Researchers study New Yorker cartoons for what they say about parenting

Two sociology professors at Indiana University have taken on what sounds like a dream assignment: Jessica McCrory Calarco and Jaclyn Tabot are scouring decades worth of cartoons from The New Yorker magazine. But they aren't in it for the laughs. They are tapping the funnies to try to track changing attitudes toward children and parenting.

"There are theories in sociology that suggest that there were dramatic shifts in the way that children were perceived in society that happened around the turn of the 20th century, with children's role in society shifting from one of being sort of the economic value, to one of being sort of emotionally priceless," McCrory Calarco tells As It Happens guest host Helen Mann.

The study suggests when cartoons reflect societal attitudes that children are a drain on finances and a burden to personal freedoms, some will choose to opt out of parenting entirely.

When asked why they chose to study The New Yorker cartoons, McCrory Calarco says, "there's good research evidence that suggests that the elites in society are often the harbingers of social trends. And so if we wanted to study changes in social attitudes over time, possibly as a predictor of things like decisions about child rearing that would trickle down to society as a whole, The New Yorker would give us a glimpse of where those attitudes first appeared."

McCrory Calarco adds that "there are interesting parallels between the current era, the sort of late 1990s early 2000s, and the 1920s and 1930s in many cases, in the way that parenting is portrayed and viewed with a high recognition of the cost associated with parenting and especially the cost associated with child rearing."

McCrory Calarco calls it "a lingering economic calculation that goes on with parents' decisions to have children and the way that they are raised in our society."

She stresses the importance of the findings and their larger political implications.

"Unless we have a good grasp of the social attitudes that exist around parenting and around children in our society it's tough to get a grasp on why policy makers make the decisions that they do."