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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27528 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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Stressed working women raise less healthy, less intelligent children who are more likely to have behavioral problems

I presume by this you mean "mothers being stressed causes their children to be less healthy and less intelligent" rather than "those women who are likely to have less intelligent, less healthy children are also more likely to be stressed". Do you have a source and an estimate of the effect size? Based on the sorts of things I've seen (example), the effects exist but are usually quite small. For example, the highest effect size I found in that study was r=0.16 for maternal exposure to a natural disaster, which explains about 2.5% of the variance in outcomes -- and most of that effect size came from a single n=20 study about an ice storm, so I expect the effect size in practice is even smaller than that.

Intelligent working women give up on producing more offspring who are also intelligent

I expect this is almost the entire effect in practice.

It would be far more economically valuable in toto and longterm if women focused on their biological role of mothers, wives, and homemakers.

From a purely economic viewpoint I doubt that. I think the opportunity cost of being a homemaker is genuinely higher now than it used to be. Also the benefits are both distributed across society, and the benefits of choosing the homemaker route are not as legible as they could be to the women making that decision.

I am not sure if a 40-day ice storm can be compared with years of chronic stress occurring pre-pregnancy, during pregnancy, and in the post-pregnancy years crucial for childhood development. Table 2 in your study shows a .24 effect size for cognitive development due to ice storms however. What I do is plug in “maternal stress [serious problem]” into google scholar and consider those results. I have never come across a study that attempted to unify all of the different provlems caused by stressed mothers. We have:

The above are for prenatal stress, and so don’t factor for stress during motherhood, breastfeeding technique, extent of breastfeeding (huge differences in yr+ exclusive feeding and gradual weening)

I read him to mean older mothers are likely to have less intelligent kids because egg and sperm quality degrades as humans age. Not sure if it is true though it seems plausible. I’m not sure I would really trust the science here since the result is clearly politically salient.

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