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New York, 1:29 PM
Sun Nov 8
25 posts in the last 24 hours
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No points.
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My husband is a way better parent than I am, thank you very much.
SuperDad is the new Black where I live.
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i think we can all agree that women are generally the caretakers of the world. to ignore the number of fatherless homes versus motherless homes is just silly.
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First, you will almost never see studies focus on dads' working habits. The reason isn't simple sexism, though. It's because virtually all men work. Thus, it is really hard to get a study together that's large enough to get enough non-working men to be statistically significant.
Then, because dads' working habits aren't that important (statistically, because there is so little variation), they tend not to be collected. I haven't read these studies because I can't seem to get to any of the BBC/Daily Mail/Guardian links above, and the synopsis provided here doesn't list the name of the study or its authors, so I can't do a Scholar search. However, from what I know about statistical surveys, the statisticians who run the numbers only very rarely write the survey themselves. They generally purchase or otherwise acquire government or privately collected data. Thus, even if they wanted to use data on men, it's probably not there. Don't blame the study's authors for that--if you're holding out for perfect data, you'll never get anything done.
Lastly, because such data on men's working habits isn't often collected, researchers can't even pool together moms+dads=parents working habits. They only have half the equation.
So what I'm saying is, cut the researchers some slack. I can't read the original article (if someone can find me the title and authors or a link, though I'll take a look) but I bet that they have pretty measured language. This seems like a classic case of the media grossly simplifying and abusing a scholarly article.
09/29/09
I still question why they could not have used the word "parent" instead of gendering it by only using "mother."
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Also- they could have done a combined study- "parent" that stayed home, throwing those few house-dads in with the house-moms. While it's entirely plausible they couldn't get enough data from dads-at-home alone, it seems that for the purposes of this study, they could have just used stay-at-home parents of either gender.
09/29/09
1) they conducted the survey themselves (which I do not know whether or not they did) and asked that question
or
2) the data that they used happened to ask about fathers' working habits. If it did, then they can create a new variable, "parent at home" which would be a 1 if either mom or dad (or both, I suppose) stays at home, and 0 otherwise.
But, you need data on dads to do either of these things...if they collected the data themselves, then I think it was poor form not to collect from both parents. However, if they just received government data, then it is the case that the study authors are just doing their best with what they have.
Note to all:
Just because these authors aren't allowed to draw the conclusion "kids who have at least one parent stay home are healthier/have lower BMI" doesn't mean that you can't. Five bucks says that they wish they could have, but didn't have the data to make that conclusion--the best conclusion they could draw, based on their data was that "kids who have a stay-at-home mom are healthier/have lower BMI." In fact, if I were a science reporter, this is a conclusion that I would draw in my article. But I'm not, so I don't.
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All that being said, I think if healthy options are available, and kids are taught healthy eating habits then it doesn't matter if the mom works or not.
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i think my mom was home though. she was just going through school and forgot we existed for a while.
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I think I probably would have come out super damaged if my mother had been unhappy and resentful of my presence during my childhood. And I thank her every day for setting such a strong example for me to follow now.
But hey, my mum worked from home. I still had the "fresh meals" and exercise that this study is talking about, even though I would get into boatloads of trouble if I disturbed her study.
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Marry a rich guy.
Love,
This story
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Marry a rich guy!
Have babies!
Work is HARD!
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In a lot of areas, $100k (or £100k :P) isn't enough to support a spouse and a child.
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