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January 23, 2006
Fathers and benefits
Less shackled by the falsely-pc notion that the two-parent family is a thing of the past, too antiquated to be backed by contemporary policy, academics in the USA have contributed extensively to the contemporary body of research which evidences the benefits of the ‘traditional’ family. The latest contribution from across the Atlantic comes out of the economics departments at the University of California and the Claremont McKenna College.
Heather Antecol and Kelly Bedard's study, ‘Does single parenthood increase the probability of teenage promiscuity, substance use, and crime?’ examines the childhood effects of fathers on teenage behaviour. The research finds that ‘…the longer the father remains in the household, the “better off” the youth is.' What makes the research particularly valuable, is that as well as working with data from a large sample (taken from the National and Longitudinal Survey of Youth and its Young Adult Supplement) the researchers have striven to control for family and environmental characteristics. Controlling for socio-economic influences allows the impact of paternal presence to be isolated and therefore measured in itself. Furthermore, the study attempts to quantify the impact of father-presence on ‘deviant’ teenage behaviour. Hence it is able to deduce that, ‘… an additional five years with the biological father decreases the probability of smoking, drinking, engaging in sexual activity, marijuana use, and conviction by approximately 5.3, 1.2, 3.4, 2.2 and 0.3 percentage points, respectively…’
Evidence such as Antecol and Bedard's is very useful for championing the importance of fathers. Policy strategy tends to be based on the assumption that adverse outcomes associated with lone-parenthood are solely attributable to the strong link between poverty and the departure of the father. Antecol and Bedard’s research however, demonstrates that the presence of a father during childhood is inherently important in itself. Research of this sort therefore pushes the case for implementing social policy which encourages and supports the two-parent family, rather than seeing the problem with errant fathers as purely an economic one, thereby focusing strategy only on outcome poverty after family breakdown. Research of this nature is a step towards persuading policy makers and government that two-parent families are fundamentally valuable to society, and thus in terms of average ‘returns’, must be invested in.
Currently this government does the very opposite, stubbornly refusing to sanction the two-parent family. The government agenda here, regarding the growing group of single mothers, is to concentrate myopically on solving the problem at hand - mitigating poverty - whilst failing to also address the wider issues surrounding absent fathers. The greater the volume of fresh research evidencing the quantifiable benefits of two-parent families, the greater the chances of re-focusing family policy. However, the politicisation of academic research funding in the UK may mean we have to be reliant on the US academe for a while longer.
Posted by Anastasia de Waal at January 23, 2006 10:58 AM
Comments
What a remarkable revelation that male and female parents are the best option for rearing their offspring.
Who would have thought that hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary fine tuning to favour this arrangement could possibly be correct when so many lefty social engineers have worked out over the last fifty years that they in fact know best.
Posted by: John East at January 24, 2006 03:35 PM
No one denies that a 'traditional' family is a good arrangement - but it isn't the best and it certainly isn't the only. Those studies are predicated upon the current condition of Western civilization and the optimal chances for children with specific backgrounds within that framework.
Communal arrangements are actually the best - where power is not centralized in the classical 'pater familias' - the economic dominance of parents over children causes friction. A close knit community bound by multilateral economic ties, as a supervisory unit over the power of parents, is the optimal arrangement for family but that would require a lot of changes to the current social, economic and political system.
The question that study did not answer was "Is a non-nuclear family such a problem for children that no adequate compensations can be made?"
The answer to that question is of course that compensations can be made to make up for the lack of a father or mother - as normal families, deprived of one parent through death etc find out every day without expensive studies.
Posted by: Dave at January 26, 2006 01:12 PM
Dave,
You say,
”No one denies that a 'traditional' family is a good arrangement - but it isn't the best….”
I’ll take this for what it is, an unsubstantiated opinion, unless you have some evidence to back it up? Simply denouncing the traditional family, in the face of the contrary evidence presented in the study, strikes me as perverse.
”Communal arrangements are actually the best - where power is not centralized in the classical 'pater familias' - the economic dominance of parents over children causes friction.”
Wiser heads might see this “friction” as that which instills societal mores leading to the beneficial outcomes found in the study.
”compensations can be made up for the lack of a father or mother – as normal families, deprived of one parent through death etc find out every day without expensive studies”
Perhaps in some egalitarian social engineers dream world adequate “compensations” are made, but the results of the study clearly show that, on average, this doesn’t happen in the real world. Unless you can suggest why this doesn't happen, and exactly what should be done to make it happen, then we are left with the father/mother model as that which works best.
Posted by: John East at January 27, 2006 08:57 AM
You forget John that in Dave's world there is no place for hypothesis testing. Didn't you know that social analysis and deconstruction suffice, that theory is synonymous with law?
He is right though when he suggests that Western civilisation would have to undergo a profound social, economic and political change in order to enjoy the benefits of close knit communities.
One way that such a transformation could be wrought would be through global thermo-nuclear war. Western civilisation would then be reduced to disparate bands of hunter-gatherers. Semi-permanent clan rivalry would then obviate 'pater familias' and general scarcity would end the economic dominance of parents over offspring.
Providing adverse climate change does not create the imperative for settled agriculture (and ultimately, capitalism), mankind could subsist in this Kalaharian paradise until the next big asteroid shows up.
Posted by: Joseph at January 29, 2006 03:57 PM
Joseph,
Perhaps global thermo-nuclear war would work as you say. It would certainly solve many other problems. However, call me a chicken if you like, I would prefer a less drastic solution.
Posted by: John East at January 29, 2006 06:28 PM
As there doesn’t appear to be a trackback system for this blog, I thought I ought to link to my discussion of how de Waal has misused this research over at the Web of Contradictions in order to give her the opportunity to reply.
With regards to the comments, I’d just like to note my bemusement that there is an obvious lack-of-fit between John East’s unsubstantiated opinion that the ‘traditional’ family is the product of ‘hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary fine tuning’ and Joseph’s view that communal childrearing used to occur in ‘disparate bands of hunter-gatherers’.
Posted by: Contradictory Ben at February 2, 2006 12:33 PM
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