DEVOTION AND DADS

National Review Online cites to a survey showing evangelicals and Catholic fathers spend more time with their children than mainline Protestant and secular dads. This finding surprised sociologist Bradley Wilcox, who came up with the study, because of evangelicals embrace "traditional gender roles." I'm not an evangelical by any means, but I firmly believe that my religious commitments will improve me as a father in the future. At the very least, my kids will never have to wonder if their father is going to make it home for dinner on Friday night. Anyway, the more foolish assumption made by Wilcox was believing child-rearing to be a zero-sum game among gender lines - the more Mom is at home, the less Dad should be. That however, is a correllary from the over-optimstic notion that the more Mom went to work, the more Dad would chip in at home - it hasn't happened, and it needs to.

The only conclusion one can draw from this survey, however, is the woefull state of sociological research. The survey failed to account for among the following the "educational backgrounds, incomes, professions or work schedules of the fathers." Well, at least this way they didn't have to worry about doing a regression.