http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/how-to-save-marriage-in-america/283732/
After discovering that 'egalitarian' marriages don't actually produce happy homes, liberals are doubling down on egalitarian marriages all the same. This article is the height of nonsensical thinking, due to the fact that it confuses correlation with causation over, and over, and over again.
In short, they draw the exact wrong lesson from why the children of 'college-educated parents' do better than the children of 'lesser education.' It has nothing to do with how the parents treat the children. In fact, parenting has been shown to have zero -- correct -- zero correlation to the outcomes of children. The adopted children of parents have a 0% correlation in IQ to their adoptive parents. This is why the Minnesota trans-racial adoption study ended in complete failure. Even when middle class whites raise black children from birth, they end up the same old blacks as always, with the same expected life outcomes as if they had been raised in the ghetto. This is because IQ is the biggest determinant of your life course, and IQ is 80% genetic. By the way, the second biggest determinant of a person's life has nothing to do with parenting, but is actually determined by your peer group. Children learn more from their friends and siblings then they'll ever learn from their parents, who are too estranged from children to ever see eye-to-eye.
Not only do parents have a 30 year age gap with children, they also have differently wired brains from children's brains, so they don't even think the same much less have the same set of memories to operate off of. Perhaps worst of all, parents operate in the world from positions of power. They're the ones ordering others around, they're the ones with tons of money who can buy for themselves whatever they want. If they don't like someone, they can just break up with them -- whereas children are stuck at school, stuck at home, and stuck in all shapes and forms with no power to take care of themselves or move out on their own. The idea that parents could sympathize with their children or help them in any way is absurd. Parents have life so easy they can avoid all pain and all stress with the flick of a wrist. Meanwhile kids are stuck with bad home environments, bad schools, bullies, treacherous relationships they were fooled into through naivety and passion, etc, etc. By the time parents have children, they are in settled, happy relationships they'll have for life. Children are born without any allies at all. They have no one they can count on. They have nothing to their name in property. They're basically nothing themselves, utterly powerless, utterly alone, and utterly miserable. It's no wonder every child is born crying into this world.
The idea that a parent, whose life situation is the exact reverse of a child's, could offer the child any good advice or direction in life is ridiculous. It's common sense to realize that you may as well try to learn how to swim from a bird or learn how to fly from a fish. Only peers can ever understand each other, and people only ever listen to their peers. At most children will obey their parents. That's the only relationship parenting will ever be.
High investment parenting is a myth. It's a pointless waste of time. Benjamin Franklin wasn't raised by 'high investment parents.' He was the seventh child of a poor family, immediately fostered off as an apprentice child worker, and basically never saw his family again. Even so, he became one of the foremost thinkers and statesmen in American history. If you have the right genes you can accomplish anything in life, no matter what your family circumstances. Correspondingly, if you have the wrong genes it doesn't matter how you're raised, you'll always end up a failure anyway. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
The reason why there's a correlation between 'high investment parenting' and 'later child success' is a complete coincidence. It just so happens that high IQ causes many different things to occur simultaneously. High IQ people have better marriages, probably because they aren't so impulsive they immediately cheat on each other, get angry at each other, etc. Instead they can talk things through and find a way to get along again, by using reason and patience. Low IQ marriages can't manage the same because they're too stupid to think long term and just immediately act on whatever emotion enters their head. This is also why low IQ people do crime while high IQ people refrain from it. High IQ people are also better able to graduate from college. It takes about a 115 IQ to make it through the strict standards of a college degree. If you fall short of that, odds are you'll fail and drop out, unless you're in some stupidly worthless field of study that anyone can pass, in which case that degree won't actually get you a good job anyway. With a college degree, it's easy to get a good job, because employers know you have a high IQ, which also happens to correlate perfectly with on-the-job productivity. Employers are happy to hire good workers, and workers are happy to take high incomes. With high incomes, happiness goes up and stress goes down. When parents are happy and unstressed, their ability to be kind and giving to others goes up -- thus they have more quality time with not only their kids, but each other and even with themselves.
A recent study showed that just giving $6,000 a year to members of a Cherokee tribe, no strings attached, left them so much happier and less stressed that crime, drug use, and alcohol use went down. More people graduated from high school/college and the divorce rate dropped. Every single indicator of life quality improved by giving people just a tiny relief from poverty. If we gave impoverished parents money, they would start treating their kids better too. If no one was poor, everyone would be better off. But this doesn't require some convoluted process like getting a college degree, getting into an 'egalitarian' marriage, and then practicing 'high investment parenting.' All it would require would be a check from the government every month, problem solved. All children everywhere could enjoy the benefits of not being poor if we, you know, actually ended poverty in America. Having a father in the home doesn't help a whit if you're still poor. It's just one more mouth to feed, and one more focal point of stress and argumentation as everyone takes out their pain and worry on the people around them in an endless blame game.
Since IQ is genetic, being the child of a 'college educated mother' is just code language for being a genetically gifted child. If said child were snatched by gypsies and raised in a circus they would still end up just as well off, because it was in their genes to succeed from the very beginning. If a 'college educated mother' got sperm from a sperm bank from a known doctor or professor, she'd end up having better kids than marrying the boys of her own prestige level. Those children would also grow up to be more successful, as children of a single mother, than if she had married and had kids in the normal fashion. Far more important than having a father is having a good sperm donor. IQ is everything in life. With high IQ, you can accomplish anything. Without a high IQ, you're utterly helpless and your life is doomed from the very outset.
Not only does the Minnesota trans-racial adoption study show genes are the only important things parents provide their children, another study showed the exact same results in reverse. When a group of Dutch women adopted children from South Korea, the children all ended up with higher life success metrics than their adoptive parents. This is because East Asians are smarter than whites, so the children quickly rose above their puny adoptive parents' level and grew into the average of their biological parents, whom they never saw or knew their entire lives. It's ridiculous to believe that high parental investment is the cause of these Asian children's success, when the parents themselves couldn't even achieve at that level, nor could other Dutch children, all raised in the same manner, match their adopted South Korean peers.
The last thing children need is 'high investment parenting.' What they could actually use is 'high investments from their parents.' If every parent gave their kids $300,000 at birth, and then never saw their kids again, those kids would be infinitely better off than nosy parents constantly nagging their children to do their piano lessons or homework or whatever 'high investment parenting' means. The world could learn a lot from Little Women. The father was off at war the whole book long. How much did father mean in their lives? Absolutely nothing. As for the mother, she was generally hands-off and let the kids look after themselves. There was no 'high investment parenting' here. What there was, was four siblings who got along with each other, and created their own little world among themselves, that was perfectly self-sufficient without any parental input.
In other words, if you want to have a good child, buy high quality sperm or eggs off the market. Then, buy your child a giant annuity that will pay them plenty of money every year for life. Then, buy this child a lot of siblings so that they're never lonely and always have friends and confidantes to talk to throughout life, all of whom also have these massive trust funds and perfectly tailored genes. Money will buy you and your children happiness. Parents won't do a damn thing.
Nor does it make sense to marry for the sake of kids. Women can have kids without marrying, so why on Earth should they marry? College educated women can support themselves and their kids just fine, regardless of whether a boy is on the scene. There is ample evidence that women ruin their kids' lives by marrying or dating someone other than the biological father of their children. But there is no evidence showing that a single mom who forswears men altogether hurts her children. If you just wanted kids there would be no point roping in a third wheel to the issue.
Ultimately, it's silly to believe that adults live their lives for the sake of their kids anyway. If that were the case, they wouldn't choose to both work, so that they could avoid being around their kids as much as possible. A single college level income is perfectly sufficient to support a home. The fact that mothers continue working anyway is a slap in the face of all the kids they leave at home. It makes quite clear exactly where a woman's priorities lie. Marriage is the exact same. It isn't about the kids. Marriage is for the sake of sex, companionship, and friendship. Just as kids can't learn anything from their parents, parents can't gain anything from the company of their children. The children are not on the same mental level as the adult and therefore don't make good conversationalists. You can't go to a kid to ask for advice or emotional support, it's like an elephant leaning on a twig. Adults marry each other so that they always have someone there for them, every night, both physically and spiritually. It's not that complicated. Married couples without children are actually happier than married couples with children, so the idea that marriage revolves around children is just silly.
This article is cruel. It's basically saying that if anyone has unhappy home lives, and if any child doesn't turn out to be a rocket scientist, it's all your own fault. If, the article says, you just behaved like we enlightened college educated married folks, and had married and raised children in the proper way like we did, all of your problems would instantly go away. However, it's impossible for stupid people to act as though they were intelligent people. If they could do that, they would be defined as intelligent people, now wouldn't they? So telling them to do so is as absurd as telling them to sprout wings and fly.
This false compassion, this false advice, which is more just smug bragging about how much better the nobility is compared to the peasantry, won't help a single poor person. It won't help a single child. $6,000 a year lifted an entire Cherokee tribe out of poverty. It actually improved children's lives across the board. But it's a lot easier to dispense smug advice than $6,000 a year, now isn't it?
How about these people shut up with all their 'good ideas for how you peons should raise your children' and just fork over some God damn cash already? Just give us the money. Somehow, miracle of miracles, money goes a lot further than condescension.
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