"First-year students whose roommates brought a video game player to college studied 40 minutes less each day on average, according to a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Those 40 minutes of lost study time translated into first-semester grades that were 0.241 points lower on the 4.0 grade scale.

The study's authors, Todd Stinebrickner, an associate professor of economics at the University of Western Ontario, and his father, Ralph Stinebrickner, a professor of mathematics and computer science at Berea College in Kentucky, were not trying to prove anything about video games. The study sought to determine how much of an effect study efforts have on grades.

The Stinebrickners say that it might seem obvious that more studying equals better grades. But research has been unable to prove it.

'Everyone knows that studying must matter to some extent, but we just don't know how much it matters relative to other things,' such as college entrance exam scores, Todd Stinebrickner says. 'And this study shows that it matters quite a lot.'"

(Source:  Kate Naseef, "Video games can shoot holes in GPA, USA Today, 18 Sep 2007; http://www.usatoday.com.)

"With the holiday shopping season in full swing, the National Institute on Media and the Family presented its 12th annual video game report card Tuesday to help parents decide what games are appropriate for their children.

'There's an endless stream of new games that will never be suitable for children,' said Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., who joined institute officials and other lawmakers at a news conference.

Efforts to protect children from the dangers posed by excessively violent video games have not kept pace with growth of the video game industry, the institute said.

'Unfortunately, we're seeing some steps backwards,' said institute president David Walsh.

Walsh said fewer retailers, for example, are participating in efforts to educate their customers and employers about the video game ratings.

The institute, a media watchdog group, cited figures showing that nearly half of kids between 8 and 12 have played M-rated games intended for those 17 and over."

The conservative French social theorist Frederic Le Play warned in the 19th century that the Industrial Revolution was destroying the family.  However, it is not the harmful effects of the Industrial Revolution that stand out in a historical investigation of American family life recently completed by Stanford sociologist Michael J. Rosenfeld.  Indeed, Rosenfeld is impressed by how much of family life Americans managed to preserve during the Industrial Revolution.  But much of what Americans preserved from the riptides of that revolution has since been lost in the emergence of young adulthood as a new life phase of freedom from family ties.

Rosenfeld begins his investigation acknowledging the plausibility of Le Play's warnings that under the stresses of the Industrial Revolution "the nuclear family system [as opposed to the extended family system] ... would be too individualistic to transmit cultural norms from generation to generation." Such warnings seem justified by some of the changes Americans saw in family life during that revolution: "Fertility and family size declined ... . The divorce rate rose.  Parents who had previously educated their own children informally were for the first time required to send [them] to school."  Nonetheless, Rosenfeld marvels at how American families "weathered the social changes of the Industrial Revolution together."  In fact, because "the Industrial Revolution in the United States ... took place during a period of Victorian social retrenchment," Rosenfeld believes that in many ways "family government" remained quite strong.  As a result, "some aspects of American family life remained surprisingly unchanged" during this tempestuous era.  

During America's Industrial Revolution, Rosenfeld points out, "most single young adults ... remained in their parents' homes until they married."  This pattern of coresidence allowed parents to maintain "a significant degree of supervision over their children's social lives and made it much more difficult for young adults to form the kinds of unions that their parents would not have approved of."   As a consequence of this family governance, "age at first marriage remained constant" during the Industrial Revolution while "extramarital cohabitation remained rare."  As evidence of the remarkably persistent power of family governance, Rosenfeld cites Census data indicating that between 1880 and 1960 the percentage of American men living in nonmarital cohabitation "remained steady at 0.1 percent, one per thousand."  

By the late 20th century, however, much of what Americans had shielded from the pressures of the Industrial Revolution was gone.  By then, "late age at first marriage" was typical of Americans headed to the altar.  What is more, Rosenfeld limns an increase in the number of nonmarital unions: "Same-sex unions and extramarital heterosexual cohabitation ... increased sharply, so that the types of romantic unions Americans form are now much more varied" than they were during or immediately after the Industrial Revolution.  

To explain the relatively recent upsurge in "nontraditional unions," Rosenfeld recounts how the family governance that persisted during the Industrial Revolution finally broke down.  Central to this analysis is the erosion of "the long-established norm of intergenerational adult coresidence."  Rosenfeld adduces statistics showing that "between 1950 and 2000 the percentage of single adult young women who lived with their parents dropped from 65 to 36 percent."  Not coincidentally, the percentage of young unmarried adults who headed their own households rose-fully 30 percent of young unmarried women and 27 percent of young unmarried men were heading their own households by 1980.

As young adulthood became a "new life stage" characterized by "increasing residential and social independence," Americans witnessed "a reversal of the old system of family government."  Rosenfeld thus looks out on a contemporary American society in which single young Americans are "living on their own ... [with] the freedom to meet, form romantic unions, and experiment beyond the watchful eyes of parents."  The results of this freedom are not always good. 

American families, it appears, may have lost less in the rise of modern industry than they did in the decline of parental authority.

(Source: Michael J. Rosenfeld, "Young Adulthood as a Factor in Social Change in the United States," Population and Development Review 32 [2006]: 27-51.)