Are children better off when one parent has a job or when both do?
pewresearch.org11 points by libpcap 16 hours ago
11 points by libpcap 16 hours ago
Why did they ask the teens? How would they know if their personal situation was better or worse than the alternative?
So many variables unmeasured. How many hours per week? What sort of job? Something the parent finds meaning and purpose in, or just a paycheck? Surely these moderate the sign of the outcome
Why would they NOT ask the teens? They're who the whole thing is about. They're the ones being affected. The child is the only one who sees the true effects parenting has on children.
How would the parents know? They're just kids that happen to have been alive long enough to gain some stupid legal rights and to have some sex and get pregnant. I've personally (anecdotally) observed that it's the person and their mindset, not age, that determines how well they understand the world around them and the consequences of their own actions. I know adults who are far more clueless than their 12-year-old children about every single thing they have ever talked about.
This idea that older people know more is absurd. You spend 50 years passively ending up with knowledge, while someone else spends 5 years doing active learning. The 5 active years wins every time. Sure there's still some deep-thinking life lessons left to be learned, but that's like "don't let your emotions get the better of you" kind of stuff, not "I understand how this works".
It's like this dude at work. Thinks he knows everything because he's worked for 50 years and so he must have gained 25 times more knowledge and experience than the new young guy. No, see, what actually happened is he spent 50 years passively learning an average of 1 bare-minimum thing per year on accident when it was absolutely required in order to complete a specific task, and the young guy spends 8 hours a day actively learning and exploring knowledge-gaps because he's just damn interested in it and has learned more in the past month than the old guy has in 25 years. So now you've got this ancient anti-intellectual with seniority power (another stupid thing) overriding good decisions just because "that aint how we done it for 25 years damn kids think they know everything why the hell would we need a damn [...]"; and so they undo the thing and productivity drops back down to where it was 25 years ago.
Yes, you're not wrong, but also consider that kids generally lack differing perspectives and knowledge of other situations. As an adult you've heard or seen other variations of how kids grew up and can better compare them. It's easy for kids to not understand how their situation actually compares to other situations they've heard about or imagined in their head. That's not to mean they shouldn't be asked, but like all things, take it with a grain of salt.