Dr. Sarah Buckland "God's design for the family"

And just a reminder as a little disclaimer here is that for those of you here in zoom we ask that you keep your microphones and cameras off during Sarah's presentation.

And then if you have questions you can post them into the into the comments, and that also goes for Facebook Live, you can post your comments, any questions into the comments and chat there on Facebook as well.

And I believe that we're, we're ready that maybe we don't even need to tell a joke tonight is that, is that right,

Robin Are we good to go. Well you'll see you'll see a joke on my screen, unless you want to.

Well, we're good. Okay, we're good so I'm going to go ahead and introduce

I'm Terry cameras out here with creation fellowship, Santy and we're a group of friends bound by our common agreement that the creation account as told in Genesis is a true depiction of how

God created the universe and all life from nothing in just six days a few thousand years ago, we've been meeting most

Thursday nights here on zoom since June of 2020. We've been blessed with presentations by pastors teachers doctors cartoonists scientists apologists and all around smarty pants people who love the

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Follow us on our creation fellowships anti Facebook page and sign up for our email list by emailing creation fellowships anti at gmail .com,

so you don't miss any of our upcoming speakers tonight we're blessed to have with us,

Sarah Buckland from Jamaica, Sarah Buckland is a Christian Jamaican interdisciplinary researcher and author, with a background spanning

Bible evidences Spanish language studies, and the environmental and social sciences,

Sarah accepted the Lord at the young age of eight and has been a Christian for nearly 20 years.

Sarah is also presently a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography and Geology at the

University of the West Indies Mona campus, and is also a past student of creation apologetics teachers college by the creation training initiative in 2018

Sarah's drive for Christian advocacy has also led her to produce her own ministry called chosen to glow ministries, aimed at reaching youth with by with the

Bible in the Caribbean and beyond. Sarah also actively participates in Christian writing ministry and has had over a dozen of her articles and book chapters published in Jamaica, the

United States, Trinidad and Guyana. She is also a member of the International Association for creation and a student member of the creation research society.

Since 2016, Sarah's academic work has also received recognition through the

Jamaican Prime Minister's National Youth Award for Excellence in academics and the

University of the West Indies postgraduate wall of excellence. Sarah's ministry initiatives and research work may be followed at her website,

Sarah Faye Buckland calm, and I'll put that into the comments on Facebook and here on zoom.

And with that, we're happy to turn it over to you Sarah, go ahead. Thank you so much, Terry thanks everyone.

I really appreciate the invitation, and this opportunity to just present a few findings and information from the scriptures on the wisdom and God's design for the family and I'll be taking a social science perspective.

Before we go into my presentation, I just wanted to share a little humor.

Before we begin, this is a video that had been actually going around Facebook, which you might, you might have seen before, but it actually has an important message that we could all, we could all learn from.

So the video apparently is not playing. Um, let's see.

I wonder if I should describe it, or if I don't know, let me see

I don't want to break the presentation. But anyway, the scenario is that this professor.

It's set in Africa and this secular professor sees a family, um, you know, eating and he was saying that okay,

I see your success in the, they had a YouTube, a

YouTube video thing going on and apparently they won an award and so they were congratulating them and then this child said that, well it's

God though, it's not us, it's God. And then he was saying, God, where is your

God? And then the girl said, our God is in heaven. And then he said, can you see your

God? And then she said no. Can you touch your God? He said no. And then he said, according to science, what you can't see or touch kind of doesn't exist.

So God doesn't exist. And then he was about to go, but the girl called him back and said, um, professor, like, do you have, like, how did she say it again?

Like, that's why I wanted the video, but, um, it was saying, can you see your sense?

Um, and he said, do you have, do you have sense? And then he said, um, oh no. So how do you know that there is a

God? There is no God. And then he said, I use my sense. And then she said, um, can you see your sense?

He said no. Can you touch your sense? And then he said no. And she said, according to science, what you can't see or touch doesn't exist.

So that means you have no sense. So that was good. Right. Um, so what

I just wanted to really take away from that, wait, this thing did not come up. I had a little, well,

I don't know what's going on with this. Anyway, I had two takeaways from this video, basically.

Number one is that you have to use honest logic when it comes on to science, because you have, you have claimed people who claim and appeal to science, but they're actually not being logical and you can't know everything from what we call science.

You have to know how to separate the interpretations from reality and from facts. Second thing is also the importance of training of our children to be able to counteract and understand, um, when there is truth or error, um, being fed to them.

So it's important that we ground our children as families so that they are not led astray by what even more educated persons bring to them, that they're rooted and grounded in their knowledge of God and their knowledge of scripture.

So that's what I wanted to actually show you here. Um, but that didn't work. Hopefully the other slides work.

But before I go into this, I just wanted to let you know, well, some of this was already said, but, um, right,

I just completed the PhD and the presentation content includes, um, work that was presented at various conferences locally, as well as on the

International Day of Families, um, this year at the UN. So, um, some of this content is found elsewhere, but that's just a disclaimer, um, that it's there.

So my presentation will really actually take five main sections.

The first I'll be speaking about the relevance of the topic to both creation science and evangelism.

I'll then be going briefly into the objectives of the presentation and defining the key terms.

Then I'll be just briefly going through the methods and the sources of my materials. I'll be mostly focusing on three studies that I did and also comparing secondary data.

Um, in my main part of my presentation, I'll be just presenting five key takeaways from the research.

And then finally, I'll be just presenting implications for faith and outreach. What does, what do these findings actually mean for us?

So since we are, um, family in creation, let me just begin there.

Um, I'm not sure why I'm seeing like the top part of my screen is being blocked. And so I'm not seeing the top of my, um, heading.

But anyway, let's begin in creation. So creation is a reflection of God's greatness.

As we are in creation fellowship, we are familiar with most of our creation scientists being focusing on the biological aspects, chemical aspects, geology, physics, all of these that provide glimpses of the divine order.

But what I'll be presenting to you today is another aspect that I have not been seeing very much focused on in creation science, which deals with the behaviors of human beings, social sciences.

And so, um, I hope that this actually fills a gap and lets us understand more about the wisdom of God's laws, because most of God's laws really, um, govern our behavior, behavior patterns.

And so, um, social sciences actually has a key that is very vital for us to, to really look at.

Right? So just a little on the importance of social sciences in evangelism, we can discover the value of God's laws, looking at, at social sciences, just as we discover useful patterns through natural law, we can find the secrets of optimal societal function to be evident when

God's laws on behavior are followed. So I just have two examples on the screen here. So if you look at psychology, um, we have many psychologists have found the benefits on our health is by just following, being forgiving and having, showing gratitude.

It's excellent for emotional health and joy also has an impact, a positive impact on our health.

So social sciences like psychology can be used to actually get insights on why

God tells us, or what are some of the secondary benefits beyond the spiritual law on why

God could have given us these commands in our lives. Another importance of social sciences in evangelism is to combat secular ideology, because if we look around in our world, we actually see that we are bombarded with an assault against God's design and the families, families are actually at the center of modern spiritual warfare.

And so, if you even just look at things like fornication and LGBT and abortion, all of these are social issues.

And it's really something that people might take for granted, but God's laws, the violation of God's laws have more consequences than just merely the spiritual consequences that are outlined in the

Bible. God knowing and having things, setting out his laws for our good actually will have physical benefits for following his laws.

And that can be insight into these can actually be seen through social sciences. Another importance is in policymaking.

If we actually, as Christians, go out and actually look and do conduct research, we can help to shape the policies.

One of the biggest problems I'm seeing is that the dominant view that is out there in the literature is not

Christian -based, even though you can use secular methods like social sciences and actually see insights into why

God says what he says. So unfortunately, our governments are using wrong evidences that are really based on political motives.

But I believe that more Christians need to step into the field of social sciences so that we can have more of a pool of evidence that is out there for Christian -based policy.

So that being said, I'm going to be just giving you the aim and scope of my presentation. My main aim here tonight is to explore the relevance of God's design for families in modern society using social science research as a tool.

My scope of focus, I'll be mostly focusing on three primary research studies that I conducted in Jamaica.

And I'll also be complementing my discussion by case studies globally. And specifically, as I had mentioned,

I'm looking at the impact of family structure and family interpersonal relationships on children.

So now that we've gone through the introduction, let me define a few of the key terms that I've been mentioning and that will be core to our discussion tonight.

So firstly, what is social sciences? Social sciences really is just a branch of science that deals with the functioning of human society and its interpersonal relationships among individuals and also institutions, as the word social would suggest in the science.

So social sciences, though, is a really different approach than natural sciences.

There are some precautions to consider because human behavior is really complex. So it's called soft science because it's not usually studied in a controlled environment.

So many different things you'll have to consider as a scientist to see, how can

I reduce bias in this? How can I actually isolate and attribute causation in social sciences?

So it is more complex because we are not deterministic. We have free will and we don't always act rationally.

So usually social scientists use what's called a correlational research design. I know this is not a science research method, so I'm not going to be going into that.

But we usually use statistics to control factors. So as I mentioned, the design of the research is very important.

And I'm just mentioning this because a part of my presentation, I'm going to be briefly giving us some tips for how to discern, you know, why some studies don't agree with others.

So we can actually discern what we hear as a basis that might seem to contradict

God's laws. There must be something wrong when something contradicts God's laws based on evidence, right?

So there are special technical requirements in social sciences. You need informed consent.

There's ethical board approvals, etc. So there is no wonder that the focus is not on social science in creation research, but hopefully we will get there as a community.

So next key term is design. What is design? So firstly, many definitions exist, but the one that I actually chose here actually,

I believe, covers four main features of design.

So firstly, let me just read it here. So I'm going to just break this down so that we don't get lost in all of this that was just said.

All right. So it mentions specification and components that really points to structure.

It mentions intent to accomplish goals that points to purpose.

It points to, it says a particular environment that points to contextual considerations and the set of requirements and constraints.

We can look at that as the functionality conditions. So I'm going to take these components of design and apply it to the family and look at scripture, at what scripture says about each of these, particularly structure, purpose and functionality.

And look at, compare what I found in my data and what the scripture says the family's design should be in terms of its structure, its purpose and its functionality.

So I'm going to be just going through that before I look at my results.

So is there a blueprint standard that we can use to compare and measure what are God's intended outcomes for families?

So as I mentioned, let's look at the three of them. I have some scriptures. So in terms of the structure, we see in Genesis 1 verse 27 that God made male and female at the beginning.

So we see the structure is heterosexual. God also mentioned that a man should leave his father and his mother and keep to his wife.

And definitely in the New Testament, monogamy is designed in the marital, in the relationship of, in the family of the parents.

Finally, I will just be highlighting about marital union, that that is the context in which families are actually designed originally by God.

So that's structural. And we will be going into each of these in my presentation and seeing what are the benefits that we can actually see in terms of children's outcomes when people follow these, these conditions versus when they are violated.

Next is the purposes of family. I have just selected two scriptures about God's purposes for family.

One is to raise God with children as Malachi 2 verse 15 says. And the next is companionship where God says it's not good for man to be alone.

And finally, functionality. What does scripture say about family's functionalities? Firstly, spiritual support and evangelism.

Deuteronomy 6 speaks about parents when they're rising, when they're going to bed.

We should always teach our children to follow God and to seek him.

Physically providing is also mentioned in the Bible. In 1 Timothy 5 verse 8, for example, it says that if you don't look after your family, you're worse than an unbeliever.

And in Colossians 3 verse 19, it speaks about mutual support where husbands should not be bitter with their wives, etc.

We're supposed to be supportive in a family unit. So the hypothesis then is that if one of these biblical hallmarks is broken, there will likely eventually be measurable externalizing adverse outcomes evidence.

So just to quickly go through how I went about finding out or testing these hypotheses,

I'm going to just briefly tell you about my data sets and how I analyze them before I go into the results.

So my primary data sets, as I mentioned, there are three. There was one that I did across Kingston, Jamaica, which is the capital of our country.

There's one that was done among college age students. And there was a larger one that I did from secondary data available at my university, which was reanalyzed by me.

All right. So for the high school data, it's targeted boys and girls from ages 11 to 19.

And I also conducted separate interviews with guidance counselors. There was a preliminary sample size of 70.

But what I did with the sample, I added that with other data and compared.

So with the sampling methods, I used actually a blind experimental design. So students were not aware of who was going to be.

They were just given the questionnaire. However, they were chosen by their teachers with codes on the questionnaire, without the students actually knowing that they were being categorized into badly behaved or well -behaved students.

So what the teachers based on their students' normal behaviors in their classes, whether they were rowdy or fight, fought a lot, etc.

They were given specific questionnaires. All had the same questions. But I did not rely on the students telling me if they've gotten detentions or if they had fights, etc.

So that was a control that I had. I also sampled from each grade level with a mixture of all girls, all boys and for educational schools.

For the college age students, there are 16 to 25 years old and there was an equal sample of males and females.

For the re -analysis data, there were 3 ,365 students sampled and similar age group as the other high school sample from Kingston.

And as I mentioned, the methodology is very important. I used random sampling for these bias.

So what were we interested to know from the surveys specifically? I didn't ask it in that way, but I found out from my analysis how family structure influenced students' behavior.

Particularly their likelihood to be fighting at school, to skip school, to smoke, steal, and whether or not they received specific school disciplinary actions like detentions, demerit suspensions.

And also how family structure influenced students' emotional health, namely their feelings of being loved, their feelings of safety, being provided for, understood, and not feeling abandoned.

I also looked at how family structure influenced students' academic attainment. I did the same thing with family involvement or its influence on all the above.

But specifically, family involvement was gauged by five different variables.

Parents' knowledge of where the student was after school hours and on weekends. Parents' general knowledge of where the student is wherever, whenever.

Parents' attention to their schoolwork, their control of their time, their coming at night, how well they knew their close friends.

So those were the five main family involvement proxies. And I compared the findings from Jamaica with those internationally.

So just to be a little bit more specific, I wanted to find out if there were significant differences in behavioral tendencies and academic performances based on marital status.

So some of the surveys actually went into great detail. So we looked at single fathers versus single mothers.

We didn't group single parents all the time. And there was also looking at widowed and blended family types.

So we tried to be as detailed as possible. We also looked at cohabiting. So whether they lived with both parents or not.

And all of these attention proxies, as I mentioned before.

And we also did some demographic controls to look at what are the most significant family related or demographic factors that affect students' behavioral tendencies and academic performance.

So regression techniques, I won't be going into that. But just to clarify, it's a statistical method to infer causation.

So those were some of the methods that I employed in my study. So, as I mentioned, some of the controls were demographic in nature.

So I kept gender, age constant when comparing the impact of family design on behavior to try and see how can

I attribute what I'm seeing. Is this actually pointing to this versus that? As I mentioned before,

I used several sources to also retest the same phenomenon. And I also used qualitative data to get actually more depth in understanding what was going on.

So I could actually probe further. All right, so now that we're done with the preliminaries, let's go into the real thing.

So I'm going to be just focusing on five key areas in which God's design for family show optimal outcomes for children.

So how I'm actually going to do this, I'm going to be having before each one a scripture that pertains to a specific aspect that I would be looking at with the results.

So I'm going to look at what God's prescription and then I compare what

I found in the field. So the first aspect of family structure,

I chose a scripture, Matthew 19, verse four to five, to speak about what the Bible says about family structure.

I use that instead of Genesis because many persons, some persons claim that Jesus never spoke about what family structure should be.

Some persons say that Jesus never said you can't be LGBT. So let me just get it from Jesus's mouth.

And he, Jesus, answered and said unto them, have you not read that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female?

And he said, and said, for this cause shall a man leave father and mother and shall cleave to his wife and they twain shall be one flesh.

Wherefore, there are no more twain but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.

So this is God's biblical specification for family design in terms of structure.

What does research practice show? All right. So this is an overview of my sample from Kingston where the teachers identify the behavioral group.

So based on just looking at who the teachers identified as being well -behaved, what these students said their family structure was, 45 % of those who were well -behaved were from new care families.

38 % were from single parent families. 17 % were from extended. We basically see a mirror opposite image with the badly behaved students where 45 % were single parent.

24 % were nuclear. 17 % were extended and 14 % were blended.

One point, even though 45 % to 38 % does not seem like a large margin.

Just to give you a context of the Jamaican society, it's actually estimated that 90 % of all families in Jamaica are single parent.

Or, well, they're born out of wedlock. But over 50%, I think it was about 70%, were actually single parent families.

And so to find that percentage of being nuclear, being well -behaved, is actually something that was significant.

However, I must hastily say, though, that this shows that it's not that all single parent families cannot have some well -behaved outcomes.

And I'll be going into that a little bit further in the presentation. So just to clarify my stance on what

I believe the data is saying. So the first main finding that I'll be showing is that more positive behavioral and academic outcomes were found in families with structures following the biblical design.

So other than about what the teachers identified in terms of their behaviors, you see the similar thing with student leaders.

There were nearly two thirds of all student leaders were from nuclear or extended families.

While 38 % of student leaders were from single parent households. And when you look at the detention cohort, 80 % of those were actually from single parent homes and only 20 % were from nuclear families.

So that was from the Kingston survey and a similar pattern was found in my college sample.

In the college sample, students from single mother homes in particular actually recorded higher rates of smoking, truancy and school dropouts than other family structure types.

Interestingly, however, proportional tendencies of the students from single father home did not display these tendencies.

In wider society, there was a study done by our police force,

Jamaican Constabulary Force of prison inmates and they actually found similarly that two thirds of prison inmates came from family backgrounds other than nuclear.

So that all of that points to that the optimal environment of bringing up children in terms of their likelihood, their likelihood of coming out good.

It's not that it's absolute because it's more than a family that takes a child to become a leader or to especially, you know, become a

Christian. But the likelihood is far greater from this data to actually have positive outcomes.

When we look at academic achievement, a similar finding was actually emerging from the data that high school students with married parents were 1 .3

times more likely to have more positive outcomes in academic performance than those with unmarried parents.

Whether those unmarried parents were cohabiting, whether they were single, whether they were divorced, separated or widowed.

And to me, that is also very significant, especially with the fact that it's not just having both parents around cohabiting.

There's actually a difference in outcomes that were actually found among persons who had married parents than cohabiting parents.

Moving on a little bit quickly, similar findings were actually emerging in international literature that I looked at.

Even in Jamaica, let me just start with another Jamaican study that was done about 20, 30 years ago, 29 years ago.

Jamaican girls from father absent homes were actually 300 % more likely to end up pregnant in their teens than girls from homes with the father present.

So that again points to the importance of father, homes with the father present as well.

There was another study that was significant that was done in Texas. It was a longitudinal study and there were differences actually found between cohabiting and married couples where adolescents from cohabiting families were more likely to engage in nonviolent delinquency.

Like stealing, for example, than compared with those from two biological married families, families, parents, married parents.

There was another study that was done on Haitian immigrants in the U .S. And they found that sexual activity was less likely among respondents who lived with both parents than those who lived with either a parent or with friends.

And there were also higher levels of mental distress and aggression among participants who were sexually active in the sample.

And the last example of an international study on the structural impact of families on youth delinquency was this one done by Maharaj, Nunez and Renwick.

This one was one of the largest studies that were done in the Caribbean. Over 25 years studying 17 countries and they found that single parent households, especially fatherless ones again, were found to be at risk in engaging in early sexual activity and teen pregnancies.

So beyond the structure, another hallmark of God's design is parental involvement.

So I have two scriptures on the screen here, one from Proverbs 1, verses 8 to 9.

Tear my son your father's instruction and forsake not your mother's teaching, for they are a grateful garland for your head and pendants for your neck.

Another one is in Proverbs 23, verse 22. Harken unto thy father that begot thee and despise not thy mother when she is old.

So the Bible speaks to complementarity and efficiency in parenting with both parents being involved in instructing their children and that the children should listen.

So when families follow this specification and when they don't, is there a difference?

So I found that children with married parents, let me go back, have more sustained involvement in their child's daily life than unmarried parents.

So that's the first part of this. So in the high school survey across Jamaica, the likelihood of parental involvement was actually found to increase by 160 % among students whose parents were married compared with those with unmarried parents.

Specifically, children whose parents were married or who lived with both parents were 1 .3

times more likely to have paid very close attention to their schoolwork. They were more likely to know about their whereabouts after school and on weekends.

I should note, though, that the effect was stronger among females in the sample. They were three times more likely, parents were three times more likely to know where their female, their girl was than the boy.

And it was also significantly varied based on age. So the parents were more likely to know where their children were aged 15 and under than those who are older.

In terms of the impact of quality time on the question as to whether family members spent more time with them, 69 % of those who stayed to their family spent quality time with them were also from nuclear families.

So again, you see the efficiency that marriage has, married parents actually have on their ability to be more involved in the child's life as the

Bible has specified. But beyond this, does parental involvement really matter in a child's life?

So we did test that. And the main finding here is that yes, higher parental involvement was significantly linked with less delinquency and better academic performance in school.

So from the reanalysis data set across Jamaica, children with families with high parental involvement, including having a set curfew for their child, knowing their child's friendships and their whereabouts outside of school hours were 220 % less likely to skip school.

They were 160 % less likely to have behavioral problems, and they were 170 % also more likely to display more positive outcomes in school behavior, particularly less disciplinary problems and better academic performance than students whose parents did not.

The two most important parental control variables from this study was parental, parents' control of students' nighttime behavior or where they are.

So that was significant for both less likelihood of them skipping school and improved academic performance.

The second most important variable was their knowledge, parents' knowledge of the student's friends.

That was found to be significant for student academic performance in particular. And when

I saw this, I thought of 1 Corinthians 15, verse 33, where God said that bad companions bring good character.

And so, you know, that was another design tip. So parents who actually thought about,

OK, who's my friend, who's my child spending time with, actually help their child in other areas of their life just by following that design tip.

So looking at other studies internationally, I think this is just one example here that I'm going to point to.

This was in the United Kingdom. The sample was 13 ,221 children and preteens.

They found that there were higher likelihoods for antisocial tendencies among respondents with weak parental closeness and disadvantaged family backgrounds.

So parents, families whose parents weren't involved well in their, you know, supervising them and disciplining their children had more antisocial tendencies.

Now, I'm just going to briefly just move away from my data now and look at the implications of this particular design feature in society.

So the Bible and the social sciences evidences overwhelmingly defend more parental involvement.

But we actually see that society is moving away from parental involvement. I'm going to just show you two articles that I came across.

One is in the AMA Journal of Ethics, where the headline is limiting parental rights in medical decision making.

It says that, you know, just to highlight a little section, that if a child is not of an age where he or she cannot contribute to a process, the decision of a physically or mentally competent parent might not be in the best interest of the child.

And they say parents have a legal obligation to refrain from actions that may harm their child.

I'm going to just pause here a little bit because we have to be vigilant about the words that they're putting into these definitions.

What do they mean by harm? Would a parent, in their right mind, because they just said the parent is competent, want to harm their child?

So when you look at the main context of what's going on now, especially in medical decision making, we actually have cases where parents have lost custody of their children because they refuse them to do transgender surgery.

They refuse for them to do conduct an abortion and just those things.

And the literature starts to define these as harming the children. But when we actually see, because here at the end, if people might not believe what

I'm saying, it speaks about religious objections to treatment having a long history of acceptance.

So it is talking about religious objections to what they define as treatment. So these are some things that we have to think about.

Why is it that when parents are involved with their child based on religious premises, that the society, despite the evidence of parental involvement, having a good impact on a child's overall life, emotional health, academic performance, even physical health.

Why is it that we're moving away from more parental involvement? This other case here was in Germany, that a couple lost custody of their children for, you see it here, because they were homeschooling their children according to the

Christian faith. In Germany, it is forbidden, despite the country having signed several international agreements that guarantees parents the right to decide their direct education of their children.

So as we can see here, society is moving one way, the Bible and the science says, no, parental involvement is good.

But that's why we need more Christians involved to actually lobby on evidence based policies on good science.

Right. So just wanted to get that in here before I move on. So now my third point is the design feature of families being the hub of physical and emotional support.

So the scripture here, 1 Timothy 5, verse 8, was if any do not take care of their relatives, especially the members of their own family, they have denied the faith and are worse than an unbeliever.

So why is this so important? Is there a difference as well based on other design features that will make an environment more conducive to fulfill this other design feature?

So, yes, as you can see on the screen, children who are from married, children of married parents,

I just did that, had higher levels of emotional health than those from single parent homes.

So in the Kingston High School sample, children who live with married parents had better emotional health than from other structures.

In particular, they mentioned feeling more of a sense of security, having higher self -esteem and getting more appreciation than those with single parent households.

You see two graphs here and they're almost mirror images having the opposite. One was asked, do you have negative feelings due to being from a single parent family?

And six to three percent of those respondents said yes, were from a single parent family, that they do have negative feelings.

Some of these negative feelings included feeling unloved, feeling neglected and abandoned, unprovided for, unimportant, misunderstood, inferior.

And we actually had it as an open ended question. So we allow the children to express themselves, how they felt.

Right. And it was anonymous. So they were free. They didn't feel intimidated to express themselves.

So when we asked, what do you do to cope with this? And they mentioned fighting, lying, cursing, not trusting anyone, locking themselves in a room for a few minutes.

I know that, you know, it's not this is not to bash single parent households, because as I will mention later in the presentation, many times, unfortunately, because of our broken world, this is unfortunately a state that we have to live with because not because of your own child.

Many times, especially mothers are left with that responsibility. So what we are really advocating for is the drive to accept and make it seem like this is the best way to live.

So we do have to support those who are in need. You know, if any of our church sisters are struggling, we do have to help them because they do have more of a challenge in juggling everything.

And that's why, you know, that's that's how we have to approach this. But I just want to put that disclaimer there.

OK, so in in contrast, the students from nuclear families were overwhelmingly expressing that they felt that being in that structure, having both of their parents affected them in positive ways.

And one quote that I have here is a student saying they feel that way because the parents ensure they do the right thing.

So there was a security that the students tended to feel when they had both parents around.

Next, so just a few other studies, consequences of deviating from God's design.

This is in the USA, Dr. Popenoe and Sarah McLachlan.

They indicated that children from single parent homes manifested a number of emotional problems, including sadness and depression, sexual difficulties, early initiation of sexual activity and teen pregnancy, as well as poor social and adaptive functioning and low self -esteem.

And just to, you know, put this in with mainstream psychology, looking at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we find that the marital union is the most conducive environment for all levels of needs that we have.

And this is just by following the pattern suggested by Genesis 2, verse 24. Now on to number four, the cohesive home environment is another hallmark of design that's found in scripture for families.

So Colossians 3, verse 19 is one example. Husbands, love your wives and be not bitter against them.

Home violence, domestic violence is a big problem. And that is one of the main reasons why you might find that some married households with both parents might not be having as much good outcomes, positive outcomes as they have the potential to.

And so that's why it's also important that we gauge many different aspects, because it's not that the structure itself is not the conducive environment, but what else is there that they're violating

God's design and that's making it so optimal. So that's one of the things that we looked at.

And let's see what I found. So there was higher delinquency among children in violent home environments.

So those home environments that did not follow first Timothy about husbands loving their wives, we saw a difference that it actually impacted them.

So in the college sample, students within violent home environments recorded higher risk of early school dropout.

So they actually had to had to, you know, go on with their studies independently after.

So it was a struggle for them to actually reach college, but they had school dropout before. So I found that 7 .7

% of respondents who did not observe home violence dropped out of school. And contrasting with six times higher rates, 42 .9

% of respondents who witnessed home violence dropping out of school. So that was a big gap, six times more likely to drop out of school based on those proportions.

In terms of receiving suspensions, two thirds of respondents from violent homes had been suspended from high school, and only half of that amount were from nonviolent homes that had been suspended.

There was also a higher incidence of smoking and fighting among students in violent home environments.

So as I was mentioning earlier, the witness of home violence, even in an otherwise more stable structure may hamper the potentially positive impact of the presence of both parents that would have had on serving youth delinquency.

Going on further, yeah. So is there a family structure with higher risk of violent environment?

In my Jamaican sample, I just want to be clear here because I believe further study needs to be done.

But in my Jamaican sample, the family structure that had the highest incidence of witnessing violence was actually from single mother homes.

That recorded 50 % of the respondents in this setting, and this contrasts with 30 % of students in homes with married parents that had violence in that environment.

One thing that happens in the Jamaican context with that is that single mothers tend to have visiting relationships, and because they tend to be very dependent on their spouse, there might be violent flare ups, even if the person doesn't live with them.

And so because of that instability and dependence without that commitment, that added that higher risk of violence, even adding on and compounding upon the other implications of having a single mother home.

There were other studies that found very similar results, that good parental relationships and family connectedness were also protective factors against early sexual activity.

Onto my final point, before I go on to the other section of my presentation, is design feature five, imparting godly values.

This is very important. It was right after the most important command in Deuteronomy 6, that said, love the

Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul, all your men and all your strength. And it went on to say, and these words which

I command thee to say shall be in thine heart, and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down and when thou risest up.

So does this really make a difference? Let's see. I did find that values at home mattered, particularly church attendance in terms of school discipline.

All of the students in my sample that did not attend church every month received suspensions.

This was in a high school sample. This compared with only around a third suspension rate and a lower rate of detentions and demerits among those who attended church more than once a month.

And in also the high school sample in Kingston, 58 % of those who said they were taught values at home were from nuclear families.

And 68 % of those who said their family members carried them to church were again from nuclear or extended family backgrounds.

So I guess this also points to, you know, greater likelihood, greater involvement because of perhaps, you know, in single mother homes, for example, the mother can't do everything.

And so they might let their child stay with them and do household chores on a Sunday because they feel they can't do any better.

Again, deficiency and then there's just a downward slope with what else it would impact.

I also wanted to show that children also noted the difference themselves in my study. When we asked whether the above activities, encouragement, spending time with them, teaching values and carrying to church affected their behavior.

72 % of the respondents admitted yes and that it affected them in a positive way. So we found that both on their reports and their own perceptions, both on the statistical analysis and also on from their own perceptions.

Just briefly, other samples outside Jamaica, again, we found that absence of religious involvement was a risk factor for substance abuse among adolescents.

And church attendance was a protective factor against early sexual activity.

And let's just remind ourselves that train of a child in the way he should go.

And when he's old, he will not depart from it. So I just wanted to, in case people wonder,

OK, let's we can just teach people values. We can teach people values, but do the type of values really matter that we empower to get really important that we have a biblical foundation or value system.

So I'm going to be just giving you a case study of sexual risk based on international research. So I have here on the screen a scale.

On one side, we have the world's formula we see in the world. Generally, people believe fornication is

OK as long as a condom is used. And on the right hand side, we see the Bible's formula that says abstinence until marriage.

And we wanted to find out what were the outcomes of each choice. Dr. Edward Green, he reported on some very interesting, interesting findings when we looked at comparing condom use with the promotion of abstinence.

He was a former director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project, Harvard. And he found that contrary to common belief, as condoms became more available, instead of infection rates going down, they actually rose.

So STIs, the rates of STIs in countries in Africa that had the most condoms were

Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe, and they did not have lower infection rates. They actually had higher infection rates.

And at the time of his study, countries such as Uganda actually had a program promoting abstinence first, being faithful and then using condoms as the last alternative.

And that actually resulted in lower infection rates for Uganda. And this is really important to note that some people believe that, you know,

OK, the values of... We're still thinking of protecting our children, but we are going to be giving them a condom to protect themselves.

And they think this is a good value to give them because they think that this is reducing risk.

However, even human wisdom can never trump, can never be more or be better than the

Bible's wisdom. And so we see that in this concrete case here in Uganda.

Unfortunately, Uganda got drawn into the mainstream

WHO type formula, which we just need to, we just need to stand firm because the pressures are very great.

Especially as we can speak, I can speak from a developing country perspective, our governments are usually offered a lot of money.

And the projects have a face where it seems like it's very good willed.

However, there are many conditions that they want to promote their secular ideologies that are not

Bible based. And yet it sounds good. It sounds reasonable. Many guidance counselors in our country, they say abstinence doesn't work.

They're not going to do it. But we can see when we stand firm on God's word that the outcomes are always better for us.

So now, what are the implications of my findings? I did mention a whole lot about marriage, a lot about the nuclear family and a lot of benefits of the nuclear family.

But I wanted to ask, does this mean that the nuclear family is the only secret of society as God intended?

And I'll quickly say again, no, the structure of the family is just one of many ingredients listed in God's word, because many nuclear families do not produce godly fruits.

There are quarreling, abuse, etc. While you do have some single parent households who have better environment and children do live what they learn.

However, what we do find is that when you follow God's design, it makes the process easier.

And when you don't, there are many other, you know, like an avalanche of after effects.

So it's we are advocating for nuclear families, but we're not condemning those who find themselves in other circumstances who need support.

But the bottom line really is that any suboptimal outcome that you find, it often points to some violation of God's laws or design, whether on your part or the part of your partner or the part somewhere in the family.

And that's why we just need to encourage each other where we fall short and try to just live by what

God wants us to do. My final section before I close, I'm going to be dealing with discernment tips.

Why don't all studies agree with the findings here? Many of us are familiar with the critical thinking skills that we need to discern, you know, the literature of evolution, for example.

What we look out for to show that these mainstream literatures are doing something to the data to tweak it to their own ideology.

So I'm just going to, you know, apply that to social sciences.

So I have three things to look out for looking at the methods. Look at how the study chooses its subjects.

As I mentioned, random sampling is usually the gold standard. Many times studies that don't show or point to the biblical design, they don't use random sampling.

They use purposive sampling, they use convenience sampling, especially convenience is the worst.

You just especially if you are using a cohort that will have the same views, etc.

We can look at the sample size and how they how they apply and what conclusions they draw.

If they want to generalize the findings, their sample sizes, or they need to need to be larger, or they need to have many studies that agree with them to actually have make the case.

We also need to look at the starting assumptions and the factors examined. So, for example, if you find a study that finds that married parents have no difference from unmarried parents or single parents, we might have emerging questions.

Does this study consider other factors that may violate God's design? Like, for example, the quarreling, the violence in the home environment, is that something that might impact or lessen the positive, potential positive impact that we can control for?

And actually see if we had compared a violent single mother and a violent married couple home, if we will have the same outcome still, or are we comparing a violent married couple with a peaceful single parent home and calling it the same?

So we can look at that. Do we have the control? Also follow the money, look at the agenda, look at who is conducting the research and try and see if it is actually being made directly for a policy.

I'm going to be giving you an example in the next slide. Look at the language as well.

If you have overly absolutist language, like not a single study has ever found any results that indicated children of same -sex parents to be any different from children of heterosexual parents in any way.

That's an actual quote from a study. Look at that. And they are repeating, not a single, any way, and you can actually go and look up and you see something that's blatantly different from what they're saying.

There might be an agenda. So we also need to distinguish facts from interpretation. So we can look at their tables of numbers and statistics and see what they're bringing out and look at what their conclusions are.

And if the conclusions really warrant what the data they actually show. So looking at the same example that I mentioned, this is a book by Walter Shum, professor of family studies at Kansas State University.

He looked at, I believe it was over 500 articles that dealt with same -sex parenting.

And he wrote that these absolute claims were made in an attempt to impress courts for the utter harmlessness that says no difference equal no harm of gay and lesbian parenting in order to promote legalization of same -sex marriage.

So many of these articles, you look up who funded them and how quickly were they used?

Was it really just a fetus study where they just wanted to say, we are using evidence -based for our policies?

So these are some examples of the flaws that he found in these studies.

As I said, so many did not use a random sample. Many of them had a very short reference list.

They didn't look at, you can't even look at their reference list and see if their references, if they're actually saying what the references said that they said.

So Shum, for example, found a study that only had 13 references. And when he looked at what they claimed those references said, and he looked back at that study, they contradicted the conclusions that the man was trying to say that they did.

So you can just look at those things. And those are some of the reasons we do need a special discernment for social sciences research.

So just my final section now, implications for evangelism. I'll be just concluding this with a call to action.

So let's fix the family in our corners. The biblically designed family is indeed the key for healthy, spiritual, physical and moral development of our next generation.

It's important for policies to uphold a cohesive natural family as they serve as potent protective factors against societal dysfunction.

And that's especially critical right now in the pandemic that we have with the increasing depression and suicide of our children.

Our families are stuck together at home mostly. And so we need to make sure we focus on them so that we don't have further crises happening.

We also need to make sure we try and promote parental rights and tell our neighbors that it's very important that their role is very important as a parent to monitor and develop their child.

And so that should be a policy priority. I believe that incentives should be given for faithful, monogamous, heterosexual unions, since this is the environment that families thrive and families are really the foundation of society.

So we need to focus on teaching, teaching to our children godly values, abstinence until marriage, faithfulness, commitment, rather than short term emotional gratification.

And if we do, we literally can collectively restore the world for better. And my final point here is to show

God's love and help your neighbor. We can have single parents ministries to provide support to those in difficult circumstances beyond their control.

And my final quote is, what if humans obeyed God's laws just as nature does?

What a beautiful world this would be. And wow.

One more thing. I keep saying that this is literally one more thing. Yeah, so I am going to be having an apologetic series coming up starting next week,

God willing. And it's so there's going to be a launch. It's a nine part series that deals with questions like worldviews, truth,

God's existence, Christianity and racism, New Testament evidences, evidences for the resurrection.

How could a loving God allow suffering? Are science and the Bible compatible? Is Jesus really the only way to God?

And it will it will end up with a pro -life workshop. There's also a competition. So it's mostly focused on youth.

And so I'm inviting everyone here and those listening that you can you can join us.

It is a little bit before this, the time for your weekly meeting.

So if you can drop in sometime, that would be good. Also, if you especially if you have youth, whether your children or your neighbors or your teacher or your classes, you can let them know.

Christian ministries will have Dr. Sarafati as one of the speakers. James Stroud has also confirmed.

We'll have some persons from Oxford, graduates from Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics, but they're not dealing with the science section.

They're more dealing with evidence for the New Testament. And yeah, so we have the launch registration and registration links

I could put in the chat for you if you're interested. And that's it for me.

Thank you for listening. Oh, that was very good. And yes, we're interested.

Please put the link in there. Now, is that an online thing or is it in person too?

It's Zoom. Okay. So many churches today are embracing the culture, rather than God's design for the family.

And it's a little scary. It is. It definitely is.

For our country, no. There is an agreement with African Caribbean and Pacific and the

European Union that has been pushing abortion, pushing homosexual legalization of homophobia.

That's not legal still in our country, but there's a lot of money at stake.

And our government, unfortunately, is not grounded enough. And we've been fighting this off for years, especially from 2013.

But I heard this year they actually signed an agreement or they have until December to sign.

And so we are in a lot of prayer and we are welcoming prayer around the world, because this is a 20 year agreement where they would agree that they will legalize abortion.

And I think it was up to 22 weeks. Wow. Yeah, there are many other conditions and it's enveloped in a gender based equality type of framing, as you know, they usually do.

And so you have to look out for these types of frames that they give to make it seem like, oh, we do want the best interest.

And yet what they're doing is killing our children. They are separating families. They're making, they're just violating

God's design and promoting all of that. And then as you can see, many consequences follow. So, a lot.

In Marxism, Karl Marx and his sidekick, whose name

I can't remember, referred to the nuclear family as the bourgeois family. And there are constantly seeking to destroy that bourgeois family.

And I noticed, if you hear young people saying bourgeois, oh, that's very bourgeois.

I found this out from my niece. What they're doing is they're digging on the nuclear family or, you know, digging on God's design.

I'm going to stop the live stream, Terry, in case we say something that people will be offended by.

Okay, before you do, let's go ahead and Sarah, go ahead and tell people one more time how they can find you and information about your upcoming conference.

Okay, right. So I'm at SarahFayeBuckland .com. We don't actually have a sign up sheet yet, sign up thing yet.

But my email, I'm willing to give it out. S .Buckland at Outlook .com.

And we do have a Facebook sign up page and I have the launch registration. If you want to copy that,

Terry, and put it on the Facebook under the chat. So if anyone is watching, they can sign up for the launch and the summit.

I actually do have flyers, too. So maybe you can drop that there.

But if you register for the launch, you'll get automatic updates. So Zoom is already there. It is on a

Thursday from September 23 to November 18. God willing, on a Thursday from 6 to 7 .30

p .m. Jamaica time. I believe that you're two hours behind us where you are in Santee. I'm not sure.

You can do the conversion on 6 to 7 p .m., 7 .30 p .m. Jamaica time on a

Thursday. Okay. All right. And then, again, we're Creation Fellowship Santee.

And if you don't want to miss any of our upcoming speakers, the best two ways to follow us are to follow us on Facebook at Creation Fellowship Santee or to email

Creation Fellowship Santee, that's S -A -N -T -E -E at gmail .com

so that you get notified whenever we have our upcoming speakers. And then you can watch our past videos on YouTube, search for Creation Fellowship Santee and on BitChute and on Rumble.

So with that, we're going to go ahead and sign off for tonight, and then the people in Zoom can hang back and ask their own questions.

So go ahead, Robin. I have stopped the live stream to Facebook, but I am still recording.