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This paper applies a child-centric approach to examine the relationship between poverty, deprivation and well-being among children aged between 11 and 16 attending government high schools in New South Wales, Australia. Poverty is measured using children’s perceptions of the ability of their family to ‘get by’ while the consensual approach is used to identify as deprived children who do not have but want items that are regarded by a majority as essential for all children. A survey was developed after conducing focus groups with children and was completed by 2672 children attending one of 52 schools in mid-2016. The survey data were used to estimate the incidence of poverty and deprivation and the severity of both conditions was compared with a range of indicators of subjective well-being that cover overall life satisfaction, happiness, connectedness and contentment with aspects of schooling. The results show that children who perceive themselves as either poor or deprived (or both) have lower levels of well-being in all four dimensions compared with children to who are neither poor nor deprived. The associations between well-being and both poverty and deprivation are similar, which suggests that both have a role to play and that some form of composite (overlap) measure should be included in future studies of child poverty and disadvantage.

Background: Genes regulated by breast cancer risk alleles identified through genome-wide association studies (GWAS) may harbor rare coding risk alleles. Methods: We sequenced the coding regions for 38 genes within 500 kb of 38 lead GWAS SNPs in 13,538 breast cancer cases and 5,518 controls. Results: Truncating variants in these genes were rare, and were not associated with breast cancer risk. Burden testing of rare missense variants highlighted 5 genes with some suggestion of an association with breast cancer, although none met the multiple testing thresholds: MKL1, FTO, NEK10, MDM4, and COX11. Six common alleles in COX11, MAP3K1 (two), and NEK10 (three) were associated at the P < 0.0001 significance level, but these likely reflect linkage disequilibrium with causal regulatory variants. Conclusions: There was no evidence that rare coding variants in these genes confer substantial breast cancer risks. However, more modest effect sizes could not be ruled out. Impact: We tested the hypothesis that rare variants in 38 genes near breast cancer GWAS loci may mediate risk. These variants do not appear to play a major role in breast cancer heritability.

Using nationally representative Time Use Surveys from Australia, Korea, and Finland (n = 19,127 diaries) we examine how parenthood and the age of the youngest child are associated with the recuperative activities of leisure and sleep, the productive activities of market and nonmarket work, and with subjective time stress. Time stress differences by fatherhood are greatest for Finns and least for Koreans; time stress differences by motherhood are absent for Finns and high for Australians and Koreans. Results of the comparative analysis suggest that social policy and average national working hours produce different gendered gaps in both objective and subjective time stress among parents.

Motherhood brings significant change in the way women spend and experience their time. Having children is an intensely personal experience. Yet, much of the practical impact upon mothers’ time is shaped by the social organisation of work and care, which means the daily demands of parenting and child-raising vary over time and place. This chapter uses nationally representative time use surveys from four countries (Australia, Finland, Korea and Spain) to compare parents’ overall workloads when paid and unpaid work is scheduled over the day and week, gender divisions of work and care and the subjective time pressure associated with transitions to parenthood. It discusses how the findings relate to family policy, national work time regimes and social attitudes towards gender roles, mothering and fatherhood.

The authors investigated gender differences in couple parents' subjective time pressure, using detailed Australian time use data (n=756 couples with minor children). They examined how family demand, employment hours, and nonstandard work schedules of both partners relate to each spouse's non-employment time quality (“pure” leisure, “contaminated” leisure, multitasking housework, and child care) and subjective feelings of being rushed or pressed for time. Mothers averaged more contaminated leisure and less pure leisure and did much more unpaid work multitasking than fathers. These results suggest that these differences in time quality do partially account for mothers feeling more rushed than fathers. Weekend work was associated with mothers having less pure leisure, but not contaminated leisure. The opposite was found for fathers. Spousal work characteristics also related to time use and feeling rushed in gendered ways, with male long work hours positively associated with higher time pressure for mothers as well as the fathers who worked them.

Few studies of media use and adiposity explore the influence of parenting on children's lifestyle behaviors. Screen media access, bedroom television, lack of physical activity, and snacking on energy-dense foods have long been implicated in child overweight. This research used data from the first three waves of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children to investigate, prospectively, the associations between parental practices in early to middle childhood and children's behaviors and weight in late childhood. A path model was used to investigate whether consistent parenting predicted setting of boundaries for access to and use of media, and was indirectly associated with children's lifestyle behaviors that increase the likelihood of healthy weight maintenance. The findings demonstrated that children's lifestyles pertinent to weight maintenance and media use cluster together and involve both old and newer screen media, but are also predicted by parenting practices and the family environment.

Gender equality in time spent in market work and in housework and family care is widely seen as desirable, potentially enhancing women’s financial security and allowing men to participate more fully in family life, but does gendered time equality engender higher subjective time stress than gender specialization? This chapter uses time use data from Australia, Finland, and Korea to compare the reported time stress of men and women in time use equality households versus those in more gender specialized households. The findings provide evidence of a complex interplay among social norms, policy regimes, average weekly employment hours, and time stress from equality of time use. Time stress of equality is lowest in Finland where average hours of employment are low for men.

Most research on gender divisions of housework focuses on couple and family households. This article extends this literature to examine gender differences in domestic labour across living arrangements, with particular focus on young adults. Using time-diary data from the nationally representative Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Time Use Survey (2006) it examines the amount and composition of domestic work performed by 20–34-year-olds ( n = 889) living with parents, in a share household, alone, or in a couple, differentiating between routine and non-routine housework tasks, and between housework done for oneself only or for the household. It finds gender differences are strongest in couple households, but pertain across living arrangements, including share houses. Also, women’s domestic labour varies more by household characteristics than men’s. However, there is some evidence of non-conformity to gender stereotypes, with young men living in couple relationships contributing more time on activities for the household than young men in other households.

The transition from having no children to starting a family brings substantial changes in time use (Craig and Bittman 2008; Kotila, Schoppe-Sullivan, and Kamp Dush 2013). The increase in household workload is large and, although it varies somewhat across different social and policy contexts, it is present cross-nationally (Dribe and Stanfors 2009; Craig and Mullan 2010; Gauthier and DeGusti 2012). Parenthood also changes the composition of time use, adding requirements to perform not only child care but additional domestic work as well (Craig and Bittman 2008). Households meet this additional unpaid time demand in a variety of ways, including redirecting time to child care that nonparents can allocate to other things, such as leisure, sleep, and market work (Bianchi 2005). Other forms of adaptation include time compression—by doing more within the same period of time (Robinson and Godbey 1997).

Mammographic density measures adjusted for age and body mass index (BMI) are heritable predictors of breast cancer risk, but few mammographic density-associated genetic variants have been identified. Using data for 10,727 women from two international consortia, we estimated associations between 77 common breast cancer susceptibility variants and absolute dense area, percent dense area and absolute nondense area adjusted for study, age, and BMI using mixed linear modeling. We found strong support for established associations between rs10995190 (in the region of ZNF365), rs2046210 (ESR1), and rs3817198 (LSP1) and adjusted absolute and percent dense areas (all P < 10−5). Of 41 recently discovered breast cancer susceptibility variants, associations were found between rs1432679 (EBF1), rs17817449 (MIR1972-2: FTO), rs12710696 (2p24.1), and rs3757318 (ESR1) and adjusted absolute and percent dense areas, respectively. There were associations between rs6001930 (MKL1) and both adjusted absolute dense and nondense areas, and between rs17356907 (NTN4) and adjusted absolute nondense area. Trends in all but two associations were consistent with those for breast cancer risk. Results suggested that 18% of breast cancer susceptibility variants were associated with at least one mammographic density measure. Genetic variants at multiple loci were associated with both breast cancer risk and the mammographic density measures. Further understanding of the underlying mechanisms at these loci could help identify etiologic pathways implicated in how mammographic density predicts breast cancer risk. Cancer Res; 75(12); 2457–67. ©2015 AACR.