There's A Prophet In The House, But Maybe Not Me

I like flowers, a lot. I'm not very knowledgeable about them, but ever since I spent about four months living with a florist as an exchange student in high school, I've been hooked. Every time I drive to work, or take the kids to soccer, or drive to the grocery store this time of year, I can't help but to ooh and ahh at the summer flowers that have come into their seasons peak, now that the bulbs and annuals of earlier in the spring have receded into the background a little. In particular, I am awestruck by the amazing rose bushes that dot the landscape of Denver's urban residential neighborhoods.

Indeed, roses are one of the few truly unifying themes of Denver's flora. The presence or absence of trees in a neighborhood turns out to be as accurate a measure of a neighborhood's prosperity in this city as payday loan shop frequency. New developments sport fancy, water efficient grasses and wildflowers as part of xeriscaping efforts. Institutional office building owners tend to have a thing for geraniums and mums. But, roses are ubiquitous, from West to East, North to South, almost all of Denver's neighborhoods have them, dotted irregularly in select houses placed prominent in front of houses, on boundary lines and climbing up back fences. Pink ones, red once, orange ones and yellow ones. Compact bushes and sprawling abundant vines. The rose bushes at the Byers-Evans house next to the Denver Art Museum are more than a century old.

Rose are to flowers what jazz is to music. Growing them isn't necessarily trendy, just as jazz isn't necessarily cutting edge, but it has appeal with every ethnicity and with people from 11 to 101. They are enjoyed by conservatives and liberals, but modernists and traditionalists, and just about anyone else.

The trouble is that in addition to not being very knowledgeable about them, I also don't have much of a green thumb.  More often than not, my gardening efforts are epic fails, despite the encouragement and help I receive from my more talented neighbors.

My dear wife is a better gardener than I am, but has different preferences. Practical woman that she is, she prefers herbs and vegetables to flowers. Flowers just aren't her thing and she isn't inclined to devote much effort to my frivolous decorations.

So, once or twice every year, I am the one who makes an effort to plant some flowers with varying degrees of success. Some years it is pansies and marigolds. On two previous occasions it has been rose bushes which promptly died. Every once and a while I have a little success that keeps me going. Last fall, I planted bulbs and all but one of them actually bloomed this spring.

This year we'd been preoccupied earlier in this spring. Our lawn was eventually fertilized and mowed a few weeks behind schedule. Our vegetables and herbs had finally gone in the week before. And, this year, for father's day, I figured that instead of going on a hike in the mountains, or watching a movie with the kids, we'd plant rose bushes. Planting rose bushes that might still be their when they have kids of their own would certainly be more memorable and would also be a better quality way to spent time with them.

So, we spent the morning traipsing across town to find our treasures. But, my daughter, ever the prophet of doom, having not forgotten the debacle of last year's effort in which our dainty new collection of freshly planted flowers was destroyed by the first bad hail storm of the year informed me:

"Dad, it's going to hail and tear all the petals off your roses. It's karma."

The weather, while clouded, wasn't that foreboding in the morning, I'm not that superstitious, and I was more worried about whether our BBQ plans would be rained out than a hail storm. So, I ignored her dire warning, and by early afternoon our two beautiful rose bushes were nicely settled in the garden plot in front of the front picture window in our living room.

Needless to say, four hours later, the hail came down with a vengeance in raisin to almost acorn sized lumps for a good half an hour or so, followed by about twenty-eight hours of rain (notwithstanding the protestations of our newspaper of record which claims that there was no measurable precipitation on Sunday).

The rose bushes survived, badly battered, and perhaps the rain will allow them to recover and last in the long run. But, given the circumstances, maybe I'm wrong about who in our household is the real "Wash Park Prophet."

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Parenting, Privacy, Porn and the Internet

If you're tired about talking about the real estate market and soccer leagues, and you want to liven up discussion at a party with people with children of a certain age, talk about how you manage your children's Internet access.

Some parents long for every opportunity to monitor and control their children's access to the Internet. Others take a more lassiez-faire attitude. My wife and I are certainly more relaxed than some, although we do have limits.

The Internet and the Death of Childhood Privacy

From a child's perspective, one of the important implications of the Internet is that it makes it possible for parents to know what they are doing at a level of detail that was previously impracticable.

The Denver Public Schools has a system that allows you to see your older child's every quiz grade, every absence and tardy notation, every homework assignment and pretty much everything else that the system has noted regarding your child in something approximating real time.

While they have the power to put passwords on their library cards, they don't, so that I can manage online book renewals and fill my household role a book return heavy, thereby minimizing library fines which is an area where we have imposed early personal financial responsibility. So, I know what they check out for the library. I can also monitor the e-books and e-audio books that they enjoy.

Netflix keeps track of which streaming media are watched for how long on which days, and which DVDs are mailed and returned. It doesn't take much in the way of investigative skills to figure out who is watching what when. If I wished, I could also impose parental controls on that account.

I could impose parental controls on my children's Internet usage, audit their web browsing histories, and more, if I was so inclined. For the moment, at least, I have the log in information to my children's e-mail accounts (all pseudonymous), so I can see how they write to, how often, what they write and when. It is also child's play to look at my daughter's cell phone and see who she has called and texted when and what was said in the texts.

Since they don't have cars yet and don't have license to wander our urban residential neighborhood very far without an accompanying adult, they can't really come and go from the house without us knowing where they are going.

The old school days when you insisted on looking at your child's report card and snooped in their diary and under their beds now and then look positively hands off compared to what is possible these days. Children roamed small town streets on bikes, food and skateboards with all the freedom of outdoor cats so long as they were home in time for dinner or called from a friend's house to say that they were having dinner there.  Local phone calls on landlines and notes passed on scraps of paper in class were not logged and hard to intercept. Nobody's television kept a record of what was being watched when that parents could review later. Library records weren't available for parents to review at the touch of a key while they were on lunch break. A child who was the first to the mailbox in the afternoon even had a plausible shot at intercepting letters directed to them through the postal service.

Bad Stuff It Is Out There

The Internet is not a rated PG forum. There is hard core pornography easily available for free to anyone savvy enough to write a Google search; some of it could even land someone in prison. This is far different from the days when you have to find someone to buy it for you, brave an inquiring neighborhood shop clerk, or engage in petty theft to see it, and even it wasn't nearly so vivid.

Cyber bullying and sexting are not unheard of phenomena, although they seem to be mostly outgrowths of real life interactions.

Phishing scams rolling in constantly to every web address and cause real financial harm.

A public embarrassment on line has the ultimate global audience and can't be erased by any reasonable means.

One of the biggest differences between controlling parents and those who are more relaxed is an assessment of how much of a risk, in terms of likelihood, seriousness and preventability is involved in these things.

Total Control Isn't Easy

We encourage them to use their computers in public view but they have laptops, they not infrequently have homework that requires computer use (my daughter had an insane amount of educational computer games for a math class last year in addition to the demands of other classes like social studies report and essay writing), and it is frequently best for family harmony if they do their work in their own rooms.

If my children were of a mind to keep secrets, they could in a variety of ways that they have the technical know how to manage if they were so inclined. If they were of a mind to use family credit cards to make online purchases, they could (although we'd know that someone made them when the statements came in each month if we paid enough attention and the purchases weren't sufficiently bland).

Having some sense of what your children are up to much of the time doesn't take much effort. Perfectly reliable monitoring and control is nearly impossible without becoming a real tyrant and consuming vast amounts of everyone's time in the process.

Why We Don't Fear Forbidden Fruit

Honestly, the best weapon in the fight against inappropriate Internet use is boredom. They simply are not interested in pushing the envelope. They'd rather watch the latest Disney drek than media aimed at older viewers. Long minutes of teenagers snogging, or worse, rates as seriously boring so far. Stop action you tube flicks of dancing Barbies to the latest tune from the radio, or cute kittens has more appeal than subversive political or religious messages. My working assumption is that adult material won't be interesting until they are ready, or almost ready for it.

We aren't terribly afraid of knowledge, even when it is a bit off color. Secrets can be corrosive, and are hard to hide within a family, and maintaining and preserving an inaccurate air brushed view of the world is even harder. We try not to put off questions, and instead to provide the answers to the questions that are really being asked without adding the undue adult emotional baggage than avoiding questions in the interests of the taboos of polite society can. We try to be truthful, factual and bland when the question and the person asking it don't indicate that it is asked, for example, "why are we learning about AIDS and HIV in a 4th grade Family Life class, the required a special permission slip?", indicate that a bare bones answer will satisfy curiosity without a full fledged birds and the bees talk.

If anything, mystery can call attention and interest to subject that tweens and even teen would otherwise find boring and uninteresting. We don't fetishize wine and liquor as forbidden fruits, and talk about the consequences of drinking too much without undue moralizing and without touting a prohibitionists line we don't adhere to. The same applies to material on the Internet that they don't need but don't necessarily want either, if we don't call attention to it.

Google holds the keys to lots of accurate information, as well as lots of mischief, work with them in research related homework projects has helped us to teach them how to distinguish trustworthy and not so trustworthy sources, and there will no doubt be queries in their lives at some point that would be mutually embarrassing for them to ask us that they can get authoritative, accurate answers to over the Internet, just as my generation did from the reference section and non-fiction books in the library. I'd rather that they have the means to get accurate information without asking an adult or letting us know that they are even asking, than not have information that they need at all. Sometimes a question about chlamydia asked because of a concern about a friend really is a question asked because of a concern about a friend. But what adult can help but to leap to suspicions? And, what smart kid doesn't know that they will?

Our main worry is not inappropriate media, or Internet predators. It is Internet and media overload. The limits that we impose have more to do with "how much" than they do with "what" online and media exposure they receive. So long as the number of hours they spend in front of a screen isn't excess, and we do impose limits in that regard, we don't worry much. If they are still reading books, getting outdoor activity, spending time with friends, keeping on top of their homework and so on, a little indulgence is accepted.

Most serious online trouble involves overindulgence. A kid who watches 3 minutes of porn once is not going to be scared for life. A kid who watches hours of it on a regular basis for weeks may get pretty messed up and not realize that this is adult fantasy and not reality. Obsession is more often a problem that knowledge.

In our privacy free online world (so far), sometimes they get caught exceeding the boundaries. Minor transgressions, like a quick check in with an age appropriate online world they have a character in, or a check of an e-mail account, between bouts of homework, are overlooked, although we don't leave them with the illusion that they are putting one over on us. A parental reputation for omniscience can discourage a multitude of sins. Major transgressions are usually punished in kind; watching a movie or playing a video game when you weren't permitted to on Tuesday night may mean forfeiting the chance to do so on Friday after school.

Strategic Reasons For a Light Touch

We try not to be disproportionate in our reactions to a great extent for strategic reasons. We'd like parental discovery of their activities to loom as a lesser tragedy than the alternatives if they get over their head. For example, we wouldn't want them to avoid letting us know about a cyber bully or someone communicating with them inappropriately out of excessive fear of punishment for using the Internet when they weren't supposed to be doing so.

We know perfectly well that we can't hope to be fully informed about what our children do with their friends and their romantic travails as teenagers. But we'd like to think that if the risks of talking to us aren't too high, and questions about their social lives remain as routine and inevitable as our questions about what kind of cake there was at the birthday party and whether it was home made, that we might at least have some sense of who most of the more important people in their lives are these days, and of what those people are like.

Let's face it. Hosting parties for your kids is not simply something that you do out of the goodness of your heart. It is also a part of a comprehensive intelligence strategy to figure out what kind of kids your children choose as company.

At some point, you can no longer choose your children's friends (or eventually, their lovers). But if you keep the door open while remaining basically honest, you can hope to provide some feedback to your child about the people in their lives, for what it is worth, that will be considered as they make their own decisions for themselves. If you acknowledge that sooner or later you will lose control, maintaining credibility becomes more important than bolstering your authority. If you can maintain credibility and stay well enough informed to know when there are opinions to be offered, you don't need hard authority over your children.

Kids have been defying their parents in matters of friendship and love since long before Romeo and Juliet became a classic. The ancient Greeks developed a whole literary genre based upon people ignoring what their betters told them was in their best interests and called it tragedy. But a lot of bridges have to burned before a child ceases to have some preference for parental approval if it is within the realm of the possible, and I'd like to believe that if this card is not overplayed that it can produce beneficial results for all involved.

Who Knows What Approach Works Best?

These observations don't come stamped with a double blind longitudinal study, or the after the fact certificate of approval that comes with kids who somehow managed to do well in the end once they grew up.

Of course, not even couples fully agree how to approach these matters.  My wife is fond of very specific rules that contain the word "never," ideally presented long before the situations to which they apply come up.  Despite, or perhaps because, of the fact that I'm a lawyer, I'm more inclined to generalized character building, talking about situations we encounter in our life, developing a way of thinking about problems, being a role model when I can, and honestly admitting my own shortcomings when I can't.  I don't like to borrow worry and I prefer to take life's challenges as they come.  She sees a parent as more like a law giver dispensing the Ten Commandments of life, while I see a parent as more like a teacher in a liberal arts curriculum or a socratic method law professor trying to get the students to draw their own conclusions from a case.

The combined effect may sometimes be incoherent on the receiving end.  When they do children can arbitrage the approaches to some extent by seeking to be regulated by the preferred parental regime, or can simply do what they wish instead of what they have been told.  What couples (and children) don't face these issues to some extent?  But, because our values aren't that far from each other on the main objectives, we manage.  Maybe we really suck at parenting, but have been blessed with children who were born predisposed to have half decent judgment anyway.  There is really no way to know for sure. But fools rush in where angels fear to tread and in the absence of definitive data you do your best because you have to do make real choices every single day and live with them.

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Reflections On Parenting As School Is Out For The Year

Today is the last day of school for my children in the Denver Public Schools (a few schools affiliated with the district have alternative calendars).

Honestly, as inconvenient as it can be to cobble together everyone's new schedules for the summer, it is a joy for the sense of rhythm it adds to life. I spend the majority of of my daylight hours in climate controlled office buildings, and Denver's weather is quirky enough that the conditions when I do venture out don't always give me a clear take on the season.

Like most jobs, my work is amorphous. I have many cases going at any given time and they almost never all stop at once. While I'm often very aware of the date, one month can blur into the next, and one year slides into another. Everything that I do except tax planning has rolling deadlines, not annual ones. I'm not the exception. A colleague of mine I had lunch with this week could figure out what year he started his current employment only in reference to the year that someone in the firm had a child.

Children ground you and give you bearings. Their schools years make your place in the seasons relevant to your life. Their well defined march from year to year is full of landmarks - entering elementary school, hitting double digits in age, entering middle school, and soon enough for me, the teen years, and high school. Life with one or two preschoolers is so very different from having children in school. Life before one of the kids is old enough to babysit has immense logistical differences from life after that point. Their school vacations, their school performances and awards ceremonies, their sports seasons, their report cards and their fund raisers add predictable highlights to the year. Without them to ground us, life might seem to go by in a fugue.

The end of the school year is also one of the dates, along with my birthday, my anniversary, New Year's Day, Valentine's Day, and the anniversary of my first admission to the practice of law that I step back and reflect on what I've accomplished in the past years.

The end of the school year, even more than my children's birthdays, is a day that I treat a bit like those signs that say "X days without accidents." I have gotten the kids this many years into their lives with parents who have stayed married, a stable home and school, and the kind of academic and social progress that they should have at this point. I'm someone who spends a lot of time reminding people of their mortality in connection with estate planning and probate work, and when I'm not doing that I'm often planning for worst case financial scenarios in asset protection planning. I also monitor the nature v. nurture debate on the context of the latest findings of psychologists and psychiatrists and neuroscientists and geneticists. So, I help but to ponder at the end of each school year, "what if I got hit by a bus right now?", how much of doing everything we've done to raise our children so far would stick and what might fall apart? How irrevocable are the benefits we've conferred upon them this year? How set are they on the courses of their lives?

The academic literature on this isn't terribly rigorous, mostly because people who have critical experiences tend to be undersampled.  Basket case parents usually don't adopt and thus, don't end up in adoption studies. Very few twins are separated at birth, because its cruel. Flakes on the brink of survival tend to not volunteer for longitudinal research studies.

There is a lot of literature on on the extent to which traits are hereditary and the point in time when academic achievement gaps start to manifest. This literature offers reassurance to the anxious parent. Statistically speaking, a much larger share of variance between people in a wide variety of traits than people who are not familiar with the literature would expect can be attributed either to hereditary effects, or to "non-shared environment" between siblings which mostly involves things other than the choices that parents can control in raising their children.

But, to be a pessimist and cast a necessary dollop of doubt upon these findings, a great many traits involve gene x environment interactions, and the vast majority of people whose experiences give rise to the estimates of heredity don't experience many major upheavals in their lives. Studies that select subjects based on shared experiences of major upheavals and traumas tend to see bigger environmental effects than studies of the general population that capture people who have experienced these things only sporadically.

For example, the research seems to indicate that the genetic component of IQ is basically a ceiling on a person's intellectual ability in the absence of negative environmental factors that drag someone down. For people in middle class or upper middle class environments that have few of these drags on learning, the genetic component of IQ is quite large. For people who grow up in poverty, the shared environment impact of poverty on family members which varies a lot depending upon the parenting present that can mitigate or aggravate these environmental drags on learning are far more important as a source of variation from one person to the next, than a person's peak genetic potential IQ which is very hard to achieve when one is in poverty.

Not all traits in a child's development are in formative periods at the same time either. The genetic and environmental influences of IQ have pretty much run their course by the time a child heads to middle school, if not sooner.  Most children have clearly left the path that includes anger management problems and disruptive behavior by then as well.  A tendency towards anxiety manifests extremely early, as does gender identity (i.e. viewing oneself as male or female, regardless of one's body or sexual orientation).  A child's capacity to delay gratification also appears to manifest quite early.

There is some psychological literature that indicates that middle school and high school are critical ages in terms of how a person will function later in life in intimate relationships. A nasty divorce or betrayal of trust by an adults through sexual relationships with a kid at that point in life can undermine a kid's willingness to make the commitments and have the trust needed to avoid stumbling blocks later in life in those relationships.  But, few people end up spending their lives with their middle school, or even high school, sweethearts.  Some people are more resilient than others in the face of trauma.  Some young people who are made into child soldiers or gang members will be forever stone cold, while others can be restored to some semblance of normalcy if intervention happens soon enough and their reentry to society is managed well.

There is anecdotal evidence that people tend to keep whatever hairstyle and fashion preferences they adopt in their early twenties for the rest of their adult lives.

For parents the goal posts keep moving. Just when you can be confident that you have finally cleared the hurdle of getting your kids on the right track in life in one thing no matter how much you screw up later, there is some new critical developmental hurdle to clear.

Of course, this isn't exclusively a parent's responsibility. Kids make good and bad choices in their own lives that start when parents no longer have effective absolute veto power over what they eat for lunches and snacks and continue well into adulthood. Academics and opera singers have critical developments they need to make in their career specialties that will influence the rest of their lives greatly, well into their thirties, long after most have left the nest. For political staffers and lawyers and management consultants and investment bankers and doctors, one's first few years on the job are typically when you develop your professional specialty, which can be very hard to predict based upon your generalized education before that point. Some people who move to a new country as adults will adapt fairly gracefully, even if they never entirely lose their accents, while others fail to thrive or "crack" psychologically at that point. A choice of a life partner can change who you become.

For better or for worse, my own tendency is not to second guess what I've already done very much - it is what it is, but to fret over how secure what has already been accomplished will be in the future and one what developmental issues are not yet set strongly for children of the same age and gender as mine. I'm sure that there are other ways of looking at it, and some are probably better than mine. But, these are the kind of yardsticks that come to mind almost involuntarily.

Similarly, it is hard for me to stay focused on what my children do well and could perhaps advance further doing, as opposed to focusing on the issues that they struggle with but need to master. Focusing on the negative can be discouraging to them, but every time I see an issue come up for one of my children that is a struggle, I hear a clock silently ticking away in my head. Is it too late to make real progress in dealing with this? And, of course, there is joy in simply seeing children cease to become abstract possibilities and become their own distinctive individuals on their own paths in life. Each time that they take one fork instead of another in life you can develop a better feel for the kinds of paths they will take in life as adults and who they are becoming. Is he outgoing or introspective? Will she be a tomboy or a girl who is all sugar and spice? How tall will they grow? What are their academic strong and weak points? How do they treat their friends?  What lessons are they learning from me by example?

Sometimes you can get ahead of yourself. My dear wife has been obsessing about where our children will go to college since they were in pre-school, although this urge has been tamed a little over time. I'm less like a "tiger dad" and more like someone reading all of the Harry Potter books from start to finish and impatiently driven by pure curiosity to see what ends up in the epilogue, perhaps at the expense of the joy of the journey, without as much emphasis on having any particular ending.  We each only have one shot for each child and we can only do our best and strive to improve.

READ MORE - Reflections On Parenting As School Is Out For The Year

Parental Rights For The Other Man

Men who father a child during an affair with a married woman have the right to seek a role in the child's life, the Kentucky Supreme Court has ruled [4-3]. In an emotionally charged decision that critics say will undermine marriage, the court reversed centuries of common law and its own 2008 ruling that held such children are presumed to be the offspring of the woman and her husband.

From here referring to this ruling.

The only think I find surprising about the result on the merits, once paternity has been established notwithstanding the non-conclusive presumption that children are the offspring of the woman and her husband, is that it was so controversial, and an examination of the opinion reveals that the issue framed by the newspaper in the quote above wasn't the real issue before the court anyway.

The common law presumption of paternity in a marriage couple is centuries old, but that presumption has rarely been interpreted as being a conclusive one and has very rarely been applied in cases where it is obvious at birth (e.g. because a child is of mixed race or the husband was away at sea or at war for the entire period when the child could have been conceived) that the child is not the genetic offspring of the mother's husband. Usually, people don't look beyond the presumption and there is no duty or expectation that married couples will affirmatively establish whether or not husbands are cuckolds, even were there are good reasons to be suspicious. In the absence of scientific testing in cases of same race fathers, where the wife continued to have sex with the husband during the affair, however, which made up most of the cases when the common law presumption was developed, there was no reliable evidentiary way to overcome the presumption, and a version of this common law approach that captured the effect of this rule but not the reasoning behind it was codified into the archaic laws of Kentucky.

So, the real controversy in the Kentucky case (notwithstanding the spin given to it by the newspaper quoted above) for five of the seven judgges was really over whether the presumption of paternity in the case of a married couple was conclusive or merely evidentiary, given the archaic language of Kentucky's family law statutes that replaced the common law in this area of law. Kentucky's past precedents which were less than clear on the issue because a 2008 decision on a similar issue produced a consensus on the outcome but not on the legal justification for that outcome. The statute gives courts jurisdiction over paternity matters in cases of children "born out of wedlock." One past interpretation of that statute reached this result by reasoning that an affair interrupted "the marital relationship" even in the absence of a divorce or physical separation, by breaking the vow of monogamy. The Kentucky Supreme Court this week took a more direct approach, holding that defines the term "born out of wedlock" in relation to a child to refer to "a child whose mother, married or not, is not married to the child's biological father" without regard to the condition of the mother's marriage.

The new rule will make it unnecessary to procure in future legal proceedings of this kind the kind of evidence considered by the trial judge in this case to the effect that:

Appellant married R.S. on October 9, 1999. They have lived together ever since. They slept in the same bed, regularly engaged in sexual intercourse, and prior to 2008 had one child, whose paternity is not at issue. From August 2007 through the spring of 2008, Appellant was involved in an intimate and secret affair with Real Party In Interest, C .H .E., who was also married but was in the process of divorce. Appellant and C.H .E. had sexual intercourse on numerous occasions between October 2007 and March 2008. Throughout the affair, however, Appellant and her husband continued having sexual intercourse on a regular basis.

According to Appellant, the affair began because her marital relationship was troubled. She professed her love to C.H .E. and told him that she wanted to leave her marriage to be with him. He professed his love for her. She lied to her husband about her whereabouts when she was with C .H .E ., and she lied about the reason his phone number often appeared on her phone bill.

In early 2008, Appellant discovered she was pregnant. By March of 2008, she decided to end the illicit affair, but admits that she did not clearly communicate that to C .H.E . Instead, she continued to have frequent, nonsexual contact with him. She met some of his family members and kept him informed about her prenatal medical care: Appellant's husband remained unaware of the affair. He testified that had they not been having regular sexual intercourse, her pregnancy would have been a "huge problem" that he would have addressed immediately.

On September 8, 2008, Appellant gave birth in Kentucky to a baby girl, N.R.S. Two weeks later, she and C .H .E. arranged for a DNA test to determine if he was the father of N.R.S. The DNA test revealed a 99.9429% probability that C.H .E . was the baby's father. When C.H.E. expressed a desire to acknowledge his daughter and to be a part of her life, Appellant informed her husband of the affair.

On October 14, 2008, C.H.E. filed a paternity action in the Kenton Family Court pursuant to KRS Chapter 406.

After this decision of the Kentucky Supreme Court, everything in the recitation of facts set forth above that is not in bold would have been excluded from testimony on the grounds that it was not legally relevant. Like "no fault" divorce, this innovation will save the husband, mother, genetic father, lawyers and judge hours of uncomfortable testimony about the sex lives and feelings of married couples and adulterers, will bring increased certainty to the law, will fit more squarely with modern views of what is just and fair, and will generally dispense will court hearings on that issue of paternity entirely - the real trial will take place in some genetic testing laboratory based entirely on scientific principles that are far more reliable than court testimony in this situation, rather than the ordinary court evidentiary process.

The notion that someone who is an established parent of a child is entitled to participate in the parenting of that child, absent of finding of unfitness, is a bedrock principle of family law in every U.S. state and probably has constitutional dimensions at this point. Also, given that it is common place in modern society for people who are not married to each other and may each be currently married to other people to co-parent a child, it is not as if this situation poses any special difficulties for family courts or societal institutions that deal with parents and children to handle.

What did the dissenting judges say?

The Chief Justice's dissent was lawyerly, and addressed the conclusiveness of the presumption, stating in the pertinent part:

The General Assembly could have adopted substantially the same
definition by incorporating into KRS 406 .011 the language proposed by the drafters of the Uniform Act on Paternity (1960) : "[a] child born out of wedlock includes a child born to a married woman by a man other than her husband." But it chose not to; instead, it explicitly "includes" in KRS 406.011 "a child born to a married woman" as a child born out of wedlock only "where evidence shows that the marital relationship between the husband and wife ceased ten (10) months prior to the birth of the child ." See J.N.R., 264 S .W.3d at 590-91. And while use of the term includes might otherwise signal an illustrative rather than exhaustive term, I believe that the legislature's refusal to adopt the broad definition proposed by the Uniform Act on Paternity draft evinces a clear legislative intent contrary to the majority's interpretation. Given that KRS 406.180 states that KRS Chapter 406 only applies to births "out of wedlock" and that the legislature chose not to adopt the definition of born out of wedlock that the majority adopts today, I do not agree with the majority that the trial court had subject matter jurisdiction simply because a paternity action was purportedly filed under KRS 406.021.

Perhaps changing mores and the advent of DNA testing call for a
different approach than the one the legislature chose in decades past . If so, the legislature should undertake that broad policy debate. But I do not believe it is proper for this Court to amend the statutes by construing them in a manner contrary to the legislature's clear intent.

The Chief Justice does not engage, perhaps because it was not adequately briefed, or perhaps because the dissent was a lost cause anyway, the constitutional argument that his proposed reading of the statute denies the father of the child a constitutional right to be recognized as a parent and to be involved in the parenting of his child absent abuse or neglect.

The other two dissenting justices on the Kentucky Supreme Court wrote a short opinion that was weak on the law, weak on the facts and classic cases of pounding on the table with characteristic Appalacian bluster and evangelical moral outrage. They also raise another issue. In their view, the problem is not necessarily that the presumption that a man married to the mother is conclusive, but that a challenge to that presumption can be raised by someone other than the man married to the mother. Thus, they want to allow a cuckolded man to have the right to challenge paternity, but also the right not to have the paternity of children of his wife, whatever their genetic ancestry may actually be, contested by "the other man." They state in their short opinion:

We vigorously dissent under the same banner for which we wrote in J.N.R. v. O'Reilly, 264 S .W.3d 587 (Ky. 2008). In essence, we hold strongly that only partners to marriage have the standing to question the legitimacy of children born during their marriage. Interlopers cannot use their own adulterous behavior as a license to invade and disrupt the matrimonial circle. The majority here deals with only one child. We speak for the thousands of children yet unborn . For centuries, the institution of marriage has "been the rock in the shadow of which children are born, shaded, protected, and nurtured." Id. at 599 (Cunningham, J., concurring in result only). Our extended comments in the J.N.R. case will be left to speak for our refusal to stand quietly by as the legal institution of marriage is surrendered to the funeral pyre of modern convenience and unanchored values. We refuse to bow down to the "Gods of the Market-Place ." RUDYARD KIPLING, THE GODS OF THE COPYBOOK HEADINGS (1919) . Who is right and who is wrong in our debate will be left to the long view of history.

It will be interesting to see how this decision plays out in the next election for Kentucky Supreme Court seats in this religiously conservative state: "The Court has seven justices, each of whom is elected for an eight-year term from one of seven geographic districts in non-partisan elections. The justices' terms are staggered; they do not all run for election in the same years. The justices choose one of their number to serve a four-year term as chief justice[.]"

The Chief Justice (from a district that includes Bowling Green, Kentucky) and the lead author for the other dissenting opinion face the voters in 2015. The concurring judge to the other dissenting opinion faces the voters in 2013 in the 7th Supreme Court District, which consists of 22 counties in Eastern Kentucky. Three justices in the majority face voters in 2016 and the other faces voters in 2015.

READ MORE - Parental Rights For The Other Man

College Graduates Usually Live With Parents After Graduating

When I graduated from college, I went straight to law school, and from law school, straight to a home that my wife and I shared with no one else but our cat.  I've never moved back in with my parents and neither did my brother after he graduated from college, nor did either of our spouses.  But, this pattern is increasingly rare. 

A new survey discussed by Time Magazine finds that 85% of college graduates move back in with their parents after graduating from college.  The iconic modern American twentysomething is comic strip character Dustin, who spends days looking for jobs and nights at home with his parents, and his undead television comedy counterpart "George" (played by Ellen Muth) in the series "Dead Like Me," both of which presciently debuted before the current economy made their protagonists' experiences so routine.  What is driving the trend?

Times are undeniably tough. Reports have placed the unemployment rate for the under-25 group as high as 54%. Many of these unemployed graduates are choosing to go into higher education in an attempt to wait out the job market, while others are going anywhere — and doing anything — for work. Meanwhile, moving back home helps with expenses and paying off student loans.

Failure to launch, is no longer the exception.  It is the norm in the current economy.  This also helps to explain why more and more young twenty-somethings are deferring getting married and having kids.  Household formation rates are at record lows.  We are experience the baby boom in reverse.

The particularly troubling part is that missteps at the beginning of a career often have a disproportionate impact on a person's entire work life.  If this is really just a temporary bump in the road, it isn't that big a deal in the greater scheme of things, but this may be a far more serious case of a nascent lost generation.  When the economy picks up again, that big businesses and professional firms that would have hired people from the last few crops of college graduates to entry level jobs that put those hires on a path to high end careers are likely to hire almost entirely from the most recent crop of new graduates, rather than trying to locate promising talent that was missed in the prior years when hiring was stopped or slowed.  Even for those new graduates who wash out of their plum first jobs a few years later as firms winow out all but the most talented prospects whom they promote, not starting off at a plum job may make the difference between being able to pay off students loans in five years and being able to pay off student loans in twenty years.

For bright new college graduates, their prospects are not totally crushed.  The current bought of unemployment is probably cyclic.  When the economy comes back, there will be jobs and it is always better to be in the job market with a college degree than to be without one.  But, jobless new graduates are left in a particularly frustrating position.  While commentators like David Brooks wants to call them lazy, what can they do?

It’s difficult to argue that they need to go to college, because they did. It’s difficult to argue that they can’t move to new jobs (unlikely to be homeowners) or suffer high health care costs (doesn’t health care reform allow employers to push their health costs onto their parents’ employer?). Unless we think that the graduating class of 2008 is fundamentally worse than the graduate class of 2006 I don’t see a technology problem.

Also for fun, the graduating classes post-Recession have increasingly large student debt loans, which should lower the reservation wage they’ll accept due to liquidity pressures. So the idea that everyone 20-24 is on vacation is harder to accept compared to earlier years.

New college graduates emerging out into the world this year are no more, and no less than unlucky.  They should have been born a few years earlier or later than the year that I graduated from high school, but they weren't.

We can hope, at least, that this will be merely a temporary circumstance.  But, it isn't impossible that this trend will endure.  For example, one of the major forces driving Islamic terrorism in the world is the existence of an immense class of unemployed college graduates across the oil rich states of the Middle East and North Africa.  Indeed, the suicide of a once too often discouraged college graduate in Tunisia was the spark the set off the wave of revolutions that have dislodged or tried to remove authoritarian regimes across tthe regime.  Similarly, this phenomena has been the norm in Japan ever since it experienced its housing bubble collapse triggered lost decade, long before the financial crisis, and it has defined a whole generation since then.  There is not obvious end to that trend on the horizon in Japan.

READ MORE - College Graduates Usually Live With Parents After Graduating

Beyond Heritable IQ in Socioeconomic Success

IQ is one of the stronger predictors of socio-economic success in life, and success on a wide variety of other measures, and a lot of a person's IQ is heritable.

Personality, IQ and Success

In a result, largely contrary to the claims of Malcolm Gladwell in his book, "Outliers" in which he claimed that the famous Terman study which looked at life outcomes for a large cohort of California students with an  IQ of 135 or higher on the Stanford-Binet in 1921-1922, over their entire lifetimes, a recent analysis of that data has shown that IQ is a significant predictor socio-economic success at all levels within this elite subgroup.  Male teman study members with IQs in the bottom of the range for inclusion, IQ 135 (roughly the 99th percentile), had lifetime earnings (in 2008 dollars from ages 18 to 75) of about $2,350,000.  Those in the top 10% of the study group (roughly the 99.9th percentile), had lifetime earnings of about $2,700,000, a statistically significant 15% difference of $350,000 that was stronger at the end of their careers than at the beginning.  Averaged over 40 years, the average annual income of those at the bottom of the IQ range was $58,750 (in 2008 dollars) and the average annual income of those at the top of the IQ range was $67,500.

Thus, there were lifetime economic benefits to being a genius, rather than merely "gifted" but the benefits weren't huge either.

More interestingly, the study also had data on the "Big Five" personality traits (conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, openness and neuroticism) of the the study participants, the most widely uses psychological description of general temperament.  Wikipedia notes regarding the Big Five that:

A number of meta-analyses have confirmed the predictive value of the Big Five across a wide range of behaviors. Saulsman and Page examined the relationships between the Big Five personality dimensions and each of the 10 personality disorder categories in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). Across 15 independent samples, the researchers found that each disorder displayed a unique and predictable five-factor profile. The most prominent and consistent personality predictors underlying the disorders were positive associations with Neuroticism and negative associations with Agreeableness.

In the area of job performance, Barrick and Mount reviewed 117 studies utilizing 162 samples with 23,994 participants. They found that conscientiousness showed consistent relations with all performance criteria for all occupational groups. Extraversion was a valid predictor for occupations involving social interaction (e.g. management and sales). Furthermore, extraversion and openness to experience were valid predictors of training proficiency criteria.

The personality impacts of Big Five personality traits in the general population were largely confirmed in high IQ populations.  Moreover, Big Five personality traits are independent of IQ in high IQ populations:

[E]ven though the Terman sample has a restricted range of IQ, there is substantial variation in personality. In fact, the Terman men do not differ from the general population in terms of personality.

Evolutionary pressures appear to quite consistently favor higher IQ in the long run, but some models suggest that evolutionary pressures on personality traits favor an ecological mix of personality types rather than a single personality, so no one personality trait has translated into "fitness" in the long run (of course, if it had, we wouldn't notice it, since it would mathematically fold into IQ by virtue of the way that IQ is constructed by psychologists).

Big Five traits are heritable, but not as strongly as IQ, although some of the weaker association may be a product of a less refined measurement instrument, as the Big Five personality traits have been consensus personality measurements only since the early 1980s, while the concepts of "g" and IQ are among the oldest in psychology, which has allowed more time to refine the measurement of the concept.

Of four recent twin studies, the mean estimated broad heritabilities on self-report measures for the Big Five traits were as follows:

Openness: 57%

Conscientiousness: 49%

Extraversion: 54%

Agreeableness: 42%

Neuroticism: 48% . . .

Many studies of longitudinal data, which correlate people's test scores over time, and cross-sectional data, which compare personality levels across different age groups, show a high degree of stability in personality traits during adulthood. More recent research and meta-analyses of previous studies, however, indicate that change occurs in all five traits at various points in the lifespan. The new research shows evidence for a maturation effect. On average, levels of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness typically increase with time, whereas Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Openness tend to decrease.  . . .

Cross-cultural research from 26 nations (N = 23,031 subjects) and again in 55 nations (N = 17,637 subjects) has shown a universal pattern of sex differences on responses to the Big Five Inventory. Women consistently report higher Neuroticism and Agreeableness, and men often report higher Extraversion and Conscientiousness. Sex differences in personality traits are largest in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities that are equal to those of men. Both men and women tend to grow more extraverted and conscientious and less neurotic and agreeable as cultures grow more prosperous and egalitarian, but the effect is stronger for men.

Conscientiousness overlaps with ADD inattentive symptoms, and both of these traits are also correlated with digit ratio which is an easy to measure physical trait associated with natal testosterone level exposures.  Specifically: "More masculinized finger-length ratios show associations with ADHD symptoms, possibly acting through the trait mechanism of conscientiousness."  This is in line with the cross-cultural gender discrepencies observed in onscientiousness.

The second digit to fourth digit finger ration has been shown to be a reliable indicator of testosterone exposure in utero. If your fourth finger (your ring finger) is longer than your second finger (the one next to your thumb) you had a high exposure to testosterone when your mother was pregnant with you. This ratio has also been associated with genital size, aggression, ADHD and now conscientiousness.

Thus, a significant cause of conscientious personality and ADHD is congenital, but not hereditary.  Digit ratio and IQ over 130 are also associated.


Conscientiousness and neuroticism are both strongly correlated with ADHD inattentive type, in that order, and agreeableness, neuroticism, and conscientiousness are strongly correlated with ADHD hyperactive type in that order).  ADHD, with the strength of the relationship being strongest between conscientiousness and ADD inattentive type diagnosis (r=-0.59), is the strongest of the Big Five/ADHD correlations.

The Big Five personality traits aren't perfectly independent of each other, but they are sufficiently independent of each other than a four factor model captures significantly less of the variation in personality from person to person, and the Big Five measure was created with the express purpose of identifying maximally independent factors.

Four of the Big Five personality traits had a measurable impact on lifetime earning of men with IQs of 135 of more.  Neuroticism, surprisingly, was completely unrelated to lifetime income.  In 2008 dollar terms, comparing the lowest decile to the highest decile in each of the other four traits, the lifetime impact of being high in each of the traits was approximately as follows (reading from a line chart):

Conscientiousness:  $800,000.
Extraversion: $650,000
Agreeableness: -$350,000
Openness: -150,000

Each of these traits showed a more or less linear relationship between decile in a personality trait and its economic impact.

Thus, an extremely conscientious, extroverted, disagreeable, and close minded individual with an IQ of 135 of more would earn an average of $1,950,000 more than an extremely non-conscientious, introverted, agreeable and open minded individual.  The combined effects of these four personality traits was about five and a half times as great as differences in IQ between the 99th and 99.9th percentile.

Even the difference between being in the sixth and tenth decile for conscientiousness has as much of an economic impact as the difference between being in the 99th and 99.9th percentile for IQ.

These four out of five personality factors and IQ influenced both the amount of education that a person received and the amount that a person earned independent of education:

Our results highlight the importance of personality and intelligence on our outcome variables. We find that personality traits similar to the Big Five personality traits are significant factors that help determine educational attainment and lifetime earnings. Even holding the level of education constant, measures of personality traits have significant effects on earnings. Similarly, IQ is rewarded in the labor market, independently of education. Most of the effect of personality and IQ on life-time earnings arise late in life, during the prime working years.

This adds to a growing literature on traits other than IQ that are important to lifetime successes.

Grit and Success

Another recent study looked at "grit" as a factor in spelling bee success.  The famous rule of thumb, also discussed by Gladwell, is that it take "10,000 hours of intense training (plus or minus a few thousand hours)" to reach the pinnacle of expertise in a pursuit.  But, Gladwell glosses over the question of what traits are necessary to be able to stick to an intense training regime for that quantity of time. 

The spelling bee study first found that the key to performance in spelling bees was the amount of deliberate practice that a kid put into it, which "involved studying and memorizing words while alone, often on note cards" as opposed to alternatives like being quizzed by others or leisure reading:

With each year of additional preparation, spellers devoted an increasing proportion of their preparation time to deliberate practice, despite rating the experience of such activities as more effortful and less enjoyable than the alternative preparation activities.

But:

Why were some kids better at drilling themselves with note cards? What explained this variation in hours devoted to deliberate practice? After analyzing the data, Duckworth discovered the importance of a psychological trait known as grit. In previous papers, Duckworth has demonstrated that grit can be reliably measured with a short survey that measures consistency of passions (e.g., ‘‘I have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost interest’’) and consistency of effort (e.g., ‘‘Setbacks don’t discourage me’’) over time using a 5-point scale. Not surprisingly, those with grit are more single-minded about their goals – they tend to get obsessed with certain activities – and also more likely to persist in the face of struggle and failure. . . . Here are the scientists: "Grittier spellers engaged in deliberate practice more so than their less gritty counterparts, and hours of deliberate practice fully mediated the prospective association between grit and spelling performance."

In other words, practice is what produces results, but "grit" (a.k.a. "tenaciousness" a.k.a.  “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.”) is the key psychological trait that determines how much someone practices.  And, like the Big Five personality traits, grit is largely unrelated to intelligence:  "Grit was found to be either orthogonal to or slightly inversely correlated with intelligence."  It is not independent of the Big Five personality traits, however, although it doesn't completely overlap:

Grit was strongly correlated with conscientiousness (r = .77, p <.001 and r = .73, p <.001) (2009). While Grit is related to conscientiousness measures, it also differs from conscientiousness in important ways. For example, while both Grit and conscientiousness are often associated with short term accomplishments, Grit is also associated with longer term and multi-year goals. This long-term persistence and dependability are important aspects that make Grit unique from conscientiousness.

Grit has been validated in settings other than spelling bees.

Grit provided incremental predictive validity . . . above and beyond the Big 5 personality traits; . . . higher levels of Grit were more highly associated with cumulative grade point average (GPA) in an Ivy league sample when compared to those with lower Grit levels (r = .25, p<.01); [and] that Grit predicted retention after their first summer in two classes of cadets at the United States Military Academy[.] . . . Grit predicts beyond the typical and unrelated cognitive construct of IQ and can account for variance over and above what is observed in the Big 5 personality construct of conscientiousness.

Grit also predicts the performance of Teach For America teachers in "under resourced public schools.", as does life satisfaction prior to entering the program.

A refined version of the test that Duckworth and Quinn used in the spelling bee study from 2009, with four fewer items and a different means of using answers to produce a scaled score strengthened  "the positive relationships between Grit and educational attainment, GPA, retention in college, and success in a national spelling bee competition."

As Jonah Leher notes in a blog post as Wired, one take away lesson from these studies is that there are personality traits that are largely unrelated to IQ which are important to socio-economic sucess other than IQ, which Steve Hsu sums as as the "W" factor, and which we are increasingly starting to be able to describe with psychological testing; like IQ, a meaningful part of these traits are genetic, congenital, or arise early in life, although there isn't good research on the relatively recently well defined trait "grit."

The other is a bit more subtle and I'll reproduce his observation in his words:

[T]here’s a major contradiction between how we measure talent and the causes of talent. In general, we measure talent using tests of maximal performance.

Think, for instance, of the NFL Combine: Players perform in short bursts (40 yard dash, short IQ test, catching drills, etc.) under conditions of high motivation. The purpose of the event is to see what players are capable of, to determine the scope of their potential. The problem with these tests, however, is that the real world doesn’t resemble the NFL Combine.

Instead, success in the real world depends on sustained performance, on being able to work hard at practice, and spend the weekend studying the playbook, and reviewing hours of game tape. Those are all versions of deliberate practice, and our ability to engage in such useful exercises largely depends on levels of grit.

The problem, of course, is that grit can’t be measured in a single afternoon on a single field. (By definition, it’s a metric of personality that involves long periods of time.)

The end result is that our flawed beliefs about talent have led to flawed tests of talent. Perhaps that explains why there is no “consistent statistical relationship between combine tests and professional football performance.” We need  . . . a test that measures how likely people are to show up, not just how they perform once there.

Mostly, we measure traits like "grit" or "W" indirectly, by looking at how well people perform academically or otherwise, after controlling for traits like IQ.

Poverty and IQ

So, we know that IQ is important to socio-economic success, and that there are independent contributions from at least a handful of personality traits that are independent of IQ.

We also know that IQ is related to poverty in a manner more complex than a Bell Curve model with highly hereditary IQ in which the stupid tend to be both poor and prone to have low IQ children, while the smart tend t obe both rich and prone to have high IQ children is involved.  This is because the measured heritability of IQ is lower, while the importance of environmental impacts is higher, in the poor than in the well to do.

Also, a large subset of mental retardation cases are not genetic and instead depended on enviromental factors like fetal alcohol syndrome, lead exposure and inadequate pre-natal nutrition, and labor and delivery medical care.  While high IQ appears to be rooted in a large number of small, cumulative factors, low IQ frequently has a single dominant cause that is different in kind from the causes of IQ levels within the normal range.  Alleviation of these mental retardation drivers is an important factor in the Flynn Effect (secular long term trends towards higher IQ in the same population from generation to generation over time).

Put another way, you are born with a maximum potential IQ, but seriously adverse environmental conditions, mostly associated with poverty, can prevent you from reaching that potential.  These environmental effects appear to be particularly strong during pregnancy and in the first few years of life. 

With that key observation in mind, the relationship between American performance on international tests of academic ability and poverty can be put in context in the nature v. nuture debate:

[T]he brutal reality is that U.S. schools that contain more than 25% poor children do abysmally--they are literally pulling the scores down:

If we subdivide the U.S. data in a very obvious way, we observe something, well, rather obvious:
But data available now tells us that poverty, as usual, had a huge impact on PISA reading test scores for American students. American students in schools with less than 10% of students on free and reduced lunch averaged 551, higher than the overall average of any OECD country. Those in schools with 10 to 25% of students qualifying for free and reduced lunch averaged 527, which was behind only Korea and Finland.

In contrast, American students in schools with 75% of more of children in poverty averaged 446, second to last among the 34 OECD countries.

We might not be living in a nation where one-third of a nation is ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. It's only one in five, give or take. . . . Until we get serious about reducing poverty, as well as breaking up large geographic concentrations of poverty, our average test scores will be poor.

This poverty effect is not simply a product of poor students having lower maximum potential IQ at birth because their parents are below average in IQ and poor as a result.  The conditions of poverty prevent thse children from achieving their potential.

You don't have to go far afield to see this effect, even within different schools that are mostly poor in the same district.  A child identified as "gifted" who attends North High School in the Denver Public Schools is far more likely to go to college and not require remedial work than a child identified as "gifted" who attends West High School, with an even more impoverished student body, a mile or two away.

In a nutshell

IQ,  which has a strong hereditary component in the absence of adverse environmental factors, has an impact on socio-economic success at all levels, but among the smartest, personality factors, which can mostly be summed up in a quite small number of measures like extraversion, conscientiousness, grit, agreeableness, and openness, are even more important with the high IQ population.  These personality traits also have some hereditary component, although probably significantly less than for IQ.  Envirommental conditions strongly assocaited with poverty, particularly during pregnancy and early childhood, prevents children from reaching their genetic IQ potential and also has a measurable impact (generally negative) on personality traits associated with socio-economic success.

Implications

This has several implications of importance:

1.  If we want to measure likelihood of success most accurately in a wide range of academic and occupational fields, a multi-dimension measure that captures both IQ and "W" factors is necessary. 

2.  While many "g" intensive activities that are proxies of IQ have been identified, less systematic work has been done to identify "W" intensive activites, like spelling bees, that are proxies for factors like "grit" and can be used to identify children who excel in these non-IQ dependent traits.

3. We should also devote research to ascertaining which occupational and academic pursuits are more or less "W" heavy, and whether there are pursuits like math and physics in the IQ demain within academics, where there appear to be theshold effects, i.e. where a minimum level of certain "W" factors are a minimum for real success, rather than making a linear contribution to outcomes.  Does one need a minimum level of "W" factors, for example, to make it as a special forces soldier or a medical doctor or an accomplished musician?  Similarly, are there occupational or academic pursuits to which individuals who are high in IQ but low in W factors, or high in W factors but low in IQ, are likely to be best suited?

4.  Much but not all socio-economic benefits of both IQ and W factors are mediated through practice and educational opportunities that must be available for people to take full advantage of what these traits offer.  Identifying IQ and W rich individuals is a beginning, not an end point in developing human potential.

5.  Research into the existent to which "W" factors are malleable and the environmental impacts that influence these factors is worthwhile because research on this for IQ has been exhaustive, but research for other factors has not been, because W factors as important to societal success as IQ, and because W factors appear to be less strong hereditary than IQ.  Indentification of enviromental factors that enhance "W" factors should be a priority for researchers.  What parenting and educational approaches best foster the non-environmental components of "W" factors and to a lesser extent IQ. 

6.  Long term success in activities from probation and parole to high school retention to college retention to adherence of mental health medications may be strongly related to W factors that vary from person to person.  This makes these factors attractive as components of validated statistical prediction tools to determine what management approach should be supervising people in these situations.  Individuals who have low conscientiousness or little grit may require more intensive supervision than those who lack it.

7.  The single most promising way to improve aggregate IQ and socio-economic performance in American society is to identify and address ways that poverty inhibits them.  Particularly attention should be devoted to reducing hardship and improving medical care for pregnant women and young children.  Another area where there is an already identified problem that can be addressed is to improve the quality of pre-college educational opportunities, college counseling and collegiate financial aid for children with established strong academic ability from less affluent families.

8.  To the extent that we can psychometric for selected "W" factors that are at least as good as those for IQ, there should be an active and open ended inquiry into what kind of patterns are seen in the residuals of performance in these combined measures.  This inquiry is useful even if the residual factors turn out to be matters such as pure luck or cohort timing that demonstrate that psychological factors related to socio-economic success have been exhausted.

READ MORE - Beyond Heritable IQ in Socioeconomic Success

Childhood Psychological Tendencies Persistent

Democratic socialists, including those in Britain, are much better at conducting very large scale, multi-purpose longitudinal studies than Americans, and those studies are starting to bear fruit. The British National Child Development Study tracks 17,634 children born in March 1958 for fifty years, checking in on the subject's progress at nine regular intervals from birth to the present and gathering detailed and accurate informaton each time from multiple sources in multiple institutions. What did they find?

In this article we assess and compare long-term adult socioeconomic status impacts from having experienced psychological and physical health problems in childhood. . . . Large effects are found due to childhood psychological problems on the ability of affected children to work and earn as adults and on intergenerational and within-generation social mobility. Adult family incomes are reduced by 28% by age 50, with sustained impacts on labor supply, marriage stability, and the conscientiousness and agreeableness components of the “Big Five” personality traits. Effects of psychological health disorders during childhood are far more important over a lifetime than physical health problems.

From Alissa Goodman, Robert Joyce, and James P. Smith, "The long shadow cast by childhood physical and mental problems on adult life", PNSA 2010.

The abstract poses the question as one of a particular childhood "problem" having a long term effect, but the results are equally consistent with the notion that psychological health has a large congential component, with much of the rest of the environmental component been based on the quality of one's early childhood environment, rather than later environment. In this view, the "problems" that a child experiences are simply manifestations of who a child is that persist throughout life rather than being the cause of later in life difficulties. In our mental health and IQ focused world, in which capacity to labor physically is largely unimportant socio-economically, it also isn't surprising that fitness that is physical, or the lack of that fitness is comparatively unimportant.

Alas, the early childhood window may be surprisingly narrow, and social class effects tend to be much more powerful than instructional effects. For example, according to another very large longitudinal study (n=13,776), the beneficial effects of full day kindergarten programs relative to partial day kindergarten programs in low income children tend to vanish by the third grade:

[T]he study found that the reading and math skills of children in full-day kindergarten grew faster from the fall to the spring of their kindergarten year, compared to the academic skills of children in part-day kindergarten.

However, the study also found that the full-day kindergarteners' gains in reading and math did not last far beyond the kindergarten year. In fact, from the spring of their kindergarten year through fifth grade, the academic skills of children in part-day kindergarten grew faster than those of children in full-day kindergarten, with the advantage of full-day versus part-day programs fading by the spring of third grade. The fade-out can be explained, in part, by the fact that the children in part-day kindergarten were less poor and had more stimulating home environments than those in full-day programs[.]

Social class linked intellectual achievement gaps are already great at age two.

Implications

The good news, for the parents of older children, I suppose, is that whatever good or bad your parenting has had on their lives, the older your children get, the less the quality of your parenting seems to matter. So, the pressure isn't as intense. A child's academic progress and character as a late tween is immensely predictive of the rest of the course of that child's life.

Then again, this may simply be a product of the fact that whatever parenting and educational quality was present early on continues to be present and having the same effect, with interruptions of these patterns being too rare to be statistically significant. Unless you are comparing kids who experience late childhood misfortune against their otherwise equal pre-misfortunte peers, you can really accurately measure the impact of those misfortunes on a child's life chances.

On the other hand, these studies are really terribly discouraging for those whose job it is to try to get people on track in life once their early childhood years have passed. The school system, for example, frequently becomes involved in a child's life only starting in kindergarten at age five or six years old, and the second study seems to suggest that it is already extremely hard to help kids who are developmentally behind at that point catch up to their more academically ready peers.

Needless to say, if your job is to turn around the lives of kids who have already started high school, fifteen years of accumulated inertia is just that much harder to reverse. If your job is to turn around the lives of adult prison inmates, the burden you must overcome is surely even more profoundly difficult to surmount.

As previous posts at this blog have noted, you may be born with a gene which is a powerful predicter of your capacity to sustain a long term marriage, and people who commit violent crimes as adults overwhelmingly are already continuing to have discipline issues that their peers have grown out of by the time that they are in elementary school: "it is extremely unlikely that an adolescent who has not been highly physically aggressive in the past will suddenly manifest significant problems with physical aggression." Such seemingly learned and social traits as succeptibility to bullying and one's likelihood of being a teenaged crime victim likewise show powerful genetic predispositions. The non-IQ factors that play an important part in life success seem to manifest just as early in life as academic ability does: Your ability to defer gratification at age four turns out to be a powerful discriminator for your life success a decade and a half later. Children likely to grow up to be psychopaths already start acting differently at age three (also here). A group of three non-IQ related genes can account to up to a 0.5 point difference in your GPA on top of any IQ effect.

We may live in the post-nature v. nuture synthesis of genes x enviroment, but the more we know, the more predictable our lives seem to be. For us, like characters in Greek tragedies, it seems that knowing our fates offers us surprisingly little help in changing our fates. Our genes are seemingly immutable, and most mental health genetic conditions are incurable, even if they are treatable in some cases. Many psychological predispositions have no established treatment. Even if you know you have a gene that makes you likely to have short lived relationships, there is no drug you can take to fix that and no solidly evidence based therapy that will solve your predisposition. Gene therapy hasn't reached that point yet, and given the implications it would have for personal identity and neurodiversity in society as a whole, perhaps this is a good thing.

Our enviroments, while theoretically mutable, aren't easy to change. And they seem to matter. People in the top fifth of the income distribution are twenty-eight times as likely to attend a selective college as those in the bottom fifth of the income distribution, for example. We don't choose our parents, and it seems as if those of us who are raised by someone other than our parents are usually worse off in the bargain - although perhaps starting off in a spot like that leaves one off poorly even with great improvement. And, of course, unlike J.K. Rowling or Eminem, most of us who find ourselves in poverty don't readily emerge from it to great riches by virtue of our intellectual talents. Parents who know that their poverty and lack of education is dragging down their children have little capacity to do anything about it. Even the heart wrenching option once available of sending tween or teen children into domestic service for a more prosperous family, or a scholarship funded tenure at a boarding school, in hopes that some of the benefits of that social class will rub off on them has largely vanished as options. Assortive marriage trends are reducing the availability of marriage as a means of class advancement, and American social class lines are deeper than those in contemporary Europe or earlier eras of American history. Just about the only thing a parent can do to improve the environment that the parent provides his or her children is to transform him or herself, which is a profoundly difficult matter.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that people do indeed change sometimes. But, the overwhelming weight of the statistics and studies tell us that this is the exception and not the norm, and becomes ever more exceptional as we get older. Kids who are well behind grade level in reading in the third grade are almost certainly not going to go to Harvard, are exceedingly unlikely to go to medical school or law school, and will have to struggle mightily and have considerable good fortune to earn a college degree of any kind. Kids who are perfect angels in fifth grade are exceedingly unlikely to have criminal justice problems or violence issues in the remainder of their lives unless they have a family history of a late manifesting mental health condition like bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia, or substance abuse, or experience a brain injury, or sustain PTSD.

I don't want the world to be this way. I'm a liberal. I believe in progress and opportunity and social mobility. I value education. Environment does matter, especially for the less well off, even if they can't change that environment themselves.

But, one can't simply ignore what study after study after study tells you either. One can look for loopholes and exceptions and ways to beat the system. There clearly are some and they should be leveraged for all that they are worth. The more I read these studies, the more that I am forced to conclude that policies designed to secure social justice have to focus more on developing meaningful productive paths for the people who we have in our society, and less on trying to transform people into something that they are not and cannot reasonably aspire to become -- especially for older youths and adults for whom the die is more firmly cast.

READ MORE - Childhood Psychological Tendencies Persistent

More Than Three Years Of Grief

A significant share of mental health issues are congenital. But, episodes of severe stress, grief and trauma don't fit this pattern. Miscarriage and stillbirth is one common, but profound stressor.

Women who have lost babies to miscarriage and stillbirth experience unusually high levels of depression and anxiety during new pregnancies and for nearly three years after delivering healthy infants. . . . Many women become depressed and anxious after losing a baby during pregnancy, and these reactions often persist after carrying another child to term[.]

From here.

Infant morality is now much lower than it used to be, so few Americans will have to bury very young children, something that my grandparents and almost all of the generations before them often experienced. But, it is estimated that about one in three pregnancies ends with a miscarriage or stillbirth, which means that the average American woman will experience at least one in a lifetime.

My mother experienced this before I was born. My wife and I experienced this before our children were born. Even people who welcome pregnancies routinely keep this very private for the first three months, when the risk of a miscarriage is greatest, so that they won't have to endure the discomfort of explaining what happened to everyone who knew.

This is one of the more emotionally potent experiences that a person can encounter. When it happened to us, we remembered it in a little ceremony for just the two of us in the mountains. For better, or for worse, this grief is rarely a community event. It can be a painful, silent, lonely grief.

People are resilient. Eventually, they do reach a point where the present overwhelms the potency of life's past heartbreaks. But, the time it takes to reach that point is often much longer than the pregnancy itself.

READ MORE - More Than Three Years Of Grief

Overkill In Drug Sentencing

As a liberal, I generally like to think that there isn't evil in the world, just misguided individuals. Then people like Former Kingfisher County, Oklahoma Judge Susie Pritchett come along and make me think that there really is evil in the world in the persons of people like her abusing the trust that has been placed in them to use their discretion appropriately.

On Dec. 31, 2009, [25-year-old Patricia Marilyn] Spottedcrow and her mother, Delita Starr, 50, sold a “dime bag” of marijuana to a police informant at Starr's home in Kingfisher, court records state. Starr handled the transaction and asked her 9-year-old grandson — Spottedcrow's son — for some dollar bills to make change for the $11 sale. Two weeks later, the same informant returned and bought $20 of marijuana from Spottedcrow.

The two women were arrested for drug distribution and because Spottedcrow's children were in the home, an additional charge of possession of a dangerous substance in the presence of a minor was added. “It just seemed like easy money,” said Spottedcrow, who says she is not a drug user but has smoked marijuana. “I thought we could get some extra money. I've lost everything because of it.”

The women were each offered plea deals of two years in prison. But because neither had prior convictions and the drug amounts were low, they gambled and entered a guilty plea before a judge with no prior sentencing agreement.

Starr received a 30-year suspended sentence with no incarceration, but five years of drug and alcohol assessments. Spottedcrow was sentenced to 10 years in prison for distribution and two years for possession, to run concurrently. She will be up for parole in 2014.... In addition, Starr was fined $8,600 and Spottedcrow $2,740.

From here via the Sentencing Law and Policy blog.

This Oklahoma case illustrates very clearly the insanity of this approach to non-violent drug cases. The case also screams racism in the exercise of discretion in the criminal justice system. Here is how the judge justified this to herself:

Former Kingfisher County Judge Susie Pritchett, who retired in December, said "the women were conducting an extensive operationand included children in the business."

"It was a way of life for them," Pritchett said.

"Considering these circumstances, I thought it was lenient. By not putting the grandmother in prison, she is able to help take care of the children."

A presentencing investigative report prepared by the Department of Corrections rated Spottedcrow's risk of re-offending as "high"and recommended substance abuse treatment while incarcerated.

"It does not appear the defendant is aware that a problem exists or that she needs to make changes in her current behavior."

Spottedcrow was unemployed and without a stable residence when arrested, the report states. The family lost their Oklahoma City home for not paying bills.

"When she needed money this is the avenue she chose rather than finding legitimate employment," the report states. "The defendant does not appear remorseful and she makes justifications for her actions."

Pritchett said on first drug offenses, sentences are usually suspended and may require treatment or random drug tests.

Only if there are other more serious circumstances is a first-time drug offender sent to prison, she said.

"When kids are involved, it's different," Pritchett said.

"This was a drug sale. When I look at someone in front of me, I'm thinking, 'What is it going to take to rehabilitate this person?' We look at their attitude and other factors."

When Spottedcrow was taken to jail after her sentencing, she had marijuana in her jacket. She pleaded guilty to that additional charge Jan. 24 and was sentenced to two years in prison and fined nearly $1,300. That sentence also will run concurrent with her other conviction.

Does the judge actually seriously believe that she's done these kids a favor?

Who is Spottedcrow?

Spottedcrow has four children ages 9, 4, 3 and 1 and is determined to keep her 8-year, common-law marriage intact. "It's been really hard on my husband,"she said. "I know a lot of things can happen, but he'll always have my back and be there."

Her son is aware of what has happened, but the girls have been told their mother is away at college.

"I missed my daughter's fourth birthday, and I'll miss her fifth one too. My other daughter just started talking, and I'm not there to hear her,"Spottedcrow said.

"My baby woke up and doesn't know where her mommy is. This is the hardest thing to do, and know I can't do anything about it. I just have to focus on myself and take it day-to-day and plan for going home. I will want to see my kids at some point. I'm trying to take this slow. I can't get depressed about it."

READ MORE - Overkill In Drug Sentencing

Achievement Gap Starts Very Early (Updated)

Achievement Gaps Are Huge At Age Four

In the mid-1960s, Betty Hart was a graduate student in child development working at a preschool in Kansas City, Kan. The preschool was for poor kids — really poor kids. Many came from troubled housing projects nearby. . . . Hart's job was to teach these underprivileged kids how to speak like the children of her professors at the University of Kansas.

For years, she and university professor Todd Risley worked tirelessly toward this goal, doing everything they could think of to expand the vocabularies of these 4-year-olds. The idea was that if the kids could speak with the fluency of their wealthier peers across town, they might go on to similar academic achievements.

But success was elusive. "We tried everything," Hart says. "Everything we could. ... We couldn't do it."

The problem, they realized, was that they weren't getting to the kids early enough. Which led to this question: If age 4 was too late, when was early enough?

From here

Forget achievement gaps in third grade CSAP scores (where they are already stark), let alone achievement gaps in high school. According to these researchers who deeply wanted to reach a different result, the achievement gap is already deep and almost insurmountable at age 4!

Talking To Babies Seems To Make A Big Difference

Their detailed study of forty families from poor, middle class and rich backgrounds found that the affluent talked to their babies and toddlers three times as much as the poor.

According to their research, the average child in a welfare home heard about 600 words an hour while a child in a professional home heard 2,100.

"Children in professional families are talked to three times as much as the average child in a welfare family," Hart says.

And that adds up. Hart and Risley estimated that by the age of 4, children of professional parents had heard on average 48 million words addressed to them while children in poor welfare families had heard only 13 million.

A study by Alan Mendelsohn in the journal the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine this month says that early intervention to have poor parents interact verbally more with their children (in fifteen sessions of 45 minutes each) works.

Skeptics question how long the benefits of this kind of intervention will last, although studies showing that quality pre-schools of very long lasting positive impacts give some hope that the short term success of Mendelsohn's inteventions could persist, and there is a body of evidence that seems to show that catching up gets harder and harder to do as time passes.

The Case That This Is Really A Manifestation Of IQ

An alternative possibility is that IQ, which has been shown to have a strong hereditary component, is simply low in both poor children and poor parents, relative to their middle and upper class peers. There are a number of reasons to think that this might be the case:

1. The earlier you get deep, almost insurmountable difference in cognitive function, the harder it is to attribute that difference to environment. If environment has an immense impact in the first four years, it is hard to think that it has so pitiful an impact in the rest of a person's life.

2. This is particularly true given that somone who learns a new language in a total immersion environment as a young teenager can usually become an almost accent free teenager with a near adult fluency in that new language. The language learning ability, per se, does decline as one gets older and older second language learners almost never attain unaccented fluency in the new language, but the cognitive barrier to learning a new second language closes about a decade after one turns four.

Factors like vocabulary and ideomatic usage are large data sets that have to be learned, but the set of vocabulary words that distinguish the dim from the bright is on the order of a few thousand words, and the number of irregular usage situations necessary to really distinguish one as educated or not probably number under a thousand.

In order words, for the "talking to baby produces lifetime achievement" hypothesis to hold water, one has to infer a more indirect relationship -- that talking to baby stimulates a broad spectrum of time limited brain development activity -- rather than simply inferring that talking to baby provides more opportunities to learn words and master other elements of language.

3. It is hard to believe that the correlation between social class and parenting style is a strong as it would have to be to produce the achievement gaps observed. Certainly, it is easy to imagine that professional parents talk more to their babies on average than parents who are in poverty. But, is that difference really close to universal? Are their really no bright upper class kids who had low levels of child-adult verbal interplay as babies and toddlers?

4. If talking to babies is so important and anyone can do it, why hasn't our culture in millenia after millenia attached more importance to this, out of intuition? Why does a little bit less talking to a baby seems socially like a fairly minor parenting point instead of a huge parenting imperitive?

The Case That Talking To Babies Matters A Lot

Of course, there are also reasons to take these findings, particularly in light of Mendelsohn's study that shows that early intervention does matter a lot, seriously. The literature on the long term benefits of high quality pre-schools is one. The fact that a lot of brain development does take place at a very young age is another, as is the literature supporting a breast feeding-IQ link. The literature that shows that IQ looks much more hereditary in middle class and upper middle class families covered by twin studies than it does in poor families, where environmental factors seem to play a larger role, is another. The apparently evidence that the Flynn effect (i.e. long term secular trends in entire populations towards higher IQ in recent times) is mostly due to improvements environment for those who were at the low end of the IQ scale in the earlier periods is another.

[UPDATE added 1/12/2011]

Razib at Gene Expression does a brilliant job of summarizing the cutting edge literature on the link between social class and the heritability of of intelligence. He lays out the data from the 2003 study that shows that genetics matter much more in high socio-economic status families, while shared environment is the predominant factor for those at the bottom of the socio-economic scale. The tendency of improved socio-economic status to make genetics a larger share of IQ variation is surprisingly linear from about the 25th percentile of socio-economic status (below which the effect is less intensely connected to socio-economic status percentile) through about the 85th percentile (after which the returns to additional socio-economic status dampen modestly).

He also presents striking data from a 2010 study demonstrating that while cognitive ability has little to do with socio-economic status at 10 months at any socio-economic level, that by the time a toddler is two years old socio-economic impacts on cognitive ability are already pronounced with heredity being much more relevant (50% of the variation v. almost none in low SES toddler and an intermediate amount for those in the middle) in better off toddlers.

Put another way, genetics seems to be primarily relevant to peak potential IQ, but peak potential only begins to be relevant once one's environmental conditions are favorable enough to have an opportunity to achieve that potential.

Great environments prevent you from being brought down by your circumstances, but they also aren't enough by themselves, as he succinctly sums it up, "Practice may make perfect, but perfection may be a goal to which you aspire only if you have initial talent or inclination." Heredity becomes more important as one gets older and has more control over one's environment. Those who received boosts from exceptional environments beyond their comfort range slack off when given the chance, those who were held back by poor environments tend to thrive once they are free to make their own choices.

His comparison to stature, is apt. He notes that "environment explains more of the variance in height in developing nations, while it explains almost none of the height in developed nations." Better nutrition in rich countries allows people to reach their full potential in height. But, in poor countries poor nutrition prevents people from reaching peak potential. His observation that there "are probably diminishing marginal returns on “nurturing” environments for a child when it comes to their intellectual development," which flows from the fact that genetics accounts for close to 85% of variance in IQ by the time one hits the high end of socio-economic status, is also apt.

Still, he also notes, as I have, that social class differences in IQ (that often flow from IQ), which are exacerbated by assortive marriage (or assortive mating anyway), potentially confounds the model of good environment as something that facilitates peak potential. In other words, perhaps environment is less capable of suppressing the IQ of generally bright children than is in the case of generally less bright children whose intellectual development advances only with good parenting.

Along the same lines, perhaps some of the variation in hereditary influence is a product the of the IQ measuring instrument which is designed to arbitrarily reproduce a normal distribution when it could be that this is a poor approximation of the structure and distribution of intelligence for those at the extremes of the range that IQ tests are designed to measure. The high level of inaccuracy of IQ tests at predicting academic performance in autistic children is suggestive of this possibility, as are the strongly diminishing correlation of IQ with success in the real world amongst very high IQ individuals. Arbitrary units for quantifying IQ that inaccurately measure to relative magnitude of IQ differences in the middle range relative to some hypothetical absolute scale would also add systemic noise to the genetics-environment data in the middle of the range.

By analogy, it you try to do temperature calculations using temperatures measured in degrees Celsius, which arbitrarily sets zero at the freezing point of water and one hundred at water's boiling point, for high temperature phenomena like metallurgy, the correct equations of thermodynamics are going to work reasonably well. But, a failure to use a Kelvin scale (which puts zero at the laws of physics defined absolute zero of approximately -273.15 degrees Celsius) for room temperature and low temperature phenomena, using Celsius temperatures in the correct thermodynamic equations is going to produce widely inaccurate results. Purely proportional relationships to temperature, for example, will look very unproportional, will make a correct mechanism for the relationships difficult to conceptualize, and will produce ugly equations in situations where temperature is just one of several variables.

If we used some non-arbitrary zero and peak number to measure intelligence, or used an intelligence measurement unit related to some real world quantity other than percentile in performance (e.g. seconds of processing time to solve some problem that people in the IQ range that the test is measuring can solve in reasonable amount of time), some of the observed IQ properties might disappear as artifacts of the measurement method.

[End Update.]

Maybe IQ is mostly genetic if you have a decent environment, but that insufficient verbal interactions with adults relative to some critical threshold is as important as insufficient folic acid in pregnant women.

Also, even if IQ is a significant cause of the gaps at age four [update: or even two!], if talking to babies more could narrow that gap, even modestly, this provides a concrete way to make everyone in society better off on average by doing something that almost no one believes to be harmful to either parents or children. The downside risk of following this parenting advice is nil. But, the guilt potential for parents who ignore this advice, if it later studies confirm that it is very important, is huge.

And, if this really is important and will soon become part of the catechism of important tips for young parents, it certainly wouldn't be the first time that a parenting choice previously believed to be of trivial importance, like putting babies to bed on their backs, actually has a very significant positive impact.

READ MORE - Achievement Gap Starts Very Early (Updated)