Bell Curve

2 12 Cognitive CClass and Social Behavior Parenting 2 13A study of twenty abusive or neglectful mothers and ten comparisonmothers from inner-city Rochester, New York, found thatmaltreating and nonmaltreating mothers differed significantly intheir judgment about child behavior and in their prohlem-solvingabilities."A clinical psychological study of ten parents who battered theirchildren severely (six of the children died) classified five as havinga "high-grade mental deficiency" (mentally retarded), one asdull, and another as below average. The remaining three were classifiedas above average.jvA quantitative study of 113 two-parent families in the Netherlandsfound that parents with a high level of "reasoning complexity"(a measure of cognitive ability) responded to their childrenmore flexibly and sensitively, while those with low levels of reasoningcomplexity were more authoritarian and rigid, independentof occupation and ed~cation.~'The most extensive clinical studies of neglectful mothers have beenconducted by Norman Polansky, whose many years of research heganwith a sample drawn from rural Appalachia, subsequently replicatedwith an urban Philadelphia sample. He described the typical neglectfillmother as follows:She is of limited intelligence (IQ below 70), has failed to achievemore than an eighth-grade education, and has never held. . . employment.. . . She has at best a vague, or extremely limited, idea of whather children need emotionally and physically. She seldom is able tosee things from the point ofview of others and cannot take their needsinto consideration when responding to a conflict they experiencea4'The specific IQ figure Polansky mentions corresponds to the upper edgeof retardation, and his description of her personality invokes furtherlinks between neglect and intelligence.Another body of literature links neglectful and abusive parents topersonality characteristics that have clear links to low cognitive ability.1421The most extensive evidence describes the impulsiveness, inconsistency,and confusion that mark the parenting style of many abusiveparent^.^' The abusive parents may or may not punish their childrenmore often or severely in the ordinary course of events than other parents(studies differ on this point),44 but the abuse characteristicallycomes unpredictably, in episodic bursts. Abusive parents may punish agiven behavior on one occasion, ignore it on another, and encourage iton a third. The inconsistency can reach mystifying proportions; onestudy of parent-child interactions found that children in abusing familieshad ahout the same chance of obtaining positive reinforcement foraggressive hehaviors as for pro-social behaviors.45The observed inconsistency of abusing parents was quantified in oneof the early and classic studies of child abuse by Leontine Young, Wednesday'sChildren. Ry her calculations, inconsistency was the rule in all ofthe "severe abuse" families in her sample, in 91 percent of the "moderateabuse" families, 97 percent of the "severe neglect" families, and 88percent of the "moderate neglect" families.46 In one of the most extensiveliterature reviews of the behavioral and personality dimensions ofabusive parents (as of 1985), the author concluded that the main problemwas not that abusive parents were attached to punishment as suchhut that they were simply incompetent as parents.47One might think that researchers seeing these malparenting patternswould naturally be inspired to look at the parents' intelligence as a predictor.And yet in that same literature review, examining every rigorousAmerican study on the subject, the word intelligence (or any synonymfor it) does not occur until the next-to-last page of the arti~1e.l~~' Theword finally makes its appearance as the literature review nears its endand the author turns to his recommendations for future research. Henotes that in an ongoing British prospective study of parenting, "mothersIn their Excellent Care group, for example, were found to be of higherintelligence . . . than parents in their Inadequate Care group," and thendescribes several ways in which the study found that maternal intelligenceseemed to compensate for other deprivations in the child's life.'4v'With such obvious signals about such tragic problems as child neglectand abuse, perhaps an editorial comment is appropriate: The reluctanceof scholars and policymakers alike to look at the role of low intelligencein malparenting may properly be called scandalous.MATERNAL 1Q AND THE WELL-BEING OF INFANTSCombined with the literature, the NLSY lends further insight into goodand bad parenting. We begin with information on the ways in whichwomen of varying cognitive ability care for their children and then turnto the outcomes for the children themselves.