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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.
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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