Photo by Georgios Karamanis under Creative Commons license.

In this Slate article author Emily Bazelon asks a few questions about changes in American kindergartens that many upper-middle-class families don’t want to ask.  Is the increasingly academic nature of kindergarten good for my children?  Why are schools and states pushing up the cutoff date for kids starting kindergarten?  What’s the impact on the other kids in the class if I start my son or daughter in kindergarten at age six?

The answers are not good.

Individually speaking, no harm done, perhaps, though the presumed benefit is an open question. But collectively, delaying kindergarten is a bad idea—especially for poor kids, for whom it often means one more year of no school.

Based on research presented in a new paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Bazelon makes these worrisome points:

• Delaying some kids another year creates an age span in the classroom that disadvantages younger students, even if they are developing at the normal pace.
• Lifetime earnings are depressed for late starters because they also enter the workforce a year later than they would have.
• Delaying kindergarten means less public school for those kids who are risk for dropping out.  They turn 18 earlier in their educational career and are thus able to drop out after receiving less education

“All of this should make us leery of governmental policies that delay kindergarten,” writes Bazelon.  But when it comes to your own kid are you really going to worry about the effect on some general group of low-income kids somewhere in the country?  The authors of the study are now looking at whether there’s an advantage to late-starters at the other end.  Do 6-year-old kindergartners later have a better chance of getting into the top colleges?

Bazelon doesn’t mention it specifically, but my gut feeling is that accountability policies such as No Child Left Behind, which link school funding with student performance, may be driving schools to encourage parents to keep their kids home a year long in the hope that older children will do better on tests.  Based on Bazelon’s reporting, this might be short-sighted.

Coming soon: 5 Questions

I want to ask all sorts of people five basic questions about the family policy in their country, record the interviews and organize everything in a nifty little interactive map. Sound good? Just give me a few weeks.

“Voices are rising in society against this phenomenon and its catastrophes,” said Shawki al-Qadhi, an imam and opposition member in Parliament who has tried unsuccessfully to muster support for a legal ban on child marriage in Yemen in the past. “But despite rejections of it by many people and some religious scholars, it continues.”

Current law in Yemen allows girls to be married at any age as long as they do not live with their husbands until they have reached puberty.  As the two girls’ experiences described in the article underscore, this law is often not followed.  A total ban on underage marriage would protect girls better than the current situation, say activists.

This fascinating New York Times article looks at this dying practice of women who become heads of their families by swearing off sex, cutting off their hair and taking on a male swagger. As gender roles become more equal and the violence that led to a shortage of men subsides, the number of sworn virgins is shrinking.

The article also includes a slide show with photographs of two of the last Albanian sworn virgins.

Key to the new legislation is that same-sex couples will be allowed to adopt and lesbians may be artificially inseminated.

• Covenant marriage
• Second marriage
• Polyamorous marriage
• Average marriage
• Long-distance marriage
• Child-free by choice
• Same-sex marriage
• Late-in-life marriage
• Married young

The one marriage type I was unfamiliar with was the covenant marriage.  Legal provisions for covenant marriages exist in Louisiana, Arkansas and Arizona.  In response to the rise in no-fault divorces, covenant marriages make it more difficult to get divorced, require counseling, and emphasize that marriage is for life.  Divorce is only allowed in cases of abuse, adultery, commitment of a felony or abandonment.

This kind of seems like a step in the wrong direction in that divorce reform is meant to provide individuals with an out from unhappy marriages, without having to accuse their spouse of abuse or adultery.  Yet it isn’t hard to get the impression that some people do take marriage and divorce too lightly.

Would you ever consider a covenant marriage?

Looking forward to seeing the first photos of the first weddings!

A new feature of Familienpolitik is the 5 questions interview. This week I spoke with Faizah Marzuki, a 31-year-old Malaysian who is an account director for an advertising company.

In the interview Marzuki refers to the fact that in Malaysia the different ethnic and religious populations are governed by different laws. Muslims, who make up about 60 percent of the population, are bound by sharia law. Ethnic Chinese and Indians, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus and other non-Muslims are ruled by civil law. This makes a big difference when it comes to marriage and divorce, as Marzuki describes in her answers.

Click to listen to 5 questions with Faizah Marzuki: 5 questions with Faizah Marzuki.

Click Here to take survey