Posted on 07/20/2011 11:38:44 AM PDT by SmithL
Study after study has shown that children with married parents are better off, and our society has embraced the idea that children should be raised by married adults. The latest research digs deep into this long-held belief and reveals an interesting twist.
A new British study finds that kids of married parents are more intellectually advanced than those born out of wedlock, but this has nothing to do with marriage. Rather it's a reflection of the types of people who tend to get married and those who don't, . . .
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
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Complete and utter nonsense!
IF you read what the study is saying, the headline is, at best, a half truth.
Kids from parents who are married DO DO BETTER. The study just says that the marrying kind of people raise smarter kids. They’re trying to push its the parents not the marriage itself. The researchers are using a convoluted argument to try and disprove something that everyone knows.
The article is tying it self in knots trying to day that marriage isn’t better for kids.
I don’t see it that way. It makes perfect sense to me. The odds of persistence of a marriage AND the welfare of the children are BOTH apparently dependent variables, the independent variables being the “quality” of the parents. This may be a matter of genes and culture - including healthy religious tendencies, proper education, etc.
Disentangling the effects of genes and culture is extremely difficult. But in any case marriage in itself, between people unsuited by genes, education and indoctrination to produce good outcomes, does not have a positive effect on outcomes.
I don’t see a conflict between the study and what you wrote.
Direct from the article........
Married people are usually well-educated, while cohabitating couples often haven’t graduated from college.
In other words, you don’t have to be married to raise a successful kid. You just need to be educated.
_________________________________________________
How’s that for making up the most random and inane analogy ever!
I remember a study years ago from a woman who embarked on the study expecting to find that children whose parents divorced would be doing just as well as those whose parents continued to be married. She studied quite a number of children (100? More? Can’t remember or her name) over at least a decade. She was shocked to find that the children of parents who divorced did consistently worse in just about every area of life, even if they were teenagers when the divorce happened. The result was the exact opposite of her expectations. Of course, she did not study children whose parents never married.
Bogus studies like these merely fuel illegitimacy by making sex partners feel that it’s “okay” to produce children without marrying. Horrible.
The old difference without a distinction crap. Well if the left consider marriage so useless, why do they so heavily support faggots doing it??
From the Institute for Fiscal Studies website (the organization that conducted the study to which this article refers)
“Here is a sample of the sorts of issues we investigate. See our research section for details of current projects. See also our strategic framework for an outline of our aims and how we set about achieving them and our quality standards for details of how our systems and practices are designed to ensure that every stage of the research process is carried out to a very high standard.
Taxes and welfare
Governments tax and spend to provide services, redistribute income and influence the behaviour of individuals and firms. Among the questions we ask: Will tax credits improve work incentives? Who wins and loses from the Budget? Is there a rationale for National Insurance? Would higher alcohol duties raise revenue? How heavy is the tax burden on business? Is independent taxation of men and women eroding? Is housing undertaxed? How many people is means-testing set to affect?
Public finance and public services
The coalition government will need to implement a combination of tax increases and spending cuts in order to meet its stated goals for reducing the budget deficit which, by both historic and international standards, is large. This will involve difficult choices over which types of families should see their incomes reduced (through either tax increases or benefit cuts) and which areas of public service provision should be cut back. Among the questions we ask: Are the government’s plans sufficient to close the hole? How sensible are its new fiscal targets? What are the pros and cons of alternative tax and spending measures? What are the likely implications of current policies for spending on different areas of public services? How do the government’s plans compare to those bequeathed to it by the previous Labour government?
Inequality and education
Education can improve people’s lifetime incomes, helping tackle poverty and inequality. Among the questions we ask: What are the financial returns from education? Does pre-school learning offer value for money? Do student loans disadvantage the poor? Why does inequality show different trends for income and spending? Can we learn more about the welfare of the very poorest? How can the government hit its child poverty target? Are “baby bonds” an effective redistributive tool?
Productivity and competition
Greater competitiveness, productivity and firm performance are the foundations for growth in living standards. Among the questions we ask: In what sectors does UK productivity lag behind the US? Should tax credits be used to encourage R&D? How do product and labour market reforms interact? How does overseas competition affect wages? Does dividend taxation affect investment?
Spending and saving
Understanding how consumers decide what to spend and save is essential for monetary, fiscal and competition policy. Among the questions we ask: Are people saving enough for retirement? Is the pension system affordable? How do house prices affect spending? How do people insure against unexpected income changes? Does inflation measure the prices shoppers really pay?
Development and poverty reduction
Poverty reduction requires policies to help poor people invest in their human capital. Among the questions we ask: Do education subsidies in Latin America improve school enrolment? Does better education lead to better health? Are cash transfers more effective when women receive the money? Do political pressures hamper policy evaluation?
Tax law and administration
Good tax policy depends on the legal process and administration, not just economics. Among the questions we ask: Is parliament involved early enough in making tax law? Is the legal treatment of same-sex couples coherent? Are the employed and self-employed treated equitably? Should we merge HM Customs and the Inland Revenue?
Methodology and evaluation
To evaluate policies rigorously - and help others do so - we develop micro-econometric techniques and pass on our skills to other researchers, civil servants, regulators and private sector economists.”
There’s definitely a perspective here, imho.
“Experts often disagree on whether parents of children born out of wedlock should be encouraged to marry their partners. Marriage can provide financial security, but if the parents are unhappily married, the child can suffer. But maybe this new study shows that experts should be taking a closer look at the parents’ education. Would these parents having kids out of wedlock benefit more from getting an education or tying the knot?”
__________________________________________
Look. Research has shown that education has little to do with the success of the family unit. In fact, children do better in a traditional family with high school drop-outs as parents than do children from broken homes with college educated parents.
I’m not sure why everybody is complaining about this story. It’s seems perfectly common sense to me.
Let’s consider a related example. Children do better when the biological father remains in the home. This is a statistical fact.
But is it because the bio-dad is present, or because the type of man who hangs around is good for kids?
Does anybody seriously think the mere presence of biologically-related gang-banging baby daddy makes the kids’ life better? Of course not! Of course we have little data on these cases because that type of “father” splits.
OTOH, the type of man who actually fathers his children is likely to be responsible in many other ways, all of which are good for kids.
Of course the people who understand the importance of the traditional family structure are more intelligent than those who do not. That is an obvious given, and did not require a study. The same is true with respect to education. Those who go to College tend to be markedly more intelligent on average than those who drop out of high school. But that is not cited as a reason for no one to go to college.
Any tribe, community village, or Nation is a multi-generational concept. The foundation for its success is the family unit. To suggest that children raised in a family unit do not benefit in their development from being raised in the unit that enables both the family and society to pass on both the cultural & material achievements from one generation to another, is silly & fatuous.
Among the many benefits, of course, is that they understand how they should comport themselves, if they are to be a part of the positive progress of their social order. It is part of their education--perhaps the most important part of their education; a correct part, at least as important as the part they gain from being sent to school or home educated, as opposed to simply wallowing on the public dole.
Yes, nature is indeed important. But that does not mean that we should neglect nurture.
William Flax
Amazing. She has it exactly bass-ackward.
First off, "our society", and certainly the author's society, if the author lives in SF, is in the process of rapidly rejecting "the idea that children should be raised by married adults." The out-of-wedlock childbearing rate is through the roof.
Back in 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was excoriated for saying the Black (at that time, "Negro") family was in crisis because the illegitimacy rate was 20%. Now the White illegitimacy rate is 30+% and the Black illegitimacy rate is 70+%.
Second of all, though "our society" in practice does NOT embrace marriage as the normal paradigm for child-raising, it should.
Of course causes and effects may be reciprocal. Better-educated parents --> delay children until marriage; married parents --> have completed their education; married parents --> better-educated kids; highly-motivated young people --> don't screw around; highly-motivated young people -->learn more, earn more; stable married parents --> kids with goals; married parents aren't screwing around and don't tolerate their kids screwing around, etc.
Plus: religious people --> marry and then have children; marryied parents tend to become more religious; religious young people --> more highly motivated, etc.
All this adds up to clusters of cultural correlations: cultures which support children's flourishing, and cultures which do not.
There's a reason why every major culture has recognized and approved of marriage as the appropriate way for men and women to match up sexually, and the appropriate way to raise kids. It's because dead-end subcultures which did not do so, did not maintain replacement levels of well-functioning adults for several generations, and subsequently ... pfft.
Its not tied in knots, its just the nature of the beast. It is an attempt to isolate a variable. Like so many aspects of human nature its very difficult to isolate a specific factor and analyze its effects, because there tend to be tangled causes and effects and a host of confounding variables.
The point is that the tendency to marry, to stay married, and to produce well-raised children are all effects of other causes - i.e., the parents themselves. I believe this is true. There is no point in forcing unsuitable people to marry.
Now, how do we go about making sure we get more good parents and fewer bad ones ?
“Bogus studies like these merely fuel illegitimacy by making sex partners feel that it’s “okay” to produce children without marrying. Horrible.”
That may be, because the people who read it that way are more likely to misread the report, because its lesson to that sort of person can only be absorbed if they are sufficiently self aware to properly understand its sobering implications, and most of these people lack this self awareness.
The real lesson they should take from this is that by merely thinking this way - that it may be “okay” - they automatically exclude themselves as good parents - i.e., they will probably be failures as parents. Its a hard thing to persuade oneself that one is inferior though. As I said above, it requires self-awareness to understand how defective you are.
I don’t think she has it that backwards.
The real lesson here is that people who will not make good parents SHOULD NOT HAVE CHILDREN.
We do have a wave of unsuitable people today, as you say below, it is the result of these many years of disastrous cultural decline. The pressing point however, is what do we do now ? What was once broken cannot easily be fixed.
It will not help to just make these people marry, that I get. Is there some other way to “fix” them ?
I don’t think she has it that backwards.
The real lesson here is that people who will not make good parents SHOULD NOT HAVE CHILDREN.
We do have a wave of unsuitable people today, as you say below, it is the result of these many years of disastrous cultural decline. The pressing point however, is what do we do now ? What was once broken cannot easily be fixed.
It will not help to just make these people marry, that I get. Is there some other way to “fix” them ?
Unfortunately, the public schools have done a job on pupils for the past fifty years. Rather than teaching them to think and reason; to be responsible for their actions while at school; by using all the change methods to indoctrinate them to be more dependent and less individualistic, many people today do not have the stability, maturity and selflessness necessary to make ar a good marriage or good parents.
A long engagement id necessaary to build a strong foundation for marriage; no sex before marriage; and recognition of irreconcilable differences before marriage are paramount. Blind infatuation is not true love. Remember I said it takes two mature and unselfish people. As women we need to be certain the man we marry will be a good father for her children. And it works both ways, men should decide if their choice would be a good mother to his children. If one is Christian, they should marry another Christian. With stars in our eyes, this is difficult but imperative to do. So a long engagement is the only way to go.
I always like to say ‘the test for love is this, the other makes you more not less.’
No matter what anyone says, no matter how well a single parent raises a child, that child will miss something very important to his/her well being if missing a father or a good mother in the home
Your variable dependent and independence are generalities floating out there in the blue. Undefined they mean absolutely nothing. So could you fill me in? Thanks.
Good for the attorney. I know one attorney who won’t take
a divorce client unless really serious efforts at
reconciliation have been made.
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