Dinner with Stephanie Coontz

Stephanie Coontz came to speak at the Yale Political Union, and I had the pleasure of having dinner with her at Mory's. Professor Coontz is a well known researcher of family history. She takes an opposing view to family values advocate Maggie Gallagher who I had dinner with earlier this year. Highlights from the dinner: - She criticized Maggie Gallagher as not being a serious, academically trained social scientist. Coontz has formed a group of social scientists who aim to provide information to the media about family issues based on the latest research. She critized Gallagher as picking out the statistics that bolstered the conservative cause, while ignoring all other evidence. - She believed that the bad outcomes of children with single parents could be avoided with proper training. For instance, a single parent is more likely to have a more friendly relation with their children. While the child is young, the parent will say things such as, "How about you go to bed now?" The child will generally obey. But when the child reaches the age of adolecent rebellion, the parent will start making a curfew, and the child will say, "I didn't used to have a curfew! Why are you restricting me now?" In a two parent family, there is usually an alliance of adults against kids and more of a definite generation boundry. It is a house rule that a child must go to bed by a certain time. Thus when the child becomes an adolescent there is already a history of having rules, and the child finds it more acceptable.