ENDEAVOUR FORUM NEWSLETTER No. 111, AUGUST 2003

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The essays of Allan Carlson, President of the Howard Centre, Rockford, Illinois, and Convenor of the World Congress of Families I and II, have been translated into Russian and published  by the Sociology Department of Moscow Lomonosov State University,  in a book  titled "Society,  Family and Person".  University of Chicago Professor Don Browning in his new book  "Marriage and Modernization" describes the Howard Centre as "standing at the centre of an emerging conservative, religious and political world strategy on families".  Information on new research (with the journal references) circulated by the Howard Centre through weekly emails is very valuable for pro-family activists. For example the item below on the babies of career women, is very relevant to Endeavour Forum’s contention that maternity (leave) payments and child care subsidies should be available to all mothers, and not only to those in paid jobs.  Many women are in paid employment until they have their first baby.  Two years later, without going back to paid work, they may have another child.  Where is the justice in giving her paid maternity leave for the first baby but not for the second?  Taxpayers' money should be used to give mothers a choice, not to coerce them back into employment when their children are young. Prime Minister John Howard has floated the idea of a $5000 payment to all mothers rather than paid maternity leave for those in employment.  Write to Mr.Howard supporting this idea. 

The Career Woman's Baby

When a mother returns to employment soon after the birth of a new child, she may be making a smart choice for career advancement, but she may be retarding her child's cognitive development with some of the adverse effects not showing up for years to come. The effects of early maternal employment recently received close scrutiny from a team of researchers at Columbia University, who had access to nationally representative data for 1,872 children born between 1982 and 1989 and tracked through ages seven or eight. These data indicate clearly "there are some negative effects of maternal employment in the first year on cognitive outcomes for white children that persist as late as age seven or eight and that these effects are larger for children whose mothers worked more hours per week in the week." 

In tracking the effects of maternal employment, the Columbia scholars sought to measure children's abilities in "receptive vocabulary" at age three or four and in math and reading at ages five or six and again at ages seven or eight. The researchers report that among the white children in this study, "maternal employment during the first year of life is associated with significantly poorer scores on all five of our age/outcome measures, with the effects ranging from -1.96 to -3.23 points." The authors of the new study further stress that "these effects are present even after we controlled for a range of individual and family characteristics that affect child development, including those that are likely to be correlated with maternal employment, such as breast-feeding and the use of nonmaternal child care." 

Perhaps to deflect attacks from feminist colleagues angered by their politically incorrect findings, the authors of the new study characterize the harmful effects of early maternal employment as "fairly small." However they are compelled to admit that "the fact that [these effects] persisted to age seven or eight is still cause for concern." What is more, readers might suppose that it might disquiet at least a few feminists that the researchers documented "more pronounced effects [of early maternal employment] on cognitive outcomes for girls." 

(Source: Jane Waldfogel, Wen-Jui Han, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, "The Effects of Early Maternal Employment on Child Cognitive Development," Demography 39[2002}: 369-392.)  

ORWELLIAN NEWSPEAK AND POLITICAL CORRECTNESS RUN AMUCK.

A new book, “The Language Police” by New York University professor of education Dianne Ravitch, reveals that some 500 words, including polo, yacht, bookworm, boyish, and barbarian, are strictly banned by the publishers of elementary and high school textbooks in America. Words are excluded because they are considered elitist, offensive, "ageist," too strong (Hell) or too religious (God). Ravitch  points out that the title of the classic "The Old Man and the Sea" would be reduced to "and " and "the." She explains that the word sea is banned [we are not making this up] because some students might live inland and not understand the concept of a large body of water.  Reuters, 29/5/03 

Good sense from the Vatican on Inclusive Language  

In commenting on the Roman Missal submitted by the Catholic Bishops of Australia, the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments states: “In an effort to avoid completely the use of the term “man” as a translation of the Latin homo, the translation often fails to convey the true content of that Latin term, and limits itself to a focus on the congregation actually present or to those presently living.  The simultaneous reference to the unity and the collectivity of the human race is lost.  The term “humankind” coined for the purposes of “inclusive language”, remains somewhat faddish and ill-adapted to the liturgical context, and in addition, it is usually too abstract to convey the notion of the Latin homo.  The latter, just as the English “man”, which some appear to have made the object of a taboo, are able to express in a collective but often concise and personal manner the notion of a partner with God in a Covenant who gratefully receives from Him the gifts of forgiveness and Redemption.  At least in many instances, an abstract or binomial expression cannot achieve the same effect

Member Organisation, World Council for Life and Family

NGO in Special Consultative Status with ECOSOC of the UN