In the surrogate mother procreation can be divorced both from sex as well as any anticipation of child rearing. Often the risks of surrogate motherhood are presented in terms of alternative family structures and economic exploitation of women. Such possibilities must invite critical reflection in order for there to be legal reform. Of paramount importance is the child's best interest and until ...

Developed economies, experiencing concomitant declining fertility and rising educational attainment, have introduced policies to boost fertility. This paper extends Galor and Weil (2000) by introducing bought in services as an input in both the rearing and education of children. Within this framework, we analyse the e¤ects on fertility and education of a baby bonus, paid maternity leave and chi...

U.S. Sentencing Commission regarding Drug Penalties (Feb. 25, 2002) at 2. “[T]he home environment is the critical determinant of the child’s ultimate outcome. . . . The drug-exposed child most often comes from a neglectful family lifestyle filled with factors that interfere with the parents’ attempts at effective child rearing and participation in the growth and development of their children. ....

The Chinese family policies are shaped by the country’s political, socioeconomic, and cultural contexts and have evolved over the years. China has passed its most significant family policies and laws in marriage; child rearing; child, women, and elderly protection; family planning; and health care in the past 60 years. This chapter will cover the most important laws and policies that affect Chi...

This paper examines economic factors affecting the declining fertility rate in Japan. A major cause of this continuous decline is the increasing participation of women in the labor force. This, in turn, increases the opportunity costs of having children for a family. These opportunity costs are closely related to the scarcity of full-time jobs for women due to the fixed employment practices of ...

This paper uses hypothetical contractarianism to consider the value of children’s rights laws as a means of protecting children. Laws protecting children from their parents have the unintended but predictable consequence of making child-rearing less desirable for some parents and thereby reducing the number of children born. Such laws therefore produce a trade-off between the expected wellbeing...

We examine the impact of rearing by an alcoholic parent on risk for child behavior problems using data on 2492 offspring drawn from two ongoing studies of children of female and male same- and opposite-sex twin pairs. Results of regression models predicting child behavior problems from parent and co-twin lifetime history of alcohol use disorder (AUD) provide support for genetic but not environm...

By augmenting the standard quantity-quality model with an extensive margin, we generate sharp testable predictions of causes of fertility transitions. We test the model on two generations of Southern black women affected by a large-scale school construction program. Consistent with our model, women facing improved schooling opportunities for their children became more likely to have at least on...

Behavioral inhibition data were collected from samples of 2-year-olds from the People's Republic of China and Canada. Information on child-rearing attitudes and beliefs was obtained from mothers of the children. Chinese toddlers were significantly more inhibited than their Canadian counterparts. Inhibition was associated positively with mothers' punishment orientation and negatively with mother...