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The surprising mental health effects of gender equality parenting

November 15th, 2012

by Bryce J. Christensen

A couple of weeks ago we noted some Swedish research that showed the adverse mental and physical effects on mothers with dependent children of working outside the home. Here is another report from The Family in America journal about the mental health benefits — or otherwise — on adolescent girls and boys of parents who hew to the gender equality model of domestic and working life.

When parents embrace the ideal of gender equality, their children enjoy the best possible mental health. They must. All the progressive commentators say so. Unfortunately, empirical science has just delivered a rude shock to the progressive dreamers, as public-health officials in left-leaning Sweden established that gender-equality between parents fosters mental pathology in adolescent children.

This linkage was the last thing the researchers were looking for. Indeed, the researchers began their study with the understanding—fostered by their colleagues’ scholarship—that “gender equality between parents is good for the children.” Their interest was the impact of parental gender equality on the well-being of adolescent females. For as they surveyed professional literature indicating that “females generally suffer more from mental ill-health conditions than males,” the researchers understandably supposed that “the search for explanations should consider the gender system.”

Their attempt to understand adolescent psychopathology focused on data collected for 54,282 Swedish boys and 51,504 Swedish girls born in 118,595 Swedish homes between 1988 and 1989. The researchers’ concern for the effect of household gender arrangements on young females seems justified, as their data reveal that “girls consume around twice as much outpatient mental care in the ages 13–18 years, and drugs due to anxiety and depression in the ages 17–20 years, than boys.”

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