Is a backlash brewing over 529 college-savings plans?

My colleague Jane J. Kim, in today’s WSJ, reports that some parents, frustrated by the management of their college-savings plans, are stopping their contributions. Instead, they are saving for college on their own, by investing in vehicles like municipal funds, individual bonds, mutual funds and annuities.

In addition to seeking more control over their investments, consumers are forgoing the tax benefits of 529 plans for more flexibility to use the money for whatever they choose. To take advantage of the plans’ tax benefits, the savings must be used for qualified educational expenses. But if your kid doesn’t go to college, you must pay taxes and penalties if you want to use the money for other purposes.

For years, 529 plans have been seen by financial planners and consumers as the ultimate college savings vehicles, Ms. Kim writes. In these plans, investors put after-tax dollars into an account that typically offers a range of mutual funds and other investments. Distributions and earnings are tax-free, as long as they’re used for higher education.

But contributions to these plans have gone way down, in the wake of the economic downturn and management problems with some funds. Investors, after tucking some $15.5 billion into 529s in 2006 and another $15.2 billion in 2007, contributed only $5.2 billion last year, Ms. Kim reports. So far this year, investors have put $4.8 billion into the plans, although there are signs that investor interest may be starting to perk up, she writes. And to bolster investor confidence, states and 529 plan managers have been rolling out new, more conservative options and tightened plan oversight.

We’ve previously discussed dealing with declining college savings funds. Readers, have recent years’ economic performance inspired you to make changes to your college-savings game plans? Anyone forgoing 529 plans in favor of other options?

Associated Press

From Gossip Girl to sexting, teen dating is hard to navigate these days.

The world of teen romance is baffling to many parents, who often feel both ill-informed and powerless as their kids start dating. I always had plenty of advice for my kids on other topics (probably too much, in fact), but dating left me tongue-tied – and worried.

New research suggests my approach may have been a mistake. While many parents feel their dating advice is about as welcome as the swine flu, new studies suggest that on the contrary, teens not only value parental input – but tend to have healthier romantic relationships when it is offered, as I report in today’s “Work & Family” column on several new studies on teen dating.

Many parents I interviewed said one hurdle to giving their kids good advice is that dating practices have changed so much since they were teens – encompassing casual hookups, nonstop texting or sexting via cell phone, and romances that transpire almost entirely on Facebook. “This is an area where parents aren’t quite sure what to do,” says Stephanie Madsen, associate professor of psychology at McDaniel College, Westminster, Md., and a leading researcher on teen dating. The new research is beginning to offer “some solid information on what is helpful, and what’s not.”

Parents who make themselves available at young people’s request to listen and talk about dating tend to have kids who enjoy closer, healthier romantic relationships, based on a study of 225 young adults ages 22 to 29, set for publication at a conference next spring. On the other hand, parents who don’t get involved in their young adults’ love lives tend to have teens with poorer relationships, says the study, led by Dr. Madsen.

Giving direct advice also is linked to better relationships, but teens prefer parents take a lower-key approach, simply listening to problems when asked, reflecting on what they hear, and talking through potential solutions, Dr. Madsen says. That means stopping short of pushing solutions, judging teens’ choices of partners, or trying to control their behavior.

That can be tough. Several parents said it can be agonizing to stand back and watch your teen head unwittingly into a painful breakup. “I keep telling myself it’s part of that whole letting-go thing, and I can’t protect him from everything,” says one mother, who fears her teenage son is about to get dumped. But still, she says, “I worry that he will be devastated.”

Most parents I interviewed said they intervene only when a relationship deteriorates and starts harming their child. One Tennessee mother says that after weeks of worry, she finally took her son aside last year to convey her concern that his longtime romance was causing him far more pain than it was worth. He seemed to take her seriously and soon broke it off. Another mother said she, too, pressured her teenage daughter to break up with a boyfriend who had become disrespectful.

Readers, do you give your teenagers dating advice? What has worked for you in keeping your teen on the right track with romance, and what has flopped? Do you worry about the hookup trend? And what, if anything, did you learn from your own parents’ oversight of your love life as a teen?

Associated Press

The holidays are already here at many retailers.

They’re playing carols at the mall, Macy’s is collecting letters to Santa for charity — despite the unseasonably warm weather in the Northeast, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas (and Hannukah!). That heralds a hodgepodge season of joy and fun and stress and strife, one that inevitably changes the juggle in all sorts of ways.

There’s buying gifts, for one thing. It’s likely to be tougher for many families this year as hard economic times linger, but even for people who are flush, it’s a chore. At our house, we’re determined to do it earlier this year and avoid our customary late scramble. My wife suggested that we plan to take advantage of the sales on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving (when many retailers are said to go into the black for the year), or from the comfort of home or office on what’s come to be known as Cyber Monday, the first workday after Thanksgiving. We’ll see if it really happens.

The battle for time off from work at the holidays is another source of holiday agitation. I’ve managed it pretty well myself this year, as I’m taking the day after Thanksgiving for the first time in three years (something that’s difficult as Fridays are always a closing day for my section) and also taking the week through Christmas. Last year, struggling to reconcile two sides of my juggle, I made plans for handling our section’s production process on Christmas Eve and also made plans to attend the Christmas pageant at church and help to set up for our annual Christmas Eve party at home—forgetting until the week itself that I couldn’t do all of that at once. I had to settle for pictures from the pageant and attended the party pretty much like any other guest, arriving after work.

Securing time off is just the beginning for many folks, of course. Then comes holiday travel, that always-delightful miasma of blackout dates, crowded airports and general emotional distress—leaving aside what happens when we actually arrive. We’re staying home throughout the holidays this year, which I’m glad of. Many families, meanwhile, are hosting friends and relatives, which means the additional stresses of meal-planning, cooking and entertaining.

What’s on your holiday worry list? How are you planning to mitigate the stress and, with luck, make it a joyous and easy season at home and at work?

Forget frugality. Want to know what the true lasting impact of this Great Recession will be? Then take a look at the kids.

A parent’s job loss increases the probability that a child repeats a grade in school by roughly 15%, according to a new paper from two economics professors at the University of California, Davis.

The authors find that household earnings are reduced by about 15% in the year after a parent’s job loss, based on their analysis of data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation in 1996, 2001, and 2004, a program maintained by the Census Bureau.

While just over 7% of children without a parental layoff repeated grades by the third SIPP study, more than 9% of children who had a parent laid off repeated grades — resulting in about a 15% greater chance that children who experience a parent’s job loss will repeat a grade.

The effect is twice as likely in boys than in girls, they find. And the effects are particularly large for families in which the parents have only a high school education or less, their study shows.

Continue reading at Real Time Economics…

Have you seen any effect on your children’s school performance or well-being if your family has experienced a layoff?

CPSC

About a million Maclaren strollers have been recalled after a dozen children reportedly had their fingertips amputated by the stroller’s hinge mechanism.

The recall includes all nine models of single and double umbrella Maclaren strollers, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and the Associated Press. (The affected models are the Volo, Triumph, Quest Sport, Quest Mod, Techno XT, TechnoXLR, Twin Triumph, Twin Techno and Easy Traveller.)

The strollers were sold by Babies“R”Us, Target and other retailers nationwide from 1999 through November 2009 for between $100 and $360. The CPSC recommends that consumers immediately stop using these recalled strollers and contact Maclaren USA to receive a free repair kit. Maclaren can be reached at toll-free at (877) 688-2326 between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET Monday through Friday or visit the firm’s Web site at www.maclaren.us/recall. A spokeswoman for Babies “R” Us said it has already made the repairs to its inventory, reported the WSJ’s Melanie Trottman.

The CSPC says that amputation risk occurs when a child’s finger is placed in the hinge mechanism of a stroller while it is being unfolded.

Lightweight, easy-to-maneuver Maclarens are ubiquitous, especially in New York and other urban areas. Are you affected by this recall?

Associated Press

Kids, take a deep breath…

I wrote recently about new research that showed how stressed out we are. But there’s more. Our kids are often stressed, too—and we don’t always see it.

One of the most striking findings in the American Psychological Association’s annual survey Stress in America was the mismatch between what kids say they are stressed about, and what parents think their kids are stressed about.

We may assume that our kids are worried about peer pressure, but this research suggests that’s not as big an issue for kids as we think. For instance, among parents of 13- to 17-year-olds, 20% said peer relationships were a source of stress for their kids. But just 11% of the kids said they worried about that.

What are kids really stressed about? The future.

A big worry was whether their family will have enough money. Among kids 8 to 17 years old, 30% said they worried about family finances—though just 18% of parents thought that their kids were stressed about financial difficulties. And 29% of teenagers said they were worried about getting into a good college or what to do after high school, while just 5% of teens’ parents thought their kids were stressed about that.

“Parents pretty predictably underreport” the amount of stress in their children, said Katherine Nordal, a psychologist and executive director for the APA’s practice directorate, at a briefing on the research last week.

The results are worrisome: Parents significantly underreported how likely their kids were to have headaches, difficulty sleeping and eating issues, compared with what the kids themselves reported. The study, conducted for the APA by Harris Interactive, surveyed 1,206 young people ages 8-17.

Dr. Nordal noted that a significant percentage of kids say they are comfortable talking with their parents about what’s on their minds, so perhaps the problem is that (stressed) parents aren’t carving out the time to sit down with them.

We’d all like to believe that our kids are fine and that we are successfully protecting them from stress. But kids are no fools, and when they see us worry, they worry too. It’s hard to sit down with a kid—at almost any age—and talk about what’s bothering them. But this research suggests that we need to do a better job of listening to them.

Readers, do you think that your own stress spills over onto your children? Do you talk with your kids about what’s stressing them out? And what advice do you have for coping with stress in the family?

In response to my post last week on the Obamas’ marriage and the difficulty of balancing two partners’ career priorities, several commenters got into a fascinating discussion on the subject of things they’ve learned about the juggle that they wished they’d known in college.

Particularly insightful was frequent poster ellieandtheboys, who lamented that the all-female college she attended left her ill-prepared for balancing work and family life. “We were taught that we could simply do it all,” she wrote. “We were that bright and that well-educated, we’d figure it out, forge new paths, be leaders in our chosen fields, have 5 children and balance all effortlessly. You simply can’t do it all, all at the same time your spouse is doing it all. Something has to give to sustain a marriage and a reasonable quality of life. Had I had better perspective on this before learning it ‘on the job,’ there are several choices I would have made differently.”

Asked by another commenter what some of those choices would have been, ellieandtheboys replied in part: “As I always knew I wanted to have children, I would have chosen a different field of finance that was less demanding in terms of pressure and hours worked. … I also would have had children earlier on, and would have had more children because I started earlier.”

I asked my wife what she would have done differently had she known in college what she now knows about the juggle, and she immediately cited the same answer I had in mind for myself: She would have saved more. I remember, shortly after college, scoffing at a friend who had started contributing to a 401(k) at his first job. Believe me, I’m not scoffing now. Though my wife and I earn strong salaries and are generally solvent, our financial condition would be less tenuous now if we’d started saving in earnest just a few years earlier than we did.

Even more important, for me, would have been a better handle on the degree of selflessness required for a good relationship, a good family life and a balanced integration of those with work. Through some difficult family circumstances in my youth, I developed a self-reliance that has risked curdling into selfishness. And not having had a real relationship before the one with the woman who became my wife, I find that even 13 years into it, I’m still learning the rhythms of putting another’s concerns above my own. As I alluded to last week, it’s an area I’m continuing to work on.

Readers, what do you wish you’d learned in college or early adulthood about juggling work and family? If you have children, how are you helping them (or planning to help them) learn the things you think you missed?

Associated Press

Thomas Keller

I love cooking and have a nice cookbook collection—a fringe benefit of writing about food and restaurants for the Wall Street Journal. Sometimes I even get to cook as part of my job, as in my recent WSJ story about a family-style cookbook by the famous chef, Thomas Keller.

Mr. Keller is known for some of the most celebrated haute cuisine in the country, at Per Se in New York and the French Laundry in Yountville, Calif. His previous cookbooks are notorious for being incredibly difficult. For proof, check out this jaw-dropping blog by a woman who actually cooks her way through one of them.

Now Mr. Keller has written “Ad Hoc at Home,” a book of family-style recipes. My task was to test a bunch of the recipes to see which ones we would run in the paper and get a sense of the book in general. What fun, I thought. I would get work done but also have Thomas Keller cuisine to serve my husband and two little boys for dinner.

Three hours later, my kitchen was a total mess, I was cursing and had renamed the chicken soup “Impossible Soup.” The recipe involved everything from sweating vegetables under a parchment-paper lid to cooking celery and carrots separately to making cream-puff dough and shaping it into quenelles, before cooking them separately and then adding them to the soup. Once the soup was done, my dumplings looked like blobs and I had dirtied every saucepan I have twice. The kids ate two licks of soup, then jumped down from the table to play with their toys. My husband kept saying everything was delicious, but all I could answer was, “It oughta be.”

Later, I spoke to Mr. Keller about the difficulty of the recipes. He explained his philosophy that cooking requires a genuine commitment — of time, energy, focus and passion. He talked about building your skill level through practice and doggedness. (He also observed that the soup recipe was probably beyond my skill level–an ego blow, but perhaps true). It was a moving explanation of the mindset of a master: To Mr. Keller, making fried chicken or ice cream sandwiches the right way, the perfect way, no matter how hard it might appear to some of us, is part of the single-minded focus on excellence in which his own life is steeped.

But when your life is a juggle, single-minded focus and excellence can feel like far-away, almost irrelevant concepts. I was annoyed by the soup recipe, and it was actually my job to make it. Would anyone actually go through that just for fun? (On the other hand, the book’s ice cream recipe is not that hard and is pretty indulgent stuff.)

Juggle readers, what’s your take? Do complicated recipes have no place in a juggler’s household? Or is there value in taking on an ambitious cooking project? What’s the most complicated thing you make?

Associated Press

Couples can declare a “zombie hour” after getting home from work, during which each partner forgives the other any bad moods.

A tough time of day for me as part of a dual-earner couple was the intersection of work and evenings at home. If either my husband or I came home from the office in a bad or anxious mood, it was easy for the other partner to skid into the dumps too.

A new scholarly study tracks the emotional spillover that tends to happen when a working husband or wife arrives at the doorstep bummed out, and finds some spouses are more likely than others to cause it. By sampling 50 couples’ momentary moods throughout eight days and evenings via cell phone technology, researchers found that those who were deeply involved in their careers were more likely than others to bring their bad moods home and spread the pain around.

The findings suggest people with demanding jobs need to draw boundaries against emotional spillover, by stopping on the way home to work out or taking a little time alone to decompress, says the study, published in the latest issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology. Weak marriages are especially at risk from this bad-mood contagion, the study says.

I wrote about this pattern in my “Work & Family” Column a couple of years ago and got a landslide of e-mail in response. A Harvard Business Review study had cited conversational “dead zones” experienced by many career-focused workers after a hard day at the office, when they’re too pooped to say anything at all to their spouses or partners. The study said such strains were wreaking havoc on family and personal life.

Readers wrote then to offer several solutions. For some, focusing on children eased the tension; this is a remedy supported by the latest study’s findings, which show the presence of children helps prevent bad-mood spillover. Other proposed remedies included a soak in a hot tub or warm bath, a long commute with music or books on tape, or taking a short walk as soon as you arrive home.

Other readers said they just hoist a white flag. One couple declared a “zombie hour” immediately after getting home from work, during which each partner consciously forgave the other any bad moods or thoughtless comments. This gave each partner time to decompress.

Readers, how do you deal with a partner’s bad moods after work? Does this kind of emotional spillover cause fights or tension between you? And does the degree to which you’re into your career make a difference?

Are your kids constantly socializing electronically?

If you’re a parent today, chances are you’ve gotten a call from a school principal’s office telling you that you need to come in and pick up your kid’s cellphone.

The common refrain: “Your child was texting in class and we confiscated the phone.”

But such disciplinary calls are now becoming less common. Instead, more educators and parents are in effect saying “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”

When cellphones first came out, many educators banned them from school grounds. Then they began telling students they could bring phones, but couldn’t turn them on until the end of the day. Now more schools are allowing children to use their phones between classes or at lunch. Some teachers are even wrapping texting into their lesson plans.

I wrote about these changes in my Moving On column this week, which summed up this new world order. Because so many people in their teens and early 20s are in this constant whir of socializing—accessible to each other every minute of the day via cellphone, instant messaging and social-networking Web sites—there are a host of new questions that need to be addressed in schools, in the workplace and at home. Chief among them: How much work can “hyper-socializing” students or employees really accomplish if they are holding multiple conversations with friends via text-messaging, or are obsessively checking Facebook? (To decipher your teens, a handy text-jargon glossary can be found here.)

There are two camps on this issue. One believes technologically-savvy young people are becoming more adept at multitasking, and that their social-networking skills will aid them in school and in the workplace. Others argue that these “hyper-socializers” are serial time wasters, and that their face-to-face interpersonal skills are poor. (One 10th-grade class in L.A., in an excruciating experiment, even tried to go without any electronic devices for one week; “We are all going crazy,” one student said.)

Where do you stand on the debate? Are your kids frequently socializing electronically — and if so, do you see an upside to your children’s obsessive online socializing? Are you texting your own friends all day from the workplace? What advice might you offer to educators and employers – and to young people who can’t stop staying connected electronically?