Kicking. Squealing.
Commenter Larry, from San Francisco, links to a working paper out of the National Bureau of Economic Research titled “The Trouble with Boys: Social Influences and Gender Gap in Disruptive Behavior”. The abstract:
This paper explores the importance of the home and school environments in explaining the gender gap in disruptive behavior. We document large differences in the gender gap across key features of the home environment – boys do especially poorly in broken families. In contrast, we find little impact of the early school environment on non-cognitive gaps. Differences in endowments explain a small part of boys’ non-cognitive deficit in single-mother families. More importantly, non-cognitive returns to parental inputs differ markedly by gender. Broken families are associated with worse parental inputs and boys’ non-cognitive development, unlike girls’, appears extremely responsive to such inputs.
Emphasis added. Of course single women will be better at raising girls since they themselves were girls and know how to handle girls. This same behavior gap exists in the classroom, and this can partially be attributed to boys and girls being taught almost exclusively by women. You hear a lot about inducing good teachers to blighted school districts, but you almost never hear about inducing men to teach boys.
I skimmed the “The Trouble With Boys” paper. The authors data dredge other data sets (NELS, NLSY 97, ATUS, Parental Warmth Index, Home Index …..), The authors had fun manipulating variables to find predictors of their primary outcome, which was expulsion from school in 8th grade.They found that the variables of _school_ environment can not predict this outcome.
So if no differences at school, are there gaps of parental investment (between boys and girls) at home ?
1) Married and LTR mothers spent between 1.2-1.4 hours/week less with their sons than with their daughters. The Single Mothers, however, spent between 2.1 and 2.3 hours/week less with their sons than with their daughters. Both gaps are seen as early as the child’s age of <3 years.
2) Boys raised by teen mothers were 21% more likely to be suspended by 8th grade than boys of non-teen moms. The equivalent % for girls was 5%.
3) "Across all family structures, we observe that boys' likelihood to act out is sharply reduced when faced with larger and better parental inputs. For girls, the relationship between parental inputs and behavioral outcomes is much weaker."
My white lesbian neighbors are raising a black boy who their wayward daughter picked up from a crackhouse when he was a day old. Their daughter was shacked up with his father and his black, drug addicted, ex girlfriend gave birth and came back to her flop house and left the baby alone while she went to buy drugs. The lesbians’ 17 year old daughter received a phone call from some crackheads who came home and found the baby alone and were trying to reach the father. The white girl went to get him and she kept him until he got too uncontrollable at about 11, and then the lesbians took over and are home schooling him. They keep him locked up all day boring the crap out of him. I call him Boo Radley. He pines and longs for male company. If he can’t have that, he is desperate to spend time with the more masculine lesbian, who is too busy working her ass off to support the whole wacky family, to spend much time with him. He was working at a local bike shop and told me how great it is” Cuz, it’s all guys. Well, there’s one girl” he said. I remember reading the story of Ishi, the last Yahi indian, and Ishi was confused that white men stayed cooped up inside with women all month long. This is bad for men. Women need to go out to the period huts once a month and take their bad magic with them.
I’m always a little skeptical about ANY “study”, even ones that seem to confirm conservative or alt-right thinking. To be fair I could probably find plenty of studies put out by the Cathedral that contradict the above.
In the end, it’s best to go with what worked for only about 10,000 years of human history and that just plain makes sense (especially when considering evo-psych). I think that beats any fancy data mining, whether supportive or not.
Thank you, miss c. I had heard of the story of Ishi but I hadn’t actually read the book. This phrase is priceless:
“…Ishi was confused that white men stayed cooped up inside with women all month long. This is bad for men. Women need to go out to the period huts once a month and take their bad magic with them.”