Judith Blume, Fudge and teasing

K1 likes the Fudge books by Judith Blume. I can't say that I really cared for them. There is an article about Blume in the Washington Post and she based the characters on her own kids and her life. There was far too much teasing in the books for my taste and we have tried to raise them from doing this. It seems like teasing by kids is almost instinctive and I'm wondering if it's genetic and I'm partial to some kind of Darwinian/evolutionary argument which is outmoded in modern societies (sort of like fight or flight). It would go like this: Teasing forces the weak out of a group keeping only the strong. Unfortunately, in these times, the weak can go out an buy themselves thousands of rounds of ammunition and an AK47 and equalize the differences. I wonder how the tendency to tease would survive this type of backlash. Most likely it would survive since there aren't enough disasters to threaten the survival of the strong. So, can the tendency to tease and bully be weeded out of our genes (if it is indeed a genetic/survival trait)?

Among behaviors that have been found to have possible genetic links:
1. Risk taking: That Wild Streak? Maybe It Runs in the Family
2. Girls like pink: Sex, shopping and thinking pink. See my old post Why Do Little Girls Like Pink although the test referred to in the Economist article doesn't actually say there is a genetically based preference. Just a preference which could have been formed by being brought up on pink hues. See also this Bad Science entry: Pink, pink, pink, pink. Pink moan.

Note: An old Washington Post article on bullying Teaching Bullies a Lesson is also available here.

Update on what parents need to know/junk science

Googling I found a book by Jane Waldfogel titled What Children Need which seems to be a good summary of what I might have wanted to see. Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of the book so I can't comment on it but the following interviews with her would indicate that this might be an interesting book.
1. Prevention Action: Why do we sometimes care so little about what children need
2. Mother's Movement: What children need

The interviews also addresses some of Judith Warner's discussion on attachment theory in her book Perfect Madness.

Update: I was also reminded of Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption which I still have to read. Michael Foster the original person who asked Andrew Gelman subsequently followed up with this post on AG's blog:

First, Carrie linked to these two studies with evidence linking toddler TV viewing to attention and learning disorders:
Christakis DA, Zimmerman FJ, DiGiuseppe DL, McCarty CA. Early television exposure and subsequent attentional problems in children. Pediatrics. 2004;113:708-713.
TV Has Negative Impact on Very Young Children's Learning Abilities (Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2005;159:619-625)

Michael then responded,
See--this is why I need to write that book. Those two papers you cite are terrible--exhibit A for bad research. Seriously.
It's very difficult to infer causal relationships from observational data like that. As you know, there could be a lot of confounding factors. But it's difficult but not impossible. One can do a range of things, such as including more variables in the analysis, adjusting for their impact in a flexible way, and so on.
In the Pediatrics paper, we took the same data and found that the effect of TV was very sensitivity to the addition of even a few covariates. And the ones we added should have been included in the first place. We also found that the effect of TV was only at extremely high levels (>10 hours / day). It's hard to believe that those "effects" were really effects--one has to wonder about those families letting kids watch that much TV being just different.
Now, one might say, this paper went through peer review at a good journal--isn't that evidence of quality? The problem is that reviewers often share the same biases as authors. It's also hard to get methodologists to evaluate papers for these applied journals . And the American Academy of Pediatrics has a policy statement urging parents not to let their little kids watch much TV. So, I think they give papers like this the benefit of the doubt in the review process.
We're writing a paper offering counter-analyses, but we had an earlier version that was more of a direct critique. Pediatrics rejected it. Of course, one of the reviewers was an author of the original paper. I'm not sure they were quite objective. I've attached an earlier version of our response. We've extended the analysis still further, and we just don't find any effects. It's probably overkill. The whole thing is just a myth.
Of course, there's the myth that living in single-parent family is bad for a child. 8-) Just published a paper on that, too. Of course, the press ignored it.

As indicated by Warner's book, it's difficult to get the press to focus on something without being able to sell an "angle" as well. It reminds me of the time when I had read in a parenting magazine that night lights were bad for the eyes of children.

Junk science for parents

Here was an interesting post on Gelman's blog: What's been written on junk science aimed at parents? Here's what I had said previously on child care based on Judith Warner's book. There is a need to bring the research together in some reasoned way. I do agree with the commenters in Gelman's blog that the term "junk science" is a loaded phrase. However, I also think that trying to get some concensus out of the research will be hard.

For instance, the NYT reported on the findings from an NICHD sponsored study titled Poor Behavior is Linked to time in Day care which was countered by the following by Emily Bazelon on Slate: The Kids Are Alright: What the latest day-care study really found. Which should we believe?

Is the government the solution to our child care needs?

It is not surprising that Judith Warner (Perfect Madness) advocates some kind of government intervention in the provision of child care for this country. The first step would be some kind of national standards to ensure that child care is of adequate quality. My initial response was that this seems rather hypocritical -- are there minimum standards to determine if we are fit to be parents? Having said that I am still all for the idea and certainly when we were looking for high quality child care the NAEYC stamp was one of the main driving factors.

I don't know how likely this will come to fruition and in her book she describes how polarized this debate can get with extremists on the left and right weighing in so shrilly that reasoned debate is almost impossible. However, my feeling is that there seems to be some momentum building that high quality child care is needed with Nobel laureate James Heckman (here, and here) weighing in as well a series of articles from the FRB of Minneapolis.

In her book, her basis for comparison is France and as I had eluded to in an earlier post, the book needs a more comprehensive description of the French system before I can buy into her argument. But in the end (pp. 280-281) as she notes, even the French system isn't perfect:

The future "France" I've constructed in my mind doesn't exist. School aged French children are every bit as stressed as their American counterparts, if not more so. Public schooling there is often a soul-crunching experience, and certain popular parenting techniques("You're an idiot... You're a slob ... Do you want me to hit you again?") leave something to be desired. If French children are not being drugged not in order to meet the kind of Olympian performance standards we hold dear, it's probably just a matter of time. Because according the the French newspaper Le Point, French children too are now being reared like racehourses, dragged to an average of three after-school activities per week and filled, from the earliest possible age, with the fear of failure. "A child must not only be seductive," wrote journalists Irene Inchauspe and Valerie Peiffer in January 2004, "he must also be ultrahigh-performing: first in his class, accomplished at sports, and a friend like none other ..." .... Life for French mothers, in the long term isn't necessarily such a bowl of cherries either. For there is a price they pay for the wonderful (and expensive) benefits they enjoy: a pervasive and all-but-unchallenged kind of institutional kind of sexism. It can keep women of childbearing age from being hired.