parenting

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Podcast: It's time to pay attention to debates about girls, Instagram and mental-health woes

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Podcast: It's time to pay attention to debates about girls, Instagram and mental-health woes

If you have followed GetReligion for a decade or so, you know that our religion-beat patriarch Richard Ostling writes a “Memo” post every week in which he focuses on religion trends and future events to which journalists should be paying attention.

This week’s Memo focused on why religious and secular debates about Death with Dignity laws will not be fading away anytime soon. As always, Ostling’s Memo posts are packed with links to relevant interest groups, experts and online resources to aid reporters.

This brings me to this week’s “Crossroads,” which — for a change — does not focus on a religion-news story in the mainstream press (click here to listen to the podcast). Instead, you can think of this feature as a kind of Mattingly Memo, in which host Todd Wilken and I discussed the news (and religious) implications of a new Atlantic Monthly essay by Jonathan Haidt that ran with this dramatic double-decker headline:

The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls

The preponderance of the evidence suggests that social media is causing real damage to adolescents

On its face, this essay was not a “religion news” piece at all. From my point of view, that was kind of the point.

One of the themes Haidt stressed was that teen-aged girls are pretty much alone, when it comes to wrestling with the moral, emotional and even medical side effects of addiction to social media — the invasive visual-image wonderland of Instagram, in particular. The article includes a depressing file of research slides on this mental-health issue from the Wall Street Journal (click here for that .pdf). Note, in particular, that teens believe their parents have next to zero understanding of what is going on.

If parents are tuned out, where does that put clergy? Should religious leaders be playing some kind of role in public-square (and personal) discussions of this issue?

These questions made me think of an “On Religion” column that I wrote in 2017 about the efforts of some Colorado teens — reacting to several suicides linked to cyber-bullying — to help their friends examine the impact of social-media programs on their lives.


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That other papal statement: Here's your rare 250-word RNS report on a gay-rights issue

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And now for something completely different. Let's take a glance at some mainstream news coverage of that other recent pronouncement by Pope Francis, the one that didn't get very much ink.

Why is that? Well, the problem is that the pope, in this case, warmly and publicly embraced a key element of Catholic moral theology linked to marriage and sexuality. This is not the sort of thing that ends up getting major play in major American newspapers.

What did the pope say? Speaking on issues linked to parenting, at a conference held by the Diocese of Rome, Francis noted the following while talking about the meaning of "communion," with a small "c":

… Being parents is based on the diversity of being male and female, as the Bible reminds us. This is the 'first' and most fundamental difference, constitutive of the human being. It is a wealth. Differences are wealth. …
"We men learn to recognise, through the female figures we encounter in life, the extraordinary beauty that women bear. And women follow a similar path, learning from male figures that the man is different and has his own way of feeling, understanding and living. And this communion in difference is very important also in the education of children”.

In the end, the pope issued a ringing affirmation of traditional marriage and the importance of children having both a mother and a father. In the current context, this is rather a rather shocking statement and worthy of coverage, even though it is basic, orthodox, 2,000 year-old Christian doctrine.

This is the kind of statement, in other words, that was granted a 250-word, bare-bones news report by the Religion News Service.


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Surprise! Same-sex couples produce happier kids, elite media say

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Ordinarily, quality journalism benefits from solid information, concrete evidence and a healthy dose of skepticism.

But certainly, major news organizations can be forgiven when they err on the side of a higher ideal, right?

In this week's example, that higher ideal would be acceptance of same-sex parents.

At this point in history, producing a baby apparently — and regrettably, it seems — still requires a father and a mother. But on the bright side, a "major study" has come up with this encouraging news:

Children of same-sex couples are happier and healthier than peers, research shows

That was the headline in the Washington Post. 

The breathless top of the Post story:

Children of same-sex couples fare better when it comes to physical health and social well-being than children in the general population, according to researchers at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

“It’s often suggested that children with same-sex parents have poorer outcomes because they’re missing a parent of a particular sex. But research my colleagues and I published in the journal BMC Public Health shows this isn’t the case,” lead researcher Simon Crouch wrote on the Conversation.

Crouch and his team surveyed 315 same-sex parents with a total of 500 children across Australia. About 80 percent of the kids had female parents and about 18 percent had male parents, the study states.

Children from same-sex families scored about 6 percent higher on general health and family cohesion, even when controlling for socio-demographic factors such as parents’ education and household income, Crouch wrote. However, on most health measures, including emotional behavior and physical functioning, there was no difference compared with children from the general population.

Crouch suggested the greater social cohesion among same-sex families comes from an equal distribution of work. He said same-sex couples are likely to share responsibilities more equally than heterosexual ones.

“It is liberating for parents to take on roles that suit their skills rather than defaulting to gender stereotypes, where mum is the primary care giver and dad the primary breadwinner,” he said.

 


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