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Bi-Weekly Discussion - "Moral Politics" and the Parenting Wars

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Brian B.
Bi-Weekly Discussion - "Moral Politics" and the Parenting Wars

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We're currently hosting our discussions at Café Walnut, not too far from our summer meeting spot in Washington Square Park. The cafe is near the corner of 7th & Walnut in Olde City. The cafe's entrance is below street level down some stairs, which can be confusing if it's your first time. Our group meets in the large room upstairs.

Since we're using the cafe's space, they ask that each person attending the meetup at least purchase a drink or snack. Please don't bring any food or drinks from outside. If you're hungry enough to eat a meal, they have more substantial fare such as salads, soups & sandwiches which are pretty good and their prices are reasonable.

The cafe is fairly easy to get to if you're using public transit. With SEPTA, take the Market-Frankford Line & get off at the 5th Street Station (corner of 5th & Market), and walk 2 blocks south on 5th and then turn right on Walnut Street and walk 2 blocks west. With PATCO, just get off at the 9th-10th & Locust stop and walk 3 blocks east & 1 block north. For those who are driving, parking in the neighborhood can be tough to find. If you can't find a spot on the street, I'd suggest parking in the Washington Square parking deck at 249 S 6th Street which is just a half block away.

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"MORAL POLITICS" AND THE PARENTING WARS

This discussion will address how socio-economic trends & cultural changes have led to recent shifts in parenting styles, sparking a public debate known as the "Parenting Wars". We'll also address the ways in which parenting styles may lead to children to develop different moral foundations and ultimately diverge in their political orientations.

Parenting & child-rearing is not something we've ever directly focused on in any of our previous meetups, although we've touched upon it briefly. In our last meetup, we talked about how children raised in a household where domestic violence is common may be more likely to become abusive or stay in an abusive relationship as an adult. The discussion before that focused on equality of opportunity, and we talked about the "Moving to Opportunity" study conducted during the Clinton era that showed poor children get some long-term benefits from moving to a lower poverty neighborhood, especially if they move before age 13. And back in January we discussed the findings from positive psychology & happiness economics that revealed that most parents report decreased happiness & more stress when their children are young but greater life satisfaction once theyre raised. (We also discussed the possible negative impact of the "second shift" - i.e. after-work parenting & household chores - on American women's happiness, but this doesn't appear to be the major factor behind the "paradox of declining female happiness" in the last 30 years.)

The Skeptics in the Pub meetup has covered some topics in education that relate to what we'll discuss here. Back in June of 2017, they had a meetup entitled "A Skeptical Look at Education" where they discussed how several economists like Steven Levitt & Bryan Caplan are skeptical that most educational interventions make any long-term, scalable, replicable difference. That's significant here because Levitt & Caplan are also skeptical of any major long-term effects from parenting styles.
https://www.meetup.com/Philly-Skeptics/events/238151623/

In October of 2017, the Skeptics meetup looked at various claims about educational interventions discussed in Malcolm Gladwell's books Outliers and David and Goliath. Gladwell downplayed the role of innate talent and touted the benefits of deliberative practice, redshirting, being a "big fish in a little pond", and "desirable difficulties". Unfortunately, as we discussed in that meetup, Gladwell got a lot wrong and his mistakes became part of the common conception of parenting & education since his books were bestsellers.
https://www.meetup.com/Philly-Skeptics/events/244315897/

There's a variety of parenting styles, and one of the more useful ways of summarizing & conceptualizing them is "Baumrind's Parenting Typology", devised by the developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind. Through her studies, Baumrind identified three initial parenting styles: authoritative parenting, authoritarian parenting and permissive parenting. The psychologists Eleanor Maccoby & John Martin expanded upon Baumrind’s three original parenting styles by proposing a fourth style (i.e. uninvolved or neglectful parenting) and placing the parenting styles into two distinct categories: responsive vs. unresponsive and demanding vs. undemanding. "Parental responsiveness" (sometimes called "warmth") refers to the degree to which the parent responds to the child's emotional & developmental needs in an accepting, supporting manner. "Parental demandingness" (sometimes called "control") refers to the parent's attempts to control and direct their child in terms of achievement & maturity, as well as their level of supervision and disciplinary efforts. With these distinctions, four new parenting styles were defined: (1) Authoritative - demanding & responsive, (2) Authoritarian - demanding & unresponsive, (3) Permissive - undemanding & responsive, (4) Uninvolved - undemanding & unresponsive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenting_styles

So how do parenting styles connect with political orientations? Psychologists are still researching this, but the cognitive linguist George Lakoff proposed an interesting hypothesis in his 1996 book Moral Politics. While the various elements of liberal & conservative party platforms often seem unrelated, Lakoff claims that all of these differences center around the two sides' respective understandings of a single concept - the ideal nuclear family. That is, Americans often metaphorically understand their country as a family, with the government corresponding to the parent(s) of the family and the individual citizens corresponding to the children. Thus, one's understanding of how a family is best organized will have direct implications for how the country should be governed. According to Lakoff, the progressive ideal conceptualization follows the model of the "nurturant parent" family, while the conservatives follows the model of the "strict father" family.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Politics_(book)

Lakoff is a liberal, so his belief that people on the political left tend to use the obviously superior "nurturant parent" model could be seen as biased; after all, he doesn't appear to have done much empirical research to back this up. Steven Pinker took Lakoff to task for this in an article in The New Republic:

"Let’s turn to the metaphor a nation is a family, in which conservatives think of a Strict Father and Progressives think of a Nurturant… well, here Lakofff runs into a wee problem. The metaphors in our language imply that the nurturing parent should be a mother, beginning with nurture itself, which comes from the same root as to nurse... But it would be embarrassing if Progressivism seemed to endorse the stereotype that women are more suited to nurturing children than men are, even if that is, by Lakoff’s own logic, a 'metaphor we live by.' So political correctness trumps linguistics, and the counterpart to the Strict Father is an androgynous 'Nurturant Parent.'
…
His Nurturant Parent doesn’t mark out the indulgent pole of the continuum but the ideal balancing point, setting 'fair but reasonable limits' and being 'authoritative without being authoritarian.' His Strict Father, on the other hand, lives by Lewis Carroll’s advice to 'Speak roughly to your little boy, and beat him when he sneezes.' According to Lakoff, the ideal parent in the conservative mindset loves and cares only for those of his children 'who measure up,' and believes that 'affection is important, either as a reward for obedience or to prevent alienation through a show of love despite painful punishment.' Lakoff provides no evidence from linguistics or from surveys to show that this ludicrous ogre is the prototype of fatherhood in any common American conception of the family... While Lakoff ostensibly offers a scholarly analysis of political thought, he can’t stop himself from drawing horns on the conservative portrait and a halo on the progressive one."
https://newrepublic.com/article/77730/block-metaphor-steven-pinker-whose-freedom-george-lakoff

For theoretical purposes, the "nurturant parent" model might be better conceptualized as a golden mean between the extremes of the "authoritarian parent" and "permissive parent" models. This is how Diana Bamrind saw "authoritative parenting" in her original 3-type model, i.e. as a golden mean between two extremes. If we revisit the Maccoby & Martin 4-quadrant model and consider the ideal of "authoritative parenting" to be somewhere in the middle, this would open up the possibility of a suboptimal parenting type that's both too responsive & too demanding - i.e. what we now call "helicopter parenting".

In this discussion, we'll look at how well Lakoff's "Moral Politics" model, as well
Baumrind and Maccoby & Martin's Parenting Typologies, explain the conflicting values and empirical trends we see in the recent debates over parenting styles. In particular, we'll focus on 4 parenting types that have received ample media coverage in recent years: helicopter parenting, tiger parenting, natural parenting, and free range parenting. These 4 styles don't graph perfectly onto Maccoby & Martin's 4-quadrant model, but if we replace "responsiveness" with an empathy & self-esteem vs grit & self-efficacy cultivation spectrum and "demandingness" with an adult-directed vs child-directed learning (or concerted cultivation vs natural growth) spectrum, we can see how these 4 styles differ.

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DIRECTIONS ON HOW TO PREPARE FOR OUR DISCUSSION:

The videos & articles you see linked below are intended to give you a basic overview of some of the major debates over parenting styles. As usual, I certainly don't expect you to read all the articles & watch all the videos prior to attending our discussion. The easiest way to prepare for our discussion is to just watch the numbered videos linked under each section - the videos come to about 43 minutes total. The articles marked with asterisks are just there to supply additional details. You can browse and look at whichever ones you want, but don't worry - we'll cover the stuff you missed in our discussion. In terms of the discussion format, my general idea is that we'll address the topics in the order presented here. I figure we'll spend about 30 minutes on each section.

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I. HELICOPTER/SNOWPLOW PARENTS & AUTHORITATIVE PARENTING VS OVER-PARENTING:

1a) Julie Lythcott-Haims, "Are Helicopter Parents Ruining a Generation?" (video - 2:30 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeltnroSGco

1b) WGBH News w/ Alfie Kohn, "'The Myth Of The Spoiled Child' Bucks Conventional Wisdom" (video - 6:35 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCehEQNNe7k

II. TIGER/AUTHORITARIAN PARENTING & TOUGH LOVE VS EMOTIONAL ABUSE:

2a) CNN w/ Amy Chua, "'Tiger Mother' defends strategy" (video - 4:19 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaFuR1DTQBI

2b) John Rosemond, "Is Your Child Getting Enough Vitamin N?"
(video - 5:24 min.)
https://youtu.be/j3cgUhtRUbE

III. NATURAL/ATTACHMENT PARENTING & GENTLE/PEACEFUL PARENTING VS PERMISSIVE PARENTING:

3a) Kate Pickert, "Attachment Parenting: Dr. Sears And The Origins Of A Movement"
(video - 4:11 min.)
https://youtu.be/Oj5NB3BHwq0

3b) Stefan Molyneux, "Peaceful Parenting In Eight Minutes" (video - 8:00 min.)
https://youtu.be/-XC0iJK3rFk

IV. SLOW/SERENITY PARENTING AND LATCHKEY KIDS & FREE-RANGE PARENTING VS CHILD NEGLECT:

4a) ReasonTV, "Helicopter Parents vs. Free Range Kids: Q&A with 'America's Worst Mom' Lenore Skenazy" (video - 4:32 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ln_tYVoDpM

4b) Reason TV, "Do Parents Matter? Q&A with Bryan Caplan, Author of Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids" (video - 7:23 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB4I1292PEE

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Cafe Walnut
703 Walnut Street · Philadelphia, PA
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