What makes a good parent? The search for that answer has sold books, started arguments, and kept a lot of parents up at night.
Researchers from The Kellogg Foundation think they have found the answer -- one that is incredibly simple and impossibly complicated at the same time. The secret to good parenting, Sendhil Mullainathan and Saugato Datta write, is ... money.
Theirs is an elegant and complex argument, and I'd recommend reading the entire essay here. The authors identify a category they call "psychic resources," which they define as such things as "patience", "self-control", "attention", a good night's sleep and other intangibles that get you through the day. Poverty drains those resources. Money creates room for them.
They write:
Many things that are trifling and routine to the well-off give sleepless nights to those less fortunate. To take a simple example, everyone may face the same bank overdraft fees - but steering clear of them is pretty easy for the well-off, while for the poor it requires constant attention, steely reserve and enormous amounts of self-control. For the well-off, monthly bills are automatically deducted and there is still some slack left over. For those with less income, finding ways to ensure that rent, utilities and phone bills are paid for out of small, irregular paychecks is an act of complicated financial jugglery.
Poverty, in short, serves as a giant magnifying glass, with each bump and obstacle looming large. For example, a car that won't start:
For the well-off, a broken- down car is little more than a temporary annoyance; if needed, they can "just take a cab." For those with less income, it necessitates real, meaningful trade-offs and painful sacrifices. If taking a cab becomes unavoidable, it may mean having to spend less on groceries. It may mean cutting back on the time spent with a child on account of having to work extra hours to make up for the unexpected expense. Equally, trying to avoid shelling out the cab fare may mean taking an extra couple of hours to get to work, with less time and energy left over for other things, not least supervising a child's school- work and keeping tabs on his social life.
True, all of us worry, and feel stress, the authors conclude, and all of us periodically "lose it" as a result. The difference between rich parents and poor parents, then, is that money can cushion the bumps while lack of money can amplify them. We all start out with the "same (limited) capacity for self-control and attention", they write, but those with less income use up far more of those resources just getting through the day. "Put in this light," the authors ask, "is it any surprise that low-income parents look like worse parents?"
The Kellogg commentary comes at a time when money, or the lack thereof, is the focus of other childhood and parenting research. In the New York Times recently, reporter Sabrina Taverise examined the wave of studies and concluded that the education gap between rich children and poor children is widening even as the same gap between black and white children is narrowing. This is true, she says, however you define and measure educational success -- standardized test scores, completion of college. And it would seem to mean that the "bad parenting" that the Kellogg authors recast as "stressed parenting" leaves impoverished parents (who are statistically less educated themselves) without the psychic resources to best help their children succeed in school.
So, what are the practical take-aways -- the policy implications -- of turning this new lens on parenting? Of seeing it as a function of economics more than parental "training" or "worth"?
After all, this is not the first anyone has ever noticed that poverty makes parenting harder. As James J. Heckman, an economist at the University of Chicago, tells Tavernise, "the danger," of this psychic resources analysis "is we will revert back to the mindset of the (1960s) war on poverty, when poverty was just a matter of income, and giving families more would improve the prospects of their children. If people conclude that, it's a mistake."
True. But the recalibration since those days, the Kellogg essay notes, has been, essentially, to give poor parents more to "do." And that, they argue, has not worked either: "Many standard policies that aim to improve outcomes for children from low-income families impose additional conditions -- take your child to an additional program, monitor his progress, attend regular meetings - that amount to a further tax on already limited available mental bandwidth. Behavioral science thus suggests that such policies by themselves are unlikely to be as successful as one might hope."
What, then, is the alternative? They start with a few suggestions: "stabilize incomes, provide low-income credit alternatives to deal with the ups and downs of life, or ensure stable housing. These may not be "parenting" programs in the conventional sense of the term. But by freeing up psychic resources they allow people to be the parents they want to be, they allow more traditional parental skills programs to be more successful."
Do you have any to add? And do you agree with the overarching premise? Is "making life easier" possibly the answer to improving parenting in poor neighborhoods? Is it an idea so simple that it can't be right? Or that it must be?
Universal health, more family-friendly policies even for low-income workers, more help with educational support at all levels....these would be helpful.
And I can think of a blog out there that desperately misses work of this caliber.
There seems to be a great confusion in America over exactly what socialism is, and what it is not. We call the countries of Western Europe socialist, when in fact their socialism usually extends no further than ensuring the availability of at least a minimum of reasonable health care, and tuition assistance for those who are academically qualified to pursue higher education. Western Europe still has lots of private ownership of business.
One example of a government that did take over an industry would be Norway, and their government ownership of the oil drilling industry. Having the profits from drilling on public land go to the public domain instead of the pockets of the 1% seems reasonable to me. Norway, one of our closest NATO allies, has no federal debt, and even has a large nest egg saved up in case something unexpected comes up. They have high taxes AND the highest standard of living in the world, and a balanced budget. Also, they had socialized medicine and free higher education decades before oil was discovered in the North Sea.
She "Hit-the-nail-on-the-proverbial-head."
On a related topic, my problem with the very wealthy is not that they are wealthy, but that some of them are very corrupt, or psychopathic, if you will. In my work I met many, many very wealthy individuals, and most of them gave me the impression of being very nice people. The same can be said for those who do not have much money - most of them are very nice people. My problem is with those who intentionally disregard the rights and needs of others in their pursuit of wealth and power. A single disreputable poor person is likely to do less damage to the fabric of society than a single disreputable Bernie Madoff, for example.
I used to stress about the car breaking down, about making my rent, about paying for child care, and about losing my job if my son got sick and I needed to stay home with him. Now that those stresses have been removed, I smile more and my son has noticed.
But it's not enough to guarantee good parenting. Abusive relationships, serial relationships, substance abuse happen in spite of the safety net. Chronic illnesses consume some parents' energies. Some parents actually prefer that their children not outshine them, because they're afraid that their more successful children will look down on them. Some who might wish to see their children exceed them are discouraged by "generational" failure and don't know how to help or motivate them. For other low income parents, though, the safety net and the schools do provide a better shot at raising happy, employable, socially responsible, successful kids.
On both sides of the ocean, all parents are challenged by the media and rampant consumerism that define teen culture, compete for the children's free time and pocket money, and tell children what's "cool" and how they can be popular. Frankly, I really resent the push-back that makes my parenting efforts so draining.
It's really another side of the "it takes a village" coin. If you have money, you can hire the village. For the rest of us, the village is a lot less sparsely populated than it used to be: extended family scattered more widely, dual-income families making it harder to watch each other's kids, HMO-driven health-care providers who don't have more than 15 minutes to see you, and are thus much less available for advice than they used to be.
Unfortunately, it's impossible to put in place the support systems that would help us ALL become better parents, without using words like "subsidized" (as in childcare), "universal" (as in healthcare), "accessible" (as in education), "cooperative" (literally, as in food coops, babysitting coops, transportation coops, and figuratively, as in tax incentives for creative solutions) -- all the words that seem to inflame the very angry, vocal political contingent who feel that because they have theirs, no one else deserves any help. Of course, they probably have theirs because someone helped them along the way.
It also meant that we were often out and about at 10 or 11 pm, wide awake and happy.
Be careful when you judge.
Poor parents = stressed parents = bad parents
Therefore:
Wealthy parents = not stressed out parents = good parents
I respectfully disagree.
"Wealthy" parents have their own set of issues and stresses that can easily make them "bad parents" that just as easily slap or ignore their child.
Cast my vote with the too simplistic an explanation for a much more complex issue.
Sheri Noga, MA
www.grateful-child.com
Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.
Gloria Steinem
I know plenty of children and former children who have grown up in affluent households who are really messed up. All the money in the world does not guarantee that a child is loved and cherished.
I'm interested as well in the assertion that giving people more money doesn't help parenting. Why is that?