18 September 2003, 838 words
In some ways, we're lucky that ours is not an especially intellectual society. This is because so many of our experts spout so much stupidness. Oftentimes, the stupidity affects important institutional areas, such as education, economics, health care, and crime. But when it comes to fundamentally important areas, such as parenting and sexual relations, our lack of intellectualism means that ordinary people just go ahead and apply common sense. This doesn't always have desirable consequences, but it is far better than what would happen if people paid attention to those persons who, by virtue of their professional qualifications, are supposed to know about such things: but don't.
I suppose, then, I should not have been flabbergasted to see the following assertion by Dr. David E. Bratt: "Unfortunately, children from homes where the mother works outside the house, develop more behavioural problems than children whose moms work at home. Behavioural problems that seem to make the child at risk for developing criminal behaviour…Initially, children, and later society, suffer the consequences of maternal deprivation." (Trinidad Guardian, 09.09.03.)
Now, even if this assertion were true, it would be very impractical to follow it, since it would mean that families would have to depend on one income from the man of the house. The thing is, Bratt's contention is NOT true. Common sense alone suggests how absurd it is: there are thousands of children who have been raised in families where both parents work outside the home, yet these kids have turned out fine. Indeed, there is hardly a middle-class family where both mother and father do not go out to work, yet it is middle-class children who are least likely to become criminals.
In matters of social psychology, though, common sense is not enough. But the most reliable research also contradicts Bratt. A 1989 survey of studies of working mothers, carried out by American psychologist L.W. Hoffman, found that children whose mothers have jobs were virtually indistinguishable from the minority whose mothers stayed at home. Other surveys have shown that children who go to kindergarten are no better or worse off than children raised at home.
Unfortunately, because Bratt is a paediatrician, many people will assume that he knows whereof he speaks, even when he speaks outside his area of expertise. What makes the problem worse, though, is that even persons speaking within their area of expertise often don't know what they're talking about. In this week's Sunday Newsday, Dr. Allison Gibbons-Barnes, a counselling psychiatrist (whatever that is), warns mothers about the need to talk to daughters about sex, writing, "This is not meant to blame mothers, but to share a wake-up call."
Apart from gross factual errors &endash; like saying "girls are the ones agonising years after the abortion" and that girls are having sex at 11 and 12 partly because of "the sexual titillation in the society plus the early hormonal inputs combined with genetically modified foods" - Barnes clearly believes that mothers can be a major influence on their girl children.
What do up-to-date researchers say? Developmental psychologists Michael Lamb and Alison Nash have analysed the many studies purporting to find a connection between a mother's parenting style and the child's socialisation and have concluded: "Despite repeated assertions that the quality of social competence with peers is determined by the prior quality of infant-mother attachment relationships, there is actually little empirical support for this hypothesis."
And George E. Vaillant, director of the most thorough study of adult development ever done, writes in his book Aging Well, "…when the childhoods of the best and worst agreeing outcomes in the Harvard Study were compared, there were few differences…fingernail biting, early toilet training, even that old standby the cold, rejecting mother, failed to predict either emotional illness or bad aging…Orphans, by the time they were 80, were as likely to be happy and in the pink of health as those whose parents lovingly watched them graduate from high school."
Reliable data must be backed by a good theory. In her book The Nurture Assumption, Judith Rich Harris gives four reasons why it would not have made evolutionary sense for children to be socialised by their parents in the ways Bratt and Gibbons-Barnes seem to believe is the case. (1) Children can't count on having parents even nowadays, and this was truer in prehistoric times, so to rely exclusively on parents for learning would have been a death sentence back then; (2) Such reliance would also limit the variety of skills needed by a family to survive changing conditions; (3) A predisposition to learn only from parents would prevent a child picking up useful innovations; and (4) Parents and children often have conflicting interests.
The wrong ideas espoused by local experts in parenting and sexual relations have not begun to permeate our society. But it is best that such nonsense be nipped in the bud before ordinary people actually start believing it. And it is a measure of our intellectual underdevelopment that it falls to a mere journalist to correct the supposed professionals.
Copyright ©2003 Kevin Baldeosingh