The study’s findings shook some parents, many of whom had built their lives around the idea that the more time with children, the better. They quit or cut back on work, downsized their houses or struggled to cram it all in....What's missing from this analysis, I think, is that a single-earner household can be less stressful and complicated with a division of labor, so that it creates the space in life for those quality things — building relationships and seizing moments and so forth. If you say, I'll go off to work and I'll transport the kids in and out of day care and get everything done including some seized moments, how good will those moments be? I think the real issue here is whether a single earner brings in enough money for the family to live on. But I'm also perceiving the usual encouragement to women to get out there and make careers for themselves. Don't worry about it.
Building relationships, seizing quality moments of connection, not quantity, Milkie said, is what emerging research is showing to be most important for both parent and child well-being. “The amount of time doesn’t matter, but these little pieces of time do,” she said. Her advice to parents? “Just don’t worry so much about time.”
April 1, 2015
"I could literally show you 20 charts, and 19 of them would show no relationship between the amount of parents’ time and children’s outcomes... Nada. Zippo."
Says Melissa Milkie, a sociologist co-author of "the first large-scale longitudinal study of parent time to be published in April in the Journal of Marriage and Family."
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My grandmother used to say a child only needs one *good* parent.
The point of those advocating having parents in the home with their kids more often is precisely to build those relationships and connecting with their children.
Only a simpleton, or someone with an agenda, would posit that the advocates of spending more time at home with ones children wasn't predicated on that very thing.
This article is in service to assuage the guilt of career women who ignore their children's needs in pursuit of their careers.
No parent ever said on his deathbed that he regretted not spending more time at the office.
I could show you 20 Sociological studies, and 19 of them would have no relevance to the real world because they're based on flawed statistics....nada zippo.
MadisonMan good point.
Abstract
"Although intensive mothering ideology underscores the irreplaceable nature of mothers' time for children's optimal development, empirical testing of this assumption is scant. Using time diary and survey data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics Child Development Supplement, the authors examined how the amount of time mothers spent with children ages 3–11 (N = 1,605) and adolescents 12–18 (N = 778) related to offspring behavioral, emotional, and academic outcomes and adolescent risky behavior. Both time mothers spent engaged with and accessible to offspring were assessed. In childhood and adolescence, the amount of maternal time did not matter for offspring behaviors, emotions, or academics, whereas social status factors were important. For adolescents, more engaged maternal time was related to fewer delinquent behaviors, and engaged time with parents together was related to better outcomes. Overall, the amount of mothers' time mattered in nuanced ways, and, unexpectedly, only in adolescence."
IOW, genes mostly determine almost everything. (Genes are naughty.)
Lurking under this article's conclusions & that of a link at Instapundit today on how Pre-K doesn't seem to help poor kids, is a nasty, nasty conclusion: much more is genetically determined than we care to admit.
I don't want to go there. I believe, as de Tocqueville pointed out to his erstwhile protege' & founder of "scientific racism", Arthur de Gobineau, that any form of biological determinism is antithetical to the spirit & letter of Liberal democracy.
But some mornings, let me tell ya, it's tough....
From the article, some female professor whines:
“No one ever asks him how he’s managing to balance it all,”
It's pointless to ask Men this question, you'll just get a blank look. You might as well ask: How are you managing to circulate your blood today?
Here's the thing: Feminist Women are the ones that floated the absurd notion that you can have it all. Blame them. When someone asks you the question, huff in disgust and say Feminists were fools to suggest such a goal.
There is absolutely no reason to explain to anyone -- besides your spouse -- how much/little you do in your family. MYOFB is a great phrase to learn.
Quality does count more than quantity. By the age of 3, children born into low-income families hear roughly 30 million fewer words than their more affluent peers. Smarter parents who both work presumably try hard to place their children in daycare environments where the children continue to be stimulated. Perhaps dumber parents who work are not similarly successful.
Here's what women should say if asked (Choose one of the three)
"Stop interrupting me."
"I just said that."
"No explanation needed."
Spending time with a child is one thing, and obviously has benefits for both parent and child. Helicopter parenting is quite another - micromanaging your child's life him does almost no good.
"Free range parenting" does not mean "live at the office and let the kid raise himself."
I suspect a household with two professional parents makes helicoptering even worse. The child is another task to be completed, particularly if one parent (usually the mother) has taken time off from her job to spend time with the child. Instead of just enjoying the experience and taking care that the domestic affairs are in order, the stay-at-home parent works to find a substitute at home for career fulfillment.
The child becomes a grand project.
MYOFB is a great phrase to learn.
wisdom for the ages.
Its all genetics, one way or another.
That's the direction Occam's razor cuts in nearly all related matters.
For societies' sake, with respect to family formation and planning, the critical matter is that intelligent, accomplished women should have as many children as possible. That's far better use of their qualities, in most cases, than whatever they can achieve individually.
The one key instance Milkie and her co-authors found where the quantity of time parents spend does indeed matter is during adolescence: The more time a teen spends engaged with their mother, the fewer instances of delinquent behavior. And the more time teens spend with both their parents together in family time, such as during meals, the less likely they are to abuse drugs and alcohol and engage in other risky or illegal behavior. They also achieve higher math scores.
But how will you be there for your teenagers if you've spent all your time while they were young at the office?
I also like that they said a mother sitting down with their child and watching TV for 6 hours is detrimental to a child's development. Was there any educated person who actually thought that sitting and watching TV all day would help their child because "I was there?"
Why is sociology considered a "science" again?
The flaw in trumpeting "Quality trumps quality" is that those who believe it all too often provide neither.
Blogger MadisonMan said...
I could show you 20 Sociological studies, and 19 of them would have no relevance to the real world because they're based on flawed statistics....nada zippo.
Nothing more needs saying, but because this is a blog and some of us like to comment, I'll quote some sociologists from Powerlineblog today:
Yep. Economics majors are more anti-social than non-econ majors. And taking econ classes also makes people more anti-social than they were before. It turns out, there’s quite a bit of research on this. . . Econ majors are less likely to share, less generous to the needy, and more likely to cheat, lie, and steal.
Sociologists telling us how bad Economists are.
Priceless.
“Perhaps if you were part of a culture that actually felt less ambivalent about mothers working, and had a system of child care in place where it was okay for mothers to work, I think you would automatically feel less guilt and pressure to spend more time with kids,” she said.
Ha Ha. That's hilarious. You know who started the mommy wars, right lady? It wasn't men...
Small sample anecdotal comparison:
Of all the children of five siblings on my wife's side of the family and all the children of two siblings on my side of the family only two children ended up as offenders in the criminal justice system, both children were raised by married mothers with careers who deposited the children in day care or with relatives for care on an almost daily basis.
Like I said, small sample but small samples make the world.
I would definitely want to look at the methodology. Most sociological studies are crap so the fact that 19 say one thing and 1 says another, on its own, does not convince me of too much.
Especially, as you point out, the 19 point to a "desirable" outcome.
The study methodology is questionable and their analysis and insights are questionable.
Is there a relation between quantity of time and incidence of quality time? Not explored.
Is there a relationship between total time available (not even spent with children) and the quantity of quality time and moments? Not explored.
I hate media-driven studies. Makes research look like a joke.
I think the concept of "being there" means availability as when needed. When we say "my parent/s" were never there for me." We don't mean at the bus stop waiting with cookies waiting on the kitchen counter, what we meant as kids, is that we trusted them and we could come to them.
I'm trying to figure out what would be considered a bad outcome these days.
Working from the answer backwards, any "conclusion" is possible.
Bob Boyd said...
I'm trying to figure out what would be considered a bad outcome these days.
Voting Republican.
Being around my kids more certainly improves my life. Sorry to hear they won't get much out of it.
Children raised by single moms do the worst, on average. Having Dad around is good for the kids and for mom. Most households need both parents working at least sometime during a kids 0-18 years. So having flexible employment is important for families.
I be willing to bet the vast majority of radical Muslim terrorists had stay at home moms.
Looking at the quote above (20 charts) and my quote from powerline (there is quite a bit of research on this) I have to wonder, how many sociologists rely on that particular fallacy?
"Look, I'm right because everyone already agrees with me."
Virgil Hilts said... [hush][hide comment]
Quality does count more than quantity. By the age of 3, children born into low-income families hear roughly 30 million fewer words than their more affluent peers. Smarter parents who both work presumably try hard to place their children in daycare environments where the children continue to be stimulated. Perhaps dumber parents who work are not similarly successful.
I guess speed freaks on welfare would be good for kids, then. They can talk all day and all night without even stopping to eat. BTW, assuming exposure to conversation for 12 hours a day, 30 million words over 3 years equals 2,283.10 words per hour.
Disagree,
A child's vocabulary and understanding of the word comes from observation of adults.
Reading Dr.Seuss & Curious George does not offer that.
That is why family dinner has a purpose.
Being around my kids more certainly improves my life. Sorry to hear they won't get much out of it.
Wonderful comment!
She probably could literally show me twenty charts. She's probably capable of that. She'd have to travel a bit, and charts bore me, so I might fall asleep after six or seven. Maybe it depends on the definition of "show you".
Still, it sounds like an empty boast.
Of course this is to encourage parents to spend as little time as possible with their own kids by labeling those little bits as "quality" ...
The State wants you to deliver what it considers its children to it as soon as possible for as long as possible (free breakfast & lunch! we're working on dinner).
Too many intact families with a SAH parent tend to lean evil conservative and be :::gasp::: more religious.
Can't have that inferring with raising good Brave New World citizens! Look how well the Junior Anti-Sex league is succeeding on campus.
I'm somewhat reminded of the description of war as being hours of boredom and moments of terror.
"Quality time" can't be scheduled, and happens in the middle of "quantity time" based on when the child wants it.
I've some good conversations with my kids driving them to various things but they start the conversations not me. It's unlikely we would have those moments if I didn't consistently offer the opportunity to listen.
There's something special about the numbers 19 and 20.
19 is 95% of 20.
When she says "19 out of 20 show no relationship", she's saying all the studies are worthless. That 1 / 20 is only showing anything because the cutoff for significance in 95%, and so you should expect 1 / 20 to show significance purely by chance.
In fact, there seems to be very little support for environmental factors in educational and other success outcomes, after taking parental IQ or its proxies out of the picture. That is, it seems that it reduces to a "which came first, the chicken or the egg" question.
This is supported by the failure of every effort to create some sort of policy intervention to cover "the gap" in educational outcomes, in spite of a vast range of fixes attempted at enormous cost over the last 50 years.
Marginal change is possible, but it is truly marginal.
@buwaya:In fact, there seems to be very little support for environmental factors in educational and other success outcomes,
I agree, provided a certain minumum threshold has been met.
Children who are actually starving are very likely to grow up less health and less intelligent.
This is not a social problem in the United States and has not been for well over 50 years.
Once certain minimum environmental standards have
been met, then yes they have little effect on life outcomes.
So it is true what they've always said.
Breeding will always out.
What is an outcome? How do you know what the outcome would have been if the parent had not spent that time with the child? Parents need to understand that no one cares for their children more than they do. Do kids stop living, growing or achieving if their parents aren't around much--of course not, but that doesn't mean that it is good. I agree that this is agenda driven research based upon skewed/flawed/incomplete data. Based upon my own observations, kids want their parents to be around and are anxious/unhappy/etc. when they are not around much.
My mother stayed a home but spending time with us was not a priority. "Get out of the house!" was her refrain. "Go down to the river and go fishing!"
"Here's a nickel, now walk six blocks by yourself and buy yourself a creamsicle."
OK, a nickel was only on allowance day, which was Thursday, IIRC.
I wonder if Milkie is a parent.
The trouble with measuring quantity vs quality is two-fold. First, one cannot easily define what is meant by "quality." It might literally be anything. The second is that it is impossible to tell when quality time might occur.
So, quantity turns out to be important, after all.
Was one of the outcomes tracked the relationship between the adult child and the parents?
A better study would be to ask the children what was most important about their childhood.
The best study is to track how well the grandchildren turn out.
Virgil Hilts and mccullough,
There is serious confounding between children raised in poor families (or single-parent families), and that's that the parental behaviors which cause poverty (or single-parenting) are largely genetic, and the kid probably inherits those genes from both parents. Adoption studies have shown that child outcomes are much more strongly correlated with biological parent outcomes than with adoptive parent outcomes.
I was babysitting with the three grandkids, ages 10 and 8. A normal occurrence. Eating jelly beans (which I had smuggled in) and talking about school.
One wondered why they got off for Easter week and I suddenly found myself explaining what Easter was. Once I got into it, the story of Easter Week took an hour to tell, with the kids asking questions all the way. "But why did they do that?" and "How could that happen?"
Was that quality time? Probably. Did I plan it to happen? Heck no.
Perhaps it is "quality time" if the work obsessed parent says it is quality time.
I was a stay-at-home mother. I had not planned on making that choice. But at age 33 after years of med school, residency, and fellowship and realizing that my magnificent time consuming career was obliterating the opportunity of having children, I discovered my children benefited most by having me as the caretaker.
My 32 year old son tells me his female friends who were raised by working mothers are opting to be stay-at-home moms. Go figure.
"In fact, the study found one key instance when parent time can be particularly harmful to children. That’s when parents, mothers in particular, are stressed, sleep-deprived, guilty and anxious."
That seems to support the single-earner household arrangement.
I cringe every time I hear someone on the left or a left leaning media source use the word "study".
OK...so we know it is not the fault of women that our children are ignorant and ill behaved.
But you still haven't explained why it is the fault of men that our children are ignorant and ill behaved.
I'm sure that was just an oversight....
I think the most obvious answer to the nature vs. nurture argument is that it is some mix of the two. However, the nurture (or environmental) probably expresses itself most significantly in the first few years of life. I thought James Q. Wilson's book The Moral Sense made a compelling case for how early childhood experiences influence the development of innate faculties like sympathy, fairness, self-control, and a sense of duty, which are necessary components to our success as social creatures.
Birches wrote...
I also like that they said a mother sitting down with their child and watching TV for 6 hours is detrimental to a child's development. Was there any educated person who actually thought that sitting and watching TV all day would help their child because "I was there?"
Yes, that made me laugh. And is that what they mean by quantity doesn't matter, only quality? Are they comparing a high quantity of watching screens alongside each other to a smaller quantity of actually spending time together?
I'll have to read the actual study later.
Oh great --an important academic study to guide our parenting actions or ease our guilt, if we are incompetent:)
Most kids, including my kids, want 3 things from me and my wife:
1. Our time
2. Our love
3. Our money
This is normal. Giving copious amounts of 1 & 2 are essential. 3 is nice, if you have it, but can lead to unintended consequences (i.e, spoiled kids, lacking in work ethic).
I hereby publish this study in the Journal of Common Sense Parenting (2015), Vol. 1, page Althouse blog.
Trashhauler said...The second is that it is impossible to tell when quality time might occur.
Yes, that's what jumped into my mind first, too. Which little pieces of time are the important ones? If you can't find out until afterwards, a maximization strategy would almost certainly involve spending as much (total) time together as possible.
Also, I'm not sure how helpful it is to lump time spent with mothers of all dispositions together. It's not surprising that extra time spent with a negative, stressed, sleep-deprived person would be detrimental.
So if it's saying that quantity, regardless of disposition, doesn't matter, but quality, read: good disposition versus bad, does matter, then it's not saying anything that should surprise anyone.
Most kids, including my kids, want 3 things from me and my wife:
1. Our time
2. Our love
3. Our money
You must not have teenagers. :)
#1 on their list is money. #2 is leave me alone. #3 is Okay, you can love me but I deny it.
My 32 year old son tells me his female friends who were raised by working mothers are opting to be stay-at-home moms. Go figure.
And my 34-year-old daughter who had a stay-at-home parent is going back to work in 2 weeks.
The implication is that if one were to run a cruel experiment, such as taking a random selection of children away from their parents and raising them in a government creche (assuming some sufficient provision of safety, order and nutrition), their life outcomes vis-a-vis their parentally raised control group would be only marginally different.
Given everything we know today, and discounting all sentimentality, I think that this is indeed what we would expect from such an experiment.
"can the truth be evil" was a good Catholic High School debate topic. There are some "truths" that make good examples for the affirmative in such a debate, quite a few of them are to be found in this area of genetics and nature-nurture.
Madison Man,
1. Our time
2. Our love
3. Our money
You must not have teenagers. :)
heh - you are astute, Sir. Oldest turns 13 next year -- may have to revisit the data and conclusions:)
Martha wrote: "my magnificent time consuming career was obliterating the opportunity of having children...."
Good on ya, Martha. Reflecting on my long military flying career, with Lord knows how much time being separated from the family, I search for nuggets of memories about my kids' childhood and cherish those I can recall, no matter how insignificant.
No regrets, mind. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. But family lasts beyond the career.
"Quality time" is scarce when time is scarce, I would imagine, especially when you don't bat 1.000 when attempting to spend "quality time".
I would be more inclined to believe the Rice University study on the number of words heard by children of different economic classes. Welfare kids heard about a third the number of words spoken on an hourly basis than did those in more secure economic circumstances both working class and upper income.
"Sometimes quantity has a quality of its own."
Spent the whole day with my boy, skiing, driving, shopping for a tux for the prom. Priceless.
Long gone are the days that I trust an academic "social science" drone to write anything trustworthy.
YoungHegelian said...
I don't want to go there. I believe, as de Tocqueville pointed out to his erstwhile protege' & founder of "scientific racism", Arthur de Gobineau, that any form of biological determinism is antithetical to the spirit & letter of Liberal democracy.
And yet "biological determinism" is real and not antithetical to much of anything except creating the New Soviet Man (i.e. Lysenkoism), and much has been learned since Arthur de Gobineau died in 1882.
Also note that "quality time" isn't addressed in the study.
Why must the focus be outcome?
What about the actual hours, days,years spent together?
Was there no value in that?
There is a false premise that in order for a parent to spend more time with a child, something better must be given up. I can't know if my life would have turned out better if my mom had chosen to work rather than care for me, but I do know I cherish the memory's I have of spending a great deal of my childhood with her.
Related - gcochran on a similar study:
"There is a new paper out in Nature Neuroscience, mainly by Kimberly Noble, on socioeconomic variables and and brain structure: Family income, parental education and brain structure in children and adolescents. They found that cortex area went up with income, although more slowly at high incomes. Judging from their comments to the press, the authors think that being poor shrinks your brain.
Of course, since intelligence is highly heritable, and since people in higher social classes, or with high income, have higher average IQs (although not nearly as high as I would like), you would expect their kids to be, on average, smarter than kids from low-income groups (and have larger brains, since brain size is correlated with IQ) for genetic reasons. But I guess the authors of this paper have never heard of any of that – which raises the question, did they scan the brains of the authors? Because that would have been interesting. You can actually do microscopic MRI.
Even better, in talking to Nature, another researcher, Martha Farah, mentions unpublished work that shows that the brain-size correlation with SES is already there ( in African-American kids) by age one month!
Of course, finding that the pattern already exists at the age of one month seriously weakens any idea that being poor shrinks the brain: most of the environmental effects you would consider haven’t even come into play in the first four weeks, when babies drink milk, sleep, and poop. Genetics affecting both parents and their children would make more sense, if the pattern shows up so early (and I’ll bet money that, if real, it shows up well before one month); but Martha Farah, and the reporter from Nature, Sara Reardon, ARE TOO FUCKING DUMB to realize this."
So does that apply to time spent in bars with children?
"Lurking under this article's conclusions & that of a link at Instapundit today on how Pre-K doesn't seem to help poor kids, is a nasty, nasty conclusion: much more is genetically determined than we care to admit"
Control for parental IQ and kid IQ at first testable age, and how much predictive firepower can you get out of other variables related to cognitive outcomes?
In a different world, the "nasty" conclusion would be just about as controversial as saying that some people are predisposed to grow tall, others short.
A counterintuitive argument that I am unwilling to accept regardless of how many charts the professor has. Certainly "quality time" is important but you only get that when you actual put in the time.
Laslo's Quality Time with Dad. Mom was pretty darn good, too.
I am Laslo.
So does that apply to time spent in bars with children?
Where good Wisconsin parents teach their children how to drink. And it's legal!
I do not believe these studies. Plain and simple. Kids with single parents do poorly, kids with both parents do better. That's basically a hard rule with few exceptions, and those exceptions likely involve other close family taking up some of the childcare (or income earning) responsibilities.
Nobody will ever convince me that spending time with my future children, and being available to them (alongside my lovely wife), won't have an effect on their outcome. Maybe not the same magnitude as genetics, but certainly some.
This study is just another, "See, single moms are just as good as a nuclear family" type social programming from the Left. I shall treat it's results with all the disdain they deserve. And my children will be better off for it.
I think the real issue here is whether a single earner brings in enough money for the family to live on.
Well, that rather depends on the desired lifestyle.
People complaining about How Much More Expensive It Is To Live Now Than In The Golden Age Of The Almost-Recent Past ... usually forget that there was a lot less consumption then.
(And I don't mean "consumption" in the sense merely of the hippie whinge against "buying things"; vacations are an expensive luxury, and "driving across the state once a year to a camp" is a lot less expensive than "flying to a resort" or the like.
Living someplace very expensive for "the best schools" or "because we just love New York/SF" is ... consumption. Those are both goods you pay extra for.
The myth of how much better life was in the 50s depends on forgetting they had tiny houses, few amenities, and cars that sucked and wore out rapidly - yet still weren't especially cheap.)
a traditional nuclear family? Isn't that racist/sexist these days?
Melissa Milkie is so full of shit her eyes are brown.
"I've some good conversations with my kids driving them to various things but they start the conversations not me."
Boy, is this true !
I was driving my daughter to school one morning when she was about 14 and she said, "If I ever had an abortion, my mother would kill me in my sleep."
I was startled to say the least. We also had conversations about herpes and other subjects that daughters may not (none of my other two did) have with their fathers usually.
Everything a sociologist says is a lie, beginning with "hello how are you?" and including every pronoun. If a sociologist claimed there was evidence the Sun rose in the East, sensible people would get up at dawn to check. You can't become a sociologist without being a sociopathic congenital liar. They have sophisticated entrance exams to detect normalcy or a conscience.
"Children raised by single moms do the worst, on average. Having Dad around is good for the kids and for mom."
Unclear is how kids turn out after repeatedly hearing, "I wish you were never born . . . ." without dad there to counter the worst thing that could be said to a child.
@ Monkeyboy: ""Quality time" can't be scheduled, and happens in the middle of "quantity time" based on when the child wants it."
Too true. The "quality time" is usually realized only after it has occurred.
Michigan Econ. Prof. Justin Wolfers takes aim at the methodology of the study and finds it "misleading." http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/02/upshot/yes-your-time-as-a-parent-does-make-a-difference.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news. Gee, you think maybe the authors had some sort of agenda they were trying to prove?
New York Times just said "Fuck You, the study is wrong" on the Front Page in the Upshot Section.
Good for the
Dale,
"Wenn ich Academic Study höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning!"
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