The only way to get the kind of results that they achieved was to skew the facts by isolating them. Yes I would agree that a handpicked group that can be part of a longitudinal study would yield superior results over a true sample across the population, but it proves nothing about the latter. This made more so if one starts to assign certain behaviors as more desirable and those behaviors happen to be more prevalent in weaker family structures where males have less interest and investment and so more likely to behave in that conformational way.
This study ignores the outcomes that are WELL known from other sources.
One can follow this link Encyclopedia of Murder & Violent Crime and read a break down of outcomes. Note that biological mothers are responsible for 70% of the child deaths and abuses. While blood fathers and social fathers are lumped together to get the other 30% of deaths. They totally drop stepmothers from the figures, or appear to, and they combine fathers who are the least likely to hurt the children, with stepfathers who are much more likely to hurt them.
Note that we are willing to remove a product like Ephedra from the shelves because less than 10 people died, out of millions taking the substance, but we are not willing to make policies that will mitigate and prevent the abuse and deaths of literally hundreds of children worldwide in a similar fashion.
There are other interesting facts on the page. Like the fact that biological fathers who kill are more likely to have mental issues than mothers who kill (meaning mothers kill with more malice of thought and less biologically mitigating reasons).
Moving on to other sources, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson ("Some Differential Attributes of Lethal Assaults on Small Children by Stepfathers versus Genetic Fathers." Etiology and Sociobiology 15 (1994):207–217) found that children incurred seven times higher rates of physical abuse in families with a stepparent than two biological parent homes, and that stepchildren were 100 times more likely to suffer fatal abuse.
So the politically based study below conveniently leaves out all the known information on such unions and statistics in favor of an anecdotal one made ligitimate through calling it a longitudinal study. Martin and Margo also showed that “In a sample of men who slew their preschool-age children, 82 percent of the victims of stepfathers were beaten to death”
While Martin and Margo didn’t do an anecdotal selective longitudinal study for advocacy reasons, they did look at a larger cross section of information from many more sources (not just Canada). “Present analyses are based on a case-by-case data archive of all homicides known to have occurred in Canada from 1974 to 1990.” And “homicide risk from stepfathers was approximately 60 times higher than from genetic fathers for this age group, replicating the immense differential found in prior analyses (Daly and Wilson 1988a,b).”
So if one were to base political policy (the purpose of such a new study) on just these new outcome selective works, then one would end up putting many more children in the hands of step fathers. They will have a much larger statistical chance of experiencing abuse and family disafectation, all the way up to and including murder, with a high likely hood of being beaten to death by what the research below tries to establish as an equivalent parent.
To quote: “Whereas a stepfather was about 60 times more likely to kill his preschool child than a genetic father, this contrast does not apply to all means of killing. In particular, a stepfather was not demonstrably more likely than a genetic father to shoot a child, but he was 120 times more likely to beat one to death. – More specifically, stepfathers who killed small children were far more likely than homicidal genetic fathers to have beaten their victims to death.”
So why wasn’t such things found out in the longitudinal study? Well the research clearly explains why.
Death appears to be the product of a single outburst of rage, attributed by the killer to some irritant such as that the victim “wouldn’t stop crying." It is of course a normal part of parenting to endure potentially irritating impositions from children, and the probability that a caretaker will react with potentially damaging anger must be partly a function of that particular caretaker’s degree of personalized affection/antipathy for that particular child.
Given the small number of people in the longitudinal study, and given that they are constantly being monitored, such behavior is much more likely to be mitigated. Selection criteria for the study would easily rule out those who are more likely to have or be problems. Those who are monitored are less likely to have sudden outbursts that result in the death of the children. They are more likely to attempt to conform their behavior to the medical staff, and to be aware that any behavior not most positive might be grounds for the researchers to omit them from the study and call the authorities.
This simple fact makes the results spurious and have little real social value. After all, the behavior seen by the researchers could easily be described in terms that a biological father is less likely to conform to a research model and more likely to conform to what they think is best for the children (which is less likely to be what researchers think may be best), while a step father under the glass is more likely to skew their behavior under the microscope of a study to act in a way that is directed by the researchers and their questions.
Comparing these new results with the known literature causes a heavy dissonance, as it also implies that policies will be changed for the conformational study, while better policies for children will be ignored since advocate studies are used to justify harmful political action, which would naturally lead to more funding to have more studies that then cause more problems which lead to more funding, etc.
In this case, the advocate study will create policies that will doom more children to abusive homes and thereby create the family crisis they need to establish that biological familes are no good, or biological fathers are not important. it’s a cleaver way to make it seem lilke the right thing to do is to accept the stranger as a better parent than the parent who has everything invested in their own children. Which can only happen if we ignore the copious amounts of other information showing the opposite.
Once again, scratch the surface of advocate work, and you find them painting targets around bullet holes for the purpose of policy. The results being carefully worked out to cause maximal misery while claiming maximal positive intent for later absolution, all seen through a warped prism of ideology.
Is this really what we want for the future children who will become future parents and citizens?
Biological fathers not necessarily the best, social dads parent well too
A large number of U.S. children live or will live with a "social father," a man who is married to or cohabiting with the child’s mother, but is not the biological father. A new study in the Journal of Marriage and Family examined differences in the parenting practices of four groups of fathers according to whether they were biologically related to a child and whether they were married to the child’s mother. Researchers found that married social fathers exhibited equivalent or higher quality parenting behaviors than married and cohabiting biological fathers.
Furthermore, whereas married and cohabiting biological fathers displayed relatively similar quality parenting, the parenting practices of married social fathers were of higher quality than those of cohabiting social fathers. Married social fathers were more engaged with children, took on more shared responsibility in parenting, and were more trusted by mothers to take care of children.Led by Lawrence M. Berger, PhD, MSW, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, participants were drawn from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a longitudinal study of children born in 20 large U.S. cities in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Sample children were mostly born to unmarried parents and had been followed from birth to approximately age five.
Analyses and regression results from interviews with mothers revealed that they perceived married social fathers to be engaged in relatively high quality parenting practices with the five-year-old children. Most notably, social fathers exhibited significantly higher levels of cooperation in parenting than biological fathers.
"On the whole, our findings suggest that marriage is a better predictor of parenting quality with regard to social fathers than biological fathers," the authors conclude. "Our study is relevant to understanding the quality of parental care that children receive from resident fathers across a range of family configurations that are now commonly experienced by children."
Source: Wiley
