Tag Archives: families

  • This is fantastic!

    April 5, 2008

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    I have become convinced over the last couple of years that we are facing a crisis of bad parenting in this country.  By which I don’t necessarily mean the usual complaints of overly indulgent parents or abusive parents, although these can certainly be a problem.  What I find particularly problematic is a lack of knowledge about normal human development and appropriate interaction with children.  It’s demonstrated by parents not knowing that they should ask their infants questions long before they can talk or that a 2 year old’s temper tantrum isn’t a sign of disrespect or that 5 year olds like rules.  It’s also demonstrated by parents who teach their kids to be quiet rather than engaging them in the everyday activities of family life and listening to them struggle to put their thoughts into words.

    At any rate, a new program in Boston is working to teach low income parents to talk with their children from a very early age and to respond to their children’s conversational cues rather than shushing them.  You may have heard of the work done by Betsy Hart and Todd Risley which found an enormous gap in language exposure between low and upper income households with 9 month to 3 year old children.  Low income parents spoke far less frequently to their children and used fewer words and less variety of words when they did speak than higher income parents.  They also tended to issue 2 negative utterances for every one positive one to their  children.  In contrast, professional parents made 6 positive comments for every one negative comment to their children.  Long term studies found that this difference translated directly into differences in academic abilities in 3rd grade.  I have long thought that a program which educates the parents of at-risk kids in the importance of talking to their children needed to happen.

    It’s not that these parents are bad people or even bad parents.   I have known low income parents who found it odd that I peppered my babies with questions as we moved through our day.  “He’s not going to answer you” was a frequent comment.  They just thought I was odd and would have felt dumb talking to someone they knew didn’t understand them and couldn’t respond.  I really think it’s a matter of education.  Parenting matters.  A lot.  It’s just fantastic to see that people are starting to do this important work.  Hopefully, this will be the start of programs which focus on families and parents over programs run by “experts” which can never hope to achieve what an engaged, knowlegable parent can do – no matter how much money we spend on them.

  • More on Public policy and Families

    March 21, 2006

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    There’s an article up on The Weekly Standard called “Indentured Families” which I found very interesting. It outlines several prime examples of how the GOP, while being miles above the Democratic Party on many things, is hardly the champion of the family it is too often allowed to portray itself as. It gives examples of 3 specific policies which hurt families but because of specific business interests, are supported (or even championed by the Republican Party). I think the 3 examples it gives are both excellent and an illustration of the fact that one need not be talking about creating new government programs or entitlements in order to support families. The policies mentioned are the really terrible bankruptcy bill passed last year, the child care tax credit and the federal student loan program. My only quibble with the piece is that they fail to point out that our unacceptably high bankruptcy rate is directly linked to another family problem the GOP refuses to take constructive action on: health care costs (and here).
    I find it encouraging that a prominent conservative magazine like the Weekly Standard has taken to addressing these sorts of issues. I also think it’s high time we start pressuring the Republican Party to take actions which help families rather than letting them get away with just slapping a family friendly face on any old thing they do.

  • Government Policies and Marriage

    March 8, 2006

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    On of the topics I have brushed on here is how the government can/should change policies in order to encourage family formation and make it easier to maintain families. Unfortunately, whenever government and policies appear in the same sentence, people may assume I’m referring t new big-government programs. This is not the case at all. In The National Review Online today, one of the authors of the study I reference below is interviewed regarding his work. In response to the question of what policy changes we should make in light of his study, he responds as follows:
    I think we should give couples and families the ability to make choices about work and family that best suit their own needs. Among other things, this means adjusting the tax code so that child-care tax credits do not reward one model of organizing family and work.
    I also think we can reform divorce laws so that spouses who commit themselves to marriage do not find themselves holding the bag when their spouse thinks they have fallen out of love or finds an attractive alternative. For instance, court decisions regarding child custody and property division should take into consideration the responsibility that each spouse bears for the divorce. As a matter of simple justice, innocent spouses who do not wish to divorce should not lose primary custody of their children or primary control of their property. Of course, spouses who are the victims of adultery, abuse, or abandonment should be able to get a divorce promptly.
    Finally, because many of our tax and welfare policies – e.g., the Earned Income Tax Credit, Medicaid, etc. – are means-tested, they end up penalizing marriage among low-income couples with children (    see). To strengthen marriage for all Americans, federal and state policies must be reformed to stop penalizing low-income couples who are considering marriage or who wish to remain committed to their marriages.
    This is exactly what I have been talking about. We really do need our lawmakers to stop claiming that every pro-business move they make is also pro-family (it may or may not be) and start looking at the nitty-gritty of what the government is already doing which makes family formation and maintenance harder than it needs to be.

  • "Gay Marriage" News You Haven’t Heard

    March 3, 2006

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    The French government set up a commission to look at the issue of same sex marriage and issued a report called the “Parliamentary Report on the Family and the Rights of Children” in late January which came down firmly on the side of traditional marriage. Story here and here. The commission held numerous public discussions, listened to a wide variety of opinions and studied the laws and after-affects of changes to marriage in numerous countries and came up with a report which could have been written by the Heritage Foundation or Focus on the Family. In our country the discussion of same sex marriage is often framed in such a way that the only possible reason for opposition to “gay marriage” is said to be homophobia or religious zealotry. Concerns about children are dismissed out of hand as being mere covers for the true motives behind opposition to same sex marriage. However, this report came to its conclusions based on a simple presupposition which gets to the real heart of the issue: “to affirm and protect children’s rights and the primacy of those rights over adults’ aspirations.” In doing this, the commission decided that it “is not possible to think about marriage separately from filiation: the two questions are closely connected, in that marriage is organized around the child. Marriage is not merely the contractual recognition of the love between a couple; it is a framework that imposes rights and duties, and that is designed to provide for the care and harmonious development of the child.“ (Emphasis mine.)
    In conclusionsion of the report, the commission actually went so far as to call laws allowing parentage of children by same sex couples “fictitious filiation by law – two fathers, or two mothers – which is biologically neither real nor plausible.” Can you even imagine what the response would be if a government report actually asserted such a thing here in the US? The report concludes: “Diametrically opposed representations were made by the people heard on this point, and they failed to persuade a majority of the Mission to support recognizing a right to a child or a right to marriage, for same-sex couples. A majority of the Mission does not wish to question the fundamental principles of the law of filiation, which are based on the tripartite unit of ‘a father, a mother, a child’, citing the principle of caution. For that reason, that majority also, logically, chose to deny access to marriage to same-sex couples.”
    I don’t know if the conclusions of the commission will hold in the face of popular support for gay marriage in France, but it sure is nice to see a group which can’t possibly be said to be either homophobic or religious zealots come to logical conclusions regarding this issue. What would be even nicer is if in light of the obvious care with which this report was developed and the strength of the arguments, this report was able to influence public thinking on the subject.
    Of course, it’s very telling that although the report has been out for over a month, there has been NO discussion of it or even reporting on it in our press. A search for information on the report elicited not a single mainstream media news report on the topic. The only people reporting it seem to be conservative news outlets and the Catholic Church. I must admit that I take allegations of liberal bias in the press with a great big boulder of salt. Actually, it’s one ofonly a few topics which I just don’t have much of an opinion on, but given the coverage that things like the approval of gay marriage in Canada got, this does seem a bit suspicious.

  • Anti-family government policies

    February 24, 2006

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    I mentioned the Crunchy Conservatives blog/book club going on at National Review Online based on the new book by the same name in a previous post. I wanted to share part of a post put up there yesterday which made me think, “somebody gets it!” A guy named Bruce Frohen writes:
    “this is a good time to point out how radically unnatural, anti-family and anti-community many of our public policies are today. In defending permanent things, and families and communities in particular, I’m not saying that people should be forced to live my way. But I am saying that societies and governments are definitely not neutral. For example, our current tax structure punishes families for having children and for making the choice of relying on a single income, along with a stay at home mom. And I do mean punishes. The tax structure assumes that all of us are atomistic individuals who may happen to choose consumption items, like children, for which we will give them some tax relief, because we claim to like kids. A system based on the family as a fundamental, natural basis of society would start from the presumption that the family is the unit taxed. That means income splitting (lowering taxes for single income families) and far more generous dependent deductions. This would show concern for and valuation of families, make it easier for more people to make family-friendly choices, and encourage employers, neighbors, and others to show more respect for families.”
    I completely agree with this. As a society, we often view having children as a consumerist choice. We talk about having a kids as being a privilege or a right. Does anyone else realize how completely and utterly insane such notions would have seemed to our ancestors? How about children as a way to ensure the continuance of a society and culture and parenting as a service to the world?
    A couple months back The Weekly Standard ran an article called “The Party of Sam’s Club” which talked about ways the Republican party could work to really support families. Some of it’s specific policy suggestions were the sort of nonsense they do in Europe. However, this excerpt got me thinking:
    “Yet the decision to raise children continues to be treated as something akin to the decision to buy an expensive automobile–a perfectly fine thing to do, but don’t expect any sympathy or support when you can’t afford a tune-up or an oil change. Having a large family used to be a sign that you had faith in the future. Today, outside the family-friendly exurbs that played a crucial role in reelecting President Bush, it’s become a form of conspicuous consumption–or, for the poor, a mark of irresponsibility.
    Crafting pro-family policies that stand against this trend is not a question of turning back the clock to some lost Ozzie-and-Harriet golden age, as critics of social conservatism often assert. Quite the opposite: Precisely because the world has changed, with the demise of lifetime employment and increasing returns to education, strong families are growing ever more important, and policies that encourage people to form them and keep them together are ever more necessary.”
    As I said elsewhere in this blog, I do not think it is the job of government to make be people be virtuous, but I do think that the government should create a situation where it is easy to choose to be virtuous (or at the very least not do things which make being virtuous any more difficult than it has to be). So, how would our government policies change if we were to make family formation and maintenance a priority? I’ve been thinking about this for a while and have some ideas which I may share later. If you have any, please post them in the comments section.
    Of course, the real question is why an at-home mom in Western Wisconsin is thinking about these things while the boneheads we elect to run our government (including the so-called “family values” ones) really don’t give a hoot about them?