I would assume there is a negative correlation between education level of a parent and levels of child abuse and neglect. There will be outliers, but I’m guessing people who are high school dropouts are more likely to abuse or neglect their children than people with graduate degrees. I’m also going to assume the relationship is probably somewhat linear.
But I can’t find any studies to verify this hypothesis. I can only find info about educational programs for abusive parents, not whether a parent with a graduate or undergraduate degree is less likely to abuse or neglect their kids (or think that doing so is moral) than a parent with a high school or less education. Has it been studied? You’d assume it would be.
But two caveats:
[ul]
[li]That is asking about socio-economic status. I’m more concerned about education alone, not SES. [/li]
[li]Also that is violence agaisnt women. I’m more interested in rates of child abuse and child neglect and how it is related to the education of a parent.[/li][/ul]
There are high school dropouts who make 100k a year, and there are people with graduate degrees who make 25k a year. So income isn’t what I’m asking, I’m asking about education.
You might have to account for the fact that an undereducated parent is more likely to be reported for abuse or neglect, of have no resources to defend herself agains allegations, even if incidents of neglect are equally distributed… So any statistical data would be subject to that bias.
And there IS a correlation between income and education, which cannot be argued away with outliers.
Possibly, but what about self reported claims of abuse in childhood? Those wouldn’t be affected by whether the parent was reported or not.
Also what if one parent has a high education and the other a low education? Maybe a father with a graduate degree and a mother with a high school diploma. On paper they are a high SES couple, but the mother and father are not the same.
Too much emphasis is put on someone that is educated. I have personally known several very well-educated people who were so extremely self-centered, narcissistic, and self-serving, that I cannot possibly imagine them being good parents. I think it totally depends on the person, whether a high-school drop-out or a brain surgeon. There is no one answer to this question.
Education is correlated to a variety of pro social outcomes. To the degree that education causes them, not sure. It could just be that more functional, intelligent people are more likely to pursue higher education. These people are also in general less likely to be unemployed, to collect welfare, be in prison, divorce but more likely to vote, pay taxes, volunteer in the community, etc.
So I figured that rates of child abuse and neglect are probably correlated too. But I’m having trouble finding out.
I’d guess, to the extent that the OP’s contention is true, that it stems primarily from a couple of things:
Educated people are more likely to be higher-income than non-educated people, and therefore are presumably not having as many unexpected and unplanned children as their uneducated counterparts.
On balance, the educated people are more likely to be intelligent than the uneducated ones. It’s not hard and fast, but I think we’d all agree that truly dumb people are overrepresented in the uneducated population, and underrepresented in the educated population.
The upshot of all this is that educated people tend to deliberately have children, while the uneducated seem to have it happen more randomly. I tend to think that if you’re having a kid by choice, you’re less likely to abuse it than if you just ended up pregnant, or knocked your common-law wife up, and you have a middle-school education.
People who have emotional problems that result in loss of self-control are less likely to succeed in endeavors requiring more self-control, such as applying themselves to higher education; not to mention learning skills and getting a better-paying job. I.e., losers are losers because they are losers. Again, this is not to say everyone fits neatly into this category; but think of it as similar to drug or alcohol abuse. It’s hard to have the problem and hide it and be successful as generally defined by society, especially for the longer term.
That’s not to say some types don’t succeed at this - if a person is more likely to be abusive to the helpless and much less powerful, then that might not be apparent in peer interactions, it would only come out when they had a serious supervisory relationship or with children.
I did this for a report in high school, so my numbers, to the best that I can report them, are from the 1980s, but there appear to be three factors. (Skip to the bottom for the TL;DR version.)
Impulsivity. People who are highly impulsive tend to have a hard time finishing things, and high school and college are among those things, so there is a relationship that is correlative, not causative.
Money. There is also a causative relationship too, though. The more money people make, the less likely they are to abuse their children. There are plenty of outliers, because child abuse is sadly common, but the more education you have, the more money you make, on average, which means less stress in the home, and fewer triggers for abuse, PLUS less of a tendency to see the child as a competitor for scarce resources. ALSO, and this cannot be overstated: wealthy parents can afford to take time out from their children. Being able to afford an afternoon or night out every single week while a babysitter stays with the kids is a great pressure valve.
Dunning–Kruger effect. I didn’t get to call it this in high school, because it hadn’t been identified as a “thing,” but I circumlocuted my way around the idea that really bad parents don’t know they are bad, and don’t seek help, while so-so parents may seek help, and become better parents. People with competence in one area are less likely to have a chip on their shoulder about their parenting skills. I had some statistic that I dug up back in 1984 that when you looked and parents who had abused (not sexually, just physically), who were offered a parenting class in exchange for no prison time (they still got fines and probation), and took the class, college educated people ended up with a very low recidivism rate, high school educated people, fair-to-middling, and high school drop outs had little change in their parenting behavior, even after correction for possible learning disabilities in the drop-outs.
There were several theories, from educated people trusting a classroom experience, and believing it would help them, while less educated people tended to be skeptical of the classroom, but also to the idea that ignorant people can’t recognize their ignorance. The last theory suggested that less educated abuser think physical abuse it the right way to raise a child, while more educated people knew secretly that they were doing something wrong, and were glad to be getting help.
The fact that this was in the 1980s is probably relevant, because spanking was still a pretty normal way to discipline a child then, and no one was shocked by it. It was only a single generation since whipping with switches, paddles and belts was the norm. You might get different results now.
But there you are-- TL;DR: People who can manage to finish college are less impulsive; people who make more money face less stress; and people who are less knowledgeable in general are less likely to recognize their parenting as faulty.
I was about to post a unfounded suspicion in my previous post that perhaps educated parents are more likely to seek out information about, if not outright educational experience on how to actually parent correctly, rather than just wing it based on how they were parented.
I know my wife and I did, as did pretty much everyone we know when their first kids were approaching- we routinely google behaviors and what-not as well.
Then there’s the other unfounded suspicion that there’s just different cultural expectations for the respective socio-economic classes. Maybe corporal punishment isn’t seen as a bad thing in some lower-education/lower-income cultures, while it’s not thought of as particularly helpful or positive within the white middle/upper-middle classes. It’s entirely possible that the social opprobrium associated with it molds people’s behaviors in ways that significantly vary the potential for abuse or neglect.
Also your point 3 that you researched is what I meant when I said this in my OP
I had a suspicion that less educated parents were more likely to think abuse was morally (and legally) acceptable while parents with more education were more likely to recognize child abuse and neglect as immoral and illegal. But I didn’t know how to word it or know if there was any research on it.
I think among other things, education gets you out in the world and see more and different ways of looking at things- thus “more likely to recognize” inappropriate behaviour.
People who have an inkling that most others are in some way better than them can often get resentful for it. They begin to hate the people who try to “set them straight”. That’s where they get a chip on their shoulder and also resent being corrected. They may even do things wrong/opposite deliberately because “nobody’s going to tell me how to do X with my children.”
Of course, it’s a lot easier to punish a child by taking away TV or video games or dessert if you have those things to give them.
First of all, quite a number of scientists, educators and others have taken issue with the assumptions and data in The Bell Curve. See the latter half of the Wiki page here.
I am wondering what exactly are your reasons for assuming that poor/uneducated people abuse their children more than rich/educated people? Perhaps poor people who abuse their kids are more likely to get caught, and shown on television. Do you actually know very many undereducated/poor people?
Here is an articlewhich states that law enforcement officers abuse their families at two to four times the national rate. As I understand it, you need a college degree to go into law enforcement. The article also mentions this tendency towards family violence in football players.
I respectfully submit that the problem is a lot less simplistic than you think it is, and involves things that probably never even occurred to you.