Erick Erickson Needs to Fact-Check His Anti-Working Moms Fairy Tale
RedState editor Erick Erickson has tripled down on his claim that since males dominate females in "the natural world," it's only "science" that male humans should be the breadwinners of the American family. He was just stating the "facts," he says. But Erick Erickson was actually not stating facts at all.
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"When you look at biology — when you look at the natural world — the roles of a male and a female in society and in other animals, the male typically is the dominant role," Erickson said on Fox Busness Network on Wednesday night. Though Erickson was the target of most of the resulting outrage on Thursday, it should be noted that his male co-panelists enthusiastically agreed. "Many feminist and emo lefties have their panties in a wad over my statements in the past 24 hours about families," Erickson responded at RedState on Thursday afternoon. He said he was being shouted down by the P.C. police:
In modern society we are not supposed to say such things about child rearing and families. In modern society we are not supposed to point out that children in a two-parent heterosexual nuclear household have a better chance at long term success in life than others. In modern society, we are supposed to applaud feminists who teach women they can have it all — that there is no gender identifying role and women can fulfill the role of husbands and fathers just as men do.
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Though he defended himself as merely stating the scientifically obvious, he cited no science proving these assertions are true. Yet Erickson continued forth on his radio show. "It is a fact that children in a two-parent heterosexual nuclear household tend to have a more stable upbringing and a better chance of success than those of single parents or of gay parents," Erickson said. "It is a matter of fact that children in a household with a mother who spends more time at home than out of the home, with a father who is earning the bulk of the income for the home, are the most well-adjusted youth in society. You may not like it. You may not like me saying it. But it's a fact."
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This is not a fact.
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When Columbia University researchers studied 1,000 kids from babies to first grade, they not only found "the overall effect of 1st-year maternal employment on child development is neutral," they discovered that working moms tended to be more responsive to their kids than stay-at-home moms. In December 2012, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Greenboro found that working moms were just as healthy, and sometimes healthier, than stay-at-home moms.
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Most convincingly, according to research published in the peer-reviewed Psychological Bulletin, an analysis of 69 studies conducted from 1969 to 2010 found that when moms worked outside the home before their children were 3 years old, their kids fared no worse academically or behaviorally than stay-at-home moms' kids. In fact, in some ways, they did better: children of working moms were rated as more high-achieving by teachers, and were less likely to suffer from depression and anxiety. Which means when it comes to who's "the most well adjusted youth in society," at least by two measures, Erickson has it exactly wrong.
(Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr.)
