Sweeping January 1 changes to the state’s reproductive laws mean that non-birth parents can now be named on birth certificates.
[…]Other changes to the Assisted Reproductive Act included recognition of “social” as well as “medical” infertility, meaning single women, gays and lesbians can access IVF treatment or commission a surrogate.
The new laws also mean children conceived using donors have the right to find out about their biological heritage once they turn 18.
Victorian Registry of Births Deaths and Marriages spokeswoman Erin Keleher, said the department was delighted it can recognise rainbow families. “It’s on the vanguard of social change,” she said.
So the state is assigning parental rights to people who are not biologically related to the child. Is that fair to the child? Is it in the best interests of the child? Do same-sex relationships offer the same benefits to a child as an opposite-sex marriage with two parents biologically linked to the child?
A free society needs people with consciences. The vast majority of people must obey the law voluntarily. If people don’t conform themselves to the law, someone will either have to compel them to do so or protect the public when they do not. It costs a great deal of money to catch, convict, and incarcerate lawbreakers — not to mention that the surveillance and monitoring of potential criminals tax everybody’s freedom if habitual lawbreakers comprise too large a percentage of the population.
The basic self-control and reciprocity that a free society takes for granted do not develop automatically. Conscience development takes place in childhood. Children need to develop empathy so they will care whether they hurt someone or whether they treat others fairly. They need to develop self-control so they can follow through on these impulses and do the right thing even if it might benefit them to do otherwise.
All this development takes place inside the family. Children attach to the rest of the human race through their first relationships with their parents. They learn reciprocity, trust, and empathy from these primal relationships. Disrupting those foundational relations has a major negative impact on children as well as on the people around them. In particular, children of single parents — or completely absent parents — are more likely to commit crimes.
Without two parents, working together as a team, the child has more difficulty learning the combination of empathy, reciprocity, fairness, and self-command that people ordinarily take for granted. If the child does not learn this at home, society will have to manage his behavior in some other way. He may have to be rehabilitated, incarcerated, or otherwise restrained. In this case, prisons will substitute for parents.
I am reading her book Love and Economics right now, and this argument is in the first couple of chapters, which is how I found this article.
What’s the best way to help children do well in school?
On the one hand, social conservatives on the right favor the traditional family structure, complete with a father who lives in the home and is an involved parent. Parents have an incentive to help children do well in school because they are biologically linked to the children and they are paying all the bills at home. They are making sacrifices and they want to see some results.
On the other other hand, social liberals on the left favor raising taxes on working families, and funneling the proceeds to unionized public school teachers. Do teachers get paid more for improving the quality of education for students? Or do they get paid more for contributing to Democrats who will increase their salaries? Do they have an incentive to make children learn?
American taxpayers invest heavily in education. Last year, spending on public K–12 education totaled $553 billion, about 4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2006. For each child enrolled in a public elementary or secondary school, expenditures averaged $9,266 that year—an increase of 128 percent, adjusted for inflation, since 1970.
Despite this increase in public spending, student achievement and educational attainment over the last four decades has remained relatively flat. In 2007, a significant portion of students, disproportionately from disadvantaged backgrounds, scored “below basic” in reading and math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Sadly, in many of the nation’s largest cities, fewer than half of high school students graduate.
While academic research has consistently shown that increased spending does not correlate with educational gains, the research does show a strong relationship between parental influences and children’s educational outcomes, from school readiness to college completion. Two compelling parental factors emerge:
family structure, i.e., the number of parents living in the student’s home and their relationships to the child, and
parents’ involvement in their children’s schoolwork.
Consequently, the solution to improving educational outcomes begins at home, by strengthening marriage and promoting stable family formation and parental involvement.
The PDF is here. In the rest of the paper, Christine supports her conclusions using evidence.
WINTERY KNIGHT 