|
Childhood and Parenting
Written and researched by Bob Murray, PhD
Latest News |
Back Issues | Get updates:
Subscribe Now
Family with Two Parents Better for All, Study Claims
September 30, 2002
The traditional two-parent family is much better for children and for society than the single-parent family, a new study has found. The report, published today by the independent UK think-tank Civitas, says that children from one-parent families are 50 per cent more likely to suffer health problems, 25 per cent more likely to commit offences and five times as likely to suffer abuse. They are also more likely to play truant, take drugs or drink alcohol, the survey says. The report cites statistics that show that only 23% of all households with children in the UK have both parents at home (down from 38% in 1961). At the same time the number of single parent households has trebled. The study, written by Rebecca O'Neill, will fuel a heated debate inside the UK Conservative Party over its policy on marriage. Iain Duncan Smith, the Tory leader, wants to restore tax incentives for marriage after the abolition of the married couples' allowance under Labor. He has been influenced by previous US studies about lone parents. But Tory modernizers are worried that adopting a strongly pro-marriage stance may be a "turn off" for younger voters, many of whom choose to live together rather than marry. The report was published on the same day that a lesbian and single-woman-only fertility clinic opened it doors in London.
Read more in the Independent
Read the report on the Civitas website
Top of page
Teens Get a Little Benefit From Health Talk
September 30, 2002
Teenagers welcome the opportunity to discuss health concerns with a health professional, but the effect on their actual lifestyles is modest, finds a study in the British Medical Journal (BMJ).
Researchers identified 1,516 teenagers (aged 14-15 years) from eight general practices in Hertfordshire, England. Teenagers in the intervention group received an appointment for a 20 minute consultation with the practice nurse to discuss health concerns and develop plans for healthier lifestyles. Teenagers in the control group received usual care.
Both groups were asked to complete questionnaires at three months and 12 months. Some 970 teenagers completed questionnaires; 23% smoked, 35% had been drunk in the previous three months, 64% considered they ate unhealthily, 39% took little exercise, and 36% had possible depression.
Three quarters (225) indicated at least one behavior they would like to work on changing; the most common were diet (50%), exercise (36%), dealing with stress (23%), and smoking (13%). At three months, marginally more teenagers in the intervention group than in the control group reported positive change in at least one of four areas of health related behaviour (diet, exercise, smoking, and drinking alcohol), but this did not persist at 12 months.
The results of the trial are somewhat disappointing in that benefits (even where significant) were small, say the authors. However, the results do provide an encouraging start, providing an opportunity to identify and tackle mental and physical health problems and encourage healthy lifestyles. The intervention was well received and relatively cheap, suggesting a way for practices to create an atmosphere that welcomes teenagers, they conclude.
As human beings are relationship-forming animals we heal largely through relationships. Almost by definition a relationship should last somewhat more than the allotted 20 minutes. It does not surprise me, therefore that these once-off chats have little effect. BM
Read more in the British Medical Journal
Top of page
How Mothers Dominate Family Life, and Child Death
September 30, 2002
Research published in New Scientist suggests testosterone levels could be the key. And the magazine also suggests mothers-in-law really can be bad for your health; historical research shows babies were more likely to die if their father's mothers were around.
New Zealand researchers used an Internet questionnaire to assess the dominance of a mother-to-be's personality. Women were asked to choose from a list of 64 adjectives, such as proud, free, bored, awed and arrogant. Among them were 13 words linked with high levels of dominance. On average, women ticked three of these words.
But Dr Valerie Grant, a reproductive scientist from the University of Auckland, found those who ticked over eight of the key words had an 80% chance of having a boy. She carried out further research, which showed those women who scored highly in the tests also had high levels of testosterone.
Dr Grant told New Scientist: "People everywhere have it ingrained in them that the father's big contribution process is the sex of the offspring." But she believes women control gender selection to produce babies whose sex suits them, pointing to the commitment they have to make to the conception, nurturing and raising of offspring.
She added: "I think the evidence that the male has anything to do with it is very flimsy."
In separate research, a study of German peasants living in the 18th and 19th centuries found that having the father's mother around doubled a baby's chance of dying.
Researchers from Germany's Giessen University believe this could be because the mother-in-law could not be sure the child was her own flesh and blood, whereas the mother's mother could. Other studies have shown that the presence of paternal grandmothers may a less beneficial effect on a child's health -- but this is the first to show a negative effect.
The researchers looked at church registers to obtain birth and death data for low-income families in the Krummh region of northern Germany. They found if the maternal grandmother was alive when the baby was between six and 12 months old, it was 79% more likely to survive than if she was dead.
Eckart Voland, who led the research, said this could be because they help with weaning the baby. But if the father's mother was alive, the baby was half as likely to survive as they would have if their grandmothers were dead.
Dr Voland suggested the explanation for the difference could be that a man's mother might be suspicious over the baby's paternity in the strict religious society they studied. The harassment of the mother might then impact on the child's care. But Harold Euler, an expert in the evolution of family relationships at Kassel University in Germany, said the grandmother may want to destabilize the relationship, so her son can go on to meet new women. "The son can also get grandchildren by having sexual relations with other women," he said.
Read more in New Scientist
Top of page
In Sex Mother Knows Best
September 30, 2002
Teenagers are less likely to start having sex when their mothers are involved in their lives, have a close relationship with them, and stress the importance of education, according to new findings from the largest survey ever conducted with adolescents in the United States. The results were most consistent among younger teens in the eighth and ninth grades. But simply warning teenagers about the dangers of early sex or telling them that they shouldn't have sex does not stop them from becoming sexually active, the study researchers found.
The latest results from the National Longitudinal Survey on Adolescent Health (Add Health) draw from interviews with more than 3,000 pairs of mothers and their teens. The findings were reported recently in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
When teens perceive that their mothers oppose their having sex, they are less likely to do so, according to the Add Health results. But while most mothers say that they do not want their sons or daughters to be sexually active, their kids don't always get the message. Even when mothers strongly disapprove of their kids having sex, 30 percent of girls and nearly 45 percent of boys do not believe that they really do.
"Parents say that they talk until they're blue in the face and their kids still don't listen," said study author Robert Blum, MD, PhD, professor and director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Adolescent Health and Development Program. "Kids will pay attention to their parents' values and beliefs on sex. But talk alone does not get the message through."
In addition to talking to their children, parents can do many things that make a difference in whether teens start having sex, Blum said. Parents need to know their teens' friends and speak with their friends' parents. Most importantly, teens, and especially younger teens, who feel close to their mothers are less likely to start having sex.
Findings from other Add Health research have also shown that teens whose parents value education are less likely to have sex.
The Add Health researchers examined self-reports from mothers and their teenagers over the course of a year to gain a better understanding of mother-teen relationships as they affect sexual behavior among teens who said that they had not had sex at the time the study began. During the ensuing year, 11 percent of boys and 16 percent of girls ages 14 to 15 said that they had had sex.
Most mothers said that they talk to their children about sex, including issues such as birth control and the consequences of having sex. Nevertheless, mothers' awareness of their teens' sex lives are frequently inaccurate. When teenagers reported that they had not had sexual intercourse, their mothers were almost always correct in their assessment. But when teens reported that they were having sex, their mothers had only a 50 percent chance of being right in their assessment.
"We need to be =ore tuned in to what's happening in our children's lives," Blum said. "Otherwise, how can we give them clear, effective messages about how to deal with the choices they will inevitably face?"
The Add Health findings identified a number of factors that are associated with postponement of early sex: For younger teens and older teenage boys, a strong sense of connectedness with their mothers in which the teen feels close to mom and perceives that she is warm and caring makes a difference. This effect was not seen among older teenager girls.
At every age studied, girls whose mothers have higher levels of education are less likely to become sexually active. On the other hand, teens whose mothers are highly religious are no less likely than other teens to start having sex.
Mothers who reported that they frequently talk with the parents of their daughters' friends had daughters who were less likely to have initiated sex over the one-year study period. Again, these findings did not hold true for boys.
Blum noted that the Add Health findings, like previous research, suggest that mothers have less influence on the timing of first sexual intercourse among their sons than among their daughters. For adolescent boys, other social influences--such as those provided by fathers, siblings, or peers--may outweigh maternal influences on early sex.
Read more in the Journal of Adolescent Health
Top of page
Childhood Trauma a Cause of ADHD
September 30, 2002
For many years the cause of ADD/ADHD has been hotly debated. On one side have been the "disease"camp who see ADHD as an illness to be treated with drugs and on the other side are those, like myself, who see it as a result of prenatal or postnatal environmental factors.
Now a major new study by Joseph Biderman, MD and others has, perhaps, gone a long way towards resolving the issue.
Their article was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
They were particularly interested in the different effect that childhood circumstances could have on boys and girls and whether these circumstances could increase the risk of either getting ADD/ADHD.
For the study the researchers studied 280 ADHD and 242 healthy comparison individuals of both genders who were between the ages of 6 and 17 years They tested the association between various traumatic circumstances (including family conflict, social class, family size, maternal psychopathology, and paternal criminality) and ADHD. They were also interested to find out whether the resulting ADD/ADHD was accompanied by other psychological problems such as learning difficulties.
What they found was that early childhood trauma was a direct cause of ADD/ADHD but that the other factors that went with it, such as learning difficulties, were different for boys and girls. In general boys were more prone to be functionally impaired by the disorder than girls. In both genders low social class made children more likely to acquire ADD/ADHD. Maternal smoking also increased the risk, but the greatest risk factor, they found, was family conflict.
Again this is something we have been saying for a long time. Ritalin and its like should be a choice of last resort and only used after really good family therapy has been applied. BM
Read more in the American Journal of Psychiatry
Top of page
Father Steals Best: Crime in an American Family.
September 4, 2002
A story in The New York Times outlines the effect familial conditioning. It tells of the criminal history of numerous off-spring of Rooster Bogle. Bogle was a migrant worker who served hard time in prison and who had a habit of beating his wife and teaching his children to steal. By the time the boys were 10 years old they were breaking into liquor stores for their dad or stealing tractor-trailer trucks, hundreds of them. The girls turned to petty crimes to support their drug addictions. In time, everybody went to jail, or to state prison, as did many of Rooster's brothers and their families. By official count, 28 in the Bogle clan have been arrested and convicted, including several of Rooster's grandchildren. Rooster Bogle (rhymes with mogul) himself died in 1998, of natural causes. "Rooster raised us to be outlaws," said Tracey Bogle, the youngest of Rooster's children by his wife, Kathryn, now 55. "There is a domino effect in a family like ours," Tracey said. "What you're raised with, you grow to become. You don't escape."
Read more in The New York Times
Top of page
Maternal Mental Health More Important Than Wealth
September 4, 2002
Growing up in poverty can cause depression and low self-esteem in adolescents, but having a caring mother who feels in control of her life can reduce this effect, says a Penn State researcher.
"Maternal mental health and warmth were found to reduce the direct impact of poverty on adolescents, illustrating the importance of maternal emotional resources in impeding the effects of poverty," says Bridget Goosby, a graduate student in sociology and demography at Penn State. However, mothers who have depressive symptoms and feel less in control of their lives are more likely to have children with low self-worth and depression, she adds.
"This suggests that maternal mental health serves as a buffer to the direct effects of poverty on her children," Goosby says. "Maternal warmth is positively associated with adolescent self-worth suggesting that as maternal warmth increases, adolescent self-worth increases as well."
Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, Goosby analyzed data on 2855 African-American and White children between the ages of 10 and 14. She presented her results as "The Effects of Poverty Experiences on the Psychological wellbeing of Young Adolescents" at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.
Education also plays a role, Goosby says, as mothers having more education tend to have children with higher levels of self-worth. "This may illustrate that mothers with higher levels of education are more likely to have the resources and time to devote to the emotional nurturance of their children because of the correlation of education and income," she says.
Her findings also suggest that the duration of poverty has a less significant effect on the self-worth of adolescents than it does on younger children. "For children that experienced persistent poverty, the prior stigma or lack of resources may no longer be salient," she explains. "Persistently poor children are more likely to live in environments where the majority of children in their school and neighborhood are poor as well. Thus, the factors influencing self-worth may shift toward peer acceptance and family relationships and interactions.
"The findings of this study indicate that experiencing poverty between the ages of 0 and 4 years has the strongest impact on early adolescent self-worth," she adds. "Experiencing economic hardship in early childhood could potentially change a child's emotional and behavioral trajectory.
"Not receiving the emotional and developmental resources from parents due to the strain of economic hardship could lead to developmental difficulties in later childhood, such as lower levels of competence and self-esteem, or poor academic performance," adds Goosby.
Poverty also tends to have a greater effect on depression and anxiety in White adolescents than it does on Black adolescents, Goosby says. "African American children are disproportionately represented among poor groups and are more likely to live in racially and socioeconomically homogenous areas," she says. "Poor White children are more likely to live in socioeconomically mixed areas, and may have difficulty identifying with the their economically advantaged peers."
In addition, female adolescents are more likely to experience lower levels of self-esteem than are males.
Read more on the Penn State University website
Top of page
Bigger Babies Are Brighter
Bigger babies do better in tests, even as adults, but being born into a higher social class is also linked to improved mental ability. However researchers from the Institute of Child Health found although both factors influenced test scores, social class had more of an effect. This evidence of the importance of social background meant the problem of childhood deprivation had to be addressed, they said.
The team studied 10,845 men and women born in early March, 1958, in England, Scotland, and Wales. They examined the combined effect of birth weight and social class, based on the father's occupation. Researchers looked at results from school tests, comparing results at ages seven, 11 and 16 in math, reading, general ability and perceptual and motor skills.
They also looked at what qualifications people had attained by the age of 33.
Test results and educational achievements all improved significantly with increasing birth weight. The proportion of men with higher qualifications (higher than A level, or high school) was 26% in the lowest birth weight group (2500 g or less). In babies who were born in the highest weight group (more than 4000 g) it was 34%. For women, the proportion rose from 17 to 28% for the comparative groups.
Maths scores increased with increasing birth weight at all ages. But babies of lower birth weight born into social classes I and II outperformed normal weight babies from classes III and IV in maths tests.
The researchers suggest the link between maths score and social class seems to strengthen with age, whilst the association with birth weight remained similar. They said their findings held true, even when factors such as gender, maternal age, whether the child was breast or bottle fed, number of siblings and parental education was taken into account.
Researcher Barbara Jefferis said: "We have been able to look at the effect of size at birth on a wide range of cognitive tests. In terms of policy, our findings suggest you really need to take seriously ways of addressing deprivation in childhood and improving social environments."
These findings should not come as any surprise to anyone. As long ago as the mid-nineteenth century it was found that the birth-weight and average height of boys attending the upper class British school, Eton, were greater than those of working-class lads. Naturally they were thought of as brighter as well. More recently the link between social class and intelligence was demonstrated in the controversial book "The Bell Curve" by Herrnstein & Murray (no relation to me that I know of, but then my father came from a large, by no means upper-class, class family). Middle and upper class families put more stress (yes, really) on educational attainment. There is also an unfortunate fallacy, deeply ingrained in both academia and in the minds of the general public, that equates educational achievement with intelligence, which any crow (see recent story Crow Reveals Talent for Technology) would dispute. BM
Read more in the British Medical Journal
Top of page
Spanking May Make Kids Violent, Analysis Finds
July 7, 2002
Spanking has become controversial in recent years, and at least one country, Scotland, has taken steps to outlaw the practice. However in the United States and Australia it remains a widely used form of discipline. Many studies on the effects of spanking have been done, but the findings vary.
Psychologist Elizabeth Thompson Gershoff, of the National Center for Children in Poverty at New York's Columbia University, analyzed 88 different studies on spanking and smacking.
Spanking was strongly linked with immediate compliance, but also with 10 negative behaviors such as aggression, antisocial behavior and abuse of children and spouses in adulthood, she reports in the July issue of Psychological Bulletin, published by the American Psychological Association.
"There is general consensus that corporal punishment is effective in getting children to comply immediately, while at the same time there is caution from child abuse researchers that corporal punishment, by its nature, can escalate into physical maltreatment," Gershoff writes.
But she said physical punishment does not automatically mean a child will grow up to be hostile or violent.
"The act of corporal punishment itself is different across (the spectrum of) parents -- parents vary in how frequently they use it, how forcefully they administer it, how emotionally aroused they are when they do it, and whether they combine it with other techniques," according to Gershoff.
The more often or more harshly a child was hit, the more likely he or she was to grow up to become aggressive or to have mental health problems, Gershoff found.
Spanking is not the best form of discipline, Gershoff said, because it does not teach children right from wrong. Although it makes children afraid to disobey when parents are present, they feel free to misbehave if they believe they can get away with it, according to the researcher.
Read more in Psychological Bulletin
Top of page
Lesbian Families Have Happy Children
July 7, 2002
Scientists from the Dutch Speaking Free University of Brussels in Belgium quizzed 41 preadolescent children brought up by lesbian couples. The children were asked about their feelings with regard to the anonymous sperm donor, and their lesbian mothers. Their comments were compared with a control group of children conceived naturally to heterosexual families.
Parents and teachers were also asked about how well-adjusted the children were. The researchers found that 46% of the children would have liked to know more about the donor, although not necessarily information that would identify them. Boys, more often than girls, wanted to know the donor's identity.
Most of the children were open to others about the fact that they had two mothers. Most did not suffer stigmatization about their family set-up from their peers. The children's perceptions of the way that they interacted with their family did not differ significantly with those who were being brought up by heterosexual families. With the lesbian families, children interacted with both their mothers in similar ways.
The researchers presented their work to the annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Vienna. They said: "Most children had informed their friends about their family structure and did not report being teased or bullied. No differences were found between youngsters raised in lesbian families and those raised in heterosexual families with regard to the quality of their interaction with parents and their psychological wellbeing."
Researcher Dr Katrien Vanfraussen said: "We can conclude, with some caution, that growing up in a lesbian family does not jeopardise children's welfare. They seem to cope rather well." However, she said that the children's continued happiness would be dependent on society accepting the concept of non-traditional families.
Tyranny of the Biological Clock
At the same conference Dr Clare Murray of the City University in London reported her findings that more than two-thirds of single women who choose to have a baby using donated sperm do so because they fear they are running out of time, new research indicates. In the first study to look at single mothers who use sperm banks, researchers found that fertility problems were not the motivation in most cases.
Dr Murray said many of the mothers in the study would have preferred to have a child within a relationship. She was speaking at the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Vienna.
However, nearly a third of the women, whose average age was 38, said they actively wanted to go it alone. The issue of whether single heterosexual women should have access to sperm banks has been controversial, and some clinics require women to be in a stable relationship before they will offer artificial insemination.
But Murray's early results found no difference in the quality of parenting between single and married donor-inseminated mothers.
The researchers compared 22 single women whose babies were born from donor sperm with 36 married women who had undergone the same treatment. The babies were all less than a year old. The researchers plan to follow the children for many more years. There were no differences between the two groups of children in eating and sleeping difficulties.
All the single mothers had lots of friends and relatives helping them. A third of them had daily contact with a member of their families, compared with only 14 percent of the married mothers. The single mothers were also much more open with people about the origin of their babies than the married women were.
These findings should not be all that surprising. In anthropological and primate terms children are mostly raised by females. Certainly in the first six years of life the male role in child rearing is, traditionally, slight. Indeed in most ape communities the male is more often seen as a danger to the newborn and is kept away. In hunter-gatherer societies, again, most of the interaction children experience is with women. The danger, at least with male children, comes after the age of six when they naturally gravitate to a male to find a role model. BM
Read more in Ananova News Service
Read more in BBC News
Top of page
RELATED LINKS
Check our event schedule for workshops and seminars.
About the Author
Dr Bob Murray is a widely published psychologist and expert on emotional health and optimal relationships. Together with his wife and long-term collaborator Alicia Fortinberry, he is founder of the highly successful Uplift Program, and author of Raising an Optimistic Child (McGraw-Hill, 2006) and Creating Optimism (McGraw-Hill, 2004).
Do you like our site? Recommend this page to a friend!
|
