Comment by acjohnson55
2 years ago
The format is very creative and technically impressive. I don't want to launch into criticisms without acknowledging that.
However, I find myself underwhelmed, for a few reasons.
- It's hard to compare the different cohorts, because of the different widths.
- The definition of "adverse experiences" seems too limited in scope of what's counted, leading to small numbers and small differentiation between the cohorts.
- The biggest difference appears to be "no adverse experiences" vs everyone else, but I think the narrative describes other things.
- Somehow, the viceral differences in experience between folks who come from healthy, happy, wealthy families and those that don't feel kind of flattened.
I'm deeply concerned for social justice and equity of opportunities. I'm sure the underlying research of this longitudinal study is fascinating. I just think that the execution of this summary misses the mark a bit.
I'm honestly not sure what conclusion to come away from this data with. It seems to be bolstering a (typically conservative) viewpoint that parenting is really important and that bad or unfit parents need to be kept in check by the state because the harm they may do to their kids can last a lifetime.
This article focuses on shootings, neglectful parents, etc. But what if we focused on more controversial things like only having one parent in the home or missing, specifically, a father figure, religious attitudes of parents, or even (to be maximally controversial) same-sex vs opposite-sex parents?
If those things were found to have impacts on children that last into adulthood also (since the data implies that our childhood shapes us so much), I doubt the author would agree that we have a collective responsibility to keep children from experiencing the negatives of those scenarios
I don't think it's at all unique to conservatives to believe that parenting is important. I would say conservatives tend to want to enforce (and sometimes preferentially support) "traditional" households, leaving up to people to self organize their support systems. Liiberals tend to want to accept households as they are but put in place systems to compensate for the specific conditions that might be suboptimal in a child's environment.
I'm biased, but I believe the liberal perspective takes a more open mind to letting people live the ways they want, under the assumption that this is likely to be locally optimal versus trying to coerce people into externally imposed lifestyles. I don't think it's controversial to say that two parent households correlate with better outcomes. But that doesn't mean that every family is better off that way. Some children are way better off if it's easy and unstigmatized for a single parent to get sole custody if the other parent is abusive.