Tag Archives: Myths

News

New study: adopted kids struggle, even with well-educated, wealthy parents

11 Comments

I’ll explain why I am posting this below, but for now, let’s take a look at the study, which is discussed at Family Studies. (H/T Brad Wilcox tweet)

Excerpt:

To expand what we know about adopted students, for this Institute for Family Studies research brief, I carried out a fresh analysis of data from a large longitudinal study of 19,000 kindergarten students that was conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics beginning in 1998.

[…]Kindergarten and first-grade teachers were asked to rate the classroom behavior of children in the ECLS-K sample—how well they got along with other children in a group situation. In both the fall of kindergarten and the spring of first grade, adopted children were more likely than biological ones to be reported to get angry easily and often argue or fight with other students.

Here’s the first chart:

Adopted kids struggle in school
Adopted kids more likely to engage in problem behaviors

And more results:

Children in the ECLS-K were also rated by their teachers on how well they paid attention in class, whether they seemed eager to learn new things, and whether they persisted at challenging learning tasks. Scores on these measures have proven to be predictive of later academic performance and career success beyond elementary school.5 Adopted children were rated less highly with respect to such positive approaches to learning than were children being raised by both birth parents.

Here’s the second chart:

Adopted kids struggle to pay attention in class
Adopted kids struggle to pay attention in class

And even more results:

As the participating children began kindergarten, the ECLS-K assessed their pre-reading skills, such as recognizing letters by name, associating sounds with letters, identifying simple words by sight.

Here’s the third chart:

Adopted kids struggle with reading skills
Adopted kids struggle with reading skills

And now math results:

In the fall of their kindergarten year, the ECLS-K assessed children’s pre-arithmetic skills like counting by rote, recognizing written numerals, and understanding greater, lesser, and equal relationships.

Here’s the fourth chart:

Adopted kids struggle with math skills
Adopted kids struggle with math skills

The article concludes:

Attachment theory holds that a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship with at least one adult, usually the mother, is essential for the mental health of infants and young children. Children who do not develop a stable and secure bond during early childhood, or have the bond disrupted, are subject to both short-term distress reactions and longer-term abnormalities in their feelings and behavior toward other people. Not having a stable maternal bond is apt to produce long-lasting deficits in the child’s social development, deficiencies that are not easily remedied by a new home environment, no matter how favorable.

Some adopted children experienced neglect, abuse, or other stressful events prior to their adoption. According to traumatic stress theory, the likelihood of long-term emotional scars depends on the intensity and duration of the stress. Severe or prolonged early stress can have long-lasting effects on a child’s development, effects that a supportive adoptive family may only partly ameliorate.

So what do I want to say about this? I want to warn young women, especially young Christian women, that children work best when grown-ups plan their lives in such a way that they can provide for what the children need, at the time they need it. And if you miss the window of opportunity to have your own kids and raise them yourself, then you can’t just fix it at the last minute with ad hoc alternatives.

But for some reason, I get a lot of kickback from young women when I tell them what studies say about things like marriage, premarital sex, cohabitation, infertility, day care, and on and on and on. The Christian women in particular dismiss all the facts with stuff like:

God is leading me to choose fun and thrills now. That’s what my feelings say (and all my friends and family tell me that my feelings are God speaking to me). Tingles and peer-approval rationalize my choice to delay marriage and child-bearing. Who cares about stuff evidence? I don’t like to hear about constraints and deadlines. So I’ll just keep up this plan to run up debts, go on missionary trips, and have fun traveling till I’m 90 years old. God always calls people to do what feels good. I’m going on an adventure! And it will be easy to find a good husband and raise happy and effective kids later – whenever I feel like it. Er, I mean when God leads me to feel like it. Yeah.

So even though all of these studies show the need for timings, pre-conditions, best practices, and so on, that can all be dismissed because the feelings are God speaking to her, and God can somehow magically make all the data not apply to her. One of my married friends once wrote to a young, single fun-seeking feminist telling her about the risks of delaying marriage and child-bearing for too long, and the fun-seeker came back to me dismissing the whole letter because “I don’t like the feeling that I am being constrained”. So, the advice of old Christian women (Titus 2:4) can be dismissed because the young adventurous feminist didn’t like the feeling of being confronted by reality by someone who had more wisdom and experience than she did.

What young children need is their mom, and a Dad who can provide for her to stay home during the crucial first 5 years of their lives. That is more important than pursuing fun and thrills, then grabbing for children as if they were handbags at the last second after natural child-bearing becomes impossible. The right thing to do is to use your 20s preparing financially and otherwise to have kids when you are young, and to be financially set up to stay home with them during the critical years. Choosing a man who can provide, and who understands the best practices for having and raising children is vital, if you want your children to be effective and influential for Christ and his kingdom.

I do think that if a couple is intentionally adopting because they want the challenge and want to help a child who really needs it, then it’s praiseworthy to do that. I just don’t want someone who isn’t ready for the challenge thinking that adoption is the same, so they can delay marriage and children.I know that I am lazy, and I always want to do things the easy way. E.g. – I buy new cars, not used cars. I will buy hand-fed birds, not rescue birds. I would buy a new house, not a fixer-upper. I’m just not cut out for doing things that are hard. I have no ability to struggle through when there is resistance. When I face rejection or resistance to trying to grow or lead someone, I just give up. I think what I was saying to young women was – don’t delay marriage and child-bearing, you’ll get better results with less work.

Related posts

Commentary

Top 5 myths that old feminists pass on to young women

1 Comment

Christina Hoff Sommers writing in the ultra-leftist Time magazine of all places.

The list:

  1. MYTH 1: Women are half the world’s population, working two-thirds of the world’s working hours, receiving 10% of the world’s income, owning less than 1% of the world’s property.
  2. MYTH 2: Between 100,000 and 300,000 girls are pressed into sexual slavery each year in the United States.
  3. MYTH 3: In the United States, 22%–35% of women who visit hospital emergency rooms do so because of domestic violence.
  4. MYTH 4: One in five in college women will be sexually assaulted.
  5. MYTH 5: Women earn 77 cents for every dollar a man earns—for doing the same work.

I’m posting 4 and 5 below, since they were mentioned in the video above (that’s not Christina Hoff Sommers):

MYTH 4: One in five in college women will be sexually assaulted.

FACTS: This incendiary figure is everywhere in the media today. Journalists, senators and even President Obama cite it routinely. Can it be true that the American college campus is one of the most dangerous places on earth for women?

The one-in-five figure is based on the Campus Sexual Assault Study, commissioned by the National Institute of Justice and conducted from 2005 to 2007. Two prominent criminologists, Northeastern University’s James Alan Fox and Mount Holyoke College’s Richard Moran, have noted its weaknesses:

“The estimated 19% sexual assault rate among college women is based on a survey at two large four-year universities, which might not accurately reflect our nation’s colleges overall. In addition, the survey had a large non-response rate, with the clear possibility that those who had been victimized were more apt to have completed the questionnaire, resulting in an inflated prevalence figure.”

Fox and Moran also point out that the study used an overly broad definition of sexual assault. Respondents were counted as sexual assault victims if they had been subject to “attempted forced kissing” or engaged in intimate encounters while intoxicated.

Defenders of the one-in-five figure will reply that the finding has been replicated by other studies. But these studies suffer from some or all of the same flaws. Campus sexual assault is a serious problem and will not be solved by statistical hijinks.

MYTH 5: Women earn 77 cents for every dollar a man earns—for doing the same work.

FACTS: No matter how many times this wage gap claim is decisively refuted by economists, it always comes back. The bottom line: the 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time. It does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure or hours worked per week. When such relevant factors are considered, the wage gap narrows to the point of vanishing.

Wage gap activists say women with identical backgrounds and jobs as men still earn less. But they always fail to take into account critical variables. Activist groups like the National Organization for Women have a fallback position: that women’s education and career choices are not truly free—they are driven by powerful sexist stereotypes. In this view, women’s tendency to retreat from the workplace to raise children or to enter fields like early childhood education and psychology, rather than better paying professions like petroleum engineering, is evidence of continued social coercion. Here is the problem: American women are among the best informed and most self-determining human beings in the world. To say that they are manipulated into their life choices by forces beyond their control is divorced from reality and demeaning, to boot.

Her conclusion:

Why do these reckless claims have so much appeal and staying power? For one thing, there is a lot of statistical illiteracy among journalists, feminist academics and political leaders. There is also an admirable human tendency to be protective of women—stories of female exploitation are readily believed, and vocal skeptics risk appearing indifferent to women’s suffering. Finally, armies of advocates depend on “killer stats” to galvanize their cause. But killer stats obliterate distinctions between more and less serious problems and send scarce resources in the wrong directions. They also promote bigotry. The idea that American men are annually enslaving more than 100,000 girls, sending millions of women to emergency rooms, sustaining a rape culture and cheating women out of their rightful salary creates rancor in true believers and disdain in those who would otherwise be sympathetic allies.

But if young women learn this for four years in college, what hope is there for any kind of trust and vulnerability with men? What hope is there for marriage? They are always going to be trying to find meaning in life on their own, apart from any kind of loving partnership with a man. And the more hooking up and cohabitating they do, the less they are going to value marriage and take practical steps towards it. That is the real problem – the wasting of time and the lack of seriousness, as if getting married can be left to age 35 with no preparation and no planning. As if careers and missionary work and traveling can fill the same hole that a family fills. Yet if no one tells these young women and pushes them to be sensible and discerning, they will mess up the most important decision of their lives.

This might be a good article to share and bookmark.

Commentary

The top 5 myths about Christmas

4 Comments

From Take Two Apologetics.  It’s an interview with Krista Bontrager. I removed the links from the excerpt below, so you can click through to their site if you want the links.

Excerpt:

Krista, many of us were taught that Jesus was born in a stable because “there was no room in the inn.” Was He born in a stable?

Probably not. Nowhere in the Bible does it state that Joseph went from home to home looking for a place to stay. That story stems from many translations’ use of the word “inn” in Luke 2:7. From that, we extrapolate a whole slew of events—the innkeeper, innkeeper’s wife, a No Vacancy sign flashing. The problem is that the word used in Luke 2 (kataluma) is not the word for inn—that’s a bad English translation. The word is better translated as “upper room” or “guest room.” In fact, the 2011 translation of NIV makes that correction. Luke 22:11 also uses kataluma to describe the guest room where the last supper took place. In contrast, pandocheion (correctly translated as “inn”) appears inthe parable of the Good Samaritan.

Where was Jesus born, then, if not in a stable?

It’s much more likely He was born in a home. Mary and Joseph were going to their ancestral home, which means they had extended family there. It’s almost inconceivable that their family would not have taken them in considering the cultural practices of that time.

So if Jesus was born in a home, why does the Bible say He was placed in a manger?

That’s an important detail because it tells us what part of the house they were in. In those days, homes had an upper level where the family would sleep and a lower level where animals were kept at night for the animals’ protection and to provide heat. It seems that Jesus was born in that lower level where the animals were kept. And he was placed in a manger (feed trough) because they make for a great little cradle. In fact it reminds me of the makeshift bed my husband and I once made for our daughter when we stayed overnight at a hotel.

What about some of the characters often suggested as being present at Christ’s birth?

The shepherds were present, but the three wise men were not. Matthew’s account apparently takes place during a different time frame than Luke’s. One clue is that the Greek word Matthew used to describe Jesus is a paidion, which can mean anything from an infant to a toddler. This range of definitions would be consistent with King Herod killing all the Jewish  boys ages two and under (Matthew 2). This would mean that Jesus was probably two or younger when He was visited by the wise men.

Okay, so we’ve eliminated the stable and the wise men from the Nativity. What about the date? Was Jesus born on December 25?

Maybe. The standard story is that December 25 was adopted after Constantine’s conversion to Christianity because it was on a pagan holiday and the winter solstice. Christians then co-opted the holiday and Christianized it. What’s interesting is that the early church put almost no emphasis on celebrating the birth of Christ. They were much more concerned with the resurrection. It’s not until AD 200 where possible dates are mentioned for the celebrating of Christ’s birth. By about AD 300 there were two dates: December 25 (for the west) and January 6 (for the east). There does seem to be a tradition of December 25 long before Constantine’s conversion, so that’s why I say maybe. This article from the Biblical Archaeology Review gives a good summary of “How December 25 Became Christmas.”

I found this post over on Apologetics 315. Brian puts up a post with apologetics stories every Friday. There’s more in there – I am listening to the 5 part lecture series on church history right now. (It’s Calvinist, but polite)