official data shows.

No-one is sure why, but the small declines (sexual abuse 6 per cent, physical abuse 3 per cent and neglect 2 per cent) continue a trend that goes back more than 15 years -- in the areas of sexual and other physical abuse, both of which have more than halved since 1992.

The figures are tracked by the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. Director, sociology professor David Finkelhor, advises caution in reaching conclusions about the recent decline as the effects of financial strain may not have shown themselves yet. However, he suggests reasons for the long-term trend:

“The long-improvement for sexual and physical abuse may be related to a generation-long effort to educate and respond more effectively and aggressively to the problem,” Finkelhor said. “If successful prevention efforts are behind the declines, then the improvements may persist even in the face of social stressors like the recession.”

His full report can be found here.  Here are some numbers from it:

Disaggregated data from the report show that sexual abuse declined 6% from 2007 to 2008 to a nationally estimated 68,500 substantiated cases. Physical abuse declined 3% to an estimated 119,500 cases. Neglect declined 2% to an estimated 546,600 substantiated cases (see Figure 1).

Sexual abuse declined 58% from 1992 to 2008, while physical abuse has declined 55%. Neglect has dropped less with only a comparatively small 10% decline since 1992.

Perhaps this shows that if a society sends clear messages and acts consistently it really can reverse a bad trend. Let's remember that teenage sexual activity and pregnancies also declined through the 1990s and up until 2005, a period when the federal government was supporting abstinence education.

France, that bastion -- if not Bastille -- of egalité, has its own debate on single-sex versus co-ed schooling, to judge by a recent opinion piece in Le Monde.

The writer notes that the subject is currently much dicussed in France. He points out that number of British schools have reverted to education organised on single-sex lines, and that a recent report in a French journal (l’Observatoire Français des Conjonctures Économiques) concluded that mixed-gender classes were having no discernable effect on recognition of male-female equality.

On the contrary, Marie Duru-Bellat, a researcher at Sciences Po, has called co-ed classrooms a daily “theatre for reproducing, or even erecting, stereotypical images of the social roles of males and females,” where the “ingrained learning, pre-established by the parents’ well before and during the years of schooling, finds itself reinforced in the co-education school.”

Why, with equal skills, opportunities and affinities is there not a more consistent outcome in gender terms for the same course of studies? asks Duru-Bellat. She pins responsibility on the teachers who, by their different demands and attitudes towards their boy and girl students, help to reinforce gender stereotypes. She takes the example of scientific subjects.

Unconsciously, there will be more attention and greater rigour shown by teachers towards the boys on the grounds that they have a potential that it’s necessary to bring out. In contrast, less attention is given to the girls.

Increasingly, the boys are reinforced in the idea [that they have] a natural leaning towards these disciplines while the girls [become] doubtful. The researcher offers the hypothesis that the careers which follow are more brilliant for the boys while the girls are less encouraged to succeed. It’s also the way the cycle of “male dominance” replicates itself. In single-sex classes this difference in treatment is absent and the girls are comfortable with succeeding fully.

Duru-Bellat’s research showed that in mixed groups male and female stereotypes had a greater tendency to assert themselves. The girls sought to avoid confrontation and rivalry with the boys, the latter exercising a form of moral pressure, intimidating them and curbing their will to succeed. However, the boys themselves were likely to achieve poorer results since they tended to adopt a macho, offhand approach to schooling.

On the other hand, in the single-sex schools, neither sex has this problem in choosing educational paths which are not necessarily related to their stereotype.

The researcher arrives at the conclusion that co-ed schooling has not been sufficiently thought through to fulfil its goals. Its simple implementation has not produced the anticipated results. It is necessary, therefore, seriously to consider a return to single-sex schools, but a return that is controlled, phased in and runs to schedule. Otherwise, this will again end up asserting that there is a difference rather than a distinction between the sexes such that each sex deserves a different education.

(Original article by Abdel Pitroipa, Le Monde, 17 August 2010. The post above is based on a translation by Michael Moynihan)

It is always gratifying when research coincides with common sense and everyday experience, as in the case of a new study showing that a relationship in which sexual intimacy is delayed is more likely to endure.

Researchers questioned 642 adults and 56 per cent of them said they had “waited until they got serious before they had sex” (quoting the Toronto Sun here). Most of them also reported that they had “a high quality relationship”.

The number was higher than for the 27% of people who had sex while dating casually and the 17% who were intimate while in a non-romantic relationship.

Professor Anthony Paik of the University of Iowa who reported the study suggested that the courtship process acts as a screening mechanism.

“The debate is ‘why can’t we have sex now?’ The expectation is that sex should occur very quickly. But doing so, you’re losing out on some information that might be useful,” he explained in an interview.

It’s almost an economic equation, he added.

“On average, the more costly the process leading into the relationship, the more likely it is to work. That’s what the data would suggest.”

Alas, he then confuses us by saying that further analysis showed it was not the early sex that caused low-quality relationships but the personalities of the people:

Certain people are simply prone to finding relationships less rewarding, and they are more likely to have sex in casual relationships, he added.

Either way, rushing into sex is not a good sign.

The contraceptive pill could make women better gossips but no better at reading maps, if research carried out in Austria is anything to go by.

The first ever study of the effect of the pill on women’s brains found that it increased areas linked with memory and conversation skills -- parts of the brain already better developed in women than in men, the Daily Mail reports. However, the contraceptive appeared to have little effect on areas more dominant in men, including those associated with spatial skills such as map reading.

Dr Belinda Pletzer, of Salzburg University, said the sex hormones in the Pill were clearly having a 'tremendous effect' on the female brain. She added: 'Larger volumes of a brain area could lead to an improvement of the functions this area is responsible for.

'Looking at the brain areas involved in our study, which are larger in Pill users compared to naturally-cycling women, this could concern several higher order brain functions, especially memory and verbal skills.”

Oddly enough, so many women forget to take the pill (too busy talking?) that public health experts have just about given up in it. Prof James Trussell, of Princeton University warned a couple of years ago:

One in 12 women taking the Pill get pregnant each year because they miss so many tablets… Women should instead use longer-lasting methods such as the implant or intra-uterine device (IUD) which can be fitted and forgotten, he said.

“The Pill is an outdated method because it does not work well enough. It is very difficult for ordinary women to take a pill every single day. The beauty of the implant or the IUD is that you can forget about them."

He said studies have shown women miss three times as many pills as they say they do. Computerised pill packs have revealed that where as about half of women say they did not miss any pills, less than a third actually did. And where as between 10 per cent and 14 per cent admitted missing more than three pills in a month, actually between 30 per cent and 50 per cent missed that many.

My word -- just think of the chatter if they were all conscientious!