"Making Time for Kids? Study Says Quality Trumps Quantity." As a new dad, I'm taking a new interest in headlines about parenting studies, and that was a smart headline for the Washington Post to slap on a writeup of a study. After all, who doesn't like a good quality-over-quantity argument?
But the actual underlying study supports a more striking claim — parenting just doesn't seem to be all that important. It's not "quality time" that the study says is important — it's money and social status.
Spending time with children doesn't change anything
At least for children in the 3-to-11 range, the researchers find that there is no correlation between the amount of time mothers spend with their children and any kind of life outcomes. Just to be sure, they looked at this two ways — available time when a mom was around, and engaged time when she was specifically interacting with the kid. Either way, it makes no difference.
Instead, the authors found that maternal socioeconomic status is strongly correlated with positive outcomes. This is by no means a new finding in the literature, but the conjunction of the socioeconomic status correlation with the non-finding about parental time advances our understanding in important ways. After all, it's certainly plausible that the issue is that better-educated or higher-income mothers are just better at mothering (maybe they read more parenting books) and this accounts for the superior outcomes. It's plausible, that is, until you learn that the superior performance of well-educated mothers' children holds true regardless of how much time a mother spends with her children.
Rather than parenting skill, the correlation between socioeconomic status and child outcomes could be driven by genetics (smart moms have smart kids) or by access to resources (high-status moms can get good stuff for their kids). But the effect takes place whether a mom spends a lot of time with the kids or not, so it doesn't seem to have anything to do with her mothering skills.
Mind the teens
For adolescents, the picture is a bit different. Researchers find that time spent with adolescent children is negatively correlated with what they call delinquent behavior. Unfortunately, delinquent behavior is measured by a grab-bag index:
Adolescents were asked how many times in the last 6 months they had done the following: "Stayed out later than your parent(s) said you should", "Hurt someone badly enough that he/she needed bandages or a doctor", "Lied to your parent(s) about something important", "Taken something from a store without paying for it", "Damaged school property on purpose", "Had to bring your parent(s) to school because of something you did wrong", "Skipped a day of school without permission", "Stayed out at night without permission", "Been stopped and questioned by the police", and "Been arrested by the police."
It seems to me that injuring someone so badly that they need medical attention is a serious moral transgression in a way that breaking curfew or even skipping school is not. Being stopped and questioned by the police, meanwhile, is in part a function of what the police choose to do, rather than the kid. This makes it somewhat difficult to tell whether an increase in delinquent behavior is a serious problem (sending other kids to the hospital) or harmless teen hijinks (staying out at night).
But even here, "the effect size was very small."
The best strategy: be rich and try to be happy
It turns out that the most reliable parenting strategy is simply to be rich. Beyond that, it's not clear that what parents do — at least among the range of things that more or less normal people do — is actually all that significant. Some people find that conclusion bleak and nihilistic. Hence the somewhat spurious framing around quality time.
A more upbeat way of thinking about it might be to say that you should spend time with your children because you enjoy doing so. Quality time with the kids can be fun. And having fun is great! But there's no need to spend lots of extra time beyond the point at which you find it enjoyable, or to end up wracked with guilt and stress about your limited availability.
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