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Notes -
Is the decline in teen mental health mostly about parenting?
https://ifstudies.org/blog/parenting-is-the-key-to-adolescent-mental-health
A mildly interesting competing hypothesis in itself compared to "smartphones and instagram wreck teen girls' psyches". But where it really gets interesting is here:
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:
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.
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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.
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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.
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."
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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That's probably true (though I don't envy anyone spending 12 years as the only white kid in a public school class), but I doubt the type of parents who would do this are red pilled on genetics. They probably, like most people, believe that school quality has a major affect on life outcomes and that poorly funded inner city schools are a major reason why black people lag behind in so many areas. So they do believe that they are hurting their child's future even if they're mistaken in that belief. I wouldn't go so far as to say it rises to the level of child abuse but I do find it disturbing that people are willing to do that to their kids for the sake of progressive ideology.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?")
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Am I missing something here? The second paragraph says this:
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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A few thoughts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-
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.
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?
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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