Gay Parenting

[Rhyfelwyr]

You can continue to make insulting insinuations about me, but they amount to nothing more than dodges. If it is such a simple concept, why can't you take the time you spent coming up with that snarky response to spell it out for me? What is the value of the parents' sex in raising children? What is unique to a woman that can only be given by/taken from them?

I think the reason you continue to avoid the question is that you realize it will take you from homophobia straight into the realm of sexism.

This is another example of how there are too many side issues/different presumptions running alongside the main issue for both sides to really engage each other.

We've already had the spin-off thread in which the scientific studies I presented were dismissed as being created by people with an agenda to exaggerate gender differences.

Women are generally more caring, sympathetic, better communicators/language skills... they are well suited to raising kids because like it or not, that's what nature moulded them for.

Men on the other hand tend to be, well... the opposite of that. Plus they think more logically, are better at science/mathematics, and provide a more strict/disciplining influence for the child. For much of history this whole debate over gender would be moot because only men could really do the hard labour that most jobs required. That is obviously not the case now, but still men were moulded to be providers for their families.

Yes you can all hate on me for saying this, but when you aren't jumping to defend teh gays you all act as if you share these same beliefs as me. Otherwise what's up with Strike's "What makes a man a man?" thread? You wouldn't think anything of it when a kid raised by a single mother bemoans the fact that he never had a father figure in his life.

But suddenly its all about the gays so everything just gets thrown out the window to pander to them...

[bamff]

Everyone has an opinion it would appear. That's great, but please remember that they are all opinions, and not necessarily right or wrong.

Trying to draw a generalisation in any such debate is fraught with danger. There will invariably be examples that "prove" or "disprove" any given theory. I know of many "conventional" (male & female parents) families in which the children have fourished, and I know of others where sadly this was not the case. Similarly, I have a number of friends who are or were raised by single parents. In some cases this has worked very well, in others, not so. The same goes for friends who are gay or were raised by gay couples (both male parents and female parents).

Rhyfelwyr raises some salient points with regard to the general nature of males and females - but again these are generalisations, and there will be those who simply do not fit within these "norms". I know of plenty of males who are skilled communicators, and who are more caring and sympathetic than many females. By the same token I know plenty of females whose orientation is toward the logical and practical.

For mine it really comes down to individuals and particular circumstances. I don't believe that there is a blanket right or wrong answer here.

Okay, there's my two cents (granted it possibly wasn't even worth that, but there it is nonetheless).

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Women are generally more caring, sympathetic,

Just to pick on this specifically, last time you said this I pointed out that studies based on self report find a large difference in favor of women, studies based on physiological response very small measures, and studies of helping behavior find that men help more. Now you're claiming I dismissed your studies (which you only ever referenced in passing) by claiming that they were by people who had an agenda? I did say that there is a bias towards the "interesting" results in publishing, and it's true, but I said a lot more. The main thing is that in studying empathy, you always have to ask how it is measured. Self report is obviously worthless--you don't get an accurate picture of how people are by asking them about something they want to be, and that's even assuming they know in the first place.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/langu...es/005496.html

gives a nice summary:

A more recent survey (Richard A. Fabes and Nancy Eisenberg, "Meta-Analyses of Age and Sex Differences in Children's and Adlescents' Prosocial Behavior", 1998) came to a similar conclusion:

Sex differences were greatest when demand characteristics were high (i.e., it was clear what was being assessed) and individuals had conscious control over their responses (i.e., self-report indices were used); gender differences were virtually nonexistent when demand characteristics were subtle and study participants were unlikely to exercise much conscious control over their responding (i.e., physiological indices). Thus, when gender-related stereotypes are activated and people can easily control their responses, they may try to project a socially desirable image to others or to themselves.

It seems unlikely that there is a significant biological difference. Other motivations (usually social) come into whether it is expressed. Do you think it is socially unacceptable for men to act in a caring way towards their children? Do you think gay men are likely to care about that? It seems bizarre to bring gender role data into an argument about potential parents who are less likely to adhere to strict roles.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

better communicators/language skills...

Title: Gender differences in verbal ability: A meta-analysis.

Located 165 studies that reported data on gender differences in verbal ability. The weighted mean effect size was +0.11, indicating a slight female superiority in performance. The difference is so small that we argue that gender differences in verbal ability no longer exist. Analysis of tests requiring different cognitive processes involved in verbal ability yielded no evidence of substantial gender differences in any aspect of processing. Similarly, an analysis of age indicated no striking changes in the magnitude of gender differences at different ages, countering Maccoby and Jacklin's (1974) conclusion that gender differences in verbal ability emerge around age 11 yrs. (PsycINFO Database Record © 2010 APA, all rights reserved)

they are well suited to raising kids because like it or not, that's what nature moulded them for.

Men on the other hand tend to be, well... the opposite of that.

You have a negative opinion of men, huh.

Plus they think more logically, are better at science/mathematics,

Title: New trends in gender and mathematics performance: A meta-analysis.

In this article, we use meta-analysis to analyze gender differences in recent studies of mathematics performance. First, we meta-analyzed data from 242 studies published between 1990 and 2007, representing the testing of 1,286,350 people. Overall, d = 0.05, indicating no gender difference, and variance ratio = 1.08, indicating nearly equal male and female variances. Second, we analyzed data from large data sets based on probability sampling of U.S. adolescents over the past 20 years: the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, the Longitudinal Study of American Youth, and the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Effect sizes for the gender difference ranged between –0.15 and +0.22. Variance ratios ranged from 0.88 to 1.34. Taken together, these findings support the view that males and females perform similarly in mathematics. (PsycINFO Database Record © 2010 APA, all rights reserved)

And one of the obvious things, which I think I pointed out in the other thread, is that you can't simply say you are measuring an innate difference. The effect sizes have decreased over time just as the differences in IQ scores between whites and blacks have decreased over time...I would think that this, if true, is very culturally based for example:

and provide a more strict/disciplining influence for the child.

Just consider the changes in child discipline over the last century!

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Anyway, it's not like that wasn't a fairly superficial scan. But there's a very long history of biased research on the subject, and no clear way to disentangle actual effects from culture, and no reason to think that any of it is important. For example:



Is a "small" effect size of .203. But do you really find it significant at ALL? From here: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/langu...es/003607.html

Which seems to a pretty good site, and for reference:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/langu...es/003420.html

Is a long list of quotes of stupid things people repeating the same baseless stat over and over...and the stat in question is something about women using 3 times as many words as men (the subject of the above graph).

***********
Basically rhyf, you are using things like this as your source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/ar...ays-study.html

Instead of things like I posted and:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/317/5834/82.abstract

Women are generally assumed to be more talkative than men. Data were analyzed from 396 participants who wore a voice recorder that sampled ambient sounds for several days. Participants' daily word use was extrapolated from the number of recorded words. Women and men both spoke about 16,000 words per day.

You just have to get a better idea of where to go for quality information.

[ajaxfetish]

Women are generally more caring, sympathetic, better communicators/language skills... they are well suited to raising kids because like it or not, that's what nature moulded them for.

Men on the other hand tend to be, well... the opposite of that.

So, would you argue that a pair of Lesbians are the ideal parents?

The fact that the during the child's crucial formulative years he/she/it can learn from, interact with, and be nurtured by, both a man and a woman.

Is it the case, and/or should it be the case, that a child interacts with and is nurtured by only its parents?

Ajax

[Beirut]

Is it the case, and/or should it be the case, that a child interacts with and is nurtured by only its parents?

The parents are the principle care givers, the people most likely to influence the child's outlook on the world, as well as influencing the child's ability to interact with it.

That being the case, and it is, would not one incredibly obvious benefit to the child raised by a mother and father be the diversity that the child would experience with a mother and father, the two sexes that make up the human race?

[bamff]

The parents are the principle care givers, the people most likely to influence the child's outlook on the world, as well as influencing the child's ability to interact with it.

That being the case, and it is, would not one incredibly obvious benefit to the child raised by a mother and father be the diversity that the child would experience with a mother and father, the two sexes that make up the human race?

Diversity of character, opinion, and outlook provided by the parents should certainly be preferred in order to give the developing child a broader spectrum from which to draw, but surely the question remains whether it is necessarily any broader simply by virtue of having one male and one female parent.

[Beirut]

Diversity of character, opinion, and outlook provided by the parents should certainly be preferred in order to give the developing child a broader spectrum from which to draw, but surely the question remains whether it is necessarily any broader simply by virtue of having one male and one female parent.

Well, as the world is made up of males and females, and only males and females, and the kid is going to grow up and interact with males and females, and form relationships, friendships, and love affairs with males and\or females, then yes, there is great virtue in the child being raised by a male and a female. The benefits are obvious.

[bamff]

Well, as the world is made up of males and females, and only males and females, and the kid is going to grow up and interact with males and females, and form relationships, friendships, and love affairs with males and\or females, then yes, there is great virtue in the child being raised by a male and a female. The benefits are obvious.

Perhaps it would have been more correct to phrase that "In my opinion, the benefits are obvious."

I don't disagree that there are benefits in having both male and female role models, but I don't agree that they need necessarily be within the household.

[Beirut]

Perhaps it would have been more correct to phrase that "In my opinion, the benefits are obvious."

Too limited in scope. I'm going for the whole burrito.

I don't disagree that there are benefits in having both male and female role models, but I don't agree that they need necessarily be within the household.

If the benefits are real, why not?

Isn't that like saying a child should eat healthy food, but not necessarily at home? (Where the vast majority of his meals are taken.)

[PanzerJaeger]

Well, as the world is made up of males and females, and only males and females, and the kid is going to grow up and interact with males and females, and form relationships, friendships, and love affairs with males and\or females, then yes, there is great virtue in the child being raised by a male and a female.

Well I couldn't drag it out of you, but you seem to be taking the position that children of gay parents will have difficultly interacting with members of the opposite sex of their parents. Is this correct?

The benefits are obvious.

Then it shouldn't be too hard to explain them.

A child of gay parents is at a specific disadvantage to a child of straight parents because ... (fill in the blank with an actual example).

[Beirut]

Well I couldn't drag it out of you, but you seem to be taking the position that children of gay parents will have difficultly interacting with members of the opposite sex of their parents. Is this correct?

I am saying that children raised by a mother and father enjoy a necessary diversity that is inherently better for the child.

Then it shouldn't be too hard to explain them.

Since I have explained it a dozen times, I think the point isn't that it's too hard for me to explain, but that it's too hard for you to understand. Perhaps it's too simple for you to understand.

You sound like one of those people who lived in the fifties, who smoked two-packs a day, coughs non-stop, wheezes up a flight of stairs, and has had two hearts attacks by age 40, but is still waiting for a scientist with a slide rule and fifty-pages of statistics to prove a link between smoking and bad health.

Some people don't need a scientist to explain life to them, they live life and make observations about it using - you guessed it - common sense.

A child of gay parents is at a specific disadvantage to a child of straight parents because ... (fill in the blank with an actual example).

Let the blank be filled!

... because the child lacked both a mother and a father in its upbringing.

[miotas]

I think there is a fundamental difference in both sides of the argument here.

The pro-hetero argument is based on the belief that gender roles are biological in origin and thus a child must be exposed to both male and female since there are things that only men can do and only women can do.

The gender-blind agument is based on the belief that (appart from obvious physical features) there is little significant difference between men and women, that gender roles are cultural in origin, and thus same sex relationships are capable of giving a complete upbriging to a child.

the world is made up of males and females, and only males and females

O RLY?

[Beirut]

I think there is a fundamental difference in both sides of the argument here.

The pro-hetero argument is based on the belief that gender roles are biological in origin and thus a child must be exposed to both male and female since there are things that only men can do and only women can do.

The gender-blind agument is based on the belief that (appart from obvious physical features) there is little significant difference between men and women, that gender roles are cultural in origin, and thus same sex relationships are capable of giving a complete upbriging to a child.

You said: "...since there are things that only men can do and only women can do." I don't think that is the case. It's not what the people do, it's what they are. The fact that a woman is a woman or a man is a man is important all on its own.

O RLY?

Ah, pardon me then, I meant the 99.99999999999999999999999999999999% of the people most of us deal with every day.

[Rhyfelwyr]

A good question. I could perhaps understand that it would be so if the two male (or female as the case may be) parents shared exactly the same characteristics, and if neither brought anything different to the table...but surely this is unlikely in the extreme. This would also appear to imply that children of single parents are inherently worse off, and that is not necessarily the case either.

And yet I think everyone in this thread would accept that single parent families are not ideal. And I'm not up to date on the procedures, but I expect adoption agencies give strong priority to two-parent families, if they even allow single parents to adopt at all.

Just to pick on this specifically, last time you said this I pointed out that studies based on self report find a large difference in favor of women, studies based on physiological response very small measures, and studies of helping behavior find that men help more. Now you're claiming I dismissed your studies (which you only ever referenced in passing) by claiming that they were by people who had an agenda? I did say that there is a bias towards the "interesting" results in publishing, and it's true, but I said a lot more. The main thing is that in studying empathy, you always have to ask how it is measured. Self report is obviously worthless--you don't get an accurate picture of how people are by asking them about something they want to be, and that's even assuming they know in the first place.

But as I said then, something you always do is that you focus too much on what the question and the answers themselves, rather than being more sutble and asking why people give those answers. Remember when this issue came up in that personality test?

Self-perception is very important. Now you will say the studies also found that when measures more objectively, little difference was found in how caring men/women are, yet I'm dubious how much these sort of surveys can assess that sort of thing. Biology does play a big part in our character, and often hormones only kick in after they have been triggered by actual sitations. For example, there was a piece on the BBC recently about how men get an upsurge in typically female hormones when they hold their young child... that would have been missed just filling in a multiple-choice form, and so that studies are biased towards finding cultural and not biological impacts.

It seems unlikely that there is a significant biological difference.

I thought it is commonly accepted that the reason men are significantly more aggressive is due to their testosterone levels. With the opposite being true for women and their oestrogen.

You have a negative opinion of men, huh.

Put it this way... God help my children if my wife is anything like me. I have a lot of aspergers eg 'extreme male brain' characteristics, they need to be balanced out.

And one of the obvious things, which I think I pointed out in the other thread, is that you can't simply say you are measuring an innate difference. The effect sizes have decreased over time just as the differences in IQ scores between whites and blacks have decreased over time...I would think that this, if true, is very culturally based for example:

Hardly surprising, since as I said biological and cultural factors have complemented each other. As the cultural factors have been reduced, so have apparent gender differences. Still, biological factors underpin certain fundamental differences, take for example the language example.

Just consider the changes in child discipline over the last century!

The particulars change but the basic principles remain the same.

So, would you argue that a pair of Lesbians are the ideal parents?


Is it the case, and/or should it be the case, that a child interacts with and is nurtured by only its parents?

Ajax

If you're going to cut the other half of my point off when you quote me, quite possibly.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

But as I said then, something you always do is that you focus too much on what the question and the answers themselves, rather than being more sutble and asking why people give those answers. Remember when this issue came up in that personality test?

I know you said that then! But here you were back pretending it wasn't just a survey of what you think about yourself. There is NOTHING subtle it about, instead it's completely disingenuous and false. What do you find so earth shattering about a finding that "there are stereotypes"?

Self-perception is very important.

It's self report, not perception, but leaving aside that, very important in what way? Anything relevant to any of the topics in the backroom? No.

Now you will say the studies also found that when measures more objectively, little difference was found in how caring men/women are, yet I'm dubious how much these sort of surveys can assess that sort of thing. Biology does play a big part in our character, and often hormones only kick in after they have been triggered by actual sitations. For example, there was a piece on the BBC recently about how men get an upsurge in typically female hormones when they hold their young child... that would have been missed just filling in a multiple-choice form, and so that studies are biased towards finding cultural and not biological impacts.

It was surveys that were the basis for your view...laboratory/etc experiments found a different conclusion. You have it backwards.

I thought it is commonly accepted that the reason men are significantly more aggressive is due to their testosterone levels. With the opposite being true for women and their oestrogen.

That quote was still from the post about empathy right? It was not "in general" obviously! If I remember correctly, testosterone is not responsible for hostile aggression, but that may be about roid rage being a myth or something...there might have been a small effect. It's generally hard to say what the specific effects of hormones are.

I don't think aggression is clear cut either, but for once the evolutionary argument is actually plausible. But you have the same issues with people not wanting to contradict their gender roles, men being in a better position to be aggressive, etc.

In general, for all of psychology, it is very problematic to say that something is a cause. Biological systems are very complex, and it is always an interaction. As an example, let's say you get a lesion on a specific part of your brain and you lose the ability to move your right hand. The temptation is to conclude that the part of the brain with the lesion is in control of your right hand. But if the nerve in your wrist was cut, you would still lose the use of your hand, but you would never say that that section of nerve was in control of your hand right? It's simply an integral part of the system. This is a problem with many studies.

Put it this way... God help my children if my wife is anything like me. I have a lot of aspergers eg 'extreme male brain' characteristics, they need to be balanced out.

Well, don't overgeneralize from your own case. It's not extreme male brain anyway.

Hardly surprising, since as I said biological and cultural factors have complemented each other. As the cultural factors have been reduced, so have apparent gender differences. Still, biological factors underpin certain fundamental differences, take for example the language example.

Case in point for what I was saying two quotes up

There are lots of biological differences. But showing "underpinning" is much different.

edit: fixed quote, also I think the researchers should be concerned that the boys did better in the auditory compared to the visual simply because they don't read much.

The particulars change but the basic principles remain the same.

Huh? Have men evolved rapidly in the last 100 years?