Quality Time

The NHL All Star Weekend is over, and it was great fun (as always). But I'm not here to talk about hockey, I'm here to talk about parenting.

Quality time, as Wikipedia informs one, is "an informal reference to time spent with loved ones (e.g., close family, partners or friends) which is in some way important, special, productive or profitable." Some parents feel the need to fill this time with programmed activities, thinking that they are better parents if they take their offspring to more exciting places and give them "experiences", maybe to make up for the limited amount of time they have to spend with their children.

Well, during the All Star weekend the players bring their kids to experience the weekend with them. They meet stars, they are in the middle of a great event, and maybe a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Yet when asked which star's autograph was the best Martin St. Louis' son says, "my daddy's."

And Danny Brière's son's reply when asked what the best part of the weekend is?

"Just hanging around with my dad."

Blimey! Somebody call social services!

BBC: Lincolnshire family warned over girl's bus stop walk

A Lincolnshire family have been warned they could be reported to social services for letting a seven-year-old girl walk alone to the school bus stop.

What?

Mark McCullough, from Glentham, said his daughter Isabelle is capable of walking 20 metres (65 ft) to the bus and crossing a road home.

But the county council said it was concerned for her safety and the road was too busy for her to cross alone.

The authority said it wanted to meet with the family to discuss the issue.

What?

'Absolute joke'

Mr McCullough said the county council sent a letter saying the matter may be reported as a "child protection issue".

"This has made me angry. I am happy for Isabelle to walk from home to the end of the road and, if necessary, cross a country lane and walk home.

"I'm not going to wrap my children up in cotton wool. For a seven-year-old not to be able to walk 20 metres to the top of the courtyard and cross a quiet country road is an absolute joke," he said.

Mr McCullough said he could see the bus stop in Chapel Court from the end of his drive.

Denise Carr, the county council's head of transport services group, said: "As a responsible authority, we have expressed our concern that a seven-year-old is standing on a busy road alone each morning, and then crossing the road unaccompanied after school."

What?

Do parents matter at all?

NY Times: Accepting That Good Parents May Plant Bad Seeds

Not everyone is going to turn out to be brilliant — any more than everyone will turn out nice and loving. And that is not necessarily because of parental failure or an impoverished environment. It is because everyday character traits, like all human behavior, have hard-wired and genetic components that cannot be molded entirely by the best environment, let alone the best psychotherapists.

“The central pitch of any child psychiatrist now is that the illness is often in the child and that the family responses may aggravate the scene but not wholly create it,” said my colleague Dr. Theodore Shapiro, a child psychiatrist at Weill Cornell Medical College. “The era of ‘there are no bad children, only bad parents’ is gone.”

I recall one patient who told me that she had given up trying to have a relationship with her 24-year-old daughter, whose relentless criticism she could no longer bear. “I still love and miss her,” she said sadly. “But I really don’t like her.”

For better or worse, parents have limited power to influence their children. That is why they should not be so fast to take all the blame — or credit — for everything that their children become.

He's focusing on genetics, but the basic idea of how much parents can influence their children reminded me irresistably of Judith Harris's 1998 book, The Nurture Assumption. In it, Harris argued that parents simply don't affect their children nearly as much as we think they do. She noted that genetics and parenting are often confused, but what I thought was most interesting was that Harris argued strongly for the influence peer groups have on children.

As the school year is just starting, I'm now going to go off on a tangent about schools. I'm wondering if I'm justified in drawing a practical conclusion from the importance of peer groups. Basically, to me that means that one of the most important parenting decisions is choosing what school to put your children in. If you want them to do well academically, you'll look for a school with good exam results. Even there, the most important factor leading to those results may well be the culture and work ethic of the students, rather than the level of teaching. I've been to some very different schools myself, and I'd argue that this is very important. Your child won't get good exam results because the school is great, but rather because other kids at that school want good exam results, so to some extent, your kid will want them too.

A wider sociological corollary of this would seem to be that there will always be "worse" and "better" schools, if only because the latter are composed largely of kids whose parents want them to do well and steer them toward that kind of environment, and the former are made up of people who aren't that interested in going to school. In my mind, this is the single biggest reason why Finland, with "free" education, also has drastically different final exam results in different schools. It's the peer group.

The way I see it, you can't really do anything about genetics, and there seems to be pretty widespread agreement that beyond some basics, the quality of your parenting also matters a lot less than people think. So really, the one big thing that you can affect is what kind of peer group your kids end up in. That comes down to choice of neighborhood and choice of school.

The fact that schools are this different, even in countries with "free" education, suggests that most parents are already thinking like this. They consider the reputation of a neighborhood before moving there, and the reputation and results of schools. This is really a feedback loop, and to me, that means that the constantly recurring discussion on how to balance differences between schools in Finland is a totally futile one. Different schools will have different "cultures" and work ethics no matter what we do to balance them out. And I don't see why that has to be a bad thing.

Better parenting through lesbianism

Earlier this month, this study came out:

CNN: Kids of lesbians have fewer behavioral problems, study suggests

A nearly 25-year study concluded that children raised in lesbian households were psychologically well-adjusted and had fewer behavioral problems than their peers.

The study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, followed 78 lesbian couples who conceived through sperm donations and assessed their children's well-being through a series of questionnaires and interviews.

Funding for the research came from several lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender advocacy groups, such as the Gill Foundation and the Lesbian Health Fund from the Gay Lesbian Medical Association.

Dr. Nanette Gartrell, the author of the study, wrote that the "funding sources played no role in the design or conduct of the study."

"My personal investment is in doing reputable research," said Gartrell. "This is a straightforward statistical analysis. It will stand and it has withstood very rigorous peer review by the people who make the decision whether or not to publish it."

Gay parenting remains a controversial issue, with debates about topics including the children's psychological adjustment, their parents' sexual orientation and adoption restrictions.

Hilariously, the conservatives are trying to discredit the study because of the funding it received from advocacy groups. While it's possible that Christian conservatives genuinely don't understand that a real scientific study can be peer-reviewed and controlled for bias, the allegations become totally ridiculous when one remembers that these same people have no problem touting the "results" of conservative think-tank papers as facts.

But anyway, lesbians make better parents than straight couples. Just thought I'd put that out there.

Poland approves castration of pedophiles

Reuters: Poland okays forcible castration for pedophiles

(Reuters) - Poland on Friday approved a law making chemical castration mandatory for pedophiles in some cases, sparking criticism from human rights groups.

Under the law, sponsored by Poland's center-right government, pedophiles convicted of raping children under the age of 15 years or a close relative would have to undergo chemical therapy on their release from prison.

"The purpose of this action is to improve the mental health of the convict, to lower his libido and thereby to reduce the risk of another crime being committed by the same person," the government said in a statement.

I bring this up mainly because several people I know support this. Also, when a Finnish tabloid broke the story over here and included an online poll, 95% of respondents supported the legistlation. I'd like to take a moment to address the ethics behind this idea. Unless otherwise noted, data is sourced from Wikipedia.

In practice, chemical castration means that the prisoners will be forcibly given drugs that reduce their sex drive. Technically, they're not being castrated in the proper wince-inducing sense of the word, as nothing is being cut off or even permanently disabled. However, their hormone production is lowered, leading to changes in both body and mind.

Several US states have passed similar laws; for example, in California a prisoner convicted for a second time of child molestation may be treated with MPA if they are on parole, regardless of their wishes. The ACLU, in opposing similar legistlation in Florida, called it a "return to the Dark Ages". Their paper can be read here.

I'm sure some people are aghast that the ACLU could oppose something like this. After all, it's for the children. It's worth looking at the core of the ACLU argument, because it puts my first point very concisely.

Sexual assault is not about sex - that is a myth. This law reinforces the stereotype that men are sex-crazed individuals and that child molesters and sexual predators need to be drugged to control sexual impulses. In reality, sexual assaults are about violence, power and the humiliation of a survivor or victim.

Eliminating sexual desire or a body part, for that matter seems like a quick fix. No more trying to squeeze extra convicts into already overcrowded jails. No more spending money to feed and clothe another felon sentenced to life. Just get rid of the testes. But this law avoids the real issues.

Firstly I should point out that pedophiles and child molesters are not the same thing. Having said that, sex crime against children does indeed happen for a variety of reasons. Most child molesters have many other psychopathological issues apart from a sexual attraction to children, and it has been argued that it's the other psychological issues they face, most especially sociopathy, that drive them to commit crimes, not their sex drive. As a matter of fact, studies have found that several convicted pedophiles already have low testosterone levels to begin with, strongly suggesting that it isn't their testosterone that makes them commit crime.

This is really the same argument as with any kind of rape. Men do not rape because of their sex drive. Men who rape do so because they have deep-seated psychological problems. Quite simply put, diminishing their sex drive does nothing to fix the underlying causes of their crimes. In a very real sense, chemical castration doesn't treat the problem at all because of this.

What I just said is highly relevant, because none of the drugs currently used for chemical castration have permanent effects. If the person being treated stops taking the drugs, their effects will subside. What this means is that the drugs will only work if the person being treated is willing to keep taking them.

In general, the best results have been gained from a combination of pharmacological and psychiatric treatment, and basically, drugs that control sex drive are no different from any other psychiatric medication. In conjunction with therapy, they can work. Without therapy, though, the medication doesn't address the underlying problems at all. In many cases, all it gets us is a former child molester who no longer has as much sex drive as before, but is still the kind of sociopath who is capable of sexually abusing children.

What's more, given that rape is not primarily an expression of sexuality but an expression of power and control, actual sexual functioning would seem to be secondary. And as I said, the drugs will need to be taken for the rest of the offender's life for them to stay effective. What if they just stop taking the drugs? You can't force anyone into therapy if they don't want it.

**

There are also some very real human rights issues involved. Sadly, "pedophiles" are such a good enemy that for a lot of people, they don't have any human rights at all. Here's how the Reuters article I started this post off with continues:

Prime Minister Donald Tusk said late last year he wanted obligatory castration for pedophiles, whom he branded 'degenerates'. Tusk said he did not believe "one can use the term 'human' for such individuals, such creatures."

"Therefore I don't think protection of human rights should refer to these kind of events," Tusk also said.

His remarks drew criticism from human rights groups but he never retracted them.

This is the kind of thing I expect from really bad novels, not actual politicians, but there you are, he said it. In Poland, pedophiles are not humans, and therefore they have no human rights.

Okay, so it's just the opinion of their prime minister. But it's a frightening one. In past times, chemical castration has been used in, for example, Britain, to treat homosexuality. Renowned computer scientist, cryptanalyst and mathematician Alan Turing agreed to undergo chemical castration to avoid being sent to prison for homosexuality. A few years later, he killed himself.

That brings me on to what I find most disturbing about this idea. The treatment will lower a patient's testosterone levels, which I pointed out are already low in some pedophiles. This means radically changing not only the person's sex drive but also their body and personality in general. If they're forced to take these drugs for a prolonged time, the "treatment" really means personality change.

Are we okay with the idea that the government can change your personality?

The treatment affects the offender's entire sex drive, at worst effectively denying them any kind of sex life. Pedophiles divide into exclusive and non-exclusive; the first kind are only sexually aroused by children, while the latter sort also have "normal" sexual impulses. Only roughly 7% of pedophiles are exclusive, so if a blanket chemical castration is applied, it means depriving 93% of the "patients" of a normal sex life. If that isn't cruel and unusual punishment, then I don't know what is.

The medical fact is that pedophiles are, by definition, mentally ill. Most child offenders are also mentally ill. What they need is treatment, not just for their sakes but for our sake as well. If people suffering from these mental disorders are going to rejoin society, they need to be treated for our safety as well as their health.

As it stands, the Polish scheme isn't going to prevent sex crime against children. Many sex offenders already undergo therapy without it being forced on them by the law. For the remainder, chemical castration won't be a treatment, it will be a punishment. And not only that, but a punishment that isn't effective at deterring the crime it's supposed to deter.

**

All in all, compulsory chemical castration is inhuman and ineffective. The only purpose it seems to have is to get politicians cheap votes from the moral panic on pedophilia. No matter how strongly we feel about any kind of crime, we can't just abandon our concepts of human rights to punish the offenders. It's even worse if we punish them in a way that doesn't even deter the crime.

Also, on a wider note, legislation like this can open doors to really scary places. As I said, are we comfortable with the idea of government-mandated personality change? In a way, that's what forcing you to take hormone-altering medication is. As psychiatric medicine advances, if we start passing laws like this, why not prescribe personality change as a punishment for other kinds of crime as well? I'm not seriously arguing that there's a direct and slippery slope from this law to a mind-control society, but it's worth thinking about. If only because the combination of moral panic, blatant disregard for human rights and enthusiasm about medical solutions sounds very scary indeed.