What’s been written on junk science aimed at parents?

Michael Foster writes,

I was thinking of writing a book on Junk Science–“How Bad Research Scares the Crap out of Parents and Leads to Bad Public Policy”–there’s a bunch of the stuff out there suggesting that day care makes kids more aggressive, tv causes attention problems and so on.

Do you know of a book that focuses on kids that already addresses these kinds of issues?

Sounds like a good book idea to me. Does anyone know what’s out there?

7 thoughts on “What’s been written on junk science aimed at parents?

  1. I don't believe there is anything out there and I do believe that there is a market for such books. The field is pretty vast — I think that to try to counter the arguments in something narrow such as maternal employment and child's school performance is quite challenging. It requires some knowledge of the data used, the statistical issues and a pretty darn good ability to spin something that is readable. Judith Warner in her book Perfect Madness spends a few paragraphs challenging the notion that kids with stay at home moms do better than kids at child care (the missing variable that was not covered in the media was child care quality). Econospinning by Gene Epstein is a book that tries to debunk a lot of the statistics that come up on CNBC and all the other business news networks but the book was extremely slow going for me. I thought it was an interesting book but tough for the average reader.

    So all in all, it would be good to have a book that tries to bring it all together except that it is always hard to to discern advocacy with real research some times. And, there is also the danger of being bashed — the issue of child care especially gets lost in the heated words between the left (for instance, feminists) and the right (for instance the religious). Again, Warner's book discusses why she thinks a rational discussion on something that we should all care about — our children — is extremely difficult because it gets seized by both the left and the right to advance their agenda.

  2. I'd be a little wary of using the term 'junk science' – it has been popularized by people such as Steve Milloy who are known to play fast and loose with the facts themselves as a means of discrediting scientific research that sometimes seems on the face to be credible. Not to say that this wouldn't be a great book – just that the term itself has a history, and is rather loaded.

  3. I found a book by Googling by Jane Waldfogel called What Children Need. Unfortunately, I don't have the book but the description seems interesting:

    Emphasizing the importance of parental choice, quality of care, and work opportunities, economist Jane Waldfogel guides readers through the maze of social science research evidence to offer comprehensive answers and a vision for change.

  4. Great idea for a book. Reminds me a little of Barry Glassner's "Culture of Fear", where he looks at why these types of "scare stories" proliferate in the media.

Comments are closed.