A recent report suggests that women's social networks positively affect her child's cognitive development, says Dr John Shaver from the University of Otago.

The analysis also suggests that religious women have stronger support networks.

Shaver says that previous studies have found that sibling number is negatively related to a child's cognitive and physiological development.

It is also negatively related to a child's socioeconomic success in adulthood.

This happens because parents have less time, and fewer resources to invest in their development.

"The expectation, based on these findings, would be that due to differences in family sizes, children born to religious parents would exhibit poorer developmental outcomes than children born to secular parents," Shaver says.

The report's authors tested the hypothesis that religious cooperation extends to alloparenting (investment in children by people other than the child's parents), that higher levels of social support for religious mothers were associated with their fertility and their children's development.

Shaver says while the findings only support some hypotheses, they were mostly consistent with the idea that religions in modern environments support cooperative breeding strategies.

Women who receive help from members of their congregation have higher fertility, and this aid, as well as more general forms of social support, were both associated with improved child cognitive development.

"By positively influencing social support, religion in the UK may help some women have more children, without sacrificing the success of these children."

Shaver is the lead author of the report Church attendance and alloparenting: An analysis of fertility, social support, and child development among English mothers, published this month in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, the world's oldest English language journal.

Source

• otago.ac.nz
• newstalkzb.co.nz
• voxy.co.nz
• Image: teara.govt.nz

The research will be led by Dr John Shaver, University of Otago's Religion programme head, with Otago Research Fellow Dr Joseph Watts, who will conduct fieldwork in The Gambia.

The study will examine the impact of globalisation on practical support available to mothers and how this support impacts women's fertility and their children's health and development.

The Templeton Foundation notes that despite scholarly projections of the demise of religion, religious groups in many parts of the world are growing.

A great deal of this growth can be attributed to the higher fertility of religious people compared to their secular counterparts.

An unexplained paradox

Studies of diverse human populations demonstrate that parents in modern societies sacrifice the number of children they have for quality of children.

Even though children born to large families are expected to suffer physiological, psychological and social obstacles to flourishing, children born into religious communities appear buffered from the detrimental effects of high fertility.

Currently, this paradox of religious fertility is unexplained.

Shaver said preliminary work in New Zealand suggests co-operation in faith-based communities extends to childcare.

"What we don't know yet is whether shared childcare among co-religionists may help to mitigate the costs of high fertility, positively affecting both fertility and child health."

Over the next 30 months, a team of seven anthropologists and demographers will conduct cross-cultural studies of 6,050 Christian, Hindu, Jewish and Muslim participants in Bangladesh, India, Malawi, The Gambia and the United States.

In addition to Otago University, the project involves researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Connecticut.

The John Templeton Foundation supports independent research on subjects ranging from complexity, evolution and emergence to creativity, forgiveness and free will.

Source

• templeton.org
• voxy.co.nz
• odt.co.nz
• Image: ecovis.com

Speaking on the BBC's Costing the Earth programme, Sir David was asked if he supported the right to die.

"I suppose I do really, but [only] if you could solve all the problems of dealing with the misuse of such a right," he said.

He added: "When you see poor people, poor in the sense of having some wretched disease, pleading for their lives to be brought to an end. . . It's difficult to think that they don't deserve to have that right."

Asked if he would consider ending his own life, he said: "I think if I was compos mentis and I was really having a wretched life."

His comments came two months after UK MPs overwhelmingly voted against changing the law to allow doctors to help terminally ill people end their lives.

Sir David acknowledged the complexity of the subject, saying: "These issues of how long people should live are very complicated and involves not only medical issues but philosophical issues."

The 89-year-old broadcaster also repeated his concern about rapid population growth, pointed out that the number of people on the planet had tripled since he started making TV programmes in the 1950s.

Asked what message he would deliver to world leaders due to gather at the upcoming climate summit in Paris, Sir David said: "I would say, ‘Please allow your population to choose whether they have bigger families or smaller families: to give the right to say how many children you will have to women.' If all the women in the world had that choice I'm fairly convinced that the birthrate would fall."

He said he would have no hesitation in delivering that message to the Pope.

Asked if the Catholic Church had got it wrong on contraception, Sir David said: "Yes I do. I think it is an extraordinary blind spot."

In 2013, Sir David said of Africa: "They are too many people for a too little piece of land. That's what it's about. And we are blinding ourselves."

Sources

• The Guardian
• The Telegraph
• Image: The Guardian