The Welfare Trait

by Adam Perkins

  Five experiments meet these rigorous scientific standards, four from the USA and one from Canada. These experiments show that disadvantaged children who received intensive preschool tutoring turn out to have significantly higher human capital as adults than non-tutored children because their personalities are on average less aggressive, antisocial and rule-breaking (that is, less employment-resistant) than those of the non-tutored children (for example, Heckman et al., 2013). Moreover, cost–benefit analyses comparisons of interventions aimed at boosting human capital strongly suggest that childhood experiences have a disproportionately large effect on the development of personality-related aspects of human capital (Heckman, 2013). This literature is summarised in Figure 5.1, which implies that adult interventions aimed at fixing a mis-developed personality are like attempts to add more eggs to a cake that has already been baked: difficult, costly and largely ineffective.

  Figure 5.1 The rate of return of childhood versus adult interventions

  Source: Cunha et al., 2006.

  Effects of child neglect on personality development

  The effect on offspring development of a form of neglect that is often dubbed ‘parental inattention’ has been studied extensively in non-human animals. For example, Liu, Diorio, Day, Francis and Meaney (2000) showed that mouse pups subjected to lower levels of maternal attention had worse cognitive development, even when cross-fostered to remove the effect of genetic inheritance. Weaver et al. (2004) found that differences in the level of maternal attention in mouse pups caused differences in DNA methylation that lasted into adulthood. In monkeys, maternal inattention causes impaired development via a similar mechanism (Provençal et al., 2012). Furthermore, environmental enrichment around puberty in mouse pups partially reversed the negative effects of maternal neglect on cognitive development (Bredy et al., 2003).

  The effects of parental inattention on human development have been studied in detail with regard to language usage in different types of households, suggesting that welfare-claiming parents are less attentive to their children than employed parents are, despite having more free time. For example, Hart and Risley (1995) studied verbal interactions between adults and children in 42 families with a view to examining the effect of home experiences on child development. The families were observed for one hour per month for almost two and a half years, with the child participants entering the study at the age of ten months and leaving it when they were three years of age. Each family was assigned to one of three socio-economic groups depending upon the occupational level of the parents: professional, working class and welfare claimant. Importantly, this was not intended to be a study of child neglect per se, so only families rated by the experimenters as well-functioning were admitted to the study. This design feature meant any differences in language development between the groups could not be explained away as the by-product of gross parental dysfunction, such as might be caused by psychiatric illness or abandonment.

  Nevertheless, what Hart and Risley (1995) found was relevant to this book. First, there were no significant differences between the children in the three groups of families in the age at which they began to speak, or in the structure and use of language. However, children from professional families heard an average of 2,153 words per hour, compared to an average of 1,251 words per hour for working-class children and 616 words per hour for the children of welfare claimants. Moreover, these differences in word flow from parents to children had significant effects on the development of the children. At three years of age, children in the professional families possessed a cumulative vocabulary of approximately 1,100 words, compared to 750 words for children from working-class families and 500 words for children from welfare-recipient families.

  Since one avenue for moulding our behaviour patterns is via speech from parent to child (well done, do this, don’t do that and so on), this discovery by Hart and Risley (1995) suggests that children of welfare claimants have a built-in disadvantage when it comes to acquiring adequate levels of social functioning, namely that their parents barely speak to them. Just how damaging this form of neglect can be was summarised in a recent OECD report on child development:

  Family disadvantage is poorly assessed by conventional measures of poverty that focus on family income, wealth, and parental education. The absence of parental guidance, nourishment, and encouragement is the most damaging condition for child development. Quality parenting – stimulation, attachment, encouragement, and support – is the true measure of child advantage, and not the traditional measures of poverty commonly used in policy discussions.

  (Kautz et al., 2014, p. 12)

  The notion that parental inattention is a key ingredient in personality mis-development is backed up by research with GED recipients by James Heckman and colleague which shows that ‘Compared to high school graduates, GED recipients are more likely to come from broken families with low incomes and have parents who invest less in their character and cognitive development’ (Heckman & Kautz, 2014, p. 7). More specifically, Heckman and colleagues found that, relative to high-school graduates, GED recipients in childhood (up to age seven) had less access to books, magazines, toys, CD/tape players and musical instruments and were less likely to be read to, taken to cultural events and have meaningful verbal interactions (Heckman, Humphries & Kautz, 2014a).

  Since we have already seen in Chapter 2 that GED recipients on average possess a personality profile that is less conscientious and agreeable than that of high-school graduates and also have worse employment records, these data on the family backgrounds of GED recipients provide credible support for the notion that parental inattentiveness promotes the development of the employment-resistant personality profile. Evidence for the importance of verbal interaction with parents in determining the quality of a child’s life has also been found in the UK. For example, a study by the Office of National Statistics which was entitled ‘Measuring National Well-being – Exploring the Well-being of Children in the UK, 2014’, utilised data from the UK household longitudinal study (now known as ‘understanding society’), which began surveying 40,000 households from the UK in 2009 (approximately 100,000 individuals). These households will be surveyed regularly on a rolling basis, with a view to building a richly detailed picture of UK life. The adults in the survey are interviewed every year and 10–15-year-olds fill in a paper self-report questionnaire.

  The key finding in the present context is that children who had relatively high satisfaction with their life in general also had better communication with their parents. For example, in 2011–2012, 69.7 per cent of children between ten and 15 years old who were relatively satisfied with their life quarrelled less than once a week with their parents. In contrast, 41 per cent of children who were relatively unsatisfied quarrelled more than once a week with their parents (see Figure 5.2).

  It is unsurprising that frequent quarrels with parents reduce life satisfaction in children because quarrelling is a specifically negative form of communication. But the study also provides evidence that lack of meaningful parent–child communication in general is bad for child well-being. For example, children who were relatively satisfied with life in general were approximately 2.5 times more likely to talk to their parents about important issues more than once a week than children who were relatively unsatisfied with life in general (see Figure 5.3).

  Figure 5.2 Children’s quarrelling with parents by satisfaction with life overall, 2011–2012

  Source: UK household longitudinal study, now known as ‘understanding society’.

  Figure 5.3 Children’s talk with parents by satisfaction with life overall, 2011–2012

  Source: UK household longitudinal study, now known as ‘understanding society’.

  These findings are correlational and so do not demonstrate causation, because low satisfaction ratings amongst children could be a product of impaired parent–child communication or they could be a cause of it, or they could arise from a third variable. But these findings are congruent with t
he notion that a lack of interest displayed by parents in their children is not only harmful to the vocabulary development of those children – as shown by Hart and Risley (1995) – but also to their subjective sense of satisfaction.

  A specific link between parental inattention and the development of antisocial personality traits has been provided by a recent study of 213 children from the Liverpool area (Bedford et al., 2014). This study showed that lower levels of maternal attentiveness predicted higher levels of antisocial personality traits in girls, suggesting that parental inattention can promote the development of antisocial personality traits (at least in females).

  In this study, children were not randomly assigned to mothers so the authors could not rule out the possibility that inattentive mothers possess antisocial traits that they pass onto their daughters via genetic rather than environmental means. However, despite this possibility, there appeared to be a genuine environmental effect of maternal inattentiveness upon antisocial personality development amongst daughters because the authors found that this effect remained significant even when maternal personality was statistically controlled.

  Viewed together with the findings by Hart and Risley (1995) that welfare claimants talk to their children less often than employed parents do, the results of Bedford et al. (2014) suggest that this lower level of attentiveness risks promoting antisocial personality traits in their children (especially their daughters). This conclusion might seem absurd, since paying attention to one’s children costs time, not money, and time is one resource that welfare claimants have in abundance compared to employed citizens. Yet my conclusion is echoed in the Sheffield problem family study by Tonge and colleagues (1975) cited in the previous chapter: the problem families in the Sheffield study, despite having higher rates of unemployment and thus more free time, were significantly more neglectful of their children than the more fully employed comparison families.

  This finding suggests that the children of welfare-claiming parents are not only at higher risk of being ignored, but also of being under-provided with the necessities of life, despite the availability of welfare funds. The negative effects of this neglect were evident in the 1981 follow-up, since the children of the problem families turned out as adults to have significantly worse work and criminal records than the children of the comparison families (Tonge et al., 1981). Viewed together with the results of Hart and Risley (1995) and Bedford et al. (2014), the Sheffield studies therefore suggest employment-resistance is transmitted from parents to children and that child neglect is implicated as a key environmental factor in that transmission.

  But the research in Sheffield did not allow a clean disentangling of genetic and environmental effects on personality development because, as Tonge and colleagues themselves observed: ‘Psychopathic parents provide a psychopathic inheritance and a psychopathic upbringing, which includes both desertion and a failure to teach the values and norms of society’ (Tonge et al., 1975, p. 37). In order to demonstrate the purely environmental effects of early childhood neglect on later life outcomes, it is necessary to turn to a group of five experiments in which children from disadvantaged families were randomly assigned to receive intensive preschool tutoring. These experiments come at the issue of child neglect from the opposite direction by using intensive preschool tutoring to counter the effects of neglect, then assessing the effects of this tutoring on life outcomes in adulthood.

  David Weikart and the Perry Preschool Project

  Born in 1931 in Ohio to parents who were social workers and teachers, David Weikart completed a psychology degree at Oberlin College in 1953 and then served as an officer in the US Marine Corps during the Korean War. Weikart started his PhD in education and psychology at the University of Michigan in 1956 and shortly afterwards began working as a school psychologist for the Ypsilanti public schools in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Through his experiences in this job, Weikart became concerned at the educational difficulties faced by children from disadvantaged African-American backgrounds and the apparent indifference towards these children by the local authorities. In response, Weikart and several reform-minded colleagues decided to test experimentally the possibility that disadvantaged children could be helped by intensive preschool tutoring programmes designed to increase intellectual maturity at three and four years old, in order to prepare them for a successful school career and a productive adult life. In order to find out if preschool programmes were effective, Weikart and colleagues hired four teachers to conduct intensive tutoring with the children in the experimental group and launched the Perry Preschool Project in October 1962, running until the spring of 1967.

  The study participants were 123 children between three and four years old on enrolment, who were all from low-income African-American families in Ypsilanti and who were considered at high risk of school failure. These children were randomly assigned to either the experimental group (58 children) or the control group (65 children). Before the project began, the experimental- and control-group children were equivalent in intellectual performance and their demographic characteristics, with both groups being recruited from disadvantaged families. The experimental group of children attended the intensive tutoring classes for approximately three hours a day, five days a week, during term time for two years. The children in the experimental group also had a 90-minute home visit by the same teacher every week. The control-group children did not have the special classes and home visits.

  Every year from the age of three to 11 the progress of both groups was assessed and follow-up assessments were conducted again at the age of 14–15, 19, 27 and 40. These follow-ups showed that the educational and life outcomes for the children in the experimental group were significantly superior to outcomes for the children in the control group. For example, in a review of the economic benefits of preschool intervention published in Science Magazine, the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman summarised the Perry preschool results thus: ‘In follow ups to age 40, the treated group had higher rates of high school graduation, higher salaries, higher percentages of home ownership, lower rates of receipt of welfare assistance as adults, fewer out-of-wedlock births, and fewer arrests than the controls’ (Heckman, 2006, p. 1901). In the context of this book, these results mean the treated children turned out to be better adjusted than those who did not receive tutoring or, in other words, the preschool tutoring made their personalities less employment-resistant.

  More specifically, in education, 77 per cent of the participants in the experimental group graduated from high school whereas only 60 per cent of the control participants did so and, in the females, the effect was even stronger with 88 per cent of the experimental group graduating compared to 46 per cent of the control group. In economic terms, at the age of 40, significantly more of the experimental group were in work (76 per cent) compared to the control group (62 per cent). The experimental group also had significantly higher median annual earnings at the age of 40 ($20,800 versus $15,300). Effects of the preschool programme on crime prevention were especially strong, with 55 per cent of the control group being arrested five times or more compared to 36 per cent of the experimental group. Similarly, by age 40, 28 per cent of the experimental group had served a prison sentence compared to 52 per cent of the control group. Finally, the preschool programme had a large beneficial effect on parenting in men, with almost twice as many of the males from the experimental group raising their own children (57 per cent) compared to the males from the control group (30 per cent; Schweinhart et al., 2005).

  The economic relevance of the Perry Preschool Project has been confirmed by detailed follow-up analyses. These revealed that by the time the participants reached the age of 40, the Perry Preschool Project had returned approximately $16 for every dollar spent running it. Broken down into specific financial areas, 88 per cent of the benefit came from reductions in crime, four per cent from reduced costs of education, seven per cent from increased tax revenue due to higher earnings and one per cent came from welfare savings (Schwei
nhart et al., 2005).

  The interesting finding in the context of this book was that the preschool programme did not permanently boost IQ. Early gains in the IQ scores of the experimental-group children were found during and for a year after the study, but these gains did not last and, from that time on, there were no significant long-term differences in IQ between the two groups of participants. This is unsurprising considering behaviour genetic studies have shown that IQ is more strongly determined by the individual’s genetic make-up than personality and therefore likely to be less amenable to environmental influence (Plomin et al., 2008).

  So if the preschool programme wasn’t improving their IQ, what aspect of the children’s psychological make-up did it improve? A clue can be found in its teaching content. David Weikart and colleagues had designed the preschool programme to build the children’s skills in planning, executing and reviewing tasks and also in conflict resolution. This suggests that the programme served to improve the social adjustment of the children by training them to be forward-looking, dependable, cooperative and thus economically effective citizens. These characteristics at face value are associated with high scores on conscientiousness and agreeableness (McCrae & Costa, 2008) and form the pro-employment personality profile that I argue reduces likelihood of welfare dependency. This impression is backed up by a recent study, cited in Chapter 1, in which James Heckman and colleagues showed that the tutored children were better equipped to behave as solid citizens during adulthood because the tutoring caused their personality profiles to be, on average, less aggressive, antisocial and rule-breaking than those of their peers who were not tutored (Heckman et al., 2013).

  The Abecedarian Project