The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (35 page)

Taking these data together, the NLSY results say clearly that high IQ is by no means a prerequisite for being a good mother. The disquieting finding is
that the worst environments for raising children, of the kind that not even the most resilient children can easily overcome, are concentrated in the homes in which the mothers are at the low end of the intelligence distribution.

P
arenting, in one sense the most private of behaviors, is in another the most public. Parents make a difference in the way their children turn out—whether they become law abiding or criminal, generous or stingy, productive or dependent. How well parents raise their children has much to do with how well the society functions.

But how are parents to know whether they are doing a good or a bad job as parents? The results seem to be hopelessly unpredictable. Most people know at least one couple who seem to be the ideal parents but whose teenage child ends up on drugs. Parents with more than one child are bemused by how differently their children respond to the same home and parental style. And what makes a good parent anyway? Most people also have friends who seem to be raising their children all wrong, and yet the children flourish.

The exceptions notwithstanding, the apparent unpredictability of parenting is another of those illusions fostered by the ground-level view of life as we live it from day to day. Parenting is more predictable in the aggregate than in the particular. The differences in parenting style that you observe among your friends are usually minor—the “restriction of range” problem that we discussed in Chapter 3. A middle-class mother may think that one of her friends is far too permissive or strict, but put against the full range of variation that police and social workers are forced to deal with, where “permissiveness” is converted into the number of days that small children are left on their own and “strictness” may be calibrated by the number of stitches required to close the wounds from a parental beating, the differences between her and her friend are probably small.

Despite all the differences among children and parents, there is such a thing as good parenting as opposed to bad—not precisely defined but generally understood. Our discussion proceeds from the assumption that good parenting includes (though is not restricted to) seeing to nourishment and health, keeping safe from harm, feeling and expressing love, talking with and listening to, helping to explore the world, imparting values, and providing a framework of rules enforced consistently but not inflexibly. Parents who more or less manage to do all those things, we
assert, are better parents than people who do not. The touchy question of this chapter is: Does cognitive ability play any role in this? Are people with high IQs generally better parents than people with low IQs?

The relationship of IQ to parenting is another of those issues that social scientists have been slow to investigate. Furthermore, this is a topic for which the NLSY is limited. For unemployment, school dropout, illegitimacy, or welfare recipiency, the NLSY permits us to cut directly to the question, What does cognitive ability have to do with this behavior? But many of the NLSY indicators about parenting give only indirect evidence. To interpret that evidence, it is useful to begin with the large body of studies that have investigated whether social class affects parenting. Having described that relationship (which by now is reasonably well understood), we will be on firmer ground in drawing inferences about cognitive ability.

The first scholarly study of parenting styles among parents of different social classes dates back to 1936 and a White House conference on children.
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Ever since, the anthropologists and sociologists have told similar stories. Working-class parents tend to be more authoritarian than middle-class parents. Working-class parents tend to use physical punishment and direct commands, whereas middle-class parents tend to use reasoning and appeals to more abstract principles of behavior. The consistency of these findings extends from the earliest studies to the most recent.
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In an influential article published in 1959, Melvin Kohn proposed that the underlying difference was that working-class parents were most concerned about qualities in their children that ensure respectability, whereas middle-class parents were most concerned about internalized standards of conduct.
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Kohn argued that the real difference in the use of physical punishment was not that working-class parents punish more but that they punish differently from middle-class parents. Immediate irritants like boisterous play might evoke a whack from working-class parents, whereas middle-class parents tended to punish when the intent of the child’s behavior (knowingly hurting another child, for example) was problematic.
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Kohn concluded that “the working-class orientation … places few restraints on the impulse to punish the child when his behavior is out of bounds. Instead, it provides a positive rationale for punishing
the child in precisely those circumstances when one might most like to do so.”
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To put it more plainly, Kohn found that working-class parents were more likely to use physical punishment impulsively, when the parents themselves needed the relief, not when it was likely to do the child the most good.

The middle-class way sounds like “better” behavior on the part of parents, not just a neutral socioeconomic difference in parenting style, and this raises a point that scholars on child development bend over backward to avoid saying explicitly: Generally, and keeping in mind the many exceptions, the conclusion to be drawn from the literature on parenting is that middle-class people are in fact better parents, on average, than working-class people. Readers who bridle at this suggestion are invited to reread the Kohn quotation above and ask themselves whether they can avoid making a value judgment about it.

Parenting differences among the social classes are not restricted to matters of discipline. Other major differences show up in the intellectual development of the child. Anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath
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gives vivid examples in her description of parenting in “Roadville,” a white lower-class community in the Carolinas, versus “Gateway,” a nearby community of white middle-class parents.
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The parents of Roadville were just as devoted to their children as the parents of Gateway. Roadville newborns came home to nurseries complete with the same mobiles, pictures, and books that the Gateway babies had. From an early age, Roadville children were held on laps and read to, talked to, and otherwise made as much the center of attention as Gateway babies. But the interactions differed, Heath found. Take bedtime stories, for example. In middle-class Gateway, the mother or father encouraged the children to ask questions and talk about what the stories meant, pointing at items on the page and asking what they were. The middle-class parents praised right answers and explained what was wrong with wrong ones.
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It is no great stretch to argue, as Robert Sternberg and others do, that this interaction amounts to excellent training for intelligence tests. Lower-class Roadville parents did not do nearly as much of that kind of explaining and asking.
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When the children were learning to do new tasks, the Roadville parents did not explain the “how” of things the way the Gateway parents did. Instead, the Roadville parents were more likely to issue directives (“Don’t twist the cookie cutter”) and hardly ever gave reasons for their instructions (“If you twist the cutter, the cookies will be rough on the edge”).
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When they got to school, the Roadville and Gateway children continued to differ. The working-class Roadville children performed well in the early tasks of each of the first three grades. They knew the alphabet when they went to kindergarten; they knew how to sit still in class and could perform well in the reading exercises that asked them to identify specific portions of words or to link two items on the same page of the book. But if the teacher asked, “What did you like about the story?” or “What would you have done if you had been the child in that story?” the Roadville children were likely to say “I don’t know” or shrug their shoulders, while the middle-class Gateway children would more often respond easily and imaginatively.
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Heath’s conclusions drawn from her anthropological observations are buttressed by the quantitative work that has been done to date. A review of the technical literature in the mid-1980s put it bluntly: “It is an empirical fact that children from relatively higher SES families receive an intellectually more advantageous home environment. This finding holds for white, black, and Hispanic children, for children within lower- and middle-SES families, as well as for children born preterm and full-term.”
¹²

To this point, we have been talking about parenting within the normal range. Now we turn to child neglect and child abuse, increasingly labeled “malparenting” in the technical literature.

Abuse and neglect are distinct. The physical battering and other forms of extreme physical and emotional punishment that constitute child abuse get most of the publicity, but child neglect is far more common, by ratios ranging from three to one to ten to one, depending on the study.
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Among the distinctions that the experts draw between child abuse and neglect are these:

Abuse is an act of commission, while neglect is more commonly an act of omission.

Abuse is typically episodic and of short duration; neglect is chronic and continual.

Abuse typically arises from impulsive outbursts of aggression and anger; neglect arises from indifference, inattentiveness, or being overwhelmed by parenthood.
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Commonly, neglect is as simple as failure to provide a child with adequate food, clothing, shelter, or hygiene. But it can also mean leaving dangerous materials within reach, not keeping the child away from an open window, or leaving toddlers alone for hours at a time. It means not taking the child to a doctor when he is sick or not giving him the medicine the doctor prescribed. Neglect can also mean more subtle deprivations: habitually leaving babies in cribs for long periods, never talking to infants and toddlers except to scold or demand, no smiles, no bedtime stories. At its most serious, neglect becomes abandonment.

Are abusing parents also neglectful? Are neglectful parents also abusive? Different studies have produced different answers. Child abuse in some bizarre forms has nothing to do with anything except a profoundly deranged parent. Such cases crop up unpredictably, independent of demographic and socioeconomic variables.
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Once we move away from these exceptional cases, however, abuse and neglect seem to be more alike than different in their origins.
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The theories explaining them are complex, involving stress, social isolation, personality characteristics, community characteristics, and transmission of malparenting from one generation to the next.
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But one concomitant of malparenting is not in much dispute: Malparenting of either sort is heavily concentrated in the lower socioeconomic classes. Indeed, the link is such that, as Douglas Besharov has pointed out, behaviors that are sometimes classified as forms of neglect—letting a child skip school, for example—are not considered neglectful in some poor communities but part of the normal pattern of upbringing.
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What would be considered just an overenthusiastic spanking in one neighborhood might be called abuse in another.

We realize that once again we are contradicting what everyone knows, which is that “child abuse and neglect afflict all communities, regardless of race, religion, or economic status,” to pick one formulation of this common belief.
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And in a narrow technical sense, such statements are correct, insofar as neglect and abuse are found at every social and economic level, as is every other human behavior. It is also correct that only a small minority of parents among the poor and disadvantaged neglect or abuse their children. But the way such statements are usually treated in the media, by politicians, and by child advocacy groups is to imply that child neglect and abuse are spread
evenly
across social classes, as if children have about an equal chance of being abused or neglected whether they come from a rich home or a poor one, whether the mother
is a college graduate or a high school dropout. And yet from the earliest studies to the present, malparenting has been strongly associated with socioeconomic class.

The people who argue otherwise do not offer data to make their case. Instead, they argue that child neglect and abuse are reported when it happens to poor children but not rich ones. Affluent families are believed to escape the reporting net (by using private physicians, for example, who are less likely to report abuse). Social service agencies are said to be reluctant to intervene in affluent families.
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Poor people are likely to be labeled deviant for behaviors that would go unnoted or unremarked in richer neighborhoods.
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People are likely to think the worst of socially unattractive people and give socially attractive people the benefit of the doubt.
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Studies spread over the last twenty years have analyzed reporting bias in a variety of ways, including surveys to identify abuse that goes unreported through official channels. The results are consistent: The socioeconomic link with maltreatment is authentic.
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Probably the link is stronger for neglect than for abuse.
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But specifying exactly how strongly socioeconomic status and child maltreatment are linked is difficult because of the genuine shortcomings of official reports and because so many different kinds of abuse and neglect are involved. The following numbers give a sense of the situation: