Fox News happily reports that a scientific study has found that Religion is Good for Kids!
Jean Mercer scrutinizes the study, finds it dubious at best, and Dale McGowan suggests that a better title would have been Religion May Make Some First Graders Marginally Easier to Manage.
Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with making first graders more docile—it would make them less likely to turn their priest in to the police, for instance. The paper is making its conclusions from some rather shaky and selective analysis of subjective observations, though, so it isn’t even particularly reassuring about that.
I am a little concerned about the way the data was sampled, though. There’s this one bit:
Because of their dependence on Early Childhood Longitudinal Study information, Bartkowski et al. were restricted to some very simple measures of religious participation, with stress on the congruence of fathers’ and mothers’ religious attendance. The measures included the question, “Do you and your [current partner] often, sometimes, hardly ever, or never have arguments about religion?”
Um, in my family, we’d answer “never” — we rarely even discuss religion. Congruence was high, there was little conflict in our family; does this mean that if we’d participated, we’d have been one of the data points supporting the conclusion that religion is good for kids?
PZ:
Ditto. When I was growing up, religion arose in conversations about history or politics. I don’t think any of these could be called “arguments”.
This study seems to have some serious correlation/causation problems:
My bogometer is reading almost three hundred millidembskis!
A recent headline in local newspaper read, “Educators Say Too Few Know Bible as Literature,” and my favorite quoate was that, as a nation, we are “raising a bunch of biblical nimrods.”
I know what he meant; nimrod is slang for moron. But at the time all I could think was, “Which Nimrod”? The one called a “mighty hunter before Yahweh”? The one who challenged Abraham to battle and was defeated by Abraham’s army of gnats? The one said to have built the tower of Babel?
Hopefully children exposed to such inconsistencies would pester their teachers to death with questions, and that would be the end of it…
A recent headline in local newspaper read, “Educators Say Too Few Know Bible as Literature,” and my favorite quoate was that, as a nation, we are “raising a bunch of biblical nimrods.”
I know what he meant; nimrod is slang for moron. But at the time all I could think was, “Which Nimrod”? The one called a “mighty hunter before Yahweh”? The one who challenged Abraham to battle and was defeated by Abraham’s army of gnats? The one said to have built the tower of Babel?
Hopefully schoolchildren exposed to such inconsistencies would pester their teachers to death with questions, and that would be the end of it…
A recent headline in local newspaper read, “Educators Say Too Few Know Bible as Literature,” and my favorite quoate was that, as a nation, we are “raising a bunch of biblical nimrods.”
I know what he meant; nimrod is slang for moron. But at the time all I could think was, “Which Nimrod”? The one called a “mighty hunter before Yahweh”? The one who challenged Abraham to battle and was defeated by Abraham’s army of gnats? The one said to have built the tower of Babel?
Hopefully schoolchildren exposed to such inconsistencies would pester their teachers to death with questions, and that would be the end of it…
From the article:
It’s also possible that the correlation between religion and child development is the other way around, he said. In other words, instead of religion having a positive effect on youth, maybe the parents of only the best behaved children feel comfortable in a religious congregation.
“There are certain expectations about children’s behavior within a religious context, particularly within religious worship services,” he said. These expectations might frustrate parents, he said, and make congregational worship “a less viable option if they feel their kids are really poorly behaved.”
__________________________
That might have a little something to do with it. I wonder if instead of taking the kids to church the study was based on taking the kids to restaurants or movies or anywhere else children are expected to sit quietly if the results would be similar?
Maybe it means that it’s good for kids to have parents who don’t argue about religion.
Religion is either memetically evolved or intelligently designed to make human beings easier to manage. I don’t see what’s so surprising about the idea that it works on children too.
Anyway, my main criticism of the study is the same as McGowan’s: Making kids sit down and shut up isn’t necessarily good for them. Obedient children may be more convenient for the parents, but isn’t it one of the responsibilities of parenthood that you place the child’s welfare *above* your own convenience?
I think there are so many confounding factors, it would be very difficult to carry out such a study meaningfully. (Admittedly, Dale McGowan started off with a similar point.)
An attempt by parents to maintain a cohesive, structured home environment will probably improve their kids’ behavior. Over large parts of the US, religious practice is taken as a norm, and my guess is that those who eschew religion in such cases are usually doing so not because of a studied objection but for the same reason they’re letting their kids eat potato chips instead of broccoli and haven’t bothered to figure out how to block out the porn on their cable TV. They’re probably overstressed and disorganized, and possibly downright irresponsible.
A small subculture of educated secularists may discourage their kids from religious belief while encouraging healthful practices and maintaining structure. My bet would be that those kids are as well behaved as any. But in the mainstream, going to church is uncritically accepted as a good thing, like eating broccoli. The parents who manage this consistently probably just have a better handle on child-rearing in general. In short, my hunch is that this study is reversing cause and effect.
As I understand it, they compared 3 different populations. They divided the religious families into those that argue and those that don’t argue where all non-religious families were lumped together, those that argue vs those that don’t argue.
It isn’t a surprise that families that don’t argue have “better” behaved kids.
Anecdotal, of course, but personal experience (with my younger brother) supports this. He wasn’t comfortable in Sunday School, and he couldn’t sit still and tended to be disruptive during the service. Clearly church wasn’t helping, and it was hinted that he was disrupting the Sunday school too. It’s funny how the misbehavior kinda solved itself when we got home. Bottom line: we went to church less often.
Kat: For the record, yes he was restless at restaurants – but at movies, which he loves, he was rapt.
I like to think of myself as a free spirit and all, but the older I get, the more I think sitting down and shutting up is a wonderfully beneficial social skill, particularly for kids. At the very least, it works well as a defensive tactic in school where the teacher/student power dynamic isn’t exactly symmetrical (“The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.”) But more the point, kids in the modern world are going to be spending at least 16 years of their life sitting in uncomfortable seats for hour-long periods at a time. It might be better if it were otherwise, but they might as well get used to it.
I think what I’d like to instill in my kids is not that good behavior is an end in itself, but that it’s an effective way of creating a good initial impression. Even the loudest and obnoxious among us don’t really enjoy meeting our doppelgangers. You can be a creative, vital, individual while at the same time being low-key, charming, and not transgressing social expectations except when absolutely necessary.
How many of the kids are on Ritalin? What are the nutritional profiles of the students?
How much TV do they watch?
Such a crock.
The Bible only speaks of the first Nimrod (the “mighty hunter”). I am curious where the story of “Abraham’s army of gnats” comes from. I have never heard that before.
The Army of gnats comes from the Midrash, which is a collection of what were then (100 AD?) well known stories and details of law among the Jewish people no longer living in Jerusalem.
I’m sure Wikipedia has better info.
Saying religion makes kids better behaved is like saying that buying women drinks makes them put out. It might or might not be true, but it’s beside the point.
Can they do the same study with people who visit public libraries–for fun?
Telling them “the boogey man will get you if you don’t behave” is probably as effective as telling them they’ll go to hell if they aren’t good little consumers. I’m sure that neither is as effective as benadryl or ritalin. :)
mjr.
Surely, You’re Joking, Mr Peterson. Richard Feynman discovered differently. Buying drinks for a woman has an indirect correlation to whether or not she will put out.
It is better to let her buy.
PZ
I sent you this link by email a few weeks ago, but that may have been caught in a spam filter :-) But this topic has some funding possibilities.
I suspect that your plate is full. BUT if you have time to apply for an NIH grant, you might be interested in this one. One wonders that the backstory might be for this initiative…
From that grants.gov page – Purpose. This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) calls for research studies that examine the mechanisms, mediators, and moderators by which religious and spiritual beliefs develop and are transmitted across generations, and whether and how these beliefs influence early sexual behaviors and alcohol or other drug use that may facilitate the transmission of HIV in children and adolescents. The focus of this FOA is on the positive and negative effects of religiosity and spirituality (henceforth referred to solely as religiosity ) on health risk behaviors in children and adolescents. There is an increasingly pluralistic religious landscape in the United States, which makes it important to consider the influences and impacts of beliefs and behaviors promulgated by numerous religions in the United States.
enjoy!
“Nimrod The Mighty Hunter”
I’d say Arnold Schwarzenegger missed an opportunity there.
Chillun & churchy things: Take a look at Jesus Camp! How’d you like to have one of those in y’r house?
Mountain Dew through my nose. Great. Just great.
Thanks, PZ…
Of course religion leads to “better behaved children” if by that you mean docile, boring and mediocre, and by religion you mean an authoritarian social environment where children and adults are encouraged to believe absurd statements on the basis of tradition.
That’s trivial. It’s like using neuroscience to show the existence of empathy. Who the hell funds these things? Are my tax dollars going into this crap? Do these guys get tenure?
Why wouldn’t one expect this sort of correlation. much of today’s christianity postulates the father as the king of the house and if you don’t submit to his authority, you are severly dsiciplined (for your own good, of course). this would seem to me to greatly increase the correlation between church attendance as measured and children’s submission to authority
Scopolamine and morphine also makes kids easier to manage…
But doesn’t inculcating the Xian religion in a young child give him something harmless to rebel against when he hits adolescence?
No, not necessarily. :-|
Wouldn’t that be a little bit like taking up heroin so you have something meaningless to give up for Lent?
I was brought up in communist Russia. I think we were pretty well-behaved. We got indoctrinated, among other things, with some very benevolent ideas (work is noble, cleanliness is next to godlessness, that kind of thing). I would like to see a comparison between the U.S. and, say, China.
I would have titled that article differently “Religious Parents Believe their children are better behaved” or “People who think their children are well behaved are also likely to believe in miracles”