I am getting the hang of writing a daily blog, and I very much appreciate your feedback.
I have also been finding that the “faith and family for centrists” blog is very heavily about family, light on the faith stuff.
And, looking ahead to the end of my sabbatical and my return to full-time teaching, I need to make a small adjustment.
SO, The Gruntled Center will remain a daily blog. Saturdays, though, when readership is at its lightest, will be very light fare.
And, to be sure that I regularly treat religious matters, Sundays will be about religion.
Monday through Friday will remain what I hope are substantive and current blogs about family life.
To start us with some light fare for this Saturday, I give you a joke I heard from a standup once. (I would be happy to credit it if anyone knows who it came from):
My wife uses fabric softener. I never knew what that stuff was for. Then I noticed women were coming up to me (sniff) 'Married' (walk off) That's how they mark their territory. You can take off that ring, but it's hard to get that April fresh scent out of your clothes.
Saturday, November 26, 2005
Friday, November 25, 2005
The Faculty Brat Shortage
The other day I wrote about student loan debt as a kind of contraception. An anonymous commentator directed me (and all of us) to a fine article by Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden, "Do Babies Matter? The Effect of Family Formation on the Lifelong Careers of Academic Men and Women." This piece appeared in the publications of the American Association of University Professors, and promotes some AAUP recommendations about how academic institutions could better accommodate motherhood in faculty and staff positions. These are sensible recommendations, which I endorse whole-heartedly.
The main finding was that women with children, especially early children (within five years of the Ph.D.) or with more than one child, are less likely to make it to the top of the academic profession. This is especially true in the sciences. I wrote about this recently in relation to the Lawrence Summers controversy. Women who want children are more likely to opt out of the research tenure-track in the first place. The academy was born as a monastery, from which married men were also excluded, and has never entirely gotten over it.
I was struck by another point that Mason and Goulden made:
Our culture has made a huge effort in the past two generations to open all opportunities to women, to encourage women to become educated, and especially to enter the sciences. This effort has paid off tremendously. There are eminent women in all professions. Most college students are women, and the graduate and professional schools are at or near parity. The number of women Ph.D.s has doubled, and doubled, and doubled again. Women are hired in very significant numbers throughout academia.
Yet most tenured women with Ph.D.s do not have children. As Mason and Goulden report, most women with advanced degrees are married to men with advanced degrees (the reverse not being true). So every childless female Ph.D. is also more likely to represent a childless male Ph.D. or the equivalent, as well. And the picture is not much better for the men. A third of men with Ph.D.s are childless.
It takes a huge social investment to produce such highly educated people – men and women. This is a social investment, not just an individual one. The first return to society is the intelligence that highly educated people can bring to social needs. The second return, the spin-off of investing in smart people is that we are more likely to get a new generation of smart kids. Smart kids can come from all kinds of parents, of course, and the academy is richly endowed with smart parents who have produced some very squirrelly children, indeed. But the fact remains that the children of smart parents are more likely to be smart, and the children of a smart couple are much more likely to be smart.
Faculty brats make a disproportionate contribution to the smarts of this country. Yet our academic system makes professors more likely to choose not to have kids in order to advance their academic careers – especially women, This is not just a loss for the family lines of these professors. Losing half of each generation of faculty brats is a long-term loss for society. We are eating our intellectual seed corn.
The main finding was that women with children, especially early children (within five years of the Ph.D.) or with more than one child, are less likely to make it to the top of the academic profession. This is especially true in the sciences. I wrote about this recently in relation to the Lawrence Summers controversy. Women who want children are more likely to opt out of the research tenure-track in the first place. The academy was born as a monastery, from which married men were also excluded, and has never entirely gotten over it.
I was struck by another point that Mason and Goulden made:
Overall, women who attain tenure across the disciplines are unlikely to have children in the household. Twelve to fourteen years out from the Ph.D., 62 percent of tenured women in the humanities and social sciences and 50 percent of those in the sciences do not have children in the household. By contrast, only 39 percent of tenured men in social sciences and humanities and 30 percent of those in the sciences do not have children in the household 12 to 14 years out from the Ph.D.
Our culture has made a huge effort in the past two generations to open all opportunities to women, to encourage women to become educated, and especially to enter the sciences. This effort has paid off tremendously. There are eminent women in all professions. Most college students are women, and the graduate and professional schools are at or near parity. The number of women Ph.D.s has doubled, and doubled, and doubled again. Women are hired in very significant numbers throughout academia.
Yet most tenured women with Ph.D.s do not have children. As Mason and Goulden report, most women with advanced degrees are married to men with advanced degrees (the reverse not being true). So every childless female Ph.D. is also more likely to represent a childless male Ph.D. or the equivalent, as well. And the picture is not much better for the men. A third of men with Ph.D.s are childless.
It takes a huge social investment to produce such highly educated people – men and women. This is a social investment, not just an individual one. The first return to society is the intelligence that highly educated people can bring to social needs. The second return, the spin-off of investing in smart people is that we are more likely to get a new generation of smart kids. Smart kids can come from all kinds of parents, of course, and the academy is richly endowed with smart parents who have produced some very squirrelly children, indeed. But the fact remains that the children of smart parents are more likely to be smart, and the children of a smart couple are much more likely to be smart.
Faculty brats make a disproportionate contribution to the smarts of this country. Yet our academic system makes professors more likely to choose not to have kids in order to advance their academic careers – especially women, This is not just a loss for the family lines of these professors. Losing half of each generation of faculty brats is a long-term loss for society. We are eating our intellectual seed corn.
Thursday, November 24, 2005
Happy Thanksgiving
I just wanted to send a greeting this holiday from the whole Gruntled family. Today our nuclear unit will sit by the fire and read. And watch movies (ok, documentaries – we are pretty nerdy).
One little bit of substance: contrary to widely believed myth, suicide rates do not rise at Thanksgiving and Christmas. On the contrary, both days have below average suicide rates (spring is suicide season). For those with families to go to, solidarity counteracts anomie, as Emile Durkheim argued long ago. And the generous nature of most families in this country means that millions of people who are at loose ends on Thanksgiving are drawn in to some social group for a feast. Go Solidarity!
One little bit of substance: contrary to widely believed myth, suicide rates do not rise at Thanksgiving and Christmas. On the contrary, both days have below average suicide rates (spring is suicide season). For those with families to go to, solidarity counteracts anomie, as Emile Durkheim argued long ago. And the generous nature of most families in this country means that millions of people who are at loose ends on Thanksgiving are drawn in to some social group for a feast. Go Solidarity!
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Student Loan Debt is Highly Effective Contraception
The recent launch of the Project on Student Debt has put the spotlight on the high levels of indebtedness that many college graduates carry. Reaching across the middle of the political spectrum, the project is led by former Clinton administration education advisor Robert Shireman, and it counts among its lead sponsors the American Enterprise Institute. Debt limits what students can do after college, and what they think they can afford to do for decades after graduation. In particular, highly indebted students often rule out low-paying public service work.
Allan Carlson, head of the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society, raises a further intriguing possibility. He believes that debt makes some students put off marriage and children until they are financially secure. Student loans, he says, are "a highly effective form of contraception."
Carlson cites as evidence the correlation between education and small family size. This seems to me a very tenuous connection. There are many factors that go into small family size that also come from education, such as the large proportion of their child-bearing years that highly educated people use to finish their education and launch their careers, the greater expense that they have to plan for in raising children who will in turn become highly educated, and the belief, still taught in many schools, that there are too many people in our country.
Nonetheless, I think Allan Carlson is probably right that college graduates with high debt would postpone children until they had brought their debt down to manageable levels. I would expect this to be especially true of women launching business or professional careers, who could expect their personal income to go from comfortable to zero in the first years of having children. That prospect is scary enough even with no indebtedness.
Carlson’s proposal is a $5,000 per child tax credit to pay off or forgive educational debt. I have some qualms about this, as it would skew the tax code even further toward the better off. Still, there would be a social benefit in making it easier for our most educated citizens to have children. Moreover, our most educated women are also the ones facing the biggest pressure to be in school or working during their prime child-bearing years as it is. Educational loan forgiveness would target exactly the people who suffer an unintended demographic injury by the current system.
I would especially welcome responses from people whose decisions to have children, and when, were affected by their school debts.
Allan Carlson, head of the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society, raises a further intriguing possibility. He believes that debt makes some students put off marriage and children until they are financially secure. Student loans, he says, are "a highly effective form of contraception."
Carlson cites as evidence the correlation between education and small family size. This seems to me a very tenuous connection. There are many factors that go into small family size that also come from education, such as the large proportion of their child-bearing years that highly educated people use to finish their education and launch their careers, the greater expense that they have to plan for in raising children who will in turn become highly educated, and the belief, still taught in many schools, that there are too many people in our country.
Nonetheless, I think Allan Carlson is probably right that college graduates with high debt would postpone children until they had brought their debt down to manageable levels. I would expect this to be especially true of women launching business or professional careers, who could expect their personal income to go from comfortable to zero in the first years of having children. That prospect is scary enough even with no indebtedness.
Carlson’s proposal is a $5,000 per child tax credit to pay off or forgive educational debt. I have some qualms about this, as it would skew the tax code even further toward the better off. Still, there would be a social benefit in making it easier for our most educated citizens to have children. Moreover, our most educated women are also the ones facing the biggest pressure to be in school or working during their prime child-bearing years as it is. Educational loan forgiveness would target exactly the people who suffer an unintended demographic injury by the current system.
I would especially welcome responses from people whose decisions to have children, and when, were affected by their school debts.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Why I Don’t Believe in Children
A decade ago, the American Sociological Association created a new specialty section on the Sociology of Children (now Children and Youth). I had long been a member of the section on the Sociology of the Family, and was drawn to the new group. In fact, I served as first secretary of the section. It is a good section, and does honorable work. However, I decided that I should not continue with it, but should stick with the Family section. The more I thought about it, the more I concluded that I don’t really believe in children as a sociological group. Children are, of course, real, and important, and I cherish my own kids. But sociologically speaking, children are, I believe, best understood as a subset of families. And children who are not part of families are in desperate trouble.
James Q. Wilson, our most distinguished criminologist, wrote in The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families, that
Among students of society in the broad middle of the spectrum, this may be the Great Divide: is the individual the basic unit of society, or is the family? This is a rich question, with many good arguments on both sides. For me and my house, though, I believe that families are the basic social unit. Families come in a variety of shapes and sizes. It is my conviction that at the core of all family forms (families as social structures, not any individual family) is the mother-child unit, to which any enduring society finds ways of attaching fathers.
Liberal social thought (think John Locke, not today’s left/right kind of liberalism) believes that individuals are created by nature, and they construct society. By contrast, I follow the great sociologist Emile Durkheim in thinking that individuals do not produce society, but society produces individuals. And the social unit that does the most to produce most individuals is the family.
Sometimes children are not in families. Alex Kotlowitz wrote about them in There Are No Children Here, about slum kids trying to make it without families in a community with few functioning marriages. This was not a story of the happy independence of individuals; it was a disaster story about “the other America.”
This is why I think it is such a mistake to treat marriage as just another “close relation” that individuals can choose to enter into. Why discussions of marriage and divorce which look only at the adults are so wrongheaded. And why well-meaning and politically savvy efforts to expand social welfare programs, such as health insurance, by starting with services to children taken separately from their families are risky. We enjoy many benefits from having a bias toward the equality of individuals. But an individualistic bias is most dangerous when we are talking about children, and not their families.
James Q. Wilson, our most distinguished criminologist, wrote in The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families, that
For a century or more, reformers tried to find ways of helping the child without hurting the family. They thought they succeeded, but all they really did was to decide that it was the individual more than the family that deserved protection. (135)
Among students of society in the broad middle of the spectrum, this may be the Great Divide: is the individual the basic unit of society, or is the family? This is a rich question, with many good arguments on both sides. For me and my house, though, I believe that families are the basic social unit. Families come in a variety of shapes and sizes. It is my conviction that at the core of all family forms (families as social structures, not any individual family) is the mother-child unit, to which any enduring society finds ways of attaching fathers.
Liberal social thought (think John Locke, not today’s left/right kind of liberalism) believes that individuals are created by nature, and they construct society. By contrast, I follow the great sociologist Emile Durkheim in thinking that individuals do not produce society, but society produces individuals. And the social unit that does the most to produce most individuals is the family.
Sometimes children are not in families. Alex Kotlowitz wrote about them in There Are No Children Here, about slum kids trying to make it without families in a community with few functioning marriages. This was not a story of the happy independence of individuals; it was a disaster story about “the other America.”
This is why I think it is such a mistake to treat marriage as just another “close relation” that individuals can choose to enter into. Why discussions of marriage and divorce which look only at the adults are so wrongheaded. And why well-meaning and politically savvy efforts to expand social welfare programs, such as health insurance, by starting with services to children taken separately from their families are risky. We enjoy many benefits from having a bias toward the equality of individuals. But an individualistic bias is most dangerous when we are talking about children, and not their families.
Monday, November 21, 2005
The Twentysomething Bride is the Happiest Wife
One of the most interesting family findings to appear recently is that women who marry in their mid-twenties are happier than teen brides or older brides. In “With This Ring,” the marriage survey of the National Fatherhood Initiative that I wrote about a few days ago , the ubiquitous and excellent Norval Glenn reported that women who married in their mid-twenties reported the highest rates of marital success. Success was measured by a combination of stability and happiness. Teen brides, as is well known, are not likely to have stable marriages. The new finding is that women who marry for the first time after 27 report stable marriages, but they are notably less happy than those of women who marry between 23 and 27. The key finding is that of the older brides who had never divorced, “more than 45 percent were in marriages they reported to be less than ‘very happy,’ a much larger percentage than was the case for respondents who married younger.”
Let me say before I go on that if you were a teen bride, an older bride, or past 27 and not yet married, you are not doomed. Many teen marriages endure; most post-27 brides have happy marriages.
It is not so surprising that teen marriages tend to be stormier and break up at high rates. Teenagers are more likely to marry impetuously (and pregnant), and the odds are not good that a teen couple will mature in complementary ways as they work their way out of adolescence. The cure for teen-age impulsiveness is marriage when you are more mature. 25-year-old brides make more mature marriages than 15 year olds do. So why doesn’t the same principle apply at later ages, as well? The intriguing question is, why would older brides be less happy?
I don’t know the answer to this question, and I don’t think anyone else does, either. I feel free, therefore, to offer two speculative possibilities.
One possible reason is that after a point a man and a woman become too set in their ways to fully grow together, to shape one another as the marriage matures. Two mature people may find one another lovable and suitable partners, but some of the plasticity of young adults is already gone. This can make for an effective partnership. As I noted earlier, happiness is not the only purpose of marriage, or even the main point.
Another possibility is that the ticking biological clock makes women more impetuous in their marital choices. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, in Creating a Life, reports fairly recent research that the quality of a woman’s eggs start to fall off sharply after about 27 years. Though many young women consciously think that they have all of their 30s, even their 40s, to find a husband and start having children, their bodies may be giving them subconscious clues starting in their late 20s that it may be time to stop waiting for Mr. Right, and take Mr. OK.
In The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton reports a brutal proverb of a century ago, that a woman is like a Christmas cake: no one wants her after the 25th. It is a very good thing that women today have many more options than the desperate marital search Wharton ably chronicled then. It is also a good thing that men and women can make a happy marriage, including having children, well past their 25th birthdays. Nonetheless, it is interesting to note that the average age of first marriage for women is now about 25. This represents a significant rise from the Baby Boom-producing years. The fact that most brides are in their mid-twenties may be more than a current statistical artifact. Perhaps American marriages are, in this one respect, at least, at an ideal benchmark.
Let me say before I go on that if you were a teen bride, an older bride, or past 27 and not yet married, you are not doomed. Many teen marriages endure; most post-27 brides have happy marriages.
It is not so surprising that teen marriages tend to be stormier and break up at high rates. Teenagers are more likely to marry impetuously (and pregnant), and the odds are not good that a teen couple will mature in complementary ways as they work their way out of adolescence. The cure for teen-age impulsiveness is marriage when you are more mature. 25-year-old brides make more mature marriages than 15 year olds do. So why doesn’t the same principle apply at later ages, as well? The intriguing question is, why would older brides be less happy?
I don’t know the answer to this question, and I don’t think anyone else does, either. I feel free, therefore, to offer two speculative possibilities.
One possible reason is that after a point a man and a woman become too set in their ways to fully grow together, to shape one another as the marriage matures. Two mature people may find one another lovable and suitable partners, but some of the plasticity of young adults is already gone. This can make for an effective partnership. As I noted earlier, happiness is not the only purpose of marriage, or even the main point.
Another possibility is that the ticking biological clock makes women more impetuous in their marital choices. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, in Creating a Life, reports fairly recent research that the quality of a woman’s eggs start to fall off sharply after about 27 years. Though many young women consciously think that they have all of their 30s, even their 40s, to find a husband and start having children, their bodies may be giving them subconscious clues starting in their late 20s that it may be time to stop waiting for Mr. Right, and take Mr. OK.
In The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton reports a brutal proverb of a century ago, that a woman is like a Christmas cake: no one wants her after the 25th. It is a very good thing that women today have many more options than the desperate marital search Wharton ably chronicled then. It is also a good thing that men and women can make a happy marriage, including having children, well past their 25th birthdays. Nonetheless, it is interesting to note that the average age of first marriage for women is now about 25. This represents a significant rise from the Baby Boom-producing years. The fact that most brides are in their mid-twenties may be more than a current statistical artifact. Perhaps American marriages are, in this one respect, at least, at an ideal benchmark.
Sunday, November 20, 2005
Is Parenthood “National Service”?
I have been having a debate with myself this morning. The occasion has been a line in Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s excellent Weekly Standard piece which attempts to get the Republican Party to actually deliver a pro-family conservatism. They offer a whole list of interesting ideas, including this one:
Will Wilkinson at the Fly Bottle offers a libertarian response. He found the comparison between parents and veterans as national servants “creepy.” He argues, rightly, I think, that the family is the most private of institutions, not an arm of the state. He reads Douthat and Salam as basing their argument solely on the potential tax return to the state of having more kids raised by subsidized families. I don’t think that is entirely fair – Douthat and Salam see parenthood and well-raised children as crucial to national survival in every way, not just the financial viability of the state. Still, he raises a good point. (I thank Maggie Gallagher for distributing Wilkinson’s piece).
I agree with Wilkinson’s starting point. The family is not an arm of the state. It is creepy to think of parenthood as an efficient way for the state to outsource the production of future taxpayers. It would be dehumanizing and perverse to think of parenthood as a branch of the service for which one volunteers, willy-nilly, by the act of having children.
Still, families do not exist only for themselves. The state does not exist only to serve families. Both families and the state are central institutions – the central institutions – of the nation. Parenthood is not state service, but it is national service. Parenthood is a great good even when there is no nation, as is the case for hunters and gatherers, and parenthood would still be a great good should there ever again be no nation. But we live in families in nations, nations with a hugely complex array of interdependent institutions. The institution charged with superintending the whole is the state. This means that the government is necessarily concerned with how families are functioning, promoting and supporting good parenting practices and compensating for and, if possible, diminishing bad parenting practices.
From that perspective, tuition credits for parenting is an idea worth considering.
There is a larger point in seeing parenting as national service. Families who have a vision of service larger than just serving themselves live a richer life. Parents will shape their children as citizens whether they intend to or not. Parents who raise their children to serve a larger cause than just their own comfort are performing a service to their children and to the nation. Families who work together to serve others are more cohesive and authoritative as families, and appear to be more contented, as well.
Parenthood as national service serves the nation and the family.
Republicans might consider offering tuition credits for years spent rearing children, which could be exchanged for post-graduate or vocational education. These would be modeled on veterans' benefits--and that would be entirely appropriate. Both military service and parenthood are crucial to the country's long-term survival. It's about time we recognize that fact.
Will Wilkinson at the Fly Bottle offers a libertarian response. He found the comparison between parents and veterans as national servants “creepy.” He argues, rightly, I think, that the family is the most private of institutions, not an arm of the state. He reads Douthat and Salam as basing their argument solely on the potential tax return to the state of having more kids raised by subsidized families. I don’t think that is entirely fair – Douthat and Salam see parenthood and well-raised children as crucial to national survival in every way, not just the financial viability of the state. Still, he raises a good point. (I thank Maggie Gallagher for distributing Wilkinson’s piece).
I agree with Wilkinson’s starting point. The family is not an arm of the state. It is creepy to think of parenthood as an efficient way for the state to outsource the production of future taxpayers. It would be dehumanizing and perverse to think of parenthood as a branch of the service for which one volunteers, willy-nilly, by the act of having children.
Still, families do not exist only for themselves. The state does not exist only to serve families. Both families and the state are central institutions – the central institutions – of the nation. Parenthood is not state service, but it is national service. Parenthood is a great good even when there is no nation, as is the case for hunters and gatherers, and parenthood would still be a great good should there ever again be no nation. But we live in families in nations, nations with a hugely complex array of interdependent institutions. The institution charged with superintending the whole is the state. This means that the government is necessarily concerned with how families are functioning, promoting and supporting good parenting practices and compensating for and, if possible, diminishing bad parenting practices.
From that perspective, tuition credits for parenting is an idea worth considering.
There is a larger point in seeing parenting as national service. Families who have a vision of service larger than just serving themselves live a richer life. Parents will shape their children as citizens whether they intend to or not. Parents who raise their children to serve a larger cause than just their own comfort are performing a service to their children and to the nation. Families who work together to serve others are more cohesive and authoritative as families, and appear to be more contented, as well.
Parenthood as national service serves the nation and the family.
Saturday, November 19, 2005
Unintelligent Non-Design
The “intelligent design” movement has been criticized as just the old theological creationism dressed up in bogus science. I think this is unfair – the observations of the natural world that intelligent design promoters rely on are just as empirical and careful as that of most scientists. They make a compelling case that some natural structures are so complex and functionally integrated that it would seem impossible for them to arise solely by small incremental mutations of previously existing structures. One possible explanation is that they were designed by a Designer. This sounds like exactly what the Bible says God does, but there are other possible theories of how there could be a Designer which was not the biblical God.
The science of intelligent design is good and modest, as most real science is. The possibility of design and a designer that it opens up is suggestive and interesting. Intelligent Design theory cannot prove that there is a Designer. And no other kind of theory, no matter how good its science, can prove that there is not a Designer.
Paul Bloom, a psychology and linguistics professor at Yale, has an intriguing article in the current Atlantic, “Is God an Accident?” He reports on fascinating research that he and others have done on how children understand physical things and psychological things. Little children understand that the body dies, but believe the mind lives on. Even infants seem to understand basic physical processes, like falling. Intriguingly, infants seem also to grasp basic social processes, like helping. These ideas do not arise simply from teaching and socialization.
Bloom has a theory of what to make of these empirical findings, which he expresses in this metaphor:
From this metaphor, he develops a theory of the origin of religion. Our brains rightly understand the physical actions of physical objects, and the psychological actions of psychological objects. We then accidentally cross the two kinds of understanding, and infer the existence of two other kinds of phenomena: the psychological actions of physical objects, and the physical actions of psychological objects. From the first kind of inference, we make the error of anthropomorphizing, seeing intentions, will, and meaning in the actions of non-human, and even non-living objects. From the second kind of inference, we make the error of believing that things we imagine have physical existence. In other words, as Bloom says in conclusion, God is an “accidental by-product of our mental states.”
This is an intriguing idea. I can see its appeal as a way to solve the intellectual puzzle of why we believe in beings we cannot see. But Bloom distorts the possible alternatives to make his theory seem true and scientific. The only alternative theories for the origins of religion that he considers are that it is the opiate of the masses, a lie told by the powerful to bolster their power, or that it is a socially functional fraternity, based on an arbitrary set of beliefs enforced to hold a social group together. In other words, Bloom simply assumes that the only serious explanations for religion are secular ones. Is that a scientific conclusion? No, it is a premise, a belief statement. Does Bloom’s theory of the origin of religion rest on compelling new science? No, it rests on a metaphor – “akin to two distinct computers in a baby’s brain.” This is also a belief statement, one that we are not even meant to take literally.
As I noted at the outset, “intelligent design” has been criticized as just the old theological creationism dressed up in bogus science. Bloom’s “unintelligent non-design” is just the old atheism dressed up in bogus science.
Let’s keep the real science. And let’s stop pretending that it can explain things it can’t.
The science of intelligent design is good and modest, as most real science is. The possibility of design and a designer that it opens up is suggestive and interesting. Intelligent Design theory cannot prove that there is a Designer. And no other kind of theory, no matter how good its science, can prove that there is not a Designer.
Paul Bloom, a psychology and linguistics professor at Yale, has an intriguing article in the current Atlantic, “Is God an Accident?” He reports on fascinating research that he and others have done on how children understand physical things and psychological things. Little children understand that the body dies, but believe the mind lives on. Even infants seem to understand basic physical processes, like falling. Intriguingly, infants seem also to grasp basic social processes, like helping. These ideas do not arise simply from teaching and socialization.
Bloom has a theory of what to make of these empirical findings, which he expresses in this metaphor:
Understanding of the physical world and understanding of the social world can be seen as akin to two distinct computers in a baby’s brain, running separate programs and performing separate tasks.
From this metaphor, he develops a theory of the origin of religion. Our brains rightly understand the physical actions of physical objects, and the psychological actions of psychological objects. We then accidentally cross the two kinds of understanding, and infer the existence of two other kinds of phenomena: the psychological actions of physical objects, and the physical actions of psychological objects. From the first kind of inference, we make the error of anthropomorphizing, seeing intentions, will, and meaning in the actions of non-human, and even non-living objects. From the second kind of inference, we make the error of believing that things we imagine have physical existence. In other words, as Bloom says in conclusion, God is an “accidental by-product of our mental states.”
This is an intriguing idea. I can see its appeal as a way to solve the intellectual puzzle of why we believe in beings we cannot see. But Bloom distorts the possible alternatives to make his theory seem true and scientific. The only alternative theories for the origins of religion that he considers are that it is the opiate of the masses, a lie told by the powerful to bolster their power, or that it is a socially functional fraternity, based on an arbitrary set of beliefs enforced to hold a social group together. In other words, Bloom simply assumes that the only serious explanations for religion are secular ones. Is that a scientific conclusion? No, it is a premise, a belief statement. Does Bloom’s theory of the origin of religion rest on compelling new science? No, it rests on a metaphor – “akin to two distinct computers in a baby’s brain.” This is also a belief statement, one that we are not even meant to take literally.
As I noted at the outset, “intelligent design” has been criticized as just the old theological creationism dressed up in bogus science. Bloom’s “unintelligent non-design” is just the old atheism dressed up in bogus science.
Let’s keep the real science. And let’s stop pretending that it can explain things it can’t.
Friday, November 18, 2005
Happiness is Not the Main Point of Marriage
The National Fatherhood Initiative has just released “With This Ring,” a report on their new National Survey on Marriage in America. They generally found very strong support for marriage among all groups in society. The report also notes that very high proportions report that their marriages are very happy or very satisfying. Sixty-nine percent said their marriages were “very happy,” and 88 percent said they were either “completely satisfied” or “very satisfied” with their marriages.
In fact, the proportion saying that their own marriages are very happy is so high that some researchers think this really means that the respondents are just telling the survey givers what they want to hear or what is socially expected.
Another possibility that “With This Ring” considers is this:
The authors of the report note that if poor marriages end easily, that is not really testimony to the strength of marriage as an institution. I think this is a fair point. A brutal divorce triage would weed out the weak marriages. This is probably a bigger cause of strong reports of marital happiness than is people lying to survey researchers.
I was struck, though, by what seems to me to be the bad effects of putting so much emphasis on marital happiness in the first place. Marriage has always been a complex institution. Even today, when most of the productive and governmental functions that families once had have been spun off to other institutions, most marriages serve multiple roles for the couple, their children, and society as a whole. Producing and rearing children, providing financially for both husband and wife through the ups and downs of each one’s work life, providing a discipline and structure for the lives of all the members of the family, and helping keep both husband and wife healthier in mind and body, are only some of the functions of marriage. And all of these roles are true benefits to the couple and to society even if, at any given time, husband or wife or both are not “very happy.”
Treating happiness as a primary function of marriage puts too much emphasis on happiness. The purpose of marriage is not to make you happy. Your purpose in marrying is not even to make your spouse happy. Most marriages are happy, and most married people are happier than they would be if they could not marry. Still, happiness should never be the prime measure of marital success. If we do take happiness, especially my individual happiness, to be the make-or-break measure of whether my marriage is working, then we will weaken marriage, indeed.
Happiness, like “self-esteem” and “community,” cannot really be achieved directly. Rather, they are by-product of doing other, more mundane but more substantial, actions.
In fact, the proportion saying that their own marriages are very happy is so high that some researchers think this really means that the respondents are just telling the survey givers what they want to hear or what is socially expected.
Another possibility that “With This Ring” considers is this:
A generally high level of marital quality is to be expected in a society, such as the United States, in which persons in unsatisfactory marriages are able, and often willing, to resort to divorce to deal with the situation. If poor marriages tend to end quickly, the average quality of intact marriages will be high, as is apparently the case in this country.
The authors of the report note that if poor marriages end easily, that is not really testimony to the strength of marriage as an institution. I think this is a fair point. A brutal divorce triage would weed out the weak marriages. This is probably a bigger cause of strong reports of marital happiness than is people lying to survey researchers.
I was struck, though, by what seems to me to be the bad effects of putting so much emphasis on marital happiness in the first place. Marriage has always been a complex institution. Even today, when most of the productive and governmental functions that families once had have been spun off to other institutions, most marriages serve multiple roles for the couple, their children, and society as a whole. Producing and rearing children, providing financially for both husband and wife through the ups and downs of each one’s work life, providing a discipline and structure for the lives of all the members of the family, and helping keep both husband and wife healthier in mind and body, are only some of the functions of marriage. And all of these roles are true benefits to the couple and to society even if, at any given time, husband or wife or both are not “very happy.”
Treating happiness as a primary function of marriage puts too much emphasis on happiness. The purpose of marriage is not to make you happy. Your purpose in marrying is not even to make your spouse happy. Most marriages are happy, and most married people are happier than they would be if they could not marry. Still, happiness should never be the prime measure of marital success. If we do take happiness, especially my individual happiness, to be the make-or-break measure of whether my marriage is working, then we will weaken marriage, indeed.
Happiness, like “self-esteem” and “community,” cannot really be achieved directly. Rather, they are by-product of doing other, more mundane but more substantial, actions.
Thursday, November 17, 2005
Lawrence Summers Was Right the First Time
I was going to stay out of this one, but Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard, is still taking grief for remarks he made last January about women and science. This has been bothering me, so I will take this opportunity to weigh in.
In a conference on “Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce, “ President Summers was asked to offer “some attempts at provocation” on the question of “women's representation in tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions.” The full transcript of his remarks is available online.
This is the summary statement he opened with. I have turned it into a list for clarity.
Summers then gave a decent overview of the state of research on each of these points.
In the sensible corner of academia in which I live, this occasioned some interesting, calm conversation over the lunch table, in which the evidence for each point was the main relevant question. Moreover, on the meta-issue of whether one could even raise such questions in an academic setting, there was no controversy. Asking, and attempting to answer, such difficult questions is what the academy is for.
Alas, Harvard is, evidently, not as sensible a place as Centre College. When Summers made his remarks, there was an immediate uproar. Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, walked out on his talk, saying later that if she hadn't left, ''I would've either blacked out or thrown up." There were calls for his resignation. President Summers felt obliged to apologize repeatedly, set up not one but two task forces to hire more women in science and engineering, and to stop asking politically incorrect questions. Not Harvard’s finest hour.
The controversy has largely been over Summers’ second point. Yet it is well documented that there are more men than women at the highest levels of math ability. Not zero women, just fewer of them. And not in the broad middle of the population, where most of us live our daily lives, but at the highest levels. As Summers said, he was talking about the miniscule population that is three or three and a half standard deviations above the mean, from which the “tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions”are filled —which, let us remember, was the topic of the conference to which he was speaking.
But that is not the most important point. Note that the controversy was not over his main point, but on a secondary one. Summers offered that the main reason that women did not make up half of the top 25 science and engineering faculties was because women were less likely to want to devote their child-rearing years to spending 80-hour weeks in the laboratory. Lab sciences are the least child-friendly of all the academic disciplines. Any professional with a demanding career puts in long hours. But I was able to do some of my work as a sociologist at home when the kids were little, and the same was true with my wife’s legal work. I could also take my children to work on occasion, as could my wife. A lab scientist, on the other hand, pretty much has to spend all those long hours in the lab, away from home and children. Moreover, a scientific laboratory is one of the most dangerous work places that a child could go to.
Some women, of course, are willing to put in the long hours in the lab. Nancy Hopkins started working obsessively with James Watson when she was an undergraduate. Early in her career she would spend long hours in his Cold Stream lab, then take the ten-hour train trip home to her husband. Hopkins is a very eminent and accomplished biologist, and an important member of the MIT faculty. I can find no report that she has children. This life is her choice, and I don’t criticize it. But it is surely relevant in studying the proportion of women at the highest levels of science and engineering that these careers are among the most difficult to succeed in while raising children.
In a conference on “Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce, “ President Summers was asked to offer “some attempts at provocation” on the question of “women's representation in tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions.” The full transcript of his remarks is available online.
This is the summary statement he opened with. I have turned it into a list for clarity.
There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference's papers document and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions.
1. One is what I would call the … high-powered job hypothesis.
2. The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and
3. the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search.
And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described.
Summers then gave a decent overview of the state of research on each of these points.
In the sensible corner of academia in which I live, this occasioned some interesting, calm conversation over the lunch table, in which the evidence for each point was the main relevant question. Moreover, on the meta-issue of whether one could even raise such questions in an academic setting, there was no controversy. Asking, and attempting to answer, such difficult questions is what the academy is for.
Alas, Harvard is, evidently, not as sensible a place as Centre College. When Summers made his remarks, there was an immediate uproar. Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, walked out on his talk, saying later that if she hadn't left, ''I would've either blacked out or thrown up." There were calls for his resignation. President Summers felt obliged to apologize repeatedly, set up not one but two task forces to hire more women in science and engineering, and to stop asking politically incorrect questions. Not Harvard’s finest hour.
The controversy has largely been over Summers’ second point. Yet it is well documented that there are more men than women at the highest levels of math ability. Not zero women, just fewer of them. And not in the broad middle of the population, where most of us live our daily lives, but at the highest levels. As Summers said, he was talking about the miniscule population that is three or three and a half standard deviations above the mean, from which the “tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions”are filled —which, let us remember, was the topic of the conference to which he was speaking.
But that is not the most important point. Note that the controversy was not over his main point, but on a secondary one. Summers offered that the main reason that women did not make up half of the top 25 science and engineering faculties was because women were less likely to want to devote their child-rearing years to spending 80-hour weeks in the laboratory. Lab sciences are the least child-friendly of all the academic disciplines. Any professional with a demanding career puts in long hours. But I was able to do some of my work as a sociologist at home when the kids were little, and the same was true with my wife’s legal work. I could also take my children to work on occasion, as could my wife. A lab scientist, on the other hand, pretty much has to spend all those long hours in the lab, away from home and children. Moreover, a scientific laboratory is one of the most dangerous work places that a child could go to.
Some women, of course, are willing to put in the long hours in the lab. Nancy Hopkins started working obsessively with James Watson when she was an undergraduate. Early in her career she would spend long hours in his Cold Stream lab, then take the ten-hour train trip home to her husband. Hopkins is a very eminent and accomplished biologist, and an important member of the MIT faculty. I can find no report that she has children. This life is her choice, and I don’t criticize it. But it is surely relevant in studying the proportion of women at the highest levels of science and engineering that these careers are among the most difficult to succeed in while raising children.
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Religion Matters More When Kids Are Old Enough to Want Real Answers
Parents of small children are a not especially sold on religion – it is only when the kids get to school age, and especially when the children are teenagers, that parents definitely see the value of religion.
I was looking at the 2002 Religion and Public Life Survey, commissioned by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. The survey asked several questions about the importance of religion in society, and especially for morality. They report the answers of those who have children under 18 at home, then break them down into those with kids under 5, with children 6 – 12, and with children 13 –17. In general, sheer parenthood is not a big differentiator on these questions. The age of the kids makes a bigger difference.
The Pew survey asked which of these two statements came closer to the respondents’ views:
A. Children are more likely to grow up to be moral adults when they are raised in a religious faith, or
B. Children are just as likely to grow up to be moral adults whether or not they are raised in a religious faith
Nearly everyone could choose one or the other. Overall, 62% of all respondents chose A. That is, nearly two thirds of Americans believe that adults will be more moral if they are raised religiously. Moreover, there is no difference between parents with kids at home (61%) versus other people (62%).
Yet when we look at parents of different ages of kids, we find an interesting pattern. Parents of children under 5 were less likely than other parents to think a religious upbringing was important – 57% to 64%. Yet the parents of middle schoolers reverse that pattern, with 63% saying yes, compared to only 59% of other parents. Parents of teens are even more likely to want a religious upbringing for their kids, with 65% answering yes, compared to the same 59% of other parents.
The survey then offered a parallel choice:
A. It is not necessary to believe in God in order to be moral and have good values, or
B. It is necessary to believe in God in order to be moral and have good values.
Again, the parents of the smallest children were likely to take the less religious answer. 57% chose option one, which shrank to a bare majority (50.2%) of the parents of teens.
These are, admittedly, not huge differences. Most American, parents or not, think that religion is important in raising up moral adults. But it is interesting that parents show an increasing appreciation of the importance of religion for moral upbringing as their children get older. The parents of teenagers are especially likely to seek religious help.
I was looking at the 2002 Religion and Public Life Survey, commissioned by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. The survey asked several questions about the importance of religion in society, and especially for morality. They report the answers of those who have children under 18 at home, then break them down into those with kids under 5, with children 6 – 12, and with children 13 –17. In general, sheer parenthood is not a big differentiator on these questions. The age of the kids makes a bigger difference.
The Pew survey asked which of these two statements came closer to the respondents’ views:
A. Children are more likely to grow up to be moral adults when they are raised in a religious faith, or
B. Children are just as likely to grow up to be moral adults whether or not they are raised in a religious faith
Nearly everyone could choose one or the other. Overall, 62% of all respondents chose A. That is, nearly two thirds of Americans believe that adults will be more moral if they are raised religiously. Moreover, there is no difference between parents with kids at home (61%) versus other people (62%).
Yet when we look at parents of different ages of kids, we find an interesting pattern. Parents of children under 5 were less likely than other parents to think a religious upbringing was important – 57% to 64%. Yet the parents of middle schoolers reverse that pattern, with 63% saying yes, compared to only 59% of other parents. Parents of teens are even more likely to want a religious upbringing for their kids, with 65% answering yes, compared to the same 59% of other parents.
The survey then offered a parallel choice:
A. It is not necessary to believe in God in order to be moral and have good values, or
B. It is necessary to believe in God in order to be moral and have good values.
Again, the parents of the smallest children were likely to take the less religious answer. 57% chose option one, which shrank to a bare majority (50.2%) of the parents of teens.
These are, admittedly, not huge differences. Most American, parents or not, think that religion is important in raising up moral adults. But it is interesting that parents show an increasing appreciation of the importance of religion for moral upbringing as their children get older. The parents of teenagers are especially likely to seek religious help.
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Raising Boys Without Men (Part Two)
“I have come to take a stand against the recent tide of opinion and the rash of books asserting that boys must have a father in the home in order to grow to full manhood.”
Thus Peggy Drexler begins her conclusion of Raising Boys Without Men.
Her conclusion is true. It is also a straw man.
There has not been a rash of books asserting that boys must have a father in order to grow to full manhood. There has been ample documentation, though – especially David Blankenhorn’s Fatherless America and David Popenoe’s Life Without Father – that boys are more likely to do better with a father than without. In any group, some will thrive despite risky conditions, and some will fail despite having all the advantages. Most members of the group, though, will respond in the normal way. That is the definition of normal. And most boys do better with a father than without. The fact that Drexler found a small, select group of boys who seem ok through middle school without a traditional father in their home is not really a disproof of the general claim.
Moreover, Drexler demonstrates the many ways in which the mothers she interviewed, especially in the lesbian couples, went out of their way to find father substitutes for their sons. The mothers, as well as the sons, sought out grandfathers, uncles, neighbors, mother’s male friends, coaches, and teachers, to be male role models for their sons. This is an admirable work-around for what the mothers themselves saw as a potentially risky absence in their sons’ lives. Most interestingly, in the lesbian couples, the birth mother tended to act like a traditional mother, and the “social mother” tended to act like a father. The single mothers, likewise, turned to “the village” for all kinds of help with their children, especially for men to be father-like to their sons.
As I noted yesterday, Drexler’s core concern, that sons raised only by mothers would suffer from “smotherlove” and be sissified, seems surprisingly old-fashioned. A more pressing question of the past decade has not been about boys with too much mothering, but boys with too little fathering. Fatherless boys cause most of the social problems that we face in America. Groups of fatherless boys – slum gangs – are the greatest domestic terror threat, posing a far greater danger than Al Qaeda or the white supremacist militias. (Those groups, by the way, seem to be disproportionately made of fatherless boys, too).
The boys that Peggy Drexler studied seem to pose no threat to society. On the contrary, the picture she presents is of boys who are unusually thoughtful and sensitive. Why are they so different from that other, more dangerous group of fatherless boys?
First, Drexler is only showing us these boys as boys. The subjects of her study had not even finished high school when the study ended. We do not see many of them in the real danger years.
Second, the enduring legacy of divorce that Judith Wallerstein writes about comes when the children of divorce attempt to marry, which they often delay for years. Only a few of Drexler’s subjects are the children of divorce. It would be interesting to see how this grab-bag of sons of “maverick moms” – lesbian couples, single-mothers-by-choice, divorced, widowed, and never-married mothers – made marriages of their own. My guess is that the children of divorced and never-married mothers would follow the pattern Wallerstein found, though this group, which Drexler seems to have selected because they are high functioning, will probably do a bit better than average. The kids of widows, single-by-choice, and lesbian moms will probably be more confident than the divorced kids that they can marry successfully, because they are less likely to feel that their fathers abandoned them. But only time, and a systematic research plan, will tell.
Third, and most important, Drexler obscures the difference that class makes in the lives of these boys. For her original study, Drexler chose stable, educated, older, white, business and professional couples. They appear to live in neighborhoods of similar families. These boys are worlds away from the sons of poor, young, single mothers in slums where few households contain stable couples of any kind. For Drexler’s main subjects, money helps keep their home and neighborhood stable and secure, and goes a long way to underwriting the “village” of coaches, teachers, and men-at-a-distance who fill in the gaps in the boys’ lives. Moreover, the lesbian couples’ families are, as far as we are told, very small – the focal boy, and maybe another child – so the double income of their white-collar mothers is not spread over many other kids. Drexler’s second set of “maverick moms, “ most of whom are single, are not as rich, and appear to have more kids. Still, with only a few exceptions, this is a middle-class-or-better sample.
Raising Boys Without Men is an interesting, but very limited, study. If it were called Raising a Boy With Functional Moms, Money, and Lots of Helpful Men and Women, Though Without Fathers in the Home, the book would be more honest, if a bit less surprising.
Monday, November 14, 2005
Raising Boys Without Men (Part One)
In Raising Boys Without Men, Peggy Drexler praises a group of “maverick moms” – lesbian couples, single mothers by choice, and a variety of single mothers not by choice – for raising the next generation of “exceptional men.” The core of the book is Drexler’s study of 16 boys raised by lesbian couples in San Francisco in the 1990s. She then supplemented this dissertation work with interviews with another 60 single mothers, half who had chosen to raise sons alone, half who had not. The lesbian couples, who make up the bulk of the analysis and examples in the book, are white, educated, white-collar, older women in stable relationships.
Drexler, a long-married mother, approaches the issue with some rather old-fashioned questions. Will boys raised by women only be sissies? Will boys raised by lesbians be gay? Sociology in the fifties and early sixties was concerned that over-mothered boys would not be manly enough. That question was largely laid to rest in the decade or so following. Likewise, research from the seventies and eighties found that children of homosexual parents were no more likely than average to be homosexual themselves, though they were more likely to be liberal in their attitudes toward sexual orientation.
Drexler did find that these boys were normal boys in most respects. They were typical boys in their interests and their play. I was pleased and a little surprised to find that Drexler expected this, as she agrees that much of the gendered activity of children is hardwired, and not simply the result of social convention and socialization.
Indeed, Drexler’s stronger claim is that the sons of lesbian couples are more sensitive to emotions and social relations than average boys are. Far from being morally retarded by growing up in a female-run household, Drexler seems to be saying that this small group of boys is morally superior to the average lad. She also seems to be making the same claim for the sons of the single mothers she studied, though it is hard for me to be certain about this as there are no real quantities reported here.
Drexler sets out to answer a too-easy question: Is it possible for lesbian couples and single women to raise good boys and men? It is practically a sociological truism that it is possible for good individuals to arise from any social circumstance, no matter how risky. The more difficult sociological question is, are lesbian couples and single mothers as likely to produce good boys and men as stable heterosexual couples are? Drexler’s sample is much too small, and much too select, to answer that question. Moreover, other research makes me think that she is mixing apples and oranges. Stable, two-parent couples generally produce better outcomes for kids than single parents do, regardless of any other factors. Calling lesbians couples, single-moms-by-choice, and women who become single mothers by divorce, widowhood, or inadvertent never marrying all “maverick moms” obscures very large differences among those groups.
Peggy Drexler did, I think, demonstrate her main point – sons of lesbian couples grow up to be regular guys. There are other questions, though, that her study raises, but does not fully answer.
Drexler, a long-married mother, approaches the issue with some rather old-fashioned questions. Will boys raised by women only be sissies? Will boys raised by lesbians be gay? Sociology in the fifties and early sixties was concerned that over-mothered boys would not be manly enough. That question was largely laid to rest in the decade or so following. Likewise, research from the seventies and eighties found that children of homosexual parents were no more likely than average to be homosexual themselves, though they were more likely to be liberal in their attitudes toward sexual orientation.
Drexler did find that these boys were normal boys in most respects. They were typical boys in their interests and their play. I was pleased and a little surprised to find that Drexler expected this, as she agrees that much of the gendered activity of children is hardwired, and not simply the result of social convention and socialization.
Indeed, Drexler’s stronger claim is that the sons of lesbian couples are more sensitive to emotions and social relations than average boys are. Far from being morally retarded by growing up in a female-run household, Drexler seems to be saying that this small group of boys is morally superior to the average lad. She also seems to be making the same claim for the sons of the single mothers she studied, though it is hard for me to be certain about this as there are no real quantities reported here.
Drexler sets out to answer a too-easy question: Is it possible for lesbian couples and single women to raise good boys and men? It is practically a sociological truism that it is possible for good individuals to arise from any social circumstance, no matter how risky. The more difficult sociological question is, are lesbian couples and single mothers as likely to produce good boys and men as stable heterosexual couples are? Drexler’s sample is much too small, and much too select, to answer that question. Moreover, other research makes me think that she is mixing apples and oranges. Stable, two-parent couples generally produce better outcomes for kids than single parents do, regardless of any other factors. Calling lesbians couples, single-moms-by-choice, and women who become single mothers by divorce, widowhood, or inadvertent never marrying all “maverick moms” obscures very large differences among those groups.
Peggy Drexler did, I think, demonstrate her main point – sons of lesbian couples grow up to be regular guys. There are other questions, though, that her study raises, but does not fully answer.
Sunday, November 13, 2005
Fighting the Culture of Fear is THE Centrist Issue
Extremists try to win the hearts and minds of the majority through fear. The culture of fear is equally a weapon of the left and the right. What they most want you to fear is what will happen if the other side wins.
Barry Glassner published a good book, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things, in 1999. He details the ways in which many of the things which are high on most Americans’ fear lists – pregnant teen girls and murderous teen boys, rising rates of drug use and violent crime, epidemic new diseases and plane crashes – are actually quite rare, and most of them are getting better. From recent news we might add a fear of pedophiles and serial killers, and, of course, terrorism. Glassner’s point holds true about these fears, as well: they are rare, and they are not getting more frequent.
Michael Moore made a similar point in Bowling for Columbine. In talking about shooting deaths, he used the wonderfully rich comparison of the United States and Canada. Both societies have many guns and a gun-accommodating culture. Yet their gun death rate is a small fraction of ours, even when adjusting for their much smaller population. Moore attributes the difference to a different culture – American culture promotes fear much more than Canadian culture does. Indeed, in the middle of the film, Moore interviews Barry Glassner about the culture of fear, while they are both standing at the street corner in South Central Los Angeles which was the heart of the Rodney King riots. Presumably, two middle-aged white guys – geeky, slow, obviously defenseless white guys, at that -- should have been at risk and felt fear in the heartland of black rage against white society. (In fact, most of the perpetrators of the Rodney King riots were Mexican-Americans, and most of the shop-keeping victims were Asian-Americans – but that did not fit the CNN story line). Yet, sensibly, they were not fearful, and were treated in a civil, even friendly, fashion by everyone they met.
Television is particularly egregious in selling fear. Television is actually, I think, a very bad way to find out what is going on. Television is driven by a need to show pictures. Most important things that happen do not produce interesting pictures. Most real news, in other words, does not make good television. So television shows good pictures – fires, car collisions, plane crashes, bombings, riots, shot and beaten bodies, and, when all else fails, crying victims of the above. These pictures give us the impression that these are the most newsworthy events. Rarely is that so. Since most people get their news from television, this mistaken impression is widespread in society. The cable news stations, if anything, make the problem worse, by repeating a few shocking headlines and pictures, and filling the rest of the time with reporters’ opinions. Local news stations answer the cable challenge with “how your innocuous possessions can kill you” stories. The best television news show, the PBS “Newshour,” is very boring television, indeed – all talking heads, with almost no pictures at all. And the “Daily Show” is a funny parody, but it is frankly fake.
Of course there are real threats in the world. There are terrorists, and tsunamis, and tsetse flies. But for most people most of the time, these are distant threats. Yes, millions die every day, and many of them from preventable causes. But the cause of prevention is also advancing every day, too. The fact that we know about deaths from around the world does not show that there are more deaths around the world, as much as it shows the great improvement in our news-gathering capacity. The fact that the 2004 tsunami was a worldwide cause for compassion shows improvement in the world. Even in the most dangerous places in the world, most people live without being attacked. Many of the bad things that happen in the world – drug addiction, alcoholism, gun-shot wounds, sexually transmitted diseases – mostly happen to people who live risky lives. If you don’t fool around with drugs, booze, guns, and sex, you are very unlikely to suffer any of these bad outcomes.
Sociology is a great help in combating the culture of fear. Sociology, more than any other science, in concerned with distinguishing the normal from the rare. We look at the whole bell curve, to see what is likely to happen to most people, and which things happen only rarely or mostly to those who live in the extreme ends of society. Of course, we should fight bad things, even if they are rare or are only likely to happen to other people.
But we need not succumb to a culture of fear. The facts, I believe, support a culture of cheerfulness.
Barry Glassner published a good book, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things, in 1999. He details the ways in which many of the things which are high on most Americans’ fear lists – pregnant teen girls and murderous teen boys, rising rates of drug use and violent crime, epidemic new diseases and plane crashes – are actually quite rare, and most of them are getting better. From recent news we might add a fear of pedophiles and serial killers, and, of course, terrorism. Glassner’s point holds true about these fears, as well: they are rare, and they are not getting more frequent.
Michael Moore made a similar point in Bowling for Columbine. In talking about shooting deaths, he used the wonderfully rich comparison of the United States and Canada. Both societies have many guns and a gun-accommodating culture. Yet their gun death rate is a small fraction of ours, even when adjusting for their much smaller population. Moore attributes the difference to a different culture – American culture promotes fear much more than Canadian culture does. Indeed, in the middle of the film, Moore interviews Barry Glassner about the culture of fear, while they are both standing at the street corner in South Central Los Angeles which was the heart of the Rodney King riots. Presumably, two middle-aged white guys – geeky, slow, obviously defenseless white guys, at that -- should have been at risk and felt fear in the heartland of black rage against white society. (In fact, most of the perpetrators of the Rodney King riots were Mexican-Americans, and most of the shop-keeping victims were Asian-Americans – but that did not fit the CNN story line). Yet, sensibly, they were not fearful, and were treated in a civil, even friendly, fashion by everyone they met.
Television is particularly egregious in selling fear. Television is actually, I think, a very bad way to find out what is going on. Television is driven by a need to show pictures. Most important things that happen do not produce interesting pictures. Most real news, in other words, does not make good television. So television shows good pictures – fires, car collisions, plane crashes, bombings, riots, shot and beaten bodies, and, when all else fails, crying victims of the above. These pictures give us the impression that these are the most newsworthy events. Rarely is that so. Since most people get their news from television, this mistaken impression is widespread in society. The cable news stations, if anything, make the problem worse, by repeating a few shocking headlines and pictures, and filling the rest of the time with reporters’ opinions. Local news stations answer the cable challenge with “how your innocuous possessions can kill you” stories. The best television news show, the PBS “Newshour,” is very boring television, indeed – all talking heads, with almost no pictures at all. And the “Daily Show” is a funny parody, but it is frankly fake.
Of course there are real threats in the world. There are terrorists, and tsunamis, and tsetse flies. But for most people most of the time, these are distant threats. Yes, millions die every day, and many of them from preventable causes. But the cause of prevention is also advancing every day, too. The fact that we know about deaths from around the world does not show that there are more deaths around the world, as much as it shows the great improvement in our news-gathering capacity. The fact that the 2004 tsunami was a worldwide cause for compassion shows improvement in the world. Even in the most dangerous places in the world, most people live without being attacked. Many of the bad things that happen in the world – drug addiction, alcoholism, gun-shot wounds, sexually transmitted diseases – mostly happen to people who live risky lives. If you don’t fool around with drugs, booze, guns, and sex, you are very unlikely to suffer any of these bad outcomes.
Sociology is a great help in combating the culture of fear. Sociology, more than any other science, in concerned with distinguishing the normal from the rare. We look at the whole bell curve, to see what is likely to happen to most people, and which things happen only rarely or mostly to those who live in the extreme ends of society. Of course, we should fight bad things, even if they are rare or are only likely to happen to other people.
But we need not succumb to a culture of fear. The facts, I believe, support a culture of cheerfulness.
Saturday, November 12, 2005
Choice vs. Faithfulness in Family Life
In the seventies family life was reconstructed to make adults free to choose the family lives they wanted. The promise of “families we choose”was that family life would be happier and more satisfying. No-fault divorce would end unhappy marriages. Easy birth control and abortion on demand would mean there would be no unwanted children. Cohabitation before marriage would end naïve marital choices. Reducing the stigma of divorce, unmarried parenting, cohabitation, abortion, and homosexual relations would widen the spectrum of “family.”
However, as Francis Fukuyama argued convincingly in The Great Disruption, the sixties and seventies disrupted traditional ways of arranging society in the name of freedom, without putting any better social arrangements in their place. Indeed, as things have played out since then, the new social arrangements have produced many new social problems, without solving the old ones. The American Paradox, David Myers argues, is that today Americans feel materially rich, but spiritually poor. Norval Glenn, a leading family sociologist, has shown that while most people are still happy with their marriages, fewer report being very happy compared to forty years ago.
The problem, I think, is that family life is not based on choice, but on faithfulness. The problem with the religion of choice is that it does not let you actually choose anything. Any choice made now forces you to give up other choices in the future. If, on the other hand, you try always to keep your options open, you never get to live any particular kind of life fully.
The conflict shows up most clearly when we are talking about marriage. As Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher demonstrate in The Case for Marriage, marriage can change lives because of the Power of the Vow. We choose our mates. More importantly, we choose never to choose another, barring death. That is what gives marriage its power. Choosing to live a married life with one particular woman is what makes the extraordinary change in men. Single men live the life of “options.” They have lots of choices, but many fewer accomplishments. Married men are the most productive economic group in society because they have given up the life of many options, and are living the life of their one great choice.
When we say “choice” now, it first calls to mind the choice about abortion. Easy abortion was supposed to end unwanted children. It didn’t. There are many factors which contribute to the problem of unwanted children. Still, a pro-choice attitude toward children, however much it may free women to live as they choose, has the unintended effect of undermining commitment to the children who are born, and to children in general.
As a society, the growth of choice about every aspect of family life – and genetic design of children and cloning are on the horizon, expanding the world of family choice – has, paradoxically, undermined our collective commitment to actual families.
Choice is a virtue in a society. But it is a secondary virtue. Faithfulness is a primary social virtue. When choice serves faithfulness, society is better. When choice displaces faithfulness as a high social virtue, society suffers. And the institution of society that depends most on faithfulness, commitment, reliability, and the Vow, is family life.
However, as Francis Fukuyama argued convincingly in The Great Disruption, the sixties and seventies disrupted traditional ways of arranging society in the name of freedom, without putting any better social arrangements in their place. Indeed, as things have played out since then, the new social arrangements have produced many new social problems, without solving the old ones. The American Paradox, David Myers argues, is that today Americans feel materially rich, but spiritually poor. Norval Glenn, a leading family sociologist, has shown that while most people are still happy with their marriages, fewer report being very happy compared to forty years ago.
The problem, I think, is that family life is not based on choice, but on faithfulness. The problem with the religion of choice is that it does not let you actually choose anything. Any choice made now forces you to give up other choices in the future. If, on the other hand, you try always to keep your options open, you never get to live any particular kind of life fully.
The conflict shows up most clearly when we are talking about marriage. As Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher demonstrate in The Case for Marriage, marriage can change lives because of the Power of the Vow. We choose our mates. More importantly, we choose never to choose another, barring death. That is what gives marriage its power. Choosing to live a married life with one particular woman is what makes the extraordinary change in men. Single men live the life of “options.” They have lots of choices, but many fewer accomplishments. Married men are the most productive economic group in society because they have given up the life of many options, and are living the life of their one great choice.
When we say “choice” now, it first calls to mind the choice about abortion. Easy abortion was supposed to end unwanted children. It didn’t. There are many factors which contribute to the problem of unwanted children. Still, a pro-choice attitude toward children, however much it may free women to live as they choose, has the unintended effect of undermining commitment to the children who are born, and to children in general.
As a society, the growth of choice about every aspect of family life – and genetic design of children and cloning are on the horizon, expanding the world of family choice – has, paradoxically, undermined our collective commitment to actual families.
Choice is a virtue in a society. But it is a secondary virtue. Faithfulness is a primary social virtue. When choice serves faithfulness, society is better. When choice displaces faithfulness as a high social virtue, society suffers. And the institution of society that depends most on faithfulness, commitment, reliability, and the Vow, is family life.
Friday, November 11, 2005
Marry Your Baby Daddy – The Book
Earlier I wrote about Marry Your Baby Daddy Day, a contest in which a group of couples who had a child together and the intention to marry someday were given an an-expenses-paid wedding, arranged by novelist Maryann Reid and Rev. Herbert Daughtry. Rev. Daughtry supplied the church and conducted the services. Ms. Reid wrote the novel, Marry Your Baby Daddy, which inspired the contest. Having been intrigued by the concept, I thought it only fair to read the novel, too.
The premise of the novel is that the loving grandmother of the three Anderson sisters has died. Each Anderson woman has a child with a man she sort-of wants to marry. To their surprise, grandma died with money – three million dollars worth. It will all come to them – if they each marry their “baby daddy” within six months. Romantic complications ensue.
Let me say at the outset that “chick lit” is not my genre, and black chick lit is terra incognita. I am not the target demographic. This is fine – in this great country of ours, there is room for every kind of reader and every genre of writing. Someday I will blog about my favorite genre, fast-paced church history. (I’m sure you can’t wait).
The women range in age from late-twenties to mid-thirties, and in class from the corporate lawyer big sister to the successful hairdresser middle child to the file clerk little one. The men include the sweet one who wants to marry, the decent one who doesn’t want the bother, and the handsome tomcat who is by turns sweet and brutal. Oh, and there is a handsome lawyer handling the estate. I am guessing that experienced readers of the genre could fill in the rest. But novelty is not the point of popular genres. My wife reads mysteries every night, not for the puzzle so much as to be drawn into the setting and the nuance of familiar kinds of characters. The evocation of the particularities of New York black culture, especially in the Brooklyn settings, is engaging. The communication among the sisters, who have only one another to rely on, is believable and really the emotional core of the story.
I was struck by a few features, though, that I couldn’t simply attribute to the genre. For one thing, nearly every chapter contains a detailed sex description. In the “Sex and the City” literary world (as opposed, of course, to real life), is this customary? Moreover, there was not a single married father in the story. We infer that grandma has been married to produce her granddaughter’s mother, but he is so long gone his departure is not even described. The sisters’ mother killed herself when the girls were young. There is no mention at all of their father or fathers, nor a suggestion that her mother ever married. I won’t be spoiling the ending to say that some of the baby daddies become married fathers by the end, but only in that order, and only under extraordinary conditions.
The poor teen moms in Promises I Can Keep, which I wrote about earlier, grow up in a world without married fathers. These women, black, white, and Hispanic, are shaped by their poverty as much as their ethnic culture. The fictional women of Marry Your Baby Daddy, on the other hand, are above poverty. Marriage is not an economic decision for them, but an emotional one. Their questions are, am I ready to settle down, and do I want to settle down with this man? Even in the end, one of the new wives does not want to commit on whether her marriage is permanent.
Jane Austen wrote the great classic chick lit about, and for, women seeking to be wives and (then) mothers. (And wonderful moral tales they are, too, which I admire hugely, lest anyone thing I am disrespectful of the great Jane). Bridget Jones, for all her near-parody of Jane Austen, still seeks the same thing. Marry Your Baby Daddy rests on a different premise, or at least a wildly different order of operations. Is this typical? I would welcome your comments.
The premise of the novel is that the loving grandmother of the three Anderson sisters has died. Each Anderson woman has a child with a man she sort-of wants to marry. To their surprise, grandma died with money – three million dollars worth. It will all come to them – if they each marry their “baby daddy” within six months. Romantic complications ensue.
Let me say at the outset that “chick lit” is not my genre, and black chick lit is terra incognita. I am not the target demographic. This is fine – in this great country of ours, there is room for every kind of reader and every genre of writing. Someday I will blog about my favorite genre, fast-paced church history. (I’m sure you can’t wait).
The women range in age from late-twenties to mid-thirties, and in class from the corporate lawyer big sister to the successful hairdresser middle child to the file clerk little one. The men include the sweet one who wants to marry, the decent one who doesn’t want the bother, and the handsome tomcat who is by turns sweet and brutal. Oh, and there is a handsome lawyer handling the estate. I am guessing that experienced readers of the genre could fill in the rest. But novelty is not the point of popular genres. My wife reads mysteries every night, not for the puzzle so much as to be drawn into the setting and the nuance of familiar kinds of characters. The evocation of the particularities of New York black culture, especially in the Brooklyn settings, is engaging. The communication among the sisters, who have only one another to rely on, is believable and really the emotional core of the story.
I was struck by a few features, though, that I couldn’t simply attribute to the genre. For one thing, nearly every chapter contains a detailed sex description. In the “Sex and the City” literary world (as opposed, of course, to real life), is this customary? Moreover, there was not a single married father in the story. We infer that grandma has been married to produce her granddaughter’s mother, but he is so long gone his departure is not even described. The sisters’ mother killed herself when the girls were young. There is no mention at all of their father or fathers, nor a suggestion that her mother ever married. I won’t be spoiling the ending to say that some of the baby daddies become married fathers by the end, but only in that order, and only under extraordinary conditions.
The poor teen moms in Promises I Can Keep, which I wrote about earlier, grow up in a world without married fathers. These women, black, white, and Hispanic, are shaped by their poverty as much as their ethnic culture. The fictional women of Marry Your Baby Daddy, on the other hand, are above poverty. Marriage is not an economic decision for them, but an emotional one. Their questions are, am I ready to settle down, and do I want to settle down with this man? Even in the end, one of the new wives does not want to commit on whether her marriage is permanent.
Jane Austen wrote the great classic chick lit about, and for, women seeking to be wives and (then) mothers. (And wonderful moral tales they are, too, which I admire hugely, lest anyone thing I am disrespectful of the great Jane). Bridget Jones, for all her near-parody of Jane Austen, still seeks the same thing. Marry Your Baby Daddy rests on a different premise, or at least a wildly different order of operations. Is this typical? I would welcome your comments.
Thursday, November 10, 2005
She Who Gets Custody Files First
Margaret Brinig, a law professor at the University of Iowa, has done several interesting studies of divorce law. I especially commend one co-authored with Douglas Allen with the wonderful title, ”’These Boots are Made for Walking’: Why Most Divorce Filers Are Women.” This work was brought to my attention by a comment on a the recent blog, “Divorce Divides Children.”
Brinig’s interesting finding is that “who gets the children is by far the most important component in deciding who files for divorce, particularly when there is little quarrel about property.” Women are much more likely to file for divorce than men – at a rate of two to one in many states. In states in which the mother is presumed to get sole custody of the couple’s children, she is much more likely to file for divorce. Joint custody rules reduce the likelihood that women will file more often than men.
Even more interestingly, joint custody rules make it less likely that either party will file for divorce in the first place. Brinig suggests that this is due, in part, to the fact that divorcing spouses often use custody filings to hurt their soon-to-be ex. Sole custody is a powerful sledgehammer against an ex. Joint custody is more like staying married.
Elizabeth Marquardt makes clear that joint custody does not make it any easier for kids to avoid being divided by divorce, and may make that feeling worse. But the main point is that it would be better for children – and parents – if there were fewer divorces to begin with.
When divorce is even on the table, all the choices are tragic. Margaret Brinig’s research about the effect of custody rules on filing, though, is a help in assessing joint custody as a tool in reducing divorce.
Brinig’s interesting finding is that “who gets the children is by far the most important component in deciding who files for divorce, particularly when there is little quarrel about property.” Women are much more likely to file for divorce than men – at a rate of two to one in many states. In states in which the mother is presumed to get sole custody of the couple’s children, she is much more likely to file for divorce. Joint custody rules reduce the likelihood that women will file more often than men.
Even more interestingly, joint custody rules make it less likely that either party will file for divorce in the first place. Brinig suggests that this is due, in part, to the fact that divorcing spouses often use custody filings to hurt their soon-to-be ex. Sole custody is a powerful sledgehammer against an ex. Joint custody is more like staying married.
Elizabeth Marquardt makes clear that joint custody does not make it any easier for kids to avoid being divided by divorce, and may make that feeling worse. But the main point is that it would be better for children – and parents – if there were fewer divorces to begin with.
When divorce is even on the table, all the choices are tragic. Margaret Brinig’s research about the effect of custody rules on filing, though, is a help in assessing joint custody as a tool in reducing divorce.
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
The “Adults First” Divorce Culture Lives On
Yesterday I posted “Divorce Divides Children” from San Antonio, where I was attending a conference. Later that morning I opened the San Antonio Express-News, and found a story typical of the problem the I have been writing about: the divorce culture that thinks divorce is about the adults’ happiness, without even asking about the children.
“An amicable divorce can benefit everyone,” by Express-News staff writer Jeanie Tavitas-Williams, reported on The Unofficial Guide to Getting a Divorce, by Russell and Susan Wild. The paper reports that “with 22 years of marriage behind them, two children, a decent portfolio, property and all kinds of other personal, financial and emotional entanglements, both acknowledge they had ‘all the ingredients that could have made for a ….’” How would you expect that sentence to end? Good marriage? Effective partnership? Secure home? No, to the Wilds, those are the ingredients of a “nasty divorce."
The Wilds did divorce. Yet the tone of the story is congratulatory. The story continues, “Yet today, fewer than two years after their union was legally dissolved, the Pennsylvania residents are good friends. They live about three blocks away from each other, have dinner together (kids included) most every Tuesday, even have keys to each other's homes.” If they had all that going for them, and still do, why did they divorce? Because, Russell Wild says, they “had exhausted all of their efforts to regain the spark before finally ‘throwing in the towel.’"
My gripe is not with the Wilds. To me, it would seem that two people who are capable of such an amicable divorce, are also capable of an amicable marriage. But I don’t know all the facts from a newspaper story, and won’t judge the Wilds.
My gripe is with the reporter, the newspaper, and the dozens of other stories like this one that you can find any month in newspapers, women’s magazines, men’s magazines, and, especially, “relationship” television and radio shows.
No one asked about the children. The reporter does not tell us what the parents think their divorce did to their children. She did not report on the growing body of expert evidence, such as Elizabeth Marquardt’s or Judith Wallerstein’s work, which details the enduring legacy of divorce on children. She did not, evidently, think to ask the children themselves what they thought of this “amicable” relationship.
With other kinds of stories, reporters have a normal routine: first report what the more powerful parties in a conflict are doing, then investigate the effects on the less powerful. If they were reporting, say, a school strike, they would interview the administration, interview the teachers, and then talk to parents and kids, or at least to some sort of experts about the effect on parents and kids. Our current divorce culture, though, treats divorce as something that adults do. The effects on kids are not a normal part of the story, are not in the reporters’ and editors’ standard calculation of affected parties.
So this is my plea: when anyone reports on a divorce, either a particular divorce or on divorce as an institution, always ask “what about the children?” Ask, and tell.
“An amicable divorce can benefit everyone,” by Express-News staff writer Jeanie Tavitas-Williams, reported on The Unofficial Guide to Getting a Divorce, by Russell and Susan Wild. The paper reports that “with 22 years of marriage behind them, two children, a decent portfolio, property and all kinds of other personal, financial and emotional entanglements, both acknowledge they had ‘all the ingredients that could have made for a ….’” How would you expect that sentence to end? Good marriage? Effective partnership? Secure home? No, to the Wilds, those are the ingredients of a “nasty divorce."
The Wilds did divorce. Yet the tone of the story is congratulatory. The story continues, “Yet today, fewer than two years after their union was legally dissolved, the Pennsylvania residents are good friends. They live about three blocks away from each other, have dinner together (kids included) most every Tuesday, even have keys to each other's homes.” If they had all that going for them, and still do, why did they divorce? Because, Russell Wild says, they “had exhausted all of their efforts to regain the spark before finally ‘throwing in the towel.’"
My gripe is not with the Wilds. To me, it would seem that two people who are capable of such an amicable divorce, are also capable of an amicable marriage. But I don’t know all the facts from a newspaper story, and won’t judge the Wilds.
My gripe is with the reporter, the newspaper, and the dozens of other stories like this one that you can find any month in newspapers, women’s magazines, men’s magazines, and, especially, “relationship” television and radio shows.
No one asked about the children. The reporter does not tell us what the parents think their divorce did to their children. She did not report on the growing body of expert evidence, such as Elizabeth Marquardt’s or Judith Wallerstein’s work, which details the enduring legacy of divorce on children. She did not, evidently, think to ask the children themselves what they thought of this “amicable” relationship.
With other kinds of stories, reporters have a normal routine: first report what the more powerful parties in a conflict are doing, then investigate the effects on the less powerful. If they were reporting, say, a school strike, they would interview the administration, interview the teachers, and then talk to parents and kids, or at least to some sort of experts about the effect on parents and kids. Our current divorce culture, though, treats divorce as something that adults do. The effects on kids are not a normal part of the story, are not in the reporters’ and editors’ standard calculation of affected parties.
So this is my plea: when anyone reports on a divorce, either a particular divorce or on divorce as an institution, always ask “what about the children?” Ask, and tell.
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Divorce Divides Children
Elizabeth Marquardt’s main point in Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce is, as the title suggests, that children of divorce grow up divided because they are never fully at home. She reports with great subtlety about the routine ways in which divorced kids learn to keep secrets from their parents, and even to lie to one parent so as not to betray the other. She makes clear that joint custody is not the happy solution that some divorced parent activists promote, because it keeps the child perpetually uprooted. Divorce takes children from being the center of one nuclear family, to a perpetual guest in two new families,
The core problem of divorce for children is that even in the best divorce, the child can never have a full life with both mother and father. All of Marquardt’s subjects were chosen because they had kept contact with both parents. We know from other research that a quarter to a half of all divorced children lose all contact with their fathers after a few years. The luckier ones who keep ties to both parents are still divided in their lives, loyalties, and longings. The divorced kids who lose a parent altogether are like emotional amputees.
I have known a number of children of divorce, some of whom have gone on, like Marquardt, to be successful in their education, their careers, their civic lives, and, most impressively, in their own marriages and childrearing. Yet, as Marquardt would be the first to acknowledge, the divorce always leaves scars. Divorced kids are more prone to become anxious over difficulties in their marriages. One of the reasons that children of divorce are more likely to divorce themselves, despite their deathly fear of divorce, is because they either marry impulsively, or throw in the towel too soon. It is hard for children of divorce to believe that they really know how to make a successful marriage, even if other people do.
I find that I can usually tell after knowing a student for a little while whether his or her parents are still together.
Divorce is one of many experiences that scar children. Compared to growing up with violence, or drunkenness, or drug addiction, divorce leaves relatively mild scars. But it always does. Marquardt says that she is not trying to condemn divorced parents, like her own mother and father. Rather, she wants everyone to see that “divorce happy talk” is a self-serving lie that parents tell when they want to convince kids that what is good for the parents is also good for the children.
The core problem of divorce for children is that even in the best divorce, the child can never have a full life with both mother and father. All of Marquardt’s subjects were chosen because they had kept contact with both parents. We know from other research that a quarter to a half of all divorced children lose all contact with their fathers after a few years. The luckier ones who keep ties to both parents are still divided in their lives, loyalties, and longings. The divorced kids who lose a parent altogether are like emotional amputees.
I have known a number of children of divorce, some of whom have gone on, like Marquardt, to be successful in their education, their careers, their civic lives, and, most impressively, in their own marriages and childrearing. Yet, as Marquardt would be the first to acknowledge, the divorce always leaves scars. Divorced kids are more prone to become anxious over difficulties in their marriages. One of the reasons that children of divorce are more likely to divorce themselves, despite their deathly fear of divorce, is because they either marry impulsively, or throw in the towel too soon. It is hard for children of divorce to believe that they really know how to make a successful marriage, even if other people do.
I find that I can usually tell after knowing a student for a little while whether his or her parents are still together.
Divorce is one of many experiences that scar children. Compared to growing up with violence, or drunkenness, or drug addiction, divorce leaves relatively mild scars. But it always does. Marquardt says that she is not trying to condemn divorced parents, like her own mother and father. Rather, she wants everyone to see that “divorce happy talk” is a self-serving lie that parents tell when they want to convince kids that what is good for the parents is also good for the children.
Monday, November 07, 2005
Divorce’s Religious Effects
Elizabeth Marquardt’s Between Two Worlds, which I have reported on in my two previous blogs, rests on a study which ultimately has a religious purpose. The National Survey on the Moral and Spiritual Lives of Children of Divorce, which Marquardt directed with Norval Glenn, was paid for by the Lilly Endowment, as part of their ongoing studies of the social effects of religion. And Marquardt’s findings on religion are among the most interesting and unprecedented in the study.
Children of divorce are less likely to be involved in organized religion. This fact has been reported before. But when children of intact and divorced families were asked how spiritual they considered themselves to be, nearly 3/4ths of each group answered “fairly” or “very” spiritual. Almost all from each group (90% and 86%, respectively) reported attending religious services as a child. The divorced kids, though, were more likely to report that they lost their early church in the divorce. Sometimes when the parents stop going, the divorced kids will start attending religious services by themselves. The children of divorce are, if anything, more serious in their search for meaning, order, and spiritual direction in their lives. Indeed, despite the generally lower church membership of divorced kids compared to kids from intact families, divorced kids are somewhat more likely to report that they are born-again or evangelical Christians, though they were no more likely to have been raised that way.
The study asked what the respondents made of the “prodigal son” story in the Bible. The two groups differed starkly in their responses. The children from intact families were likely to identify with the prodigal being welcomed home by loving parents, based on their own lives or those of siblings or friends. The divorced kids, on the other had, were more likely to identify with the parent, welcoming the prodigal home – only in their case the roles were reversed; their parents were in the role of the prodigal. This response is of a piece with the common effect of divorce in making the children, especially the eldest, adults before their time. Similarly, the intact family kids could respond straightforwardly to the commandment to “honor their father and mother,” especially if they were now married parents themselves. The children of divorce, on the other hand, found this commandment harder to embrace, or even understand.
The most fascinating, and poignant, religious responses of divorced kids come from their attempts to relate to “God the Father.” For many, their own bad experiences with their fathers spoiled the whole biblical vision of God for them. This difficulty, among others, likely contributed to children of divorce being less churched as adults. On the other hand, a subset of the divorced kids found great comfort in religion – God was the father they did not have in their own family life. These kids were more likely to have gotten themselves to church as a way to cope with the divorce. I expect that it is this group that produces the higher-than-expected rates of born-again and evangelical Christians.
One religious message of Between Two Worlds is that children of divorce, even high-functioning adult children of divorce, yearn for God and a supportive religious community. Precisely because they are torn between two worlds in their parents’ homes, they are more in need of a unified and supportive religious home. The superficial secularity of divorced kids hides a religious need and want which is, if anything, even greater than that of children from intact homes.
Children of divorce are less likely to be involved in organized religion. This fact has been reported before. But when children of intact and divorced families were asked how spiritual they considered themselves to be, nearly 3/4ths of each group answered “fairly” or “very” spiritual. Almost all from each group (90% and 86%, respectively) reported attending religious services as a child. The divorced kids, though, were more likely to report that they lost their early church in the divorce. Sometimes when the parents stop going, the divorced kids will start attending religious services by themselves. The children of divorce are, if anything, more serious in their search for meaning, order, and spiritual direction in their lives. Indeed, despite the generally lower church membership of divorced kids compared to kids from intact families, divorced kids are somewhat more likely to report that they are born-again or evangelical Christians, though they were no more likely to have been raised that way.
The study asked what the respondents made of the “prodigal son” story in the Bible. The two groups differed starkly in their responses. The children from intact families were likely to identify with the prodigal being welcomed home by loving parents, based on their own lives or those of siblings or friends. The divorced kids, on the other had, were more likely to identify with the parent, welcoming the prodigal home – only in their case the roles were reversed; their parents were in the role of the prodigal. This response is of a piece with the common effect of divorce in making the children, especially the eldest, adults before their time. Similarly, the intact family kids could respond straightforwardly to the commandment to “honor their father and mother,” especially if they were now married parents themselves. The children of divorce, on the other hand, found this commandment harder to embrace, or even understand.
The most fascinating, and poignant, religious responses of divorced kids come from their attempts to relate to “God the Father.” For many, their own bad experiences with their fathers spoiled the whole biblical vision of God for them. This difficulty, among others, likely contributed to children of divorce being less churched as adults. On the other hand, a subset of the divorced kids found great comfort in religion – God was the father they did not have in their own family life. These kids were more likely to have gotten themselves to church as a way to cope with the divorce. I expect that it is this group that produces the higher-than-expected rates of born-again and evangelical Christians.
One religious message of Between Two Worlds is that children of divorce, even high-functioning adult children of divorce, yearn for God and a supportive religious community. Precisely because they are torn between two worlds in their parents’ homes, they are more in need of a unified and supportive religious home. The superficial secularity of divorced kids hides a religious need and want which is, if anything, even greater than that of children from intact homes.
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