Rich:

Your column on fatherhood is, I am afraid, full of the kinds of false arguments that bedevil studies of child development. As a dad myself, I should very much like to believe that we dads make as much difference as you and Prof. Wilcox say. The empirical evidence, however, is ambiguous, to put it mildly. In any case, the evidence cited in your piece is all very leaky.

—-”Boys in a single-parent home are roughly twice as likely to have served jail time by their early 30s.”

I’ll bet this is true, but it is susceptible to many other explanations than just simple cause (missing father) to effect (jail time). There are the effects of group socialization, for example, which are of tremendous importance in forming the adult personality. I have a British accent; my wife has a Chinese accent; our kids speak unaccented American English. Why? Groups socialization–the natural inclination human beings have to fit in with their peer group, and the larger local group (including adults) outside the home. Single parent families are poor, so kids from single parent families grow up in poor neighborhoods; and poor neighborhoods have more misfits and criminals–a thing that was true even before they were dominated by single-parent families (see the novels of Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, etc.). You can’t discount genetics, either. Being a criminal, and being a single parent, might both be the consequences of impulsive behavior. That’s an aspect of personality, which is in part heritable. So it may not be one cause (missing Dad) generating one effect (jail); it might be one heritable cause (impulsive or antisocial behavior) generating both things.

—-”According to the report, men who have never married or are divorced have higher levels of testosterone than do married men, particularly married fathers. Since testosterone is associated with risk-taking and anti-social behavior, this makes the married man more civilized and dependable.”

Since testosterone is associated with risk-taking and anti-social behavior, then one would expect high-testosterone males to be less inclined to get, or stay, married. This doesn’t tell us anything about the benefits of fatherhood for children; it only tells us that high-testosterone males are not as a good bet to make good fathers, on average, as are low-testosterone males.

—-”Girls in intact married households experience puberty later than girls in single-parent households. This is important, Wilcox notes, ‘because when girls develop prematurely, they are more likely to become attracted to older boys and men and to have sex and become pregnant at an early age.’”

Again, the connection between childhood home environment and early onset of female puberty us assumed, without any justification, when all sorts of other factors are in play and not accounted for. There is actually a discussion of this very issue in Judith Rich Harris’s new book No Two Alike. Here is the relevant paragraph (p.250):

“The problem with the ‘evolutionary theory’ of female mating strategy proposed by Belsky, Steinberg, and Draper [i.e. the theory Rich stated, more or less] is that it was based on the wrong kind of research. Individual differences in girls’ physical maturation and sexual activity were attributed to their home environment in early childhood, but the method used by the researchers provided no way of establishing that the differences they found were indeed due to the home environment and not to genetic differences among their subjects. The researchers should have looked at pairs of twins or siblings reared in the same home, to see if the home environment had similar effects on both siblings. They didn’t do this; they looked at only one subject per home. It was a behavioral geneticist, David Rowe, who finally did the right kind of research. Rowe found that environmental factors do play a small role in the age of onset of sexual activity, but his evidence suggests that these factors operate during the teen years, not in early childhood, and involve cultural or subcultural influences–the environment shared by siblings outside the home.”

[Derb] That old Viennese witch doctor cast a long shadow. If I turn out wrong, it must be Mom and Dad’s fault! This cast of mind has influenced & distorted child development research for 60 years. Nowadays, however, there is a lot of counter-research, in which the influence of the home family environment, at any rate after age three, dwindles away almost (according to some researchers, anyway) to inconsequentiality. The big determinants of adult personality are (1) genes, and (2) group socialization. The home environment of the child comes in a distant third.

Probably the best thing we dads can do to give our kids a happy and useful adulthood is to make enough money that we can choose where to live, and then choose a district where our kids will be group-socialized to civilized bourgeois norms.