Epictetus comments on Open Thread, May 4 - May 10, 2015 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: Gondolinian 04 May 2015 12:06AM

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Comment author: Epictetus 04 May 2015 05:07:32AM 3 points [-]

Here is a government study showing a markedly higher risk for perpetrating violent crime among children who were abused or neglected by their parents. So that's one effect. Bad parenting leads to bad outcomes.

Comment author: D_Malik 04 May 2015 05:46:12AM 10 points [-]

That study is observational, not experimental. Maybe genes for disagreeableness make parents abuse their children, and they pass those genes on to their offspring. Probably both nature and nurture contribute.

Comment author: Epictetus 04 May 2015 06:09:25AM 1 point [-]

Certainly. Correlation isn't causation. One hurdle is that any experimental study of this phenomenon would be highly unethical.

But all is not lost. Single-parent households are also associated with higher risk of juvenile delinquency. I'll see if I can dig up a study of children abused by foster parents or step-parents.

Comment author: philh 04 May 2015 11:30:51AM 3 points [-]

Single-parent households are also associated with higher rates of parental divorce and teenage pregnancy.

I think I remember reading what happens if you only look at single-parent households where the other parent got sick and died, but I don't remember the answer.

Comment author: ChristianKl 04 May 2015 01:40:50PM 0 points [-]

Certainly. Correlation isn't causation. One hurdle is that any experimental study of this phenomenon would be highly unethical.

Not always. It might be possible that there are orphanage systems where children are randomly assigned to either orphanage A or orphanage B. If you go to Africa to set up such a system you can add special funding to one of the two orphanages to raise it's quality much higher than that of the average African orphanage.

You can also split test different educational philosophies that way.

Comment author: Lumifer 04 May 2015 06:18:27AM 4 points [-]

Here is a different study which says:

The role of parenting in the development of criminal behavior has been the source of a vast amount of research, with the majority of studies detecting statistically significant associations between dimensions of parenting and measures of criminal involvement. An emerging group of scholars, however, has drawn attention to the methodological limitations—mainly genetic confounding—of the parental socialization literature. The current study addressed this limitation by analyzing a sample of adoptees to assess the association between 8 parenting measures and 4 criminal justice outcome measures. The results revealed very little evidence of parental socialization effects on criminal behavior before controlling for genetic confounding and no evidence of parental socialization effects on criminal involvement after controlling for genetic confounding.

Comment author: gwern 04 May 2015 02:41:48PM 3 points [-]

Indeed. One could also look at Sariaslan's population registry studies.

Sadly, most of these sorts of studies can be written off with a single sentence: "includes no family design, therefore is useless and merely shows that heritable traits gonna inherit."

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