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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   29759 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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Is the decline in teen mental health mostly about parenting?

https://ifstudies.org/blog/parenting-is-the-key-to-adolescent-mental-health

The findings are clear. The most important factor in the mental health of adolescent children is the quality of the relationship with their caregivers. This, in turn, is strongly related to parenting practices—with the best results coming from warm, responsive, and rule-bound, disciplined parenting. The data also reveal the characteristics of parents who engage in best-practices and enjoy the highest quality relationships.

A mildly interesting competing hypothesis in itself compared to "smartphones and instagram wreck teen girls' psyches". But where it really gets interesting is here:

Yet, some parental characteristics do matter. Political ideology is one of the strongest predictors. Conservative and very conservative parents are the most likely to adopt the parenting practices associated with adolescent mental health. They are the most likely to effectively discipline their children, while also displaying affection and responding to their needs. Liberal parents score the lowest, even worse than very liberal parents, largely because they are the least likely to successfully discipline their children. By contrast, conservative parents enjoy higher quality relationships with their children, characterized by fewer arguments, more warmth, and a stronger bond, according to both parent and child reporting.

That paragraph actually understates the findings compared to the chart just above it, if you click on the link- just look at the stark discontinuity between 'very conservative' and everyone else. In fact the order by political ideology, on parenting quality, is 1) very conservative 2) blank spot 3) conservative 4) moderate 5) very liberal 6) liberal. And I would hazard a guess that this is majorly correlated with the other two, quality of parents' relationship, factors.

Now there's a couple of hypotheses as to why this is- it could be that parenting has just been getting shittier recently, that more conservative types are somewhat insulated from the trend by being, well, conservative, and that there's some population discontinuity between 'liberal' and 'very liberal'. This could be red tribe-blue tribe ethnogenesis manifesting itself in an interesting way- the red tribe adopted adaptive parenting measures, the blue tribe didn't(or alternatively, they both used to share good parenting practices but as part of ethnogenesis the blue tribe is moving away from them, which I guess is pretty close to the first explanation. It seems pretty clear that they didn't both used to have terrible parenting with the red tribe moving away because teen mental health is a relatively newer problem). It could be a regional difference. It could be that, given fertility differences by political ideology, conservative parents have more role models allowing them to more easily adopt good parenting practices. Personally, I lean towards number two, myself- I'm reminded of a section in Irreversible Damage, describing how nearly every girl with rapid onset gender dysphoria had a liberal mother, and some had country club republican/rino fathers but most of the fathers were liberal as well. The section goes on to claim that at least some parents of daughters with ROGD found success in sending their daughter to live with more conservative relatives, resulting in desistance. That's obviously not conclusive, or even particularly strong, evidence(and it's also confounded all to heck by duh), but it's a second datapoint on a trend.

In any case, it seems like the other interesting question raised by this report is, well:

Returning to the present crisis, it would appear as if this scholarship has been forgotten. No effort is being made by leading public health organizations to inform parents about what works to prevent depression, anxiety, or behavioral problems in teens. ...... Expert-led services that could heal relationships—through family or individual therapy, for example—are often not even covered by health insurance, in part because reimbursement rates are too low. Parents are disempowered and sidelined, and yet social science continues to show that their actions, judgments, and relationships are the key to their teen’s mental health.

My assumption is that inscrutable bureaucratic reasons are the main factor in that. But it's worth noting that this is probably the main explanatory factor behind why conservative teens have so much better mental health than liberal ones; after all, the competing "it's smartphones and instagram" hypothesis doesn't explain this. And even if you assume parenting doesn't matter much in the long run, it doesn't pass the smell test to say it doesn't affect kids while they're being parented.

This study makes a ton of intuitive sense.

Glancing over it, did anyone pick up on how exactly they're measuring mental health? I couldn't quite place it but I didn't dig super deep.

It looks like they’re measuring correlates and then matching it up to Haidt’s data.

I'm not remotely shocked that children of conservative parents have better mental health. Conservative men and women have better mental health. If it's genetic, why wouldn't it transfer down to the kids? If it's in the culture/worldview, likewise?

Life is just better as a conservative. You get to accept things at face value and touch grass, instead of constantly turning your neuroticism up to 11 in order to deconstruct every load bearing pillar of your identity, family and society.

I think just assuming for a moment that the results are accurate, a couple of things stand out about conservative parenting particularly.

First, parenting for conservatives is a focal point for life. Family formation and child rearing are central to the conservative and they will absolutely rearrange their lives and schedules to focus on their family life. If they see public schools as a problem, they’ll do whatever they have to do to route around the problem. If they have to scrape by on one income, drive beater cars and live in a tiny house or apartment so that mom can stay home with the kids they will do that. Kids do pick up on this. They know the kinds of sacrifices their parents are making for them. They know that the reason dad works long hours is so that they can have the best life possible. And this tells them they matter to their parents enough to make serious sacrifices for them, which tells them that they are absolutely valued.

Second they tend to teach self discipline, which in my mind is absolutely critical to developing self esteem because disciple is what makes achievement possible. And achieving things is where real self esteem comes from. A kid that lacks the self discipline to make the baseball team, or keep a clean room or get decent grades or whatever else fails a lot, and he doesn’t have the mindset of “I’ll do this thing differently and then I can make the team or get the grade next time.” Without knowing how to succeed in his efforts life becomes arbitrary and frustrating because he has no idea why he’s such a failure. This is why so many children of liberals love Jordan Peterson. His advice isn’t magic, there’s no “one weird trick” he’s telling people what conservative parents have been saying all along — get disciplined, do the work, get along with people, and learn some self control. Without those things you get lost and often depressed.

Third, the conservative mindset itself might well be protective. It doesn’t focus too heavily on how you feel at the moment, which prevents rumination on negative emotions. Not to say don’t feel them or that they don’t matter at all, but the conservative mindset does not see feelings as facts in themselves. They see it “either you do something about the problem, or learn to live with it.” It’s a kind of practical stoic mindset. Yes, people can be jerks, don’t be one of them, but also don’t let them ruin your day. This is a major issue I have with modern therapeutic culture in which people are encouraged to focus on feelings, treat them as facts, and do nothing about them. If I wanted to cause depression, that would be the ideal way to do it. Especially if I can make you anxious about things you have no control over.

If they see public schools as a problem, they’ll do whatever they have to do to route around the problem.

At a party last week, I was chatting with a liberal couple whose kid will be starting public high school in a couple years. The place I live uses a lottery system: you can end up with your kid assigned to any school in the city, many of which are bad. I asked, what if you end up with a bad (academically failing, unsafe) school? Their response (after some throat clearing that no school is bad) is that they are committed to public schooling, and no matter which one he gets sent to or if he'd prefer a different one, they'll send him there.

I can get this mindset as a cope, if you don't have resources. But they do have resources and could easily afford any of the well-regarded private schools. My unsaid thought was "that's child abuse."

My unsaid thought was "that's child abuse."

I am probably on the far end here in terms of thinking that adolescent experiences matter to long term outcomes(I really do believe that habits formed in late adolescence and early young adulthood dictate your habits for the rest of your life in ways that are frequently independent of genes, and that stereotypically adolescent/early young adult mistakes(eg substance experimentation, petty crime) are a pretty big deal for affecting future life trajectory). But that goes too far; your highschool education doesn't matter very much, he can make it up in a year or two of community college if he has to.

Now exposing your child to unnecessary danger may well count as abusive, but I doubt the public schools are that bad if you don't go out of your way to expose yourself to danger.

Their response (after some throat clearing that no school is bad) is that they are committed to public schooling, and no matter which one he gets sent to or if he'd prefer a different one, they'll send him there.

This is what they think now, their opinions might be a bit different a few years down the line when Jr. really is faced with the prospect of going to Toilet High.

Yeah, also much easier to say in kindergarten where everyone’s 5 than when everyone’s 15.

I went to one of the worst public schools in the state because my parents didn't want neighbors. It ran the whole gamut from rural white trash to rust belt ghetto, and honestly, I couldn't tell. I hung out with the smart kids or the popular kids and everyone was either middle class or at worst working class and it didn't seem any different than if I was a few miles away at one of the better schools in the state. At least until graduation, when I realized how much of a minority we all were.

I had a similar issue, except it was the small rust belt city my dad grew up in and always intended to start his family in. Dirt poor husk of a town that is currently at about 33% of its peak population in 1950. Everyone was just sort of the same. The kids "with money" had parents that were accountants or engineers. A few rich people are hiding in the country for the low CoL and light legal oversight of their estates, but they don't send their kids to the local schools at all. The first time I heard the term "Advanced Placement" was when my college advisor asked me which AP classed I'd taken in High School.

My unsaid thought was "that's child abuse."

If they can easily afford any of the well-regarded private schools, their kid will be fine wherever they go.

Well-being isn't just long term outcomes (and I'd agree with you that the actual long term trajectories would be similar). It's about their experience while there: there's being bored constantly and concerns around physical safety.

If the kid doesn't care about being academically challenged or physical safety, I agree that probably it doesn't qualify as child abuse.

Assuming they survive.

Here are some more

I don't know the specific district this kid is in. But getting thrown into a "bad" school carries more risk than just learning less.

And I am sure that I can dig up anecdotes of kids at private schools committing suicide because of various pressures. The kid is overwhelmingly likely to be fine.

Edit: Not to mention easier access to hard drugs in pvt schools.

But the kid would likely be better off were they to go to a well-regarded private school. We calculate child support based on what the parent can afford, not based merely on what is necessary for the kid to be "fine", because the child is entitled to parental support. Why shouldn't we similarly require parents with the necessary means to not skimp out on their child's education?

Yes, I am sure the kid would be better off in many respects. But the claim was that it was child abuse.

I am going to call bullshit on this study. There are already a couple of posts in the thread pointing out that children of strict parents won't give honest answers to the survey which reflects on their parents, and that parents won't give honest answers to questions about their kids' mental health that reflects badly on their parenting. Given the existence of social desirability bias, I don't even trust parents reporting their own parenting practices - the reported high quality of "very conservative" parenting could be interpreted as "Very conservative parents are more likely to know the correct answers (as determined by a conservative think-tank) on a how-to-parent quiz."

But even if they have 100% honest answers (which they don't) I don't think this study does what it says on the tin:

  1. Child response bias. They spoke to 6643 parents, of whom 2956 had one or more teenage children who could have been included. (Were the other 3687 parents included in the study? They don't say). Only 1580 children were included - that is a 52% response rate. Are the teens who responded representative of the whole sample?

  2. Over-reliance on parental reports. The published results just don't use the child questionnaire data that much. It is used as part of a mostly parent-reported "index of mental health", and as one item out of six on a mostly parent-reported "index of relationship quality". The methodology section of the paper doesn't say how they combine households with child and parent questionnaires with households with only parent questionnaires to get a single set of results - this seems like the key step in the process to me, and it could mean that the published results are almost entirely parent-reported. "Parents who think they are good parents also think they have well-adjusted kids" doesn't seem like an interesting response to me, and could be Dunning-Kruger just as easily as actual parenting quality.

  3. Chart-crime. The correlations between parenting practices and mental health, and the correlations between adverse experiences and relationship quality on mental health, are shown on different graphs with different scales, concealing the fact that the impact of relationship quality dwarfs the impact of parenting practices. The text points out that the impact of relationship quality is larger. This isn't that bad - I have put out worse charts myself, with the excuse that I was running for public office at the time.

  4. Missing regression. They have the data to compare parenting practices to relationship quality, but they don't. Given that "does authoritative parenting improve child mental health by improving relationship quality or via some other mechanism" is an interesting question, I assume they ran the regression and didn't report the results because they didn't like them. The text even asks the question, saying that the large impact of relationship quality on mental health is evidence that parenting style works via relationship quality. But it isn't the evidence you are looking for - you need to show more of the correlation matrix.

  5. Reverse causation and how. The aspects of "authoritative parenting" which correlate best with mental health are "My child completes priorities I set for them before they are allowed to play or relax" and "My child follows a regular routine", and "I find it difficult to discipline my child" (reversed). Those are measures of a parent's success at implementing authoritative parenting, not their commitment to doing it. And when you correlate that with parent-reported mental health, the direction of causation is obvious to anyone who has parented a difficult child. (I have a diagnosed ASD son - I speak from experience). IFS are putting out an "umbrellas cause rain" study.

  6. Genetic confounding. They mention this possibility, but dismiss it. I am not going to try to work out whether the stuff they cite to say that this study isn't genetically confounded does in fact say that, but my prior is that everything is genetically confounded. Grading on a curve, at least they considered the possibility.

  7. Talking around the 1 vs 2 parent question - WHY? This is the IFS we are talking about, 2 parents being better than 1 is a big part of their raison d'etre. But I can't find a clear discussion of it anywhere in the paper. They show breakdowns based on divorced/married/never-married status and high-low quality relationship with current partner (not co-parent!), but not the straightforward is the kid still living with both biological parents test. Do they have a dataset which shows that 2 parents are not, in fact, better than 1 and chose to hide it? (This is consistent with the small impact on child mental health of "Has a parent who used to live with you stopped living with you?")

  8. Inconsistent data presentation. The way the correlations between parenting style and parent demographics, and relationship quality and parent demographics are presented is completely different to the way the correlations between child mental health and parenting style, and child mental health and relationship quality are presented, in a way which confuses the fact that they are effectively different cells in the same correlation matrix, and also makes it hard to compare effect sizes.

  9. Missing regression. Why not compare adolescent mental health with parent demographics directly? You have the information. Haidt did it - he found conservative adolescents are healthier (particularly daughters). Again I unfortunately have to be specific.

I don't think this is unusually bad for a think-tank writing up some survey research - I do think they made more mistakes than usual because the underlying study is more complicated (there are four major groups of variables with unknown causal links between them - mental health, relationship quality, parenting practices, and parent demographics). But there is enough hinkiness that I can't trust the results, and I don't have a good response if I try and beat a tofu-eating attachment parent with the study and they say "correlation is not the same as causation". I do wonder why the main author (who is an economist at Gallup) didn't run the paper past a professional statistician - Gallup must have them on staff.

Haidt's work is much better at explaining why he thinks his theory is causally correct.

Agreed on all these points. I wasn't impressed with the methodology at all, this seems like your typical progressive study in how rigorous it is but with the political valence swapped.

I'm wondering how to square this with the data that suggests that modern parents do way more parenting. Apparently modern fathers spend almost as much time on childcare as 1960s housewives.

Children seem to have had more freedom 50 years ago and were less neurotic. It seems more intuitive to me that overparenting would contribute to poor mental health than the wrong kind of parenting.

It seems oddly kids fifty years ago had both more freedom and more specific rules. Modern liberal parents are both deeply involved but have a weird “well they are going to do it anyway attitude” to many things they shouldn’t.

with the best results coming from warm, responsive, and rule-bound, disciplined parenting

Water sure is wet. The parents for whom this comes to naturally [or if it doesn't, those who have a memeplex encouraging them to be this], Group 1, have better results than the ones with a memeplex and cultural milieu that explicitly calls exercise of that capability harmful and anti-social, Group 2.
The Iron Law of Bureaucracy is this concept generalized to bureaucracies (of which society in general is one).

As for the difference between "very liberal" and "liberal", I'm not convinced there aren't more progressives in the latter category even though they'd realistically fall into the former just because this is a self-identified answer rather than directly testing against Haidt's 6 Foundations (or similar). Identifying oneself as "very liberal" (if a progressive) suggests at least some self-awareness, which generally tends to predict those positive parenting qualities even among those operating according to Group 2 logic.

No effort is being made by leading public health organizations to inform parents about what works to prevent depression, anxiety, or behavioral problems in teens.

Anything they could say would be an active infohazard to Group 1 (who are already in the right, but the marginal cases are the most vulnerable to suggestions they aren't) and completely ignored by Group 2; I don't see a problem with them staying silent in this case.

Keep in mind that the 'data' here is a poll by a right-wing think tank. The data basically says that conservative parents said they have a good relationship with their children and that their children have good mental health on a single survey. /shrug.

Polling definitely isn't useless in general, but there are things it can tell you and things it can't. In particular, surveys of minors like this typically contact the parent, and have the parent ask their child questions and then fill in the survey for them; there's bound to be confounds between parenting style and what your child tells you when you ask them these types of questions, 'lying to my strict father that everything is fine so he doesn't get mad' is a trope for a reason.

I can't prove to you post hoc that I would have dismissed this survey if it had come out closer to my preferred beliefs, maybe I'm stupid enough that I wouldn't have, but I hope I would have and I do think I should have, in that hypothetical.

A mildly interesting competing hypothesis in itself compared to "smartphones and instagram wreck teen girls' psyches".

Note that it's not actually inconsistent to say that 'The big decrease in mental health compared to past generations is caused primarily by social media' and 'The biggest factor explaining the differences in mental health between different kids today is parenting style'.

If all kids in your survey are similarly saturated in social media, then social media will explain very little of the variance in your data because everyone gets the same exposure. That doesn't mean that social media isn't having a huge effect on everyone, just that this effect is uniform in your data set.

It's sort of like how intelligence is very very highly heritable if you only measure among affluent college kids who signed up for your study, and a lot less heritable if you take a global sample that includes people with childhood malnutrition and lack of education access. These are all measures of the amount of explained variance in your data set, you have to think about what types of variance that data set does and doesn't capture in order to interpret it correctly.

But it's worth noting that this is probably the main explanatory factor behind why conservative teens have so much better mental health than liberal ones; after all, the competing "it's smartphones and instagram" hypothesis doesn't explain this.

Does it not?

I guess I don't have evidence on this, but I just assumed that it's still the case that rural children spend less time on screens and more time outside than urban children, even if the gap is shrinking.

Also, if the political difference (presuming one exists) were caused by conservative parents limiting screen time and/or banning social media, that's still congruent with those things being the proximal causal factor.

Keep in mind that the 'data' here is a poll by a right-wing think tank. The data basically says that conservative parents said they have a good relationship with their children and that their children have good mental health on a single survey. /shrug.

Am I missing something here? The second paragraph says this:

My colleagues and I at Gallup launched a study this summer to understand the causes. We surveyed 6,643 parents, including 2,956 who live with an adolescent, and we surveyed an additional 1,580 of those adolescents. We asked about mental health, visits to doctors, parenting practices, family relationships, activities, personality traits, attitudes toward marriage, and other topics, including excessive social media use, as discussed in prior work. I present the results in a new Institute for Family Studies and Gallup research brief.

The author is one Jonathan Rothwell, who is an employee of Gallup. This is easily verifiable by Google. So the polling wasn't done by the IFS but by Gallup. Is Gallup a right-wing think tank? Furthermore, he claims that they surveyed the adolescents as well, quite comprehensively given the large list of topics he describes them covering.

What is the basis on which you're claiming that the results are simply from conservative parents claiming their children have good mental health?

Gallup was hired by IFS to conduct the survey. This is how pretty much all survey firms work, they're not independent research organizations, they take contracts from clients who want the survey run, and those clients then own the data and decide if/how it is released and distributed.

The fact that Gallup is involved is definitely legitimizing, they have a reputation that won't let them intentionally collect biased data or allow clients who mention their name to lie about what the data say too much without speaking up. As compared to if IFS had done the calling internally or with a less famous vendor.

But at the end of the day, IFS still commissioned the poll and determined what it would ask about and how the questions would be formed, and is in control of how the findings are released.

A mildly interesting competing hypothesis in itself compared to "smartphones and instagram wreck teen girls' psyches".

Why is this a competing hypothesis? I would imagine they're interrelated. It seems obvious to me that conservative parents would have greater restrictions on, or at least greater oversight of their children's social media usage and technology use. And the other way, it is likely a child who hasn't been 'influenced' by social media drivel is more responsive to conservative parenting and a better relationship with (conservative) parents.

They are willing to criticize other adults, including teachers or even their child’s other parent, directly to their kids or in their hearing. It’s an important part of growing up to understand that authority figures are flawed and human, but perhaps it’s a little scary and destabilizing to believe that, at 12, you know better than the people with power over your life.

This is the biggest factor that will probably drive me to private schools once my kid is old enough for kindergarten. I don't want to have to burst that bubble so early in my kid's life once their teacher starts talking gender ideology. The basic "everyone has a gender identity and it's about what you feel inside" is part of published curriculum starting in fourth grade here. I doubt all teachers refrain from engaging in those conversations until it's mandatory, nor do I believe at all that they'll only promote what's in the published curriculum.

At a school board meeting one mom was talking about what she loved about her child's school, and shared an anecdote about kids engaged in face painting activities. The mom asked one kid about the symbol she had on her face, and the kid relayed that it's to show that she's a lesbian. The kid was in second grade.

I know I won't be able to keep destructive ideas from my kids completely, they'll definitely hear them from peers, and I'll have to address them as they come up. But I really would prefer that authority figures aren't endorsing them, and it seems the only control I have over that is to go private.

It's a shame, we live three houses from our public elementary school, and this was one of the big selling points for us.

They are willing to criticize other adults, including teachers or even their child’s other parent, directly to their kids or in their hearing. It’s an important part of growing up to understand that authority figures are flawed and human, but perhaps it’s a little scary and destabilizing to believe that, at 12, you know better than the people with power over your life.

Honestly, that's an important thing that I hadn't considered and I'm really glad you mentioned it.

My parents had a policy of never disagreeing with each other in front of their children, except about practically irrelevant issues e.g. whether there is life on Mars. This required additional rules, e.g. if one of them told us that something was forbidden and the other disagreed, then they would debate it afterwards, and it was the responsibility of the parent who made the assertion to tell us that it was actually allowed.

I only found out about this policy in my late 20s.

In general, they are remarkably good about handling disagreements, despite (perhaps because of?) having masculine, discursive, and sceptical personalities.

They backed up even my silliest teachers.

Yeah, my parents definitely didn't do that. I heard all about my mother's ongoing struggle with teachers and the ASD's administration over my education since preschool, and by 4th grade, I'd already corrected my teachers too many times on math and science mistakes to assume competence. I vividly remember a junior high vice-principal telling me outright I had "no business being that smart," and if he could, he'd've had me denied access to math or science classes until my age-peers could "catch up." I had a teacher tell me to 'quit pointing out that you're smarter than me.'

(Well, it also didn't help that my mom, even now, describes her late mother to people by starting with "remember the meanest teacher you had in school." This was a woman who taught Special Ed primarily because learning-disabled kids are easier to bully.)

My brothers and I also got our own version of "the Talk" about police, and to always be perfectly compliant and deferential to them… because they are all trigger-happy petty tyrants who will go out of their way to wreck your life if they think you don't respect their authoritah.

My parents are also fond of that Reagan quote our education secretary tried to turn on its head. "Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together." Bullshit. Government is not "us," government is "them." Government is that asshole up in the castle sending the Sheriff of Nottingham out to squeeze you dry.

adults were basically competent until proven otherwise, which was the correct assumption given my social milieu.

Perhaps this comes down to me growing up at the bottom edge of the working class — materially poorer than the neighbors on government handouts. Did you ever have to hunker down in an apartment bathtub at age seven or so with your brothers because it was the safest place from a stray bullet, waiting for the gunshots to stop?

The shittiest among them sometimes end up arguing with an eight year old as if they are peers at my dinner table on Christmas Eve.

The misguided western mindset of believing we are all equal bears its poison fruit once again.

When I have children I won't treat them as my equals, I'll treat them as my children. Doesn't mean I want to keep my children down, nothing would make me happier than seeing them surpass me as they reach greater and greater heights, but that's not happening when they are 10 years old (unless we're in the extremely rare case where I'm blessed with a child prodigy, in which case of course the whole parenting dynamics will be very different).

In other words, this is what happens when you have parenting advice intended for people who don't need it, implemented by those who aren't capable or self-aware enough to pull it off. Which is probably the best argument for censorship of ideas about relationships that are actively bad for people not capable of implementing them for whatever reason; too bad that always ends badly for other reasons.

but perhaps it’s a little scary and destabilizing to believe that, at 12, you know better than the people with power over your life.

The high-capability children are already well-aware they know better than the people with power over their lives and are thus fine to discuss this with; the problem is every parent thinking their child is high-capability when they aren't (because what mother doesn't think that about her kid?).

They believe it’s important to explain their reasoning to their kids. Not all of them do this with the paternal grace of Atticus Finch.

The problem with velvet-glove-in-iron-fist-style parenting (of which I am personally a fan) is that it doesn't work if the iron fist isn't consistently there. (Alternately: the most successful parents, as all effective rulers, are all obeying Machiavellian principles.)

When their 15 year old comes back from vacation in a country where the drinking age is 16, they ask her, “Did you go out? Did you have a beer?” When she says no, they tease her.

This is more a problem inherent to "doing drugs with your boss is generally a bad idea", adjacent to "dating them is also a bad idea". This becomes a better idea if you're once or twice removed from the authority relationship and have cultivated a reputation of generally being safe, but less kids means fewer chances you'll get to be the cool aunt (and you need to know parents that trust you enough), so...

They don’t enforce basic civic norms, like standing for the national anthem.

People who fail the shopping cart test are unfit to live in civilized society; this trait is inherently overrepresented by those in any moral majority.

They don’t enforce basic civic norms, like standing for the national anthem.

People who fail the shopping cart test are unfit to live in civilized society; this trait is inherently overrepresented by those in any moral majority.

Since when is a symbolic gesture the same as leaving the world around you as convenient for others as it was for you?

Leaving the cart isn’t a symbolic gesture whatsoever, it has a direct effect on the operation of the store, on the number of staff required, and so ultimately on the price everybody pays.

I was calling standing up for the anthem a symbolic gesture.

Ah, my bad.

Standing is the symbolic gesture.

What makes standing for the national anthem important? Like, which one? The national anthem of England, or the one of the traitorous colonists? If in Nazi Germany or the USSR, is it a basic civic norm to stand for the national anthem?

In my book, trying to force kids to stand for the national anthem is practically child abuse. Loyalty to country is a thought-terminating cliche.

If in Nazi Germany or the USSR, is it a basic civic norm to stand for the national anthem?

This is a good place for the "is it okay to shoot them" criterion. If it's okay to shoot them (regardless of whether it's safe to shoot them), it's also okay to do a whole bunch of other things you normally shouldn't be doing. If it isn't okay to shoot them, then follow the norms.

And as I thought that I mentioned in my post, that preexisting data is the main reason I’m giving this study more credence than I otherwise would.

I think that’s totally true- these aren’t necessarily competing hypotheses, they could equally be complimentary. I do think ‘conservatives limit their teens’ instagram use’ is still something that comes back to… parenting.

Fair enough, that makes sense to me. Sorry that I jumped the gun and assumed that your attempt at dispassionate analysis was some kind of crusading moral argument.

It’s child abuse to… strongly encourage your child to have the same beliefs and behavioral norms as the vast majority of people he or she will meet and interact with? To set your child up for a smooth and healthy social life rather than encouraging him or her to be an atomized contrarian?

Look, man, as someone who staunchly refused to stand for the national anthem starting in high school and continuing up until a couple of years ago, I probably share nearly all of your complaints about the thought-terminating clichés implied by standing for the national anthem. I personally derive very little patriotic feeling or inspiration when I hear the Star-Spangled Banner; its lyrics are a mawkish and clumsy paean to an irrelevant battle from a war which America didn’t even win, and to a country which no longer exists in any meaningful sense.

But saying it’s child abuse to want one’s child to fit in and to have normal run-of-the-mill beliefs that will allow that child to go through life successfully and have healthy relationships with others? That strikes me as a completely ass-backwards accusation.

Well, I think that in a society as liberal as the modern US it's nearly child abuse to bullshit your kid deliberately so that they will have an easier time fitting in. If you're raising your son in Nazi Germany and he has a pretty decent chance of literally getting killed if you teach him to be a free thinker, I guess that's different. But in a more liberal society, the way I see it you're depriving your child of some of the things that make life most worth living in an awake and aware way in order to make it easier for them to sleep through life, all just so that they have an easier time of fitting in with various forms of idiocy.

Fair enough, maybe calling it close to child abuse is a bit exaggerated on my part, but I would say it's not too far off the mark.

The most specifically challenging point of "The Star Spangled Banner" is that there actually is one weird trick that makes it easier to sing--at least for a soloist--that most people don't know. The third note of the song (on "say") is the lowest note you'll sing, so you want to start the song near the bottom of your vocal range.

It's pretty common for people to assume that the first note of a song is generally near the middle-ish of the necessary range, and choose their starting pitch accordingly, but this is a big trap here, leading to "free" being unreachable for most, when they are trying to fit the entire range of the song in the upper half of their own vocal range. "Free" gets most of the attention, but "say" is the first domino in the cascade--the "big range" of the song is mostly an illusion.

To me that is the worst part about it; it means that it can’t be sung communally by a group of normal untrained people without sounding like absolute shit. Personally I would prefer an anthem that is accessible to the common man, rather than being essentially an operatic aria which we all need to stand around and solemnly observe an elite trained singer perform.

It's not perfect, but,

And the rockets' red glare The bombs bursting in air Gave proof through the night That our flag was still there

Slaps

Personally I would prefer an anthem that is accessible to the common man, rather than being essentially an operatic aria which we all need to stand around and solemnly observe an elite trained singer perform.

I unironically agree with this. God Save The King thankfully is easy to sing, but the connotations of that are terrible (it's actually a French tune, with a rumour of being first invented when the King of France was getting an anal fistula removed), Land of Hope and Glory is so so much better than that doggerel tune.

Among the Limey anthems, I like Rule Brittania! the most.

Ah yes, that's another absolute banger. I have zero issues with it, but I think the populace of the modern country itself won't like it.

A couple of generations ago, the median American sang frequently for fun or at least every Sunday in church. I’m guessing the anthem, sung by a crowd, didn’t used to be the big horrible embarrassed mumble it is today.

Most songs designed for mass singing have all the notes in the same octave. Looking at national anthems, God Save the King and Deutschland uber alles are all on one octave, La Marseillaise goes one note beyond the octave, and The Star-Spangled Banner goes four notes beyond a single octave. In addition, the top note of the tune is on "free", and "ee" is one of the harder vowels to sing at full volume.

To put the required vocal range into perspective, an operatic soloist is expected to to have a useful range of two octaves, and chorus singers can get by with slightly less.

A soloist singing The Star-Spangled Banner can choose the key to optimise for the middle of their vocal range (and the singer opening a sporting event will do just that - that is part of the reason the song is usually sung unaccompanied). Someone singing it in a choir can't - in order to be in tune they either have to sing at the same pitch as everyone else, or exactly one octave different.

This was never a song that was easy to sing.

As an aside, I've always wondered why we don't just make a song like America the Beautiful the anthem. It's a much better song, to be honest. And it's less arduous to sing. But it would lose the flag stuff and I think that would make a lot of people very angry. And I have no lack of judgment to think that if we open that can of worms, we won't get something by Cardi B as our anthem. So this is all just a useless lament.

Sometimes I feel like the flag itself has a position that flags don't in every other country, it's the center of civic nationalism in the way that monarchs tend to be in some other countries. That's probably the core of the disconnect that makes non-Americans weirded out by the American love of the stars and stripes.

Brits sing "God save the King" and pledge allegiance to "his majesty King Charles III and his heirs and successors according to lawr", Americans sing "does that star-spangled Banner yet wave" and pledge allegiance to "the flag, of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands." The British make fun of Americans for frequently flying the flag, but then they go wait hours and hours to see the Queen lying in state and buy cheap tat whenever there's a jubilee year. Conservatives push to ban flag burning as a constitutional exception to free speech, "compassing or imagining" the death of the king is a crime -- once upon a time a capital one -- in Britain. We hand flags out for dead veterans, soldiers talk about the flag as a centerpoint for allegiance the way the British talk about the King. Conservative Americans get very, very offended if people talk about how they hate the flag, conservative (well, high Tory, at least) Brits get very, very offended if people talk about how they hate the King. And progressives push those boundries because of course they do.

As another aside, I wonder why the British don't make "Rule Britannia" the anthem. (Of course, I understand why, but still.) God save the king is so... bland. "RULE BRITANNIA! BRITANNIA RULE THE WAVES! BRITONS NEVER, EVER, EVER WILL BE SLAVES!" is so fucking metal and it makes me want to go to war for the country, and I've never even been there.

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They believe it’s important to explain their reasoning to their kids.

I think it's really valuable to explain your reasoning to your kid whenever possible. My parents did to me all the time. However, they made it clear that my obligation to obey them was not contingent upon my agreement with their reasoning.

It just seems to me, and of course I’m not a parent, that a lot of this is determined by innate temperament - some hereditary, perhaps, but much the luck of the draw.

I’ve seen extraordinary, loving, firm, principled parents laid low by awful children and I’ve seen poor parents blessed by kids who follow the rules for their own sake, have a natural ambition and work ethic, and do great things with their lives.

Too often parents seem to think it’s them when it isn't. But I think it’s actually easier to blame yourself than it is to accept that your kid’s a bad apple and would be nasty and contemptible in any environment, the same way it’s easier and more comforting to think your kid’s smart but lazy than that he’s stupid.

warm, responsive, and rule-bound, disciplined parenting

Hot take: the characteristics of the optimal parenting style mirror the traditional relationship of God to humanity. A person who spends hours a week focusing on God’s relationship to himself is, practically speaking, understanding the optimal parenting strategy where he is on the receiving end. (Prayer can sometimes just be seeking for what the divine optimal parent would say). This translates into a general skill in being a parent. The reason there is a relationship between “very conservative” and mental health of children is that the very conservative have conserved their traditional understanding of deity as compassionate yet strict, punishing yet merciful, loving yet disciplining.

Cold take: kids with strict parents lie to interviewers on the phone about their parents.

Cold take: kids with strict parents lie to interviewers on the phone about their parents.

It's worse than that, these calling houses typically aren't allowed to/won't talk to minors directly without a parent's involvement, the parent is ussually the one filling out the survey (and supposedly asking the child for their answers, but...).

Given that the this entire study is about disciplined and punitive parenting vs open and free-wheeling and the question is 'does your child say that you are great and they are doing great and everything is great when you ask them what to put down on this survey', there's probably a good measure of auto-correlation going on here.

Anecdotal I know, but among my friends and aquaintances I think the ones with easy-going parents are both happier and more successful on average than the ones who had tough love parents.

It's not that I distrust this conservative organization's study, necessarily, but at the least I wonder if they would ever have published it had it shown the opposite results. That kind of factor already introduces bias.

It's not that I distrust this conservative organization's study, necessarily, but at the least I wonder if they would ever have published it had it shown the opposite results. That kind of factor already introduces bias.

That kind of factor is present in literally every study ever, you can always wonder if the authors just printed self-flattering bullshit. Going off the replication crisis, it's even a safe bet.

A few thoughts.

  1. How much of this is paradox of choice? Conservatives being more religious, and successful religions today having a few thousand years to (even for an atheist) evolve to fit well with human psychology. Versus modern liberalism kind of being a be whatever you want to be? Even if I weren’t opposed to pronouns etc I feel like if I grew up in a left area and having to choose which one I was would just put a lot of fear in me I’m choosing wrong. Versus growing up in a traditional area where being a straight white male as my only choice avoids any am I making a mistake issues.

  2. I’m not sure why very liberal is better than liberal. Doesn’t fit my expectations. The only thing I could see would be liberal would pick up a lot of general corporate type liberal while very liberal people atleast have an ideology they teach their kids. (Paradox of choice again.

  3. I thought there was something where liberals actually get divorced less than conservatives because they marry later or perhaps that’s just your upper class highly educated liberal. I would have thought for that reason that parental environment and good parenting wasn’t the issue.

  4. Would like to see some racial background combined with ideology. I think most on the right associate the rise in mental health issues with the woke mind virus. So I was trying to figure out how blacks fit in where I think the vast majority of their community doesn’t have that virus. And I guess Republican/Democrat isn’t necessarily the same as liberal/conservative.

  5. Maybe the liberal having more issues is because they still have a lot of normie vibes but also often are in areas with very liberal people. Being in a declared camp is a lot better than being in no man’s land.

A couple of thoughts on some of your thoughts-

  1. It looks like the difference is kind of small, and also there might be some kind of liberalism by half measures effect. It might be random sampling bias(although the sample size should be big enough), or it could be a selection effect on what kind of very liberal people become parents- if that's less of a default, it's reasonable to think it might be less suitable parents that drop off first, and it certainly seems borne out by data that very liberal people are less likely to have kids than liberals.

  2. I know red states tend to have higher divorce rates than blue states, but does the divorce rate actually propagate on ideology or is that a typical "democrats in red states are pretty uniquely dysfunctional" effect, like what drives crime and (some of the)welfare use?

  3. They claim they controlled for that. It looks like this was a study only of intact nuclear families, though- which at least among AADOS is not the default, so there's a selection effect there. So I would like to see a broader study, but I think all it would return would be "kids do best in an intact two-parent household" which isn't a revelation to anyone.

I do think paradox of choice explains a lot, and I'd also go further- for any given norm, 99% of deviations from it are probably destructive/stupid. Most norms are norms for a reason.

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