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BERKELEY PROF: WHINY, INSECURE KIDS GROW UP TO BE CONSERVATIVES
Left-wing academic is continuing liberals' propaganda war on our children, says best-selling kid's author Katharine DeBrecht. Flaws and contrary data suggest problems with Berkeley professor's study, claims DeBrecht, who sees it as yet another attempt by liberals to indoctrinate America's children. "Books about gay kings and socialist fish."
An academic from UC Berkeley is claiming that children who are whiny and insecure grow up to be conservatives, while confident, self-reliant kids grow up to be liberals. The study, which is to be published in the Journal of Research Into Personality, claims that certain types of behavior in children in nursery school indicates whether or not they will be likely to be conservatives or liberals when they grow up. Professor Jack Block asserts that his study of a generation of Berkeley children and the attitudes that they adopted upon entering adulthood led him to these conclusions.
"This is yet another attempt by liberals to continue their war of indoctrination against our children," says best-selling kid's author Katharine DeBrecht, a mother of three and the author of the #1 hit Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed. "They have long been bombarding our children's classrooms and libraries with books about gay kings (King & King) and socialist fish (Rainbow Fish) and even marijuana use (It's Just a Plant), but this is a first -- even for liberals."
DeBrecht contends that the professor's study has a partisan agenda by suggesting that conservatism is the result of undesirable childhood traits. She points out that his study drew only on children from Berkeley, CA, a well known liberal enclave, and also ignores well established polling and demographic data that suggests that Republicans tend to be happier, better educated, and more successful than Democrats -- traits that certainly contradict the notion that liberals are more self-reliant and comfortable.
"The fact of the matter is that liberals have no sense of humor!" laughs DeBrecht, whose first book -- which portrayed Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy as cartoon villains taxing and regulating a lemonade stand -- was soundly condemned by liberals such Alan Colmes, Ron Reagan, and even Hillary Clinton's press secretary. The popular liberal website the Democratic Underground even named her to its "Top 10 Conservative Idiots" list.
"Liberals know that they cannot win at the polls or in the world of ideas, so they're attacking our children," adds DeBrecht, whose new book Help! Mom! Hollywood's in My Hamper emphasizes that children should not emulate the celebrities they see on television. "They've shown that they'll go to any extreme to push their propaganda, and they're not afraid to use children as their pawns to do it."
*** A biography of Katharine DeBrecht and an article describing the UC Berkeley academic's research immediately follow. ***
ABOUT KATHARINE DEBRECHT:
Katharine DeBrecht is an author of conservative children's books and a mother of three. Her first book Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed! hit #1 on the Barnes & Noble website in September 2005 and was profiled by the Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. A graduate of Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, DeBrecht served as co-captain of "Security Moms for Bush" for South Carolina, where she resides with her husband and children. Her latest book is titled Help! Mom! Hollywood's in My Hamper!
How to spot a baby conservative
KID POLITICS | Whiny children, claims a new study, tend to grow up rigid and traditional. Future liberals, on the other hand ... Mar. 19, 2006. 10:45 AM KURT KLEINER SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative.
At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals.
The study from the Journal of Research Into Personality isn't going to make the UC Berkeley professor who published it any friends on the right. Similar conclusions a few years ago from another academic saw him excoriated on right-wing blogs, and even led to a Congressional investigation into his research funding. But the new results are worth a look. In the 1960s Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality. The kids' personalities were rated at the time by teachers and assistants who had known them for months.
There's no reason to think political bias skewed the ratings — the investigators were not looking at political orientation back then. Even if they had been, it's unlikely that 3- and 4-year-olds would have had much idea about their political leanings.
A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity.
The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests. The girls were still outgoing, but the young men tended to turn a little introspective.
Block admits in his paper that liberal Berkeley is not representative of the whole country. But within his sample, he says, the results hold. He reasons that insecure kids look for the reassurance provided by tradition and authority, and find it in conservative politics. The more confident kids are eager to explore alternatives to the way things are, and find liberal politics more congenial.
In a society that values self-confidence and out-goingness, it's a mostly flattering picture for liberals. It also runs contrary to the American stereotype of wimpy liberals and strong conservatives.
Of course, if you're studying the psychology of politics, you shouldn't be surprised to get a political reaction. Similar work by John T. Jost of Stanford and colleagues in 2003 drew a political backlash. The researchers reviewed 44 years worth of studies into the psychology of conservatism, and concluded that people who are dogmatic, fearful, intolerant of ambiguity and uncertainty, and who crave order and structure are more likely to gravitate to conservatism. Critics branded it the "conservatives are crazy" study and accused the authors of a political bias.
Jost welcomed the new study, saying it lends support to his conclusions. But Jeff Greenberg, a social psychologist at the University of Arizona who was critical of Jost's study, was less impressed.
"I found it to be biased, shoddy work, poor science at best," he said of the Block study. He thinks insecure, defensive, rigid people can as easily gravitate to left-wing ideologies as right-wing ones. He suspects that in Communist China, those kinds of people would likely become fervid party members.
The results do raise some obvious questions. Are nursery school teachers in the conservative heartland cursed with classes filled with little proto-conservative whiners?
Or does an insecure little boy raised in Idaho or Alberta surrounded by conservatives turn instead to liberalism?
Or do the whiny kids grow up conservative along with the majority of their more confident peers, while only the kids with poor impulse control turn liberal?
Part of the answer is that personality is not the only factor that determines political leanings. For instance, there was a .27 correlation between being self-reliant in nursery school and being a liberal as an adult. Another way of saying it is that self-reliance predicts statistically about 7 per cent of the variance between kids who became liberal and those who became conservative. (If every self-reliant kid became a liberal and none became conservatives, it would predict 100 per cent of the variance). Seven per cent is fairly strong for social science, but it still leaves an awful lot of room for other influences, such as friends, family, education, personal experience and plain old intellect.
For conservatives whose feelings are still hurt, there is a more flattering way for them to look at the results. Even if they really did tend to be insecure complainers as kids, they might simply have recognized that the world is a scary, unfair place.
Their grown-up conclusion that the safest thing is to stick to tradition could well be the right one. As for their "rigidity," maybe that's just moral certainty.
The grown-up liberal men, on the other hand, with their introspection and recognition of complexity in the world, could be seen as self-indulgent and ineffectual.
Whether anyone's feelings are hurt or not, the work suggests that personality and emotions play a bigger role in our political leanings than we think. All of us, liberal or conservative, feel as though we've reached our political opinions by carefully weighing the evidence and exercising our best judgment. But it could be that all of that careful reasoning is just after-the-fact self-justification. What if personality forms our political outlook, with reason coming along behind, rationalizing after the fact?
It could be that whom we vote for has less to do with our judgments about tax policy or free trade or health care, and more with the personalities we've been stuck with since we were kids.
Kurt Kleiner is a Toronto-based freelance science writer.