Ah! Spring is in the air and bizarre findings from questionable scientific research abound. From University of Alberta psychologist Andrew Harrell we hear of a study exploring the relationship between people who do not wear wedding rings and their attentiveness to their children. According to Dr Harrell, people who don't wear wedding rings are more neglectful of children compared to those that wear them. His research goes on to say that attractive people who do not wear wedding rings are the most neglectful parents of all.
Now, you'd think that such a controversial finding would have some pretty hard data to back it up. I mean, one can't make such inflammatory claims without substantial evidence to support them, right? Well, I'll let you be the judge. Dr Harrell's "research" involved teams of observers, placed in supermarkets, studying the social interaction between parents (or caregivers) and their children. Dr Harrell's definition of "neglect" was measured according to how often the children were more than 10 feet away from their parents, or if they wandered out of sight. The children in this experiment were guesstimated at being between the ages of one and seven. Dr Harrell reports that 14 percent of caregivers lost sight of children at least once, but the figure rose to 19 percent if the caregivers were attractive females who were also ring-less.
Wow. How on Earth can you define "neglect" as being 10 feet away from your children in the supermarket? It's apparent to me, as a mother of two children under the age of four, that Dr Harrell has never been grocery shopping with children. As anyone who has will attest, it's nearly impossible to keep your eyes on them all the time, especially if you have more than one child, or if they are too big to fit in the shopping cart seat. Given that Dr Harrell's research subjects were estimated to be between the ages of one and seven, a good many of those children would be.
If you have one child, small enough to fit in the shopping cart seat, then you know where they are all the time. But what if you're halfway down the aisle and you've forgotten something 10 feet behind you? Do you wheel the laden cart all the way back to grab that one item? Or do you simply step-back and get it? Ooooh! 10 feet away from the baby! Neglectful parent alert! And if those researchers had been watching me when my daughter was a baby, they'd have noticed that I wasn't wearing a wedding ring. Would my lack of a wedding ring, as Dr Harrell suggests, be "interpreted as an interest in establishing social or sexual ties outside of marriage"? Well, it might have been. But the lack of a wedding ring actually meant I WASN'T MARRIED!
When we got pregnant with our daughter, my husband and I weren't married. We decided to wait until after she was born to get married, for many reasons, none of which were to do with a desire to "establish sexual ties outside of marriage". And if that's what I was really after, would I be doing it under the fluorescent lights of the supermarket, complete with infant in tow? Yeah! That's sexy! A new mom in her post-pregnancy jeans, wearing a breast-milk stained shirt and massive bags beneath her eyes from lack of sleep. "Come and get it, boys!"
But my interpretation of the supermarket differs significantly from Dr Harrell, who informs us that it "is more than a place to purchase bananas and cereal. It can also be a place for social encounters and maybe even a romantic rendezvous." Now either Dr Harrell knows of far sexier supermarkets than I do, or he's been reading too many erotic novels for sex-starved housewives.
And as for these "attractive" female parents or caregivers: attractive according to whom? And compared to whom? And if they weren't wearing a wedding ring, does this signify that they're "telling" people they're not married, or are they actually not married? And how do we even know if these attractive female caregivers are even the mothers of these "neglected" children? If they are nannies, or babysitters, or aunts, then the lack of a wedding ring would signify very little about their supposedly scurrilous attempts to find sexual gratification outside of marriage. They're probably not wearing one, because THEY'RE NOT MARRIED!
Dr Harrell informs us that, "Past research suggests that the absence of a wedding ring in North American culture is indicative of a lack of emotional commitment to marriage." How about, rather than a lack of "emotional" commitment to marriage, it simply signifies that people are not married?
Who is paying for this research? If I was a student at the University of Alberta, I'd be a tad exasperated to find out that the crippling student loans I'd taken out to fund my education might be used to fund such important "research".
