The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

by Richard J. Herrnstein

  The Role of Education

  White chronic welfare recipients are virtually all women with modest education at best, as set out in the next table. More than half of the chronic welfare recipients had not gotten a high school diploma; only six-tenths of 1 percent had gotten a college education. As in the case of IQ and socioeconomic status, this is a radically unrepresentative sample of white women.10 It is obviously impossible (as well as unnecessary) to analyze chronic welfare recipiency among college graduates.

  The women for whom socioeconomic background was the main risk factor for being chronically on welfare are those who had not finished high school For women with a high school diploma or more, IQ was more important than socioeconomic status (other things equal) in affecting the probability of becoming a chronic welfare recipient.11

  Educational Attainment of White Chronic Welfare Recipients

  Highest Degree Percentage

  Advanced degree 0

  B.A. or B.S. 1

  Associate degree 3

  High school diploma 42

  GED 16

  Less than high school 38

  Why? Apparently the women who did not finish high school and had an illegitimate child were selected for low intelligence, especially if they had the child while still in high school.12 The average IQ of these women was about 91, and analysis tells us that further variation in cognitive ability does not have much power to predict which ones become chronic welfare cases.13 Instead, for this narrowly screened group of women, family background matters more. Without trying to push the analysis much further, a plausible explanation is that for most white American parents, having a school-aged child go on welfare is highly stigmatizing to them. If the daughter of a working-class or middle-class couple gives birth to a baby out of wedlock while still in high school, chances are that her parents will take over support for the new baby rather than let their daughter go on welfare. The parents who do not keep their school-aged daughter off welfare will tend to be those who are not deterred by the stigma or who are themselves too poor to support the new baby. Both sets of parents earn low scores on the socioeconomic status index. Hence what we are observing in the case of chronic welfare recipiency among young women who do not finish high school may reflect parental behavior as much as the young mother’s behavior.14

  Other hypotheses are possible, however. Generally these results provide evidence for those who argue that a culture of poverty transmits chronic welfare dependency from one generation to the next. Our analysis adds that women who are susceptible to this culture are likely to have low intelligence in the first place.

  DRAWING TOGETHER THE FINDINGS ON ILLEGITIMACY AND WELFARE

  As social scientists often do, we have spent much effort burrowing through analyses that ultimately point to simple conclusions. Here is how a great many parents around America have put it to their daughters: Having a baby without a husband is a dumb thing to do. Going on welfare is an even dumber thing to do, if you can possibly avoid it. And so it would seem to be among the white women in the NLSY. White women who remained childless or had babies within marriage had a mean IQ of 105. Those who had an illegitimate baby but never went on welfare had a mean IQ of 98. Those who went on welfare but did not become chronic recipients had a mean IQ of 94. Those who became chronic welfare recipients had a mean IQ of 92.15 Altogether, almost a standard deviation separated the IQs of white women who became chronic welfare recipients from those who remained childless or had children within marriage.

  In Chapter 8, we demonstrated that a low IQ is a factor in illegitimate births that cannot be explained away by the woman’s socioeconomic background, a broken family, or poverty at the time the child was conceived. In particular, poor women of low intelligence seemed especially likely to have illegitimate babies, which is consistent with the idea that the prospect of welfare looms largest for women who are thinking least clearly about their futures. In this chapter, we have demonstrated that even among women who are poor and even among those who have a baby without a husband, the less intelligent tend to be the ones who use the welfare system.

  Two qualifications to this conclusion are that (1) we have no way of knowing whether higher education or higher IQ explains why college graduates do not use welfare—all we know is that welfare is almost unknown among college-educated whites, but that for women with a high school education, intelligence plays a large independent role—and (2) for the low-IQ women without a high school education who become chronic welfare recipients, a low socioeconomic background is a more important predictor than any further influence of cognitive ability.

  The remaining issue, which we defer to the discussion of welfare policy in Chapter 22, is how to reconcile two conflicting possibilities, both of which may have some truth to them: Going on welfare really is a dumb idea, and that is why women who are low in cognitive ability end up there; but also such women have little to take to the job market, and welfare is one of their few appropriate recourses when they have a baby to care for and no husband to help.

  Chapter 10

  Parenting

  Everyone agrees, in the abstract and at the extremes, that there is good parenting and poor parenting. This chapter addresses the uncomfortable question: Is the competence of parents at all affected by how intelligent they are?

  It has been known for some time that socioeconomic class and parenting are linked, both to disciplinary practices and to the many ways in which the intellectual and emotional development of the child are fostered. On both counts, parents with higher socioeconomic status look better. At the other end of the parenting continuum, neglect and abuse are heavily concentrated in the lower socioeconomic classes.

  Whenever an IQ measure has been introduced into studies of parent-child relationships, it has explained away much of the differences that otherwise would have been attributed to education or social class, but the examples are sparse. The NLSY provides an opportunity to fill in a few of the gaps.

  With regard to prenatal and infant care, low IQ among the white mothers in the NLSY sample was related to low birth weight, even after controlling for socioeconomic background, poverty, and age of the mother. In the NLSY’s surveys of the home environment, mothers in the top cognitive classes provided, on average, better environments for children than the mothers in the bottom cognitive classes. Socioeconomic background and current poverty also played significant roles, depending on the specific type of measure and the age of the children.

  In the NLSY’s measures of child development, low maternal IQ was associated with problematic temperament in the baby and with low scores on an index of “friendliness,” with poor motor and social development of toddlers and with behavioral problems from age 4 on up. Poverty usually had a modest independent role but did not usually diminish the contribution of IQ (which was usually also modest). Predictably, the mothers IQ was also strongly related to the IQ of the child.

  Taking these data together, the NLSY results say clearly that high IQ is by no means a prerequisite for being a good mother. The disquieting finding is that the worst environments for raising children, of the kind that not even the most resilient children can easily overcome, are concentrated in the homes in which the mothers are at the low end of the intelligence distribution.

  Parenting, in one sense the most private of behaviors, is in another the most public. Parents make a difference in the way their children turn out—whether they become law abiding or criminal, generous or stingy, productive or dependent. How well parents raise their children has much to do with how well the society functions.

  But how are parents to know whether they are doing a good or a bad job as parents? The results seem to be hopelessly unpredictable. Most people know at least one couple who seem to be the ideal parents but whose teenage child ends up on drugs. Parents with more than one child are bemused by how differently their children respond to the same home and parental style. And what makes a good parent anyway? Most people also have friends who seem to be raising their chi
ldren all wrong, and yet the children flourish.

  The exceptions notwithstanding, the apparent unpredictability of parenting is another of those illusions fostered by the ground-level view of life as we live it from day to day. Parenting is more predictable in the aggregate than in the particular. The differences in parenting style that you observe among your friends are usually minor—the “restriction of range” problem that we discussed in Chapter 3. A middle-class mother may think that one of her friends is far too permissive or strict, but put against the full range of variation that police and social workers are forced to deal with, where “permissiveness” is converted into the number of days that small children are left on their own and “strictness” may be calibrated by the number of stitches required to close the wounds from a parental beating, the differences between her and her friend are probably small.

  Despite all the differences among children and parents, there is such a thing as good parenting as opposed to bad—not precisely defined but generally understood. Our discussion proceeds from the assumption that good parenting includes (though is not restricted to) seeing to nourishment and health, keeping safe from harm, feeling and expressing love, talking with and listening to, helping to explore the world, imparting values, and providing a framework of rules enforced consistently but not inflexibly. Parents who more or less manage to do all those things, weassert, are better parents than people who do not. The touchy question of this chapter is: Does cognitive ability play any role in this? Are people with high IQs generally better parents than people with low IQs?

  SOCIAL CLASS AND PARENTING STYLES

  The relationship of IQ to parenting is another of those issues that social scientists have been slow to investigate. Furthermore, this is a topic for which the NLSY is limited. For unemployment, school dropout, illegitimacy, or welfare recipiency, the NLSY permits us to cut directly to the question, What does cognitive ability have to do with this behavior? But many of the NLSY indicators about parenting give only indirect evidence. To interpret that evidence, it is useful to begin with the large body of studies that have investigated whether social class affects parenting. Having described that relationship (which by now is reasonably well understood), we will be on firmer ground in drawing inferences about cognitive ability.

  The first scholarly study of parenting styles among parents of different social classes dates back to 1936 and a White House conference on children.1 Ever since, the anthropologists and sociologists have told similar stories. Working-class parents tend to be more authoritarian than middle-class parents. Working-class parents tend to use physical punishment and direct commands, whereas middle-class parents tend to use reasoning and appeals to more abstract principles of behavior. The consistency of these findings extends from the earliest studies to the most recent.2

  In an influential article published in 1959, Melvin Kohn proposed that the underlying difference was that working-class parents were most concerned about qualities in their children that ensure respectability, whereas middle-class parents were most concerned about internalized standards of conduct.3 Kohn argued that the real difference in the use of physical punishment was not that working-class parents punish more but that they punish differently from middle-class parents. Immediate irritants like boisterous play might evoke a whack from working-class parents, whereas middle-class parents tended to punish when the intent of the child’s behavior (knowingly hurting another child, for example) was problematic.4 Kohn concluded that “the working-class orientation … places few restraints on the impulse to punish the child when his behavior is out of bounds. Instead, it provides a positive rationale for punishing the child in precisely those circumstances when one might most like to do so.”5 To put it more plainly, Kohn found that working-class parents were more likely to use physical punishment impulsively, when the parents themselves needed the relief, not when it was likely to do the child the most good.

  The middle-class way sounds like “better” behavior on the part of parents, not just a neutral socioeconomic difference in parenting style, and this raises a point that scholars on child development bend over backward to avoid saying explicitly: Generally, and keeping in mind the many exceptions, the conclusion to be drawn from the literature on parenting is that middle-class people are in fact better parents, on average, than working-class people. Readers who bridle at this suggestion are invited to reread the Kohn quotation above and ask themselves whether they can avoid making a value judgment about it.

  Parenting differences among the social classes are not restricted to matters of discipline. Other major differences show up in the intellectual development of the child. Anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath6 gives vivid examples in her description of parenting in “Roadville,” a white lower-class community in the Carolinas, versus “Gateway,” a nearby community of white middle-class parents.7 The parents of Roadville were just as devoted to their children as the parents of Gateway. Roadville newborns came home to nurseries complete with the same mobiles, pictures, and books that the Gateway babies had. From an early age, Roadville children were held on laps and read to, talked to, and otherwise made as much the center of attention as Gateway babies. But the interactions differed, Heath found. Take bedtime stories, for example. In middle-class Gateway, the mother or father encouraged the children to ask questions and talk about what the stories meant, pointing at items on the page and asking what they were. The middle-class parents praised right answers and explained what was wrong with wrong ones.8 It is no great stretch to argue, as Robert Sternberg and others do, that this interaction amounts to excellent training for intelligence tests. Lower-class Roadville parents did not do nearly as much of that kind of explaining and asking.9 When the children were learning to do new tasks, the Roadville parents did not explain the “how” of things the way the Gateway parents did. Instead, the Roadville parents were more likely to issue directives (“Don’t twist the cookie cutter”) and hardly ever gave reasons for their instructions (“If you twist the cutter, the cookies will be rough on the edge”).10

  When they got to school, the Roadville and Gateway children continued to differ. The working-class Roadville children performed well in the early tasks of each of the first three grades. They knew the alphabet when they went to kindergarten; they knew how to sit still in class and could perform well in the reading exercises that asked them to identify specific portions of words or to link two items on the same page of the book. But if the teacher asked, “What did you like about the story?” or “What would you have done if you had been the child in that story?” the Roadville children were likely to say “I don’t know” or shrug their shoulders, while the middle-class Gateway children would more often respond easily and imaginatively.11

  Heath’s conclusions drawn from her anthropological observations are buttressed by the quantitative work that has been done to date. A review of the technical literature in the mid-1980s put it bluntly: “It is an empirical fact that children from relatively higher SES families receive an intellectually more advantageous home environment. This finding holds for white, black, and Hispanic children, for children within lower- and middle-SES families, as well as for children born preterm and full-term.”12

  SOCIAL CLASS AND MALPARENTING

  To this point, we have been talking about parenting within the normal range. Now we turn to child neglect and child abuse, increasingly labeled “malparenting” in the technical literature.

  Abuse and neglect are distinct. The physical battering and other forms of extreme physical and emotional punishment that constitute child abuse get most of the publicity, but child neglect is far more common, by ratios ranging from three to one to ten to one, depending on the study.13 Among the distinctions that the experts draw between child abuse and neglect are these:

  Abuse is an act of commission, while neglect is more commonly an act of omission.

  Abuse is typically episodic and of short duration; neglect is chronic and continual.

  Abuse typically aris
es from impulsive outbursts of aggression and anger; neglect arises from indifference, inattentiveness, or being overwhelmed by parenthood.14

  Commonly, neglect is as simple as failure to provide a child with adequate food, clothing, shelter, or hygiene. But it can also mean leaving dangerous materials within reach, not keeping the child away from an open window, or leaving toddlers alone for hours at a time. It means not taking the child to a doctor when he is sick or not giving him the medicine the doctor prescribed. Neglect can also mean more subtle deprivations: habitually leaving babies in cribs for long periods, never talking to infants and toddlers except to scold or demand, no smiles, no bedtime stories. At its most serious, neglect becomes abandonment.

  Are abusing parents also neglectful? Are neglectful parents also abusive? Different studies have produced different answers. Child abuse in some bizarre forms has nothing to do with anything except a profoundly deranged parent. Such cases crop up unpredictably, independent of demographic and socioeconomic variables.15

  Once we move away from these exceptional cases, however, abuse and neglect seem to be more alike than different in their origins.16 The theories explaining them are complex, involving stress, social isolation, personality characteristics, community characteristics, and transmission of malparenting from one generation to the next.17 But one concomitant of malparenting is not in much dispute: Malparenting of either sort is heavily concentrated in the lower socioeconomic classes. Indeed, the link is such that, as Douglas Besharov has pointed out, behaviors that are sometimes classified as forms of neglect—letting a child skip school, for example—are not considered neglectful in some poor communities but part of the normal pattern of upbringing.18 What would be considered just an overenthusiastic spanking in one neighborhood might be called abuse in another.