Polemics

New study: parents who work nightshifts or weekends damage their children

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The UK Telegraph reports on a new study.

Excerpt:

The 24/7 economy is damaging children, a study has concluded, with youngsters more likely to suffer developmental and behavioural problems if their parents work unsociable hours.

Children of parents who work nightshift and weekends were found to have poorer language, reading and mathematics skills and were more likely to be overweight or obese.

By adolescence, they were also more likely to be depressed and to have abuse drugs and alcohol.

The comprehensive review, led by Jianghong Li, a senior researcher from WZB Berlin Social Science Center, looked back at 30 years of research comparing parents’ work schedules with their children’s development.

21 out of 23 reviewed studies showed weekend and nightshifts damaged child development.

Authors found that working unsociable hours: “has negative consequences for the developing child with regards to mental health and behavioural problems, cognitive development, being overweight and obesity.”

The impact was worse for pre-school children who were up to 35 per cent more likely to have developmental problems.

Why would parents have to work so much? Well, it might be materialism and consumerism. But it might also be caused by policies of the secular left, like high tax rates, the marriage penalty, etc. The secular left is very much against marriage and they do not like the idea that a man will be able to provide for a family and keep his wife home to raise them when they are very young.

It’s not just nightshift and weekend shifts, either. Previously, I wrote about another Oxford University study on daycare that was featured in the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

Academics at Oxford University discovered that exposure to some forms of early education contributed to bad behaviour and could be linked to emotional problems.

The study, based on an analysis of infants from almost 1,000 families, showed that the strongest influence on children came from within the home itself.

Children raised in poor families with high levels of parental stress or mental health problems were most at risk of developing emotional problems by the time they started school, it emerged.

The research also uncovered trends relating to children who were in formal child care — away from their parents.

[…]The report, published in the journal Child: Care, Health and Development, said that “children who spent more time in group care, mainly nursery care, were more likely to have behavioural problems, particularly hyperactivity”.

The study, led by Prof Alan Stein, of Oxford’s Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, found that “spending more time in day care centres, over the total period was a predictor of total problem scores”.

“Children who spent more time in day care centres were more likely to be hyperactive,” it said. “Children receiving more care by childminders were more likely to have peer problems.”

The authors added: “The findings in relation to childminding suggest that it might be out of home care rather than group care that raises the risk of behavioural difficulties.”

[…]The study said: “These findings suggest that interventions to enhance children’s emotional and behavioural development might best focus on supporting families and augmenting the quality of care in the home.”

My point in posting these studies is to show that what what children really need in order to do well are their parents. They need time from their parents to talk to them and do activities with them. They need input and guidance from their parents. Any time you here left-wing feminist politicians talking about how we need to push to have children, especially very young children, educated by experts, you need to keep in mind that they don’t have the facts to back up their idea. People who push these plans push them because they want women to behave like men and work outside the home. They also want to boost tax revenues by making bother parents work more.

Everyone knows that parents who are careful about who they marry and careful about staying married will have more successful children than those who don’t marry before having kids, or who don’t prepare for marriage themselves, or who don’t marry someone with the skills to do their roles in the marriage. But people on the left want to reverse that – they want everyone’s children to be “equal” regardless of what decisions the parents make. And they want to do this by redistributing wealth (not character) from parents who succeed to parents who fail. So when you hear this “equality” crowd talking about the need to replace incompetent parents with taxpayer-funded government bureaucrats, you need to keep studies like the ones above in mind.

Related posts

Videos

William Lane Craig lectures against naturalism at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland

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Note: if you have heard Dr. Craig’s arguments against naturalism before, then I recommend jumping right to the Q&A time, which starts 72 minutes in.

About Dr. William Lane Craig:

William Lane Craig (born August 23, 1949) is an American analytic philosopher, philosophical theologian, and Christian apologist. He is known for his work on the philosophy of time and the philosophy of religion, specifically the existence of God and the defense of Christian theism. He has authored or edited over 30 books including The Kalam Cosmological Argument (1979), Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology(co-authored with Quentin Smith, 1993), Time and Eternity: Exploring God’s Relationship to Time (2001), and Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity (co-edited with Quentin Smith, 2007).

Craig received a Bachelor of Arts degree in communications from Wheaton College, Illinois, in 1971 and two summa cum laudemaster’s degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, in 1975, in philosophy of religion and ecclesiastical history. He earned a Ph.D. in philosophy under John Hick at the University of Birmingham, England in 1977 and a Th.D. underWolfhart Pannenberg at the University of Munich, Germany in 1984.

Here is the full lecture with Q&A: (2 hours)

Summary:

  • Naturalism defined: the physical world (matter, space and time) is all that exists
  • Dr. Craig will present 7 reasons why naturalism is false
  • 1) the contingency argument
  • 2) the kalam cosmological argument
  • 3) the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life
  • 4) the moral argument
  • 5) the ontological argument
  • 6) the resurrection of Jesus
  • 7) religious experience

The Q&A time starts around 1:12:00.

Dr. Craig does mention an 8th argument early in the Q&A – the argument from the non-physicality of mental states (substance dualism), which is an argument that I find convincing, because a materialist conception of mind is not compatible with rationality, consciousness and moral agency. He gets a couple of questions on the moral argument early on – one of them tries to put forward an evolutionary explanation for “moral” behaviors. There’s another question the definition of naturalism. There is a bonehead question about the non-existence of Jesus based on a Youtube movie he saw – which Craig responds to with agnostic historian Bart Ehrman’s book on that topic. There’s a question about God as the ground for morality – does morality come from his will or nature. Then there is a question about the multiverse, which came up at the physics conference Dr. Craig attended the day before. There is a good question about the Big Bang theory and the initial singularity at time t=0. Another good question about transfinite arithmetic, cardinality and set theory. One questioner asks about the resurrection argument. The questioner asks if we can use the origin of the disciples belief as an argument when other religions have people who are willing to die for their claims. One of the questioners asks about whether the laws of nature break down at 10^-43 after the beginning of the universe. There is a question about the religious experience argument, and Craig has the opportunity to give his testimony.

I thought that the questions from the Scottish students and faculty were a lot more thoughtful and respectful than at American colleges and universities. Highly recommended.

Commentary

George Will: Governor Scott Walker is a good pick for Republicans in 2016

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Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker

I like Scott Walker because he is a man who defeats Democrats and gets things done, and I like Senator Ted Cruz because he is a brilliant debater. Both are tough conservatives. But if I had to pick one of them right now for 2016, I’d pick Scott Walker. And I’m not alone.

Here’s an editorial from the St. Louis Dispatch that Dennis Prager discussed on Monday, authored by moderate conservative George Will.

Excerpt:

In 2011, tens of thousands of government employees and others, enraged by Gov. Scott Walker’s determination to break the ruinously expensive and paralyzing grip that government workers’ unions had on Wisconsin, took over the Capitol building in Madison. With chanting, screaming and singing supplemented by bullhorns, bagpipes and drum circles, their cacophony shook the building that the squalor of their occupation made malodorous. They spat on Republican legislators and urinated on Walker’s office door. They shouted, “This is what democracy looks like!”

When they and Democratic legislators failed to prevent passage of Act 10, they tried to defeat — with a scurrilous smear campaign that backfired — an elected state Supreme Court justice. They hoped that changing the court’s composition would get Walker’s reforms overturned. When this failed, they tried to capture the state Senate by recalling six Republican senators. When this failed, they tried to recall Walker. On the night that failed — he won with a larger margin than he had received when elected 19 months earlier — he resisted the temptation to proclaim, “This is what democracy looks like!”

[…]Walker has long experience in the furnace of resistance to the looting of public funds by the public’s employees. He was elected chief executive of heavily Democratic Milwaukee County after his predecessor collaborated with other officials in rewriting pension rules in a way that, if he had been re-elected instead of resigning, would have given him a lump-sum payment of $2.3 million and $136,000 a year for life.

To fight the recall — during which opponents disrupted Walker’s appearance at a Special Olympics event, and squeezed Super Glue into the locks of a school he was to visit — Walker raised more than $30 million, assembling a nationwide network of conservative donors that could come in handy if he is re-elected next year. Having become the first U.S. governor to survive a recall election, he is today serene as America’s first governor to be, in effect, elected twice to a first term.

The radically leftist New Republic has this to say about Governor Walker.

Excerpt:

Right now, the Republican Party is an increasingly factional place, divided between north and south, establishment and grassroots, Tea Party Conservatives and practical Conservatives, religious right and business, libertarians and populists.

[…]There’s another potentially unifying mainline conservative, though, and he lurks in Madison. Scott Walker, the battle-hardened governor of Wisconsin, is the candidate that the factional candidates should fear. Not only does he seem poised to run—he released a book last week—but he possesses the tools and positions necessary to unite the traditional Republican coalition and marginalize its discontents.

Walker has the irreproachable conservative credentials necessary to appease the Tea Party, and he speaks the language of the religious right. But he has the tone, temperament, and record of a capable and responsible establishment figure. That, combined with Walker’s record as a reformist union-buster, will appeal to the party’s donor base and appease the influential business wing. Walker’s experience as an effective but conservative blue state governor makes him a credible presidential candidate, not just a vessel for the conservative message. Equally important, his history of having faced down organized labor and beaten back a liberal recall effort is much more consistent with the sentiment of the modern Republican Party than Jeb Bush’s compassionate conservatism. Altogether, Walker has the assets to build the broad establishment support necessary for the fundraising, media attention, and organization to win the nomination. He could be a voter or a donor’s first choice, not just a compromise candidate.

The other mainline conservatives possess some of Walker’s characteristics, but not all. He’s more compelling and presidential, with more gravitas than Rubio or Jindal.

[…]But even though Walker’s political skills remain an open question, there are reasons why he might be a stronger candidate on paper. For one, he’s a more experienced politician—and the fact is that political skills and instincts are learned and honed under tough circumstances. By the time Walker’s wins reelection—which I expect—he will have won three competitive statewide contests in a tilt-blue state, under three different circumstances. He will have done so while campaigning and governing as a conservative. There are very few politicians who can claim as much.

We need to have someone who is a non-Romney – someone who likes to fight with the Democrats, and is able to beat them.

I found this article that lists six of his accomplishments.

Here’s are a couple:

#2 He passed a killer budget. Over the summer, he signed into law a state budget thatslashed taxes as well as unnecessary spending, including a $650 million income tax cut (part of nearly $1 billion in total tax cuts), Medicaid reform (see #4), the introduction of work requirements for people on food stamps, a freeze in university tuition and limits on residential property tax increases.

#3 He stands up to corruption. One of Walker’s first actions as governor was to create the Commission on Government Waste, Fraud, and Abuse, which was projected to save taxpayers $300 million. He also passed a law that prevents unions from using members’ dues to fund political campaigns.

I have placed his new book about his victories in Democrat-dominated Wisconsin on my wishlist. If you like politics, might be a good one for you as well.