Tag Archives: Mother

Commentary

What helps kids to learn? Parents, teacher unions or education bureaucrats?

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Christine Kim
Christine Kim

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?

Parents vs teacher unions: Who does the best job?

Consider this research paper from Christine C. Kim of the Heritage Foundation, my favorite think tank.

Excerpt:

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:

  1. family structure, i.e., the number of parents living in the student’s home and their relationships to the child, and
  2. 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.

Commentary

What prevents teen sexual activity? Parents, sex education, or social programs?

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Christine Kim
Christine Kim

What are some of the measurable consequences of pre-marital sex?

The kinds of problems most people think of when they think of pre-marital sex are problems like sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancy, abortions, reduced ability for stable marriage, and maternal poverty.

What’s the best way to prevent teens from engaging in pre-marital sex?

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. On the other other hand, social liberals on the left favor laws that promote pre-marital sex and no-fault divorce, which tends to weaken marriage and break up families. Those on the right prefer strong families and involved parents, while those on the left prefer to tax money away from families and use that money to provide sex education, taxpayer-funded abortions, and single-payer health care.

Who’s right?

Well, consider this research paper from the Heritage Foundation, my favorite think tank.

It’s written by Christine C. Kim. The title is “Teen Sex: The Parent Factor”. (PDF)

She writes:

Many policymakers, health professionals, and “safe sex” advocates respond to these troubling sta­tistics by demanding more comprehensive sex edu­cation and broader access to contraceptives for minors. They assume that teens are unable to delay their sexual behavior and that a combination of information about and access to contraceptives will effectively lead to protected sex, preventing any form of harm to youngsters. Not only are these assumptions faulty, they tend to disregard impor­tant factors that have been linked to reduced teen sexual activity. A particularly noticeable omission is parental influence.

[…]The empirical evidence on the association between parental influences and adolescents’ sexual behavior is strong. Parental factors that appear to offer strong protection against the onset of early sexual activity in­clude an intact family structure; parents’ disapproval of adolescent sex; teens’ sense of belonging to and sat­isfaction with their families; parental monitoring; and, to a lesser extent, parent-child communication about teen sex and its consequences.

That parents play a role in teen sex points to at least two significant policy implications. First, pro­grams and policies that seek to delay sexual activity or to prevent teen pregnancy or STDs should encourage and strengthen family structure and parental involvement. Doing so may increase these efforts’ overall effectiveness. Conversely, programs and policies that implicitly or explicitly discourage parental involvement, such as dispensing contra­ceptives to adolescents without parental consent or notice, contradict the weight of social science evi­dence and may prove to be counterproductive and potentially harmful to teens.

She supports her conclusions using her research findings and some very helpful graphs (see the PDF version).

My thoughts

So what does this mean? It means that parents need to be trained and equipped to talk to their children about topics like pre-marital sex. It means that unmarried men and women need to be serious about choosing their spouse so that there is an increased likelihood that the spouse will have the knowledge, the time, and the disposition to talk to their children about sex. The best way to find a spouse who can make moral judgments and be persuasive on moral issues with the children is to choose some who demonstrates those capabilities over a significant period of time, during the courtship.

I’ve noticed that many young people reject prospective mates who make moral judgments and who have definite ideas about moral issues. What young people seem to want is complete autonomy to pursue their own happiness. They don’t even want to deal with the normal demands of relationships with friends, co-workers, pets, children – and even with God. They just want to pursue their own vision. And if their own choices make them unhappy, then they blame others and demand to be bailed out, (often by the government).

But valuing amorality and permissiveness in prospective mates is not going to attract a spouse who is capable of teaching children right from wrong. Instead, young people should seek to marry someone who is informed on moral issues, and who is passionate about persuading others. Marriage is not the kind of thing that two selfish, amoral people can do well – there has to be a vision and a way of settling disagreements using a standard of objective morality and moral reasoning. Children don’t do well being raised by parents who have no vision for how the children ought to be.

I think a pretty good question to ask a prospective mate is “how would you like your children to turn out?”. What you are looking for is a person who wants their child to have respect for objective moral values and duties and a strong relationship with God. And then ask a second question, “what capabilities do you think your spouse should have to achieve that vision?”. And finally ask, “how have you prepared yourself to guide your children towards that vision?”. These are the questions that we should be asking during courtship to find out whether prospective mates are capable of imparting moral knowledge to their future children.

Personal

How I talk to my mother about Christianity

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I could write a lot about this, so I’ll just try to provide a brief insight. I should probably put up a poll to see what my regular readers are more interested in: 1) news or 2) apologetics and mentoring.

A word of warning

One thing I’ve noticed about women is that they like it when men treat their mothers nicely and what they mean by that is never judging or disagreeing with their mothers, and never trying to change their mothers. This view of love is, of course, false. I want my mother to go to Heaven and to know and love God, so I have to talk to her about these things and disagree if she is wrong about them. So I think that disagreeing with her about spiritual things is being nice to her. But read on and judge for yourself.

The plan

My plan for my mother is not to begin by convincing her that Christianity is true. Instead, I begin by convincing her to approach religious issues just as she would approach any other area of knowledge, such as investing, or nutrition. If she agrees to treat religion as any other area of of knowledge, then I think that she will eventually conclude that Christianity is true. Currently, she is forming her beliefs about God’s existence, character and what he wants from her, using subjective mechanisms, i.e. – intuitions and experience. I want her to try a different method.

Goals

My goal for my mother, as with anyone else, is to try to get her to accept Christianity as objectively true, based on arguments and evidence. I don’t think that a person can be an authentic Christian if Christianity is just wish-fulfillment. I don’t think that a person will stick with Christianity when it goes against their own self-interest, unless their belief is anchored on arguments and facts. People act on what they really believe is true, when stressed by reality.

So, what I need to do is to argue for a method of discovery that is not dependent on emotions and intuitions, but is more rigorous. I need to offer my mother tools, such as the laws of logic, historical analysis and the scientific method. These tools can be used to investigate whether God exists, and what he is really like, and what he wants from her. By using these tools instead of intuition and experience, my hope is that I will be able to get her to arrive at a view of God as he really is.

Questions

The first question to ask her is “Does a Creator and Designer of the Universe exist independently of whether anyone thinks so or not?”. And then I ask the immediate follow-up question “How do you know that?”.

The second question to ask her is “What is the Creator/Designer’s character like?”. And again, the immediate follow-up question is “How do you know that?”.

The third question to ask her is “How does the Creator/Designer expect you to act?”. Once again, immediately follow up with “How do you know that?”.

Discussion

And the results of the inquiry were as follows: 1) she thinks that God is exactly like her and approves of everything she does, and more importantly, 2) her method of investigating religion is basically to invent “God” using her own feelings and experiences. Her method of arriving at these conclusions was by using intuition and experience, and she was resistant to the idea of using logic, science and history to find out the truth about God, his existence, his character, and what he wanted.

The next thing I did was to argue that her method of arriving at her religious beliefs was subjective and unreliable, and that she would never use that method of determining truth in any other area of life. I made a list of everything she cares about and started approaching each topic using her subjective method of determining truth, in order to expose the disastrous consequences that would occur if she made decisions in these other areas using intuition and experience.

For example, I explained my theories on how watching TV produces university degrees, how chocolate causes weight loss, how fruits and vegetables cause cancer, etc. All of this to show that subjectivism is not a reliable method of arriving at truth in any area of knowledge, especially in religion. The desire for happiness should not drive the search for religious truth. People need to avoid inventing a self-serving view of God, just because it gives them a feeling of security without any moral demands.

Finally, I introduce a reliable method of arriving at the truth in any area, including religion. I’m sure that you all already know about the concepts of propositional truth, the correspondence theory of truth, and the test for truth (logical consistency, empirical validation, experiential relevance). And you all know about how to use science/history/logic to confirm/disconfirm religious claims, etc. If necessary, I would apply these methods to other areas to show how they produce real knowledge.

A useful thing to do is to show how well-accepted facts like the origin of the universe from nothing and the crucifixion of Jesus falsify various world religions. This helps to make the point that a lot of people believe things that are false. That way, you motivate the question – “am I interested in knowing what is really true or am I interested in engaging in wish-fulfillment and projection in order to make myself feel better about my own selfishness and insecurity?”.

Some things I found out

I found that engaging in these discussions brought out some very interesting data that reminded me of what I see in the church. Each of these is worth a post, so I’ll just throw them out there in point form.

  • She viewed my efforts to get her to employ logic and evidence to determine her views as being critical of her
  • She felt “constrained” by allowing logic and evidence to override her “freedom” to invent a self-serving God
  • She didn’t want to know about the laws of logic, or how religions make conflicting truth claims
  • She didn’t want to know about what science and history could confirm/disprove religious truth claims
  • She thought that it was better to let everyone believe anything they wanted to believe
  • She thought that religion was mostly for making people believe things that made them feel happy and secure
  • She didn’t think that God expected her to act morally if it didn’t make her feel happy to do so
  • She didn’t care to find out the truth about whether God exists, what he was like, and what he wanted from her

Note: we didn’t get into any fights over this, it was just a friendly discussion, although I could sense her resistance.

My biggest concern about this view is that if it were a common view among Christians, it would increase the incidence of several non-Christian ideas, like moral relativism, inclusivism, postmodernism, pluralistic salvation, the non-reality of Hell, etc. And I think that if a lot of Christians believe Christianity is self-serving, then we will be perceived as being hypocritical by non-Christians when we don’t do the difficult things we are supposed to be doing. Non-Christians want to see some consistency between out actions and what the Bible says.

In a poll of my friends I did a while back, I found that people thought that talking to relatives about Christianity was the most difficult thing to do, higher than talking to people at work. So I’d be curious for readers to share their experiences about who is harder to talk to, and what you found in talking to people.

Mentoring

Apologetics advocacy

And here are some lectures that got me interested in apologetics.