wonkette.com

A recent study came out showing the IQ of children can be lower if they are raised by mothers with clinical depression (the assumption is less emotional support of the child).

The press is misreporting the meaning of the study, as it’s been a long time since the press employed science reporters. That reporting is all Depression will make your kids dumb!

The researchers themselves noted the limitations: The test used does not have a sufficient pool of pre-schoolers to properly norm the test. That said, the test used scores IQ from 1-19, and the deviation between children was 0.34 points. One standard deviation on that test is 1.94.

Writer Carlos Sagan goes into the hair-on-fire reporting from ABC, what the researchers actually said about their longitudinal study, and how you take an interesting and probably significant study (if it can be repeated) and turn it into hair-on-fire clickbait at ABC.