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Asynchronous Development between Partners

In the context of this encyclopedia, asynchronous development between partners contains two hidden assumptions that must be made explicit at the outset: (1) asynchrony is presumed to exacerbate stress that in turn is known to serve as a generalized risk factor for a host of medical, social, and emotional illnesses; and (2) asynchronous development presumes a change over time—both historical-social time and partnered time. Asynchronous development is also considered to be a risk factor for divorce in contemporary society. This entry examines changes in family parenting roles, gendered educational attainment, and the implications of both for life satisfaction, stress, and health.

Paternal and Maternal Roles

In their classic book published more than a half century ago, Talcott Parsons and Robert Bales theorized that roles of fathers were assigned by society and assumed the instrumental role while mothers were assigned and assumed the socioemotional, or nurturant-expressive, roles within the family system. Fathers were expected to be breadwinners and mothers nurturing homemakers and caregivers for children. For the decade of the 1950s when this book was written, it likely was an accurate theoretical formulation for the modal American family.

However, social expectations for both mothers and fathers have changed substantially over the following half century beginning with the sexual and women's revolutions of the 1960s and continuing to the present. The broad thrust of these changes in social norms has been the demand that fathers add to their instrumental role components of the nurturant-expressive role previously assigned to mothers. In a synchronous fashion, mothers were expected to add an instrumental component to their previous nurturant and social-emotional assignment.

While changing social mores dictate what is “supposed” to change, the most highly involved component of the father's role—breadwinning—has remained an expectation from the 1950s to the present. Gordon Finley and Seth Schwartz used a retrospective design with 1,989 undergraduates who rated their fathers on a 5-point scale indicating how involved their fathers were in 20 different domains of their lives. In this study, young adult children continued to rank breadwinning as the most highly involved paternal domain. There was, however, clear evidence that fathers were involved in nurturant and expressive functions as well.

Historical Changes in Gendered Educational Attainment

In tandem with the family role norm changes noted above, differential educational attainment also can lead to asynchronous development. Data from the U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences chronicle this asynchronous transformation. Earlier in our nation's history, males received substantially more degrees in higher education than did females until gender equality was attained for bachelor's degrees in 1981, for master's degrees in 1985, and for doctoral degrees in 2006. Following each of these years, where males and females attained educational equality, accelerating trends and projections indicate that females currently receive and are projected to continue to receive more degrees in higher education than are males.

These demographic projections are of substantial social and economic significance. In the early years of our nation, men dominated education and consequently the higher social and economic status positions in society. Since highly educated women were a minority, men who wanted to marry often were required to “marry down”—educationally speaking. In the parlance of social exchange theory, men traded education and economic status for spouses with physical attractiveness, personality, companionship, or motherly characteristics for their children. This educational differential contributed to the differential roles assigned to men and women by Parsons and Bales.

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