Bringing up father

In this place, however, the two most popular simplistic solutions are prayer and parenting. In my column of July 8, I demonstrated empirically why prayer has no correlation with social progress — an exercise which really shouldn’t have been necessary but which, in this superstitious society, was. What is worse, though, is that the same intellectual laziness that underlies religious beliefs infects secular opinions as well.

That is why we continually hear that the solution to our social problems, especially crime, is to make parents more responsible.

The leading voice in this vein is Professor Ramesh Deosaran who, in an official report for the Education Ministry, has even made the recommendation that parents be punished for their children’s delinquency. I have on several occasions cited the research which shows why this policy would unfairly target working-class parents, but Deosaran has a PhD so he doesn’t need to actually prove his opinions.

This trait is hardly unique to Deosaran, however. The majority of commentators seem content to proffer opinions without doing any research to support what they are saying. Prominence, not proof, counts for more in our social order. Thus, Independent Senator and attorney Dana Seetahal, in her column of August 21, writes, "Recent research shows that where a father is actively involved in the rearing of a child, the likelihood of that child engaging in deviance is significantly reduced by more than half."

Exactly where Seetahal got this "recent research" is not revealed. Noting that many young criminals come from families where "no father was ever involved: he had abandoned the family, he was unknown or was just not interested" and that "many male accused appear to act together with others in their criminal endeavours," she concludes, "It does not take a rocket scientist to grasp that such associations replace the lack of real family that these men never had." In fact, a rocket scientist, since he knows nothing about psychology, would make the same error Seetahal does — not the bad sentences, but taking correlation for causation. "The absence of a father may not be a cause of adolescent problems, but a correlate of the true causes," says psycholinguist Steven Pinker in his book The Blank Slate, "which may include poverty, neighbourhoods with lots of unattached men (who live in de facto polygyny and hence compete violently for status), frequent moves (which force the child to start at the bottom of the pecking order in new peer groups) and genes that make both father and children more impulsive and quarrelsome."

As for young males acting in concert when committing crimes, Judith Rich Harris, author of The Nurture Assumption, writes, "Little boys seek out the company of older boys, even if the older boys are quite rough with them...This hearkens back to the mixed-age groups of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, where the older children were in charge of the younger ones and the younger ones learned how to behave by watching the older ones." So Seetahal’s observation, while true, is also true for non-criminal males.

In similarly uninformed fashion, trade unionist Raffique Shah on August 21, asserts, "a study of the young criminals who are running wild and reckless in the country will no doubt show that they are the products of parents who were too young to guide them or too old to manage them. When couples have children at the right time in their lives, chances are the parents are strong and influential and mature enough to steer them in the right direction, and from here we have the success stories of those who make it through education and training."

Note that Shah doesn’t even have a real study to cite — he is just proposing what he thinks such a study would find. In any case, even if the survey did find what he says, it wouldn’t prove that parenting was the key factor. Women who have their first child in their late 20s or early 30s, for example, are usually better educated and more financially secure.

This means that their children will probably have a healthy birth-weight, genetically inherit above-average intelligence, get a nutritious diet, and live in better neighbourhoods. Harris observes that, "Within an economically disadvantaged inner-city neighbourhood, the kids who live with both parents are no better off than those who live with only one ...The higher income of a family that includes an adult male means that kids with two parents are more likely to live in a neighbourhood with a middle-class culture and, therefore, more likely to conform to middle-class norms."

Shah’s older-parent hypothesis also lacks any empirical basis. Indeed, psychologist Dean Keith Simonton, in his book Origins of Genius, notes, that "parents of eminent personalities were older than is the norm when their illustrious progeny was born." (Mind you, both my parents were in their early 30s when their first child — me — came along, so obviously that factor doesn’t always work). Shah’s point about educational success is also disproved by an American Department of Education project, called the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study.

Among the factors which researchers found had absolutely no correlation with academic performance are the child’s family being intact; the child’s mother not working between birth and kindergarten; and the child being regularly spanked. Shah considers beating children to be a sign of strong parenting, but the data show it has no effect — good or bad — on academic performance.

So, as tired as I am of repeating it, I will do so again: putting time, energy and money into parenting policies is a waste of time, energy and money. If we want to help our young people, we need better maternal care, early childhood testing, the school-feeding programme, better schools, and better neighbourhoods. Unfortunately, these arguments won’t have any influence unless somebody eminent makes them. All I have on my side is evidence.

E-mail: kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com

Website: www.caribscape.com/baldeosingh