Blaming road deaths on mum
Over-protective mothers are now being blamed for road deaths among teenage boys. I suppose it’s a change from saying that overprotective mothers make boys gay, as Freud famously imagined.
We’ve written before about the problem of seeing and trying to explain a trend when there’s really nothing there but random variation. That isn’t what’s happening here. In this case the trend is real. It’s just in the opposite direction to the explanation.
The graph above is from the Ministry for Social Development. It shows road deaths by age, over time. Road deaths in the high-risk 15-24 age group have been dropping steadily. But perhaps the decrease is mostly in females, you suggest? This also turns out not to be the case: the MSD says “Between 2005 and 2009, the average annual road user death rate for males was 13 deaths per 100,000 males, while the rate for females was 6 deaths per 100,000 females. For both sexes, this was less than half the average annual rate in the mid-1980s (33 deaths per 100,000 for males and 14 per 100,000 for females in 1985–1989), and around two-thirds the average annual rate in the mid-1990s (19 per 100,000 for males and 9 per 100,000 for females in 1995–1999).”
An advertising campaign telling mothers not to pick up their sons’ laundry [I’m not making this up] would have novelty value, but there’s fortunately not much risk that it would reverse the trend in teenage boys road deaths.
If you want an attack on overprotective parenting that’s slightly more connected to reality, I suggest ‘Free Range Kids’.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
I am afraid that I do not see the link between the assertion that ‘Helicopter’ mums increase vehicle accidents from teenage boys and your graph and comments.
Can you be more specific about the linkages and how you are rebutting Celia Lashie’s argument.
The graph shows a reduction an overall reduction in road deaths for all age groups over time. This trend could just as easily be used to prove improvement in car safety or improvement in road safety or improvement in driver training etc, etc.
It does not give a comparison road deaths by the age (or sex) of the driver that caused the accident, or the type of mother that the driver had.
Can you please elucidate?
12 years ago
The claim is that (a) helicopter moms are a new trend that didn’t happen in the Good Old Days and (b) that they are responsible to some meaningful extent for teenage boys’ road accidents.
If there were a real effect of any significant magnitude, it should show up as an increase in male road deaths in that age group, at least relative to other ages or to teenage girls. In fact, the decrease for males in the high-risk teenage/young adult age group is faster than other ages and very similar to females in that age group.
It is, of course, logically possible that there is some other factor reducing the death rate specifically among males in this age group that happens to exactly counteract an large increase that is the fault of overprotective mothers, and that’s why there appears to be no effect. Rigorously disproving this would require individual level information, but I don’t think anyone has actually advanced this hypothesis seriously.
As the link to ‘Free Range Kids’ suggests, I’m about as strongly opposed to overprotective parenting as someone without children of their own can reasonably be, but the idea of reducing the road toll by campaigning against mothers picking up their sons’ laundry needs a lot more actual supporting data before anyone should take it seriously.
12 years ago
You stated “Rigorously disproving this would require individual level information” so I am wondering you chose to attempt disprove Celia Lashie’s argument without the appropriate rigorous information?
I think I would have appreciated a comment similar to that written by James Curran in ‘What the frack? “To show fracking is causing an increase in seismic activity would require proper experimentation. However, it may be possible to show correlation at least between the increase in fracking wells and the number of seismic events. I don’t have enough clout, or time, to extract the information about the number of wells, and their location. However it is still interesting just to take a look at the data we can get regarding the number of earthquakes ourselves.”
12 years ago
On reflection, I’m still happy with my summary from the previous reply
“The idea of reducing the road toll by campaigning against mothers picking up their sons’ laundry needs a lot more actual supporting data before anyone should take it seriously.”
12 years ago
I am sorry but I seem to be having difficulty articulating my concerns.
For me if you distil the Celia Lashlie article it is about the decision making abilities of the drivers and what were the influencing factors in shaping those abilities. So the appropriate data set would have to be based the causes of the accidents, not the results. The MSD site does not make any comment on the causes of the accident.
For example a young girl drives into a group of cyclists killing 3, the driver is unharmed. Celia is asking about the training (upbringing) of the driver. Then you are rebutting this argument using data on the three cyclists that died. (http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/5511385/Widower-slates-young-drivers)
My grave concern is that you used an incorrect data set to trivialise Celia’s concerns.
I am not sure if Celia is correct or not, but perhaps it is worthwhile stripping out the emotions and looking more closely about how people react in a harm situation.
12 years ago