Society’s Impact on Good Parenting (Correction)

I previousloy duplicated the last post under this heading. Here is the correct one.

I have a fundamental belief that children are the most important asset to the future success of our nation. I further believe that there is a normal distribution of reasoning ability that is a genetic part of the individual and to maximize the probability of success we must allow them to rise to their maximum potential. I read and hear more and more that the jobs or the future depend on three attributes; analytical thinking, creativity and social skills. The first two of these, though they may be able to be enhanced by education, for all intents and purposes cannot be taught. As I discussed in a previous post on education, universities, though they do not create analytical thinkers or creative individuals, do “brand” them. The higher the degree, the greater the probability that they have these thought-after characteristics. With rare exception, individuals without degrees may not be recognized as being analytical or creative. So I am interested in expanding education to certify as many of the talented as possible. The more we get into our mainstream the better for our future.
As I have followed debates on education, I hear much about the importance of good parenting. The debate regarding the impact of parenting is not whether good parenting has an impact or not but is it a 50% or a 95% issue. That being the case the question boils down to how can parenting be improved?
May 5th I watched a special on Democracy Now, a very liberal broadcast, which featured a composite of three different interviews of Dr. Gabor Mata, a Canadian physician who studied and wrote about addiction, autism and attention deficit disorder. Gabor Mata, a Jew, born in Hungary during the Nazi regime and brought up in a home where the family was in work camps and in general, given the Nazi attitude toward Jews, under tremendous stress. As he discusses various studies he also often cites himself as an example of behavior consequential to his early upbringing. (I also find some relevance to my own symptoms though I am sure my formidable years were not nearly as terrible as his.)
He started by pointing out that unlike most mammals, the humans, because of the size of our brain need to enter the world before the brain is fully developed and spend the first two years of our lives continuing the development of the neural connections and whatever else goes on in the brain. During this period, for proper development, it is crucial to be in the presence of a calm loving person. He attributes the bulk of the above ills and their increase to improper development brought about by parents living under more and more stress and thus depriving the child of the environment needed to properly finish the development started in the womb. His conclusion is that whereas these diseases are considered and treated as medical or psychological maladies, they really are societal ills. He cites the increased stress brought on by deteriorating economic conditions requiring mothers in two parent households to work and the revision of the welfare system forcing single mothers to go into the workplace as conditions that remove the loving hand and their ability to comfort.
If there is merit to his argument, (I believe he has hit the nail on the head) what can we as a society do to improve the development of the infants and thereby improve our future society? In the LA area there are “Mother’s Clubs” which provide a setting where mothers from impoverished families can go and spend some time with their children in a calm atmosphere while learning to read and write and basic parenting skills. Though I think, such are very worthy efforts, they reach a very small number of people and don’t get to the root cause. The answer need to come in the form of policies that reduce the stress on families and allow for more parental contact during the time the brain is developing. The zeal with which the Conservatives want to punish “free riders” and thus improve our Nation may back fire. It may result in a society with ever increasing dysfunction which hurts them as much as the people they insist on not helping. To succeed in an ever competitive global economy we must deploy the best talent we can and not allow a significant segment to fail because of improper development. I can’t imagine a two year old being branded a worthless “free rider”, even by the staunchest Libertarian.
It would be interesting to compare the level of addiction, ADD and autism in various countries against the policies they deploy affecting early childhood development. All advanced industrialized nations are in essence Free Market Capitalist Welfare States though they vary with the level of “safely net”. The US has one of the lowest and along with the very low minimum wage and strong advantage of business over labor, makes it both easy and necessary for mothers to work. In countries like Germany and Italy with Christian Democratic governments, it is very difficult to fire a worker and minimum wages are high. High minimum wages make it harder to get childcare there than in the US and the increased job security for the man of the house makes it both difficult and less necessary for the mother to work. I am not suggesting that that is what we want to do but only giving an example of policies that may have a positive effect on early childhood development. In the former Soviet Union where everyone worked and there was extensive government supported child care, I suspect, along with the very high rate of alcohol addiction, there probably is also a high rate of ADD and autism, though they may lag substantially in diagnosing these.