Study: Women’s IQ connected to childbearing choices
It seems that women these days are too clever for their own good, at least when it comes to making babies. Research emerging from the London School of Economics examining the links between intelligence and maternal urges in women claims that more of the former means less of the latter.
In an ideal world, such findings might be interpreted as smart women making smart choices, but instead it seems that this research is just adding fuel to the argument that women who don’t have children, regardless of the reason, are not just selfish losers but dumb ones as well.
~ Sadhbh Walshe criticizing research that finds a link between women’s intelligence and their child-bearing choices, The Guardian, August 7
[HT: Laura Loo]
Aug.09, 2013 6:00 am |
Pregnancy |
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
There have always been, and always will be, women who don’t have children. Heck, some of them have “Mother” attached to their names: Mother Theresa, Mother Angelica. The late Nellie Gray, founder of the March for Life, was a prominent childless woman. Some of our most creative and accomplished women have been childless.
If a study showed that more intelligent women tend to want children more badly or want more children, that shouldn’t be taken as a slam against those who don’t want or have kids. Maybe the egghead types look forward to instructing the little ones in the ABCs and numbers. It is possible that being highly intelligent is connected to a desire to teach and teaching is certainly part of being a Mom. It may also be good for the next generation if the ladies who have babies are disproportionately the intelligent ones.
Or there’s the obvious explanation: 1) smart women take longer to complete their education, and 2) society doesn’t support women who have babies while in school, thus 3) forcing smart women to delay childbirth and have fewer kids whether they like it or not.
Kudos to SFLA’s Pregnant on Campus initiative for working to change the second factor.
I love the conclusion that people are coming to in the article: “lets have more maternity benefits and these high-IQ ladies will have babies.” I thought that intelligent women were foregoing motherhood because of their high intelligence, not because of the economy. Which is it? A good study would have eliminated money as a factor. But, as usual, these studies end up being dubious at best and probably biased.
I don’t understand how this could be interpreted to say that women who don’t have kids are “dumb”? Am I just…dumb?
The thread title reminded me of this abysmal piece from predictably abysmal Thought Catalog: http://thoughtcatalog.com/2013/8-reasons-why-intelligent-and-financially-stable-people-dont-want-kids/
I know this is just anecdotal, but my friends (and I don’t have any stupid friends) have an average of four kids apiece. Had I not lost two to miscarriage I’d be having my eighth in a few months. I’ve got highly intelligent friends with eight and ten. These are all people with minimally a four year college degree. Maybe I just run in the right circles. :)
So… is this supposed to mean that women who have children are… stupid? The more children, the more stupid?
Got it. Sounds like more pro-abort propaganda to me.
There is also the anti-family indoctrination attitude that exists in higher learning institutions which exposes ‘smart’ women to an anti-life perspective.
Could this be why PP targets poor people – to make sure smart people don’t have to support so many dumb people.
No matter the reason we know who is to blame; this is all the patriarchy’s fault.
I would never call a woman who did not want children “dumb.”
My opinion: it’s only wrong when you don’t want children and you’re willing to kill them (before or after birth) to make sure you don’t have them.
“No matter the reason we know who is to blame; this is all the patriarchy’s fault.”
Really? I thought this was all Bush’s fault. :)
A related problem is that “women’s equality” didn’t demand equal recognition and value for what has traditionally been “women’s work.” We must recognize that the term “working mother” is redundant. EVERY mother works regardless of whether or not she is in the paid labor market. In addition, many childless women also “work” even if out of the paid labor market. DOMESTIC WORK is work.
I hope the computer will help bring the paid labor market back into the home, making it easier for people to combine caring for their own babies and making money.
Additional point: when I was growing up, daytime TV was largely soap operas. Many women were at home during the day and could keep up with the stories. Today, many fewer women are at home during the day. One of the results is that soap operas are no longer the bulk of daytime TV.
I wasn’t understanding the seeming contradiction, but now I see they are using “dumb” to mean unwise, versus intelligent. From the article: “Basically he [the researcher] seems to come to the paradoxical conclusion that intelligent women just aren’t all that wise.” I think it’s a lot of the factors people have mentioned, and ultimately, they are deceived into believing lies. I almost was.
There might actually be something to this….
We know that alpha-female chimps have fewer children than the lower-status chimps.
And we know that affluent human societies have fewer children than poorer societies.
In both cases, economic advantage leads to lower fertility.
Modern society likes to reward academic credentials with good jobs and comfortable middle-class status. Credentials are commonly mistaken for intelligence, as in this article. And (as has been commented before) young women delay marriage and children while earning their credentials.
Seems to me that the drivers are economic and social pressure, not “intelligence.” We don’t need a “study” by some “intelligent” person to tell us this.
Or… and bear with me here… marriage is being delayed in favor of education and career (must establish myself first!), and by the time that these smart women are ready to start a family, they don’t want to give up their lifestyles for the “burden of a baby”
Or/and… people like our President who say they wouldn’t want their daughters “burdened with a baby” are stigmatizing parenthood so much as to make it the far inferior choice to education.
To answer Alexandra’s question, go and read the article. Basically, she’s saying that smart women are being presented as ‘dumb’ because they don’t know what’s good for humankind enough to do their part by having babies.
As it is, birth control is presented as the only sensible life choice, young women are pushed into taking it before they are even considering sexual relations at all, and people like myself who practice NFP (or Quiverfull or *any* alternative method of spacing-or not) are treated as stupid religious fools who contribute to the “overpopulation crisis”. Is it any wonder that those who are intelligent look at all of this and choose to limit their family size? After all, intelligent doesn’t automatically mean courageous against pressures of the world.
Or… and bear with me here… marriage is being delayed in favor of education and career (must establish myself first!), and by the time that these smart women are ready to start a family, they don’t want to give up their lifestyles for the “burden of a baby”
I think this is a lot of it. I think that people get accustomed to a lifestyle without children, by building an adult life that does not take children into account in order to “establish oneself;” and then it becomes very hard to imagine anything worth changing that lifestyle for. For the most part, most of the people who would want to give up annual vacations, freedom to stay until last call if you feel like it, and nice furniture in exchange for dirty diapers, nights filled with “one more glass of water!!” bedtime extensions, and all the rest of it are…people who already have kids and know how worth it the trade-off actually is.
Or, try this on for size: My mother didn’t pursue a college education but she could budget, was a voracious reader, and had mad people skills. She was smarter than a lot of educated women, but she was practical smart and eager to pass on what she knew. Perhaps it’s the willingness to pass on the skills and knowledge that is a kind of intelligence that “book larnin'” doesn’t give by itself. Perhaps the act of teaching in daily life MADE my smart mother even SMARTER. She taught me to write cursive so early it frightened my kindergarten teacher. I had to read all the Babar books in the kid’s library to keep from being bored. Go MOMS!
Not to leave out the Dads: is it possible that answering the “why? but why? but why? and then why?” makes you smarter? My dad had a lot of patience with The Whys. I guess that made him wise. Doh! I love puns. Must have gotten that from my smart parents.
For the most part, most of the people who would want to give up annual vacations, freedom to stay until last call if you feel like it, and nice furniture in exchange for dirty diapers, nights filled with “one more glass of water!!” bedtime extensions, and all the rest of it are…people who already have kids and know how worth it the trade-off actually is.
My daughter and her husband want children, but they want to be more financially stable first. They are in a great deal of debt, mainly from student loans, and want to make a dent in them before they even start thinking of having children. I wish I could help them but I am not very wealthy myself. Student loan payments are wreaking havoc with many young adult lives. Not everyone who delays having children is a selfish yuppie!
It simply comes down to personal choices and priorities.
People who have both the IQ and the desire to undertake higher study and a career requiring high levels of personal committment, who thus reap the rewards of income and lifestyle, simply choose to have less children.
Others may have just as high an IQ but not the same level of desire for higher learning and the career because they prefer a different lifestyle, which may include having more children.
Not a whole lot to do with smart/dumb or wise/unwise.
Its all a matter of choice.
People don’t necessarily assume housewives are “dumb.” I was a housewife (no kids) throughout my 11 year marriage to a college professor. One of his college prof friends said to a bunch of others that i was “even smarter” than my husband.
Tyler sez: “Could this be why PP targets poor people – to make sure smart people don’t have to support so many dumb people.”
Bingo.
This is the rhetoric you hear when we liberals fail to censor our true thoughts. Usually, we are good at framing this in terms of a woman’s opportunity for a “future.” However, our real issue is that these dark-skinned, lower class people – the “minorities” in the United States, and all of the foreign countries where the United Nations has ben massively pushing birth control and abortion access, will be great inconveniences to our enlightened, privileged lives.
Soon after Darwin came up with the theory of natural selection, his cousin, Galton, came up with the idea of eugenics. Back then, in England, with support for the poor being a long-running political issue represented by the history of the “Poor Laws,” the issue of the burden of supporting people who procreated irresponsibly, and put a burden on the charity of the middle classes and upper classes, was a big deal.
From way back, various means have been attempted to keep the “wrong” people from procreating. On the more benevolent side, Christian women would promote chastity, etc. On the more controlling side, steilization was favored.
Margaret Sanger was full of this rhetoric of endorsing birth control and abortion so the rest of us would not be burdened by having to help those poor pitiful dumb creatures.
In the U.S., we had sterilization campaigns for these low-intelligence people.
In the 1940 “Preface to Eugenics,” eugenics advocate Frederick Osborn reviews the various situations justifying eugenics. He actually notes that the data show that you cannot reliably predict IQ from parent to child, so that reason for abortion and sterilization goes down a couple notches on his list.
Various states had sterilization programs up to the 1970s – the argument usually being that those of low IQ, as well as those with mental illnesses or genetic criminality, should not reproduce. Why? To ease the burden on the rest of us.
For Indian Health Service, I believe the sterilization process went on into the 1980s.
In these, the govt decided criteria for sterilization. Women often did not know they were being sterilized.
go back and read that again.
In these, the govt decided criteria for sterilization. Women often did not know they were being sterilized.
Where is that in our history books? Sure, Hitler is there, and slavery. But they are safe topics, since they are so removed.
We educated liberal developers of curricula will not tell school kids about involuntary sterilization in the United States because it connects the heinous history right to PP, Obama, Hiraly, and our present politics overseas and here in the U.S.
We “stable classes” do not want those poor folks irresponsibly reproducing like animals because it will take money out of our pocket to take care of them.
“Or… and bear with me here… marriage is being delayed in favor of education and career (must establish myself first!), and by the time that these smart women are ready to start a family, they don’t want to give up their lifestyles for the “burden of a baby””
There was just an article in People Magazine about foregoing children to “have it all”. One of the married couples who was choosing not to have children said something like “We play this game every week where we try to imagine fitting a child into our busy work and social lives and we can’t imagine how we’d do it.” This is the mindset.
I want what I want, when I want it. Great mindset for a society (not).
Children help us grow up, help us give of ourselves, and help create the next generation of (hopefully) good people ready to help others. While practically speaking — children are work — it is wonderful work that helps shape society.
Families done right help society to do right.
Just watched an interesting movie on Netflix. ‘Alleged’
It is about the Scopes monkey trial.
John T. Scopes was the high school math teacher who volunteered to be the defendant and was charged, tried and convicted of violating the Butler Act, a Tennessee state law which prohibited the teaching of human evolution in the public schools.
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After the trial was concluded, Scopes was given the opportunity to continue teaching at Dayton High School but he chose to attend graduate school in Chicago with money raised by the scientific scientific experts invited to testify at the trial.
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John Scopes later said,
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“There is more intolerance in higher education than in all the mountains of Tennessee.”
Intelligence is defined as: the ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use knowledge to adapt to new situations.
In other words, most current view of IQ makes the distinction between either being book smart or street smart, the former not correlating with success in life.
I have come to know some highly book smart women who “can’t find their way out of a paper bag.” LOL. Would they make better mothers? Jury is still out..
The Last Democrat you make some good points about Margaret Sanger and the eugenics movement. PP’s founder was a racist, eugenicist who wanted “to rid society of human weeds” someone here may have the link to her interview with Mike Wallace where she says in effect “the kindest thing that a poor family can do for their child is to kill it”. BHO goes to PP and ends his speech with “God Bless PP”, Celeste Richards gets the red carpet at the DNC convention and Hilary (who they assume with be the next Demoncratic presidential nominee) accepts The Maggie Award in honor of this pathetic individual, it all makes me sick to my stomach.
Being blessed to be a mother was one of the greatest things to ever happen to me and if I had to compare it to getting my college degree (the college degree was great) but becoming a mother was the highlight of my life. My mother and grandmothers were very smart women just never had the opportunity to obtain degrees but they were smarter than most of the professors I had in college because they knew what was really important in life like commitment to faith and family. Actually I believe the quote is truthful that says “the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world”.
I understand we are supposed to attack ideas and not people BUT I need to point out that Satoshi Kanazawa (author of the study) is not all that credible in science circles. About a year and half ago he published a study that claimed black women were objectively the least attractive. Of course as he does now he had his science and statistics behind his claims. Needless to say it was controversial and other scientists afterward pointed out holes in his reasoning. I would be weary to take anything he says seriously even if it was a conclusion I agreed with.
Thanks for the good reporting, Zee.