Coggins7 wrote:Some more interesting analysis and data from the scholars at The Howard Center on the overwhelming importance of the intact nuclear family and the consistent presence of mother in the home, as well as the failure of the long standing feminist project of the equalization of genders and its cultural pseudopod, the working mother who works not because of need through divorce or death of a spouse, but because of material lifestyle concerns or ego gratification (which is, unfortunately, the reason all to many men seek the career paths they do).
Loran---
Let's take a closer look at the first tidbit you posted:
Depressed Without Mom, Delinquent Without Dad
Mothers help keep teens from falling victim to anxiety and depression; fathers help keep adolescents from turning belligerent and defiant.
An interesting claim. Let's see if it is borne out in the evidence which this article
actually cites:
Of course, in an age of rampant divorce, custodial mothers may try to do their best for their children, but noncustodial fathers can do very little for their offspring’s psychological development.
The markedly different ways that mothers and fathers affect their adolescent children’s lives are detailed in a study recently published in the Journal of Early Adolescence by a team of researchers at Yale and Florida State Universities. But because so many fathers are now largely absent from their children’s lives, the paternal side of the parental equation remains merely a theoretical abstraction for many of the teens in this new study.
Scrutinizing data collected from 116 sixth- through eighth-grade students (selected so as to be demographically representative for the state of Florida), the Yale and Florida State analysts look for indications of how parents affect their adolescent children’s lives. The data in this study clearly indicate that “fathers are less involved in parenting their adolescent children than are mothers and that adolescents report feeling more securely attached to their mothers than to their fathers.” The influence of mothers on their adolescent children further manifests itself in statistical analyses establishing that for “internalizing problems” (I.e., problems manifest by “extreme shyness, worry, anxiety, and depression), “maternal factors ... outweigh paternal factors in terms of relative influence.”
Did you not read this part? Or did you not understand it? What this is telling us is that mothers
have a greater influence on negative "internalizing" than fathers do. Would you care to explain how this relates to your argument in any way, shape, or form whatsoever? Are you claiming that moms should stay home, since they have a greater influence on the internalizing of problems?
However, when the Yale and Florida State scholars shift their focus to adolescent children’s “externalizing problems” (evident in “hyperactivity, impulsivity, aggression, and delinquency”), the researchers see fathers’ influence eclipsing that of mothers. “For externalizing behavior problems in the full sample,” the researchers report, “the paternal factors (involvement and attachment) explained significant, unique variance; however, maternal factors did not.” Surprisingly, fathers’ effect on externalizing behaviors shows up in particular strength among adolescent daughters, “with fathers apparently exerting more influence on girls’ externalizing behaviors than on the expression of similar behaviors in their sons.”
Again, how does this support your argument? On a sidenote: I have seen studies which demonstrate that sons raised by lesbian mothers tend to be less aggressive. Do you like the sound of that, Loran?
What is more, when the researchers examine data for “total behavioral problems” for both boys and girls, they conclude that “only the paternal factors of involvement and attachment were found to be uniquely significant.” In other words, “for externalizing and total behavioral problems, the father-child variables outweighed the mother-child variables” for both genders.
Once more: how does this support your argument? This says *nothing* about the importance of moms staying at home. In fact, this article does not mention whether the moms were working or not at all....
Not surprisingly, adolescent children are not likely to feel attached to a father who does not live with them, nor is an absentee father likely to be very involved in their lives. The authors of this study in fact report that “nonresident fathers were found to be less actively involved, in comparison to resident fathers, in the lives of their teenage children.” The researchers further remark that “the teens of nonresident fathers also reported feeling less securely attached to their fathers than did their peers whose fathers lived with them.”
Since this new study identifies weak paternal involvement and attachment as statistical predictors of adolescent behavior problems, its findings can only underscore the vulnerability of the many teens now growing up without fathers.
But where did the article mention this? Perhaps you can enlighten me. Basically, this seems like a hack-job.