Media misreports study: Stepdads better than dads? Not so fast
Posted in Liberated Musings by R Lee Wrights on August 31st, 2008 by Mike McCormick and Glenn
“Stepdads beat biological fathers in parenting, study says.” “Stepdads do better than real dads in ‘fragile’ families.” “Stepfathers make better parents.” This is how dozens of major newspapers and media outlets are reporting a new study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family which compares stepfathers to biological fathers.
Conventional wisdom says that biological fathers are more committed to their children than stepfathers are to their stepchildren. While media accounts of the study claim that research contradicts this wisdom, a closer look at the study shows that this simply isn’t true. Moreover, the study’s misconstrued findings could have a harmful impact on family law and child custody cases.
For one, the researchers did not study fathers as a whole, but only a limited cohort–”fragile families,” defined as “low-income urban families prone to nonmarital births.” Also, fathers were not studied independently-all assessments of them were based entirely on the children’s mothers’ reports.
My wife and I have been doing the “snowbird” routine in Southern Arizona again this winter. Being interested in local “goings on”, we have noted that, unless one lives under a rock, one cannot avoid hearing and seeing stories about drug arrests and seizures. On an almost daily basis the local news outlets run an item about another “record” seizure from across the border (62 miles from Tucson) by the Border Patrol, the DEA or a local enforcement agency (sometimes all three combined after a multi-year investigation).
For two months we have been subjected to the media’s latest meal ticket: the Enron collapse. While the investors, shareholders and employees have been burned pretty badly, it has become embarrassingly obvious that the media’s real concern is to find political scandal in what is otherwise only a spectacular business collapse. Finding no improper political influence on the part of the Bush White House with which to make scandal, the media then does a 180 and screams that they are at fault because they didn’t exert their influence.
“The right of the state to deal with the entire subject (health care) can assuredly not be gainsaid. The physician is a social instrument.” This is just one of Flexner’s statements that bespoke a deep socialist paternalism. It could have been made by John Dewey, the radical socialist educator and Flexner’s contemporary. In retrospect, Flexner was a cog in the wheel of socialism and an authoritarian one to boot.
Harrold, Tex. School district trustees and Supt. David Thweatt deserve accolades for changing school policy to allow staff and teachers to carry concealed handguns to protect against school shootings, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said today.
Five fascists in Tennessee were caught on tape openly torturing a guy to sign a “consent” form to let them search his home without a warrant. They wanted to catch him selling drugs, but didn’t want to bother with all that constitutional stuff of getting a warrant. Luckily, before leaving the home so the fascists could “interrogate” the guy, his wife left an audio recorder running. As a result, five fascists are now doing time.
Who would support a self-serving political agenda at the expense of your health, wealth, and job mobility? AFL-CIO president John Sweeney and Colorado executive director Mike Cerbo. In a recent Denver Post commentary, they perpetuate the big lie behind politician-controlled medicine: “that the free market is not working,” and that consequently, “costs have been spiraling out of control.”
I lost a true and valued friend today. Not just a personal acquaintance, but a cherished compatriot in liberty. I lost him to this damned war.
“Freedom is the oxygen of the soul.”
A recent Southeast Missourian editorial attempted to define the United States as a nation and why we celebrate the Fourth of July.
