The Bell Curve- Chapter 10 Parenting

Everyone agrees, in the abstract, that there is good parenting and bad parenting. The question this chapter addresses is how does the parent’s intellect affect their parenting skills? Again, most of the statistics quoted were derived from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY) and the data was taken exclusively from information gathered from white parents. Parenting, in one sense is among the most private of behaviors, in another it is the most public. Parents make a difference in the way children turn out- whether they become law abiding or criminal, generous or stingy, productive or dependent. Most importantly, how successful parents are in raising their children determines how well a society functions. The first issue the authors address is the role of social class to parenting styles. From earliest studies in 1936 to the most recent it has been clear that working-class parents tend to be more authoritarian than middle class patents. Working class parents tend to use physical punishment and direct commands to effect behavior while middle class parents are more likely to reason with the child to change his behavior. Generally, and keeping in mind the many exceptions, the conclusion to be drawn from the literature on parenting is that middle class people are better parents, on average, than working class people. To this point the authors have been talking about parenting within the normal range. Now they turn to child neglect and child abuse, practices labeled "malparenting" in the technical literature. Physical battering and emotional punishment get most of the publicity, but child neglect is far more common. What are the differences between child abuse and neglect? Abuse is an act of commission while neglect is an act of omission. Abuse is typically episodic and of short duration, neglect is chronic and continual. Abuse usually arises from impulsive outbursts of aggression and anger; neglect, on the other hand, arises from indifference, inattentiveness, or being overwhelmed by parenthood. At its most extreme, neglect becomes abandonment. Malparenting of either sort is heavily concentrated in the lower socioeconomic classes. Letting a child skip school, for example is not considered neglectful in some poor communities; rather, it is the normal pattern of upbringing. The media, politicians and child advocacy groups usually treat child neglect and abuse as if it were evenly spread across all social classes and imply that children have about an equal chance of being abused or neglected whether they come from a rich home or a poor one, whether the mother is a college graduate or high school dropout. Yet from the earliest studies to the most recent, malparenting has been strongly associated with economic class. The groups who argue otherwise do not have data to support their claims; instead, they argue that child neglect and abuse are reported when it happens to poor children but not rich ones. However, the socioeconomic link with malparenting is undeniable. A study in 1967 revealed that 60 percent of families involved in child abuse were on welfare. The American Humane Association reported on 1976 that half of 20,000 reported cases of child abuse were from families below the poverty line and most of the rest were concentrated just above it. A study in 1984 of child maltreatment in El Paso Texas revealed that 87 percent of alleged offenders were in families with incomes below $18,000 and 73 percent of the female predators were unmarried. A federally funded national study in 1979 found that 43 percent of the cases of child abuse came from families with incomes under $7,000. Only 6 percent of abuse or neglectful families had incomes of $25,000 or more. Finally, a second National Incidence study in 1986 found that the rate of abuse and neglect in families with incomes under $15,000 was five times that of families with incomes above $15,000. Only 6 percent of families involved in neglect or abuse had incomes above the mean for all American families. Given the one-sidedness of the evidence, why has the myth of classlessness been so tenacious? Pelton blamed social service professionals and politicians, arguing that that both had a vested interest in a medical model in which child abuse falls of its victims at random, like the flue. The authors of the bell curve believe that, because most Americans hold child abuse and neglect in intense distaste, most of those who write about malparenting do not want to encourage this hostility toward the poor and disadvantaged by writing about it. Thus, the evening news will continue to report, as they have in the past, that child neglect is not a special problem of the poor when, in fact, the exact opposite is true. Now let's address the issue of parental IQ and parenting. If cognitive ability is a cause of socioeconomic status, which it is, and if socioeconomic status is a related to parenting style, as shown above, the cognitive ability must have some role in parenting style and child maltreatment. Gil's national study of child abuse found that 65 percent of abusive mothers and 56 percent of abusive fathers had not completed high school. A study of 480 indigent women in an urban hospital found that, even within this disadvantaged population, less educated women were more likely to neglect their babies. Similarly, a study of child maltreatment in a Virginia city of 80,000, found that neglecting families had an average eight-grade education and three-quarters of them had been placed in classes for the mentally retarded during their school years. A study of school children in Cleveland with histories of failure to thrive found that their mothers' IQs averaged 81 which means that they were functioning at the lower 10th centile of intelect. A clinical study of ten parents who battered their children severely, six of the children died, classified five as mentally retarded, one as dull, and another as below average in cognitive ability. Finally, a study of 113 two-parent families in the Netherlands found that parents with high cognitive ability responded to their children more flexibly and sensitively while those with low IQ were more authoritarian and rigid, independent of occupation and education. Norman Polansky, whose research began in Appalachia and later was replicated by his work in urban Philadelphia described the typical neglectful mother in this way. She has limited intelligence (IQ below 70), has failed to achieve more than an eighth grade education. and has never held a job. She has at best a vague, or extremely limited idea of what her children need emotionally or physically. She seldom is able to see things from the point of view of others and cannot take their needs into consideration when responding to a conflict they experience. The IQ Polansky refers to corresponds to the upper limit of retardation and his description of her personality invokes further links between neglect and intelligence. Studies of prenatal care reveal that most white women in the different cognitive classes behaved similarly during pregnancy. Smoking was the exception. The smarter the women the less they smoked during pregnancy. Fifty-one percent of dull and very dull women smoked and 19 percent smoked more than a pack a day. In the top two cognitive classes, only 16 percent smoked at all and only 4 percent admitted to smoking more than a pack a day. Mothers with extremely low IQs give birth to low birth weight babies on average 7 percent of the time while the probability of having a low birth weight baby in only 2 percent in women with high IQs. These studies show that the mother's socioeconomic background is irrelevant with respect the chances of her child being of low weight at birth. Note that premature births were not included in these studies. The chances of a child living in poverty in early child hood are closely related to the mother's IQ and her socioeconomic status. In fact, the curves related to the effects of maternal IQ and maternal socioeconomic status on childhood poverty are nearly identical. Thirty-one percent of children born to mothers with extremely low IQs live in poverty while 33 percent of impoverished children have mothers who were extremely impoverish in the year before they gave birth. As you might expect, childhood poverty was nonexistent in women who were extremely intelligent and of high socioeconomic status. The problems experienced by poor children usually are attributed in both public dialogue and academic writings to poverty itself. Most of the world's children throughout history have grown up poor and their poverty was far more severe than the "poverty" experienced by those living in America today. Many of the disadvantages today's children experience are not the poverty itself but the contemporary correlates of poverty; for example, being without a father or living in a high crime neighborhood. The children of low IQ mothers are far more likely to be raised under these adverse conditions than are the children of mothers with average or above intellect. Having said this, there are abundant examples of excellent parenting throughout all but the very lowest range of cognitive ability. The authors used the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) to study the relationship of the mother's IQ to the IQ of her children. The table below summarizes the results of this analysis. Note, there were no Very Bright mothers in the study. IQ in the Mother and the Child for Whites in the NLSY Cognitive class Of the Mothers Mean IQ of The Children Percentage of Their Children in the Bottom Decile of IQ 1 Very bright - - 11 Bright 107 7 111 Normal 100 6 1V Dull 95 17 V Very Dull 81 39 All White mothers 99 10 White mothers in the top three-quarters of the IQ distribution have few children who are in the bottom decile of IQ. For mothers in the bottom quarter of the distribution the proportion of low IQ children rises dramatically. Granting the many exceptions at the individual level, the relationship of cognitive ability to good and bad parenting is undeniable. This irrefutable conclusion holds for a wide range of parenting behaviors, from prenatal negligence that leads to low birth weight and to post natal care of the child which results in neglect and abuse, to developmental outcomes and cognitive outcomes. On the other hand, the data reviewed provide little or no evidence that the smartest women make the best mothers; rather, children can flourish in a wide variety of environments that are merely okay. But some home environments are so bad that even the most resilient children have difficulty overcoming them. These truly disadvantaged homes are disproportionately associated with women of very low intelligence. Comment: This chapter on parenting is long and somewhat tedious. This is so, because irrespective of what aspect of malparenting the authors analyze the conclusions drawn from the various relevant studies are invariably the same. Although, as the authors stress, there are exceptions, in general low IQ mothers and fathers make bad parents and their children suffer greatly from their bad behavior. Of more importance, I believe, is the finding that low IQ mothers tend to have low IQ offspring. The authors pursue the relationship between the cognitive ability of mothers to the intelligence of their children at great length in subsequent chapters of The Bell Curve.