Why so much fitness and parenting advice is bullshit

Et tu, Psychology Today? And you, Dr. Michael J. Breus? What’s your excuse, Thomas Friedman?

You never have to look far to find flagrant violations of the “Correlation does not imply causation” law. They abound in newspapers, magazines, TV programs, parenting and diet books—anywhere, basically, that covers topics like parenting or fitness, and thus relies heavily on behavioral research. In the past month, you could find examples of the problem, among other places, on the website of the country’s leading popular psychology monthly, in a piece by the triple-Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist, and in a psychologist’s column on Huffington Post.

As many of you may recall from your old science and psychology courses (or from a Brain, Child piece I wrote last year), just because two things are correlated doesn’t mean that one of them caused the other. For example, if there’s a correlation between A and B—more of A tends to go hand in hand with more of B—that’s no proof that A caused B. It might have. Or maybe B caused A, or some combination of the two, or a third factor, C, caused both.

In a Psychology Today blog post titled “Parents: Your Words Matter,” University of Chicago psychology professor Sian Beilock writes about a correlation between the way parents talk to their preschool children and the children’s later problem-solving skills. Researcher Susan Levine, Beilock reports, found that the more parents talked about spatial characteristics of objects—using words like “big, tall, circle, curvy, edge”—the better the child performs, years later, on spatial problems.
 

“What Dr. Levine and her colleagues found was that children's spatial abilities are in, large part, driven by what their parents say,” Beilock writes.

If that’s what Dr. Levine and her colleagues really found, there’s no evidence of it in Beilock’s post, nor in the abstract of Levine’s article in Developmental Science. Based on what they present, it could just as easily go the other way around.

Now, I’m not going to argue that parents words don’t matter (though in research I’ve conducted in my own household, I found little correlation between parental instructions to take one’s dirty dishes into the kitchen and the likelihood that one’s dirty dishes will actually be taken into the kitchen). It may seem logical that a child who’s always hearing her parents talk about objects' sizes and shapes might be more attuned to those qualities and, thus, better at solving problems involving those concepts.

That might make intuitive sense, but intuition isn’t proof—another lesson from those college psychology courses. Besides, it’s just as intuitively logical that parents who are good at spatial problems are more likely to perceive the world in spatial terms and (unconsciously, perhaps) pepper their language with spatial words. And that their children tend to inherit those skills and later prove, unsurprisingly, to be good at spatial stuff, too.

One big moral of this story is that simple correlations between parental actions and children’s behavior rarely proves cause and effect if the parents and children are biologically related. In most stuations, it’s too difficult to rule out the possibility that genes, rather than parenting, are the cause. 

Thomas Friedman forgets that, too. He writes about a study in which 15-year-olds whose parents read to them when they were little scored higher on a test than kids whose parents didn’t. From this, Friedman concludes:

We need better parents. Parents more focused on their children’s education can also make a huge difference in a student’s achievement.

Spot the correlation/causation error here? Again, it's a problem of ignoring possible genetic influence. What kind of parents read books to their kids? Probably those who like to read themselves. What kind of people like to read? Usually people who are good at reading. What kind of parents involve themselves in their child’s education? Most likely parents who did well in school themselves.

So it’s no big leap to imagine that children who are read to also inherited their parents' reading skills and academic achievement. Yet neither Friedman nor the researchers seem to have considered that possibility. But hey, even if their conclusion were 100 percent scientifically sound, they still would hardly justify this comment, quoted by Friedman, from the guy who oversees the testing:

[J]ust asking your child how was their school day and showing genuine interest in the learning that they are doing can have the same impact as hours of private tutoring.

First, judging from the monosyllabic grunts I usually get in answer to that question, it seems doubtful. Anyway, how would he know this? I’m going to step out on a limb and guess that there probably aren't many parents alive who purchase “hours of private tutoring” for their children yet don't bother to ask how school is going. So who would be the control group here?

Finally, in his rhymingly titled Huffington Post piece, “Sleeping Late, Eating Late, Leads to Gaining Weight,” Michael J. Breus similarly jumps to a conclusion, based on a correlation between sleep patterns and weight gain.

A message to night owls: There's news that your bedtime -- and those late-night snacks -- may be preventing you from dropping those stubborn extra pounds.

 Again, it’s not hard to think of another explanation for this correlation: That people who like to stay up late are often also people who like to eat a lot. As a card-carrying member of both groups, I can vouch for this. But Breus, a.k.a. “The Sleep Doctor,” doesn’t even consider that possibility. Wonder if this could have anything to do with the topic of his recent book, The Sleep Doctor's Diet Plan: Lose Weight through Better Sleep.

Even if those writers and researchers are leaping to conclusions, you might ask, where’s the harm? Why wouldn't you want to ask about your kid's school day, whether it got him better test scores or not? (Do you ask about your partner's work day, even if you don't think it will get him or her a raise?) Besides, if there’s any chance, however slight, that it would improve their school performance, why not go for it? Asking the question is pretty easy.

The spatial language situation is a bit more difficult. You might be willing to stop and think about every word you say to your child and deliberately insert spatial terms into the mix. (Although what if by doing that you’re squelching some other form of communication that might be equally important? I used to play word games with my then-preschool kids. On the day when I asked one to name the opposite of “short” and he came back with both “long” and “tall,” I knew he would be good in language classes, and voila, he is. Yet I can't say his language skills are the result of playing word games; very likely, he and I both liked playing word games because we’re both good at language.)

But the most damaging result of all of this misinterpretation and misinformation is guilt. It's the guilt you might feel if you take Friedman seriously when he proclaims, “We need better parents.”

Don’t most of us—at least, those of us who comprise the audience for these articles, i.e., people interested in figuring out how to be better parents—already do plenty of fretting about what we’re doing wrong? Must we really be told, once again, that we’re never good enough?

A woman's shadow work is never done

Speaking of paid and unpaid work, the New York Times just ran a fascinating op-ed piece by Craig Lambert, deputy editor of Harvard Magazine, about “shadow work.” That’s a term Lambert says was coined 30 years ago by Australian philosopher Ivan Illich to describe all of the work people do that they don’t get paid for, such as housework, shopping, paying bills, etc.

Lambert argues that machines, instead of liberating us from repetitive and menial tasks, have actually increased the amount of shadow work we do. We pump our own gas, squeegee our own windows, bag our own groceries, plan and book our own travel arrangements. Chores that we now perform for ourselves, often with the help of technology, were once done by human beings who got paid for it. At our jobs, support staff  like secretaries and clerks have been reduced, their tasks—typing, copying, mailing, sorting email—added to remaining employees’ other responsibilities. “Even those in senior management perform these humdrum jobs,” Lambert writes.

Doctors say patients complain of fatigue, Lambert notes. “Much of this fatigue may result from the steady, surreptitious accumulation of shadow work in modern life,” he writes. “People are simply doing a huge number of tasks that were once done for them by others.”

I’ll leave it to economists to figure out whether Lambert is right, whether technology has produced a net increase or decrease in shadow work. Obviously, technology has streamlined many unpaid tasks: washing dishes, looking up information, shopping for certain items.

What most interests me is the timely point tucked within Lambert’s piece. More people are questioning, thanks in part to the Occupy Wall Street movement, why so many Americans are struggling while a tiny minority rakes in phenomenal wealth.

Lambert’s thesis provides one explanation for that phenomenon. But he steers around that point, blaming not CEOs but the machines themselves. “The robots have won,” he announces. “The robots are in charge now, pushing a thousand routine tasks onto each of our backs.”

But of course, robots aren’t the ones forcing humans to do extra work. Robots, who will gladly work for free, don’t benefit from the arrangement. Robots aren’t lighting cigars with $100 bills. That would be, at least theoretically, the people who profit from the robots’ work. Of course, not all business owners are thriving financially, not even those who have replaced employees with machines. But whatever financial savings are being seen—in salaries, health insurance and so on—isn’t going to the machines, let alone the people taking on extra shadow work.

Meanwhile, there’s one important category of shadow work that Lambert doesn’t mention at all—understandably, since it’s not central to his point—but that is relevant to this blog: caregiving. Technology, as far as I can tell, neither dramatically reduces nor increases the work of caring for children, the old and the sick. But some research indicates that parents, especially mothers, are spending more time than ever on childcare.

As the New York Times reported last year:

Before 1995, mothers spent an average of about 12 hours a week attending to the needs of their children. By 2007, that number had risen to 21.2 hours a week for college-educated women and 15.9 hours for those with less education.

Although mothers still do most of the parenting, fathers also registered striking gains: to 9.6 hours a week for college-educated men, more than double the pre-1995 rate of 4.5 hours; and to 6.8 hours for other men, up from 3.7, according to an additional analysis by Betsey Stevenson and Dan Sacks, economists at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

It stands to reason that, as our population ages, we’ll be spending more time caring for our elders, too.

Unpaid caregiving represents a big chunk of shadow work, and it still falls disproportionately on women. If Lambert is right, it helps explain why we’re feeling so overwhelmed. We’re juggling paid work, plus more of the traditional shadow work than we performed in the past, plus new high-tech forms of shadow work.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some shadow work to do in the kitchen.

Why I don't "like" the idea that mothers do the work of twenty, for free

I saw this image posted the other day on the Facebook page of a social networking site for mothers. When I last checked a moment ago, the picture had been shared 2,920 times (including by a friend of mine, whose status update is where I first saw it) and “liked” 3,742 times on this mothers’ site page alone.

I didn’t share the post. I did not “like” it. I didn’t even like it.

Which made me more or less alone among the 700-some people who left comments. I haven’t read every last one, but in a quick skim I didn't see any other commenter who wasn’t delighted with the sentiment expressed in the post. Typical comments—short and hastily typed, as if clicked out between laundry loads, or while waiting that cry from the nursery signaling naptime had ended—said things like “True!” and “Sharing,” and  “Ain’t this the truth,” and “AMEN,” and “Sounds about right” and “Us mums are incredible :)” and “LOVE LOVE LOVE this.”

Not to be a buzz kill. But this approving reaction goes a long way toward explaining why mothers’ labor gets exploited, why mothers, far from being financially compensated for their parenting work, are in fact financially penalized for performing it, to their eventual economic peril.

Oh, that's OK, the comments suggest. We don’t mind! Our children are so important to us. We’re happy to do it! We LOVE LOVE LOVE doing it!


Lots of people love their work. Yet many of them are nevertheless rewarded for it monetarily, sometimes handsomely. (At least writers, who also often wind up working for free because the market exploits their love of the work, complain about it.) Posts like this—simply the new-technology delivery of an age-old sentiment—are one way society reinforces the idea that good mothers don't mind sacrificing. That good mothers are proud of sacrificing.

The post isn’t quite accurate; even the most hardworking mothers don’t do the work of more than two or three people, tops. And not even that on average, according to a cover story in Time magazine in August, which reported that new research shows mothers work about the same amount as fathers—as long as you count both paid and non-paid work, since mothers unsurprisingly do proportionately more of the latter than fathers do.

“ What these new findings mean is that the widespread belief that working mothers have it the worst—a belief that engenders an enormous amount of conflict between spouses—is simply not the open-and-shut case it once was,” wrote Ruth Davis Konigsberg. “… And it's time that women — myself included — admit it and move on.”

Again, I must differ. Unless by “move on” Konigsberg means “turn our attention from who works more hours to focus on what is really the far bigger issue—i.e., the fact that many more of those oh-so-equal hours that fathers put in are rewarded with paychecks. Not to mention retirement accounts, professional advancement, earning power, social status, health and dental, the respect of future employers and the occasional company car.”

Whereas mothers, as even the disliked post above correctly notes, “work for free” much of the time.

Konigsberg doesn’t dwell on the pay thing. On the contrary, she barely mentions it, writing as if the issue of monetary compensation were a triviality, as if paid and unpaid work were, for all practical purposes, the same thing; work is work.

I, on the other hand, consider a paycheck a salient difference, if for no other reason because even when it's shared between partners, the partner whose name is on the checks is building a much stronger foundation of future employability.

Frustrating as it is to see that overlooked in a Time cover story, it's better than the other, far more widespread attitude: that paid and unpaid work are completely different. So different, in fact, that unpaid work actually isn’t work at all.

Mothers’ caregiving work doesn’t count for the purpose of acquiring health insurance or 401(k) contributions or Social Security credit. Mothers’ work doesn’t count even if their labor—washing diapers, meeting with teachers, driving to dental appointments, coaching with homework, preparing meals—frees the other parent to devote more time to work that does earn a paycheck and therefore does count. (To avoid being labeled sexist, let me note that the genders are occasionally reversed.)

Sure, by now anybody with a speck of cultural sensitivity is careful to use the PC terminology, to delicately distinguish between work “outside the home” and “in the home.” But that's one of the rare times when mothers’ caregiving work is treated like, well, work.

Mothers who “opt out” to care for their children are considered to have stopped working. If they later try to find a paid job, they worry about how to explain “the gap in their resume” as if having to rationalize a time when they weren’t working. I have talked to women who've been told they would be better off padding that gap with a minimum-wage, part-time, unskilled job than admitting to potential employers that they were at-home mothers.

This attitude helps explain why, even when they're getting paid and working in comparable jobs, mothers make less money than non-mothers (including fathers and childless people of either sex). It helps explain why more women than men are poor. It helps explain why so little status is attached to mothering, why at-home mothers often mention experiencing the “cocktail party demotion” in which they see people’s eyes, when they mention their occupation, dart around the room in search of better conversation, as if a (working) accountant or engineer is automatically better at exchanging sparkling repartee over the martinis.

It helps explain why, when I divorced and thereby lost my health insurance, I wasn’t eligible for the federal government program that, because of the bad economy, subsidized about two thirds of COBRA premiums for laid-off workers. Even though it was just as tough for me to find a job or afford COBRA (about $500 a month, in my case).

I may not have been doing the work of twenty people. But in the federal government's eyes, I wasn't even doing the work of one.

So am I suggesting that someone should start paying mothers a salary for taking care of their own children? Well, that's hard to envision, certainly in the current political climate. But folks, let's start considering it real work that deserves the respect and some of the economic protections and social benefits we give to other kinds of work. Either that, or let's insist that mothers and fathers share the work of parenting more equitably—that both, let's say, do the work of ten people.

Until then, damned if I'm going to “like” a post comparing me to a masochist and a saint. I have no interest in earning either label.

Here’s what I wrote in the comments:

True or not, celebrating this sort of slogan reinforces the idea that it's OK. Mothers should not be expected to do the work of 20 people for free. The work of raising children should be shared among fathers and the rest of the village, and mothers should not have to sacrifice their financial security to see that it gets done.

Four people clicked “like” on my comment.

Then the posted comments returned to “True!” and “Awesome!” and “Yup, spot on."

What we talk about when we talk about parenthood

Rebecca Odes has written an excellent post on Babble's "Strollerderby" blog about discussing parental ambivalence with non-parents. And I say that not because she agrees with me.

Well OK, that is a big part of the reason. But also because Odes explains the phenomenon really well, and makes several additional good points.

Such as:

Yes, parenthood is hard sometimes. But really, so are a lot of things that bring rewards.  You don’t have to tell a parent about the rewarding part; a parent is living it. But the feelings of joy and fulfillment that come from raising a child are hard to describe or to express. Partially, perhaps, because people feel bad about expressing them,  because everyone knows that non-parents don’t want to hear you get all googly eyed over your kid. People complain when parents complain, but they complain about parents kvelling, too.

It seems like non-parents mostly want parents to just shut up already.

Excellent observation. The XX Factor post I mentioned a few posts ago that criticized mothers' complaints was also put off by their "bizarre baby proselytizing." My impression is that people who don't want to hear you gripe about parenting really really don't want to hear you go on about what a joyful experience it is.

And you know what? I get this. Before I became a parent, I didn't particularly want to go into a lot of conversational detail about either one, either. Any more than I want to hear, say, a runner friend go on and on about his or her pacing and hydration and electrolytes and whatever. At least not more than maybe once.

Which is why, when I talk to my non-parent friends, I tend to discuss other subjects. Which is fine! Because believe it or not, I'm interested in many other subjects, including but not limited to the weather, work, food, books, movies, travel, current events, the economy, politics, fashion, politics, religion, writing, shopping, funny things we saw on the internet.

(And I would rather discuss just about any other subject, really, than what my children are up to lately with a non-parent friend who asks in a sort of polite, perfunctory, obligatory way, as if secretly thinking, "I know her life revolves entirely around them and she probably has no interest in talking about anything else, so here goes ..." Which, by the way, in my observation seems to happen less to fathers than mothers.)

When parents are talking to each other, though, their kids are sort of an natural area of conversational commonality. And if there's a non-parent or two in the room at the time, I don't think parents are required to show only the good parts in order to soothe or cajole or trick them into making the same choice. Or as Odes puts it:

Acknowledging the difficulties should me a way for parents to find support, both personally and culturally.  But even if it’s not, I don’t think parents should have to be their own marketing department.  As far as I’m concerned, my evolutionary imperative does not extend to the species at large.

Right? Most people don't, or at least shouldn't, care whether someone else chooses to have kids or not. (Except maybe because we want lots of workers paying taxes at the point when we're collecting Social Security.) Anybody else, as far as I'm concerned, is free to do whatever they want.

And somehow it usually all works out. My non-parent friends, like my parent friends, seem quite happy with the paths they've taken.

Great reading in the new Brain, Child

As promised, here is my article/essay (essicle? artay?) in the new issue of Brain, Child magazine about mothers who complain, and the people who complain about mothers who complain.

Also, check out Brain, Child's table of contents for a couple of really excellent essays. Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser writes about open adoption and her complicated relationship with her daughter's birthmother. Tracy Lynch explores what we mean when we call something "inappropriate," and wonders whether we could all stand to stretch our boundaries a bit.

And of course, check out the whole paper issue of Brain, Child itself to read lots of honest and intelligent writing about motherhood. It's a magazine in which, if you complain about motherhood, people won't roll their eyes. And if you talk about how wonderful motherhood is, they won't give you that pat frozen smile and try to be subtle as they gaze around the cocktail party in search of more interesting conversation.