Does Professor O’Brien know anything about what day-care these children had when they were young? No she admitted
Posted in General on 17. Jul, 2010
Does Professor O’Brien know anything about what day-care these children had when they were young? No, she admitted to me, she does not She has studied them only between the ages of 14 and 16. She cannot sub-divide those who had good care from those who had bad: it might show that quality of care, not hours with mother is more significant.Does she know how much time fathers spent with these children? (They are all two-parent families.) No, she says, she does not. Does she have a comparison of the total family income of both the part-time and the full-time working mother families? No, she says she does not. In fact, there are so many more questions to ask, you can add in your own here.If you would like to consider the complexity of such surveys, take the work being done by Charlie Lewis, of the University of Lancaster, a previous co-author with Professor O’Brien.
Investigating all the available studies, he found that paternal absence has a devastating effect on families Children did worse in all respects. But once he corrected for the poverty effect of the absence of a father, he found, to his surprise, that the differences between families with and without a father diminished to a level below statistical significance.Or take the work of Kathleen Kiernan of the LSE, who studies the huge National Child Development Study – a cohort of all the children born in one week in 1958 This survey has all the data on the families from birth. Kiernan finds where mothers are working when a child is 16, daughters do considerably better and sons quite a lot better than where mothers are not working at all – and this is true of both lone-parent and two- parent families.Blaming the mothers is a good populist game – either these hard-working mothers or, as in a previous disgraceful Panorama, stay-at-home single mothers scrounging off the state. This programme is deeply politically incorrect in an era when most mothers work. But what if it is just plain incorrect?This is not just an academic issue.
This research will remain in the popular imagination for a decade or more. People will quote it to one another for years to come, even if it were to be debunked at some later date. It will make many families anxious and cause them to make wrong choices. (For instance, mothers who decide to abandon their careers may find themselves non-working lone parents later; and children of non-working lone parents do far worse than children of single mothers who work.) Mothers already think they are to blame for their children’s character defects or failure to fulfill their potential. To be less than perfect is, of course, to be human and so is having a less than ideal mother. How many ways can a mother fail her child? Too many to count.But now step back a pace or two and ask this question. Supposing Professor O’Brien’s research is water-tight, what exactly are we supposed to be so worried about? Are we, as a society, worried that some children have less good opportunities than others? Do we worry that life is unfair to some children? If so, just look at the chasm that divides the children of the middle classes from those of the growing wretched underclass.