Science Daily reports on a new study from McGill University.
Excerpt:
New findings from the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) show that the absence of a father during critical growth periods, leads to impaired social and behavioral abilities in adults. This research, which was conducted using mice, was published today in the journal Cerebral Cortex. It is the first study to link father absenteeism with social attributes and to correlate these with physical changes in the brain.
[…]Dr. Gobbi and her colleagues compared the social behavior and brain anatomy of mice that had been raised with both parents to those that had been raised only by their mothers. Mice raised without a father had abnormal social interactions and were more aggressive than counterparts raised with both parents. These effects were stronger for female offspring than for their brothers. Females raised without fathers also had a greater sensitivity to the stimulant drug, amphetamine.
“The behavioral deficits we observed are consistent with human studies of children raised without a father,” says Dr. Gobbi, who is also a psychiatrist at the MUHC. “These children have been shown to have an increased risk for deviant behavior and in particular, girls have been shown to be at risk for substance abuse. This suggests that these mice are a good model for understanding how these effects arise in humans.”
In pups deprived of fathers, Dr. Gobbi’s team also identified defects in the mouse prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that helps control social and cognitive activity, which is linked to the behavioral deficits.
“This is the first time research findings have shown that paternal deprivation during development affects the neurobiology of the offspring,” says Dr. Gobbi. These results should incite researchers to look more deeply into the role of fathers during critical stages of growth and suggest that both parents are important in children’s mental health development.
This study is important because although we have a lot of data showing that fatherlessness children exhibit many problem behaviors when compared to children in married households, corelation doesn’t imply causation. Now we know about the causation that is behind the corelation. It’s the progress of science. It might not fit with feminist ideology, which claims that men in the home are dangerous and harmful to children. But you can’t argue with science – especially not with ideology.
Let’s talk another look at some of the problems with fatherlessness.
Here is Dr. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation to explain:
Census data and the Fragile Families survey show that marriage can be extremely effective in reducing child poverty. But the positive effects of married fathers are not limited to income alone. Children raised by married parents have substantially better life outcomes compared to similar children raised in single-parent homes.
When compared to children in intact married homes, children raised by single parents are more likely to have emotional and behavioral problems; be physically abused; smoke, drink, and use drugs; be aggressive; engage in violent, delinquent, and criminal behavior; have poor school performance; be expelled from school; and drop out of high school.[19] Many of these negative outcomes are associated with the higher poverty rates of single mothers. In many cases, however, the improvements in child well-being that are associated with marriage persist even after adjusting for differences in family income. This indicates that the father brings more to his home than just a paycheck.
The effect of married fathers on child outcomes can be quite pronounced. For example, examination of families with the same race and same parental education shows that, when compared to intact married families, children from single-parent homes are:
- More than twice as likely to be arrested for a juvenile crime;[20]
- Twice as likely to be treated for emotional and behavioral problems;[21]
- Roughly twice as likely to be suspended or expelled from school;[22] and
- A third more likely to drop out before completing high school.[23]
The effects of being raised in a single-parent home continue into adulthood. Comparing families of the same race and similar incomes, children from broken and single-parent homes are three times more likely to end up in jail by the time they reach age 30 than are children raised in intact married families. [24] Compared to girls raised in similar married families, girls from single-parent homes are more than twice as likely to have a child without being married, thereby repeating the negative cycle for another generation.[25]
Finally, the decline of marriage generates poverty in future generations. Children living in single-parent homes are 50 percent more likely to experience poverty as adults when compared to children from intact married homes. This intergenerational poverty effect persists even after adjusting for the original differences in family income and poverty during childhood.[26]
My next post talks about the rise of women-perpetrated domestic violence in the UK. Maybe the increase in fatherlessness in the UK is to blame for women becoming more violence? And what causes fatherlessness? Well, the main driver of it is social programs that literally pay women welfare money to have children before they are married. Maybe we should stop doing that, because that seems to be causing children to become more violent – especially the next generation of women, as we’ll see in tomorrow’s article. In the meantime, I would just urge men to be very very careful about getting involved with women who grew up without a father. It’s something you need to account for.
Filed under: Polemics
