5 What Makes a Perfect Parent?Read more at location 2060
Note: 5@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ COSA CONTA X ANDAR BENE NEI TEST: ESSERE E FARE. TROPPO TARDI X MIGLIORARSI. ACTING WITHE. L ARTE DI VALUTARE I RISCHI. SCHOOL CHOICE. GENI. ADOTTATI Edit
Breast feeding, for example, is the only way to guarantee a healthy and intellectually advanced child—unless bottle feeding is the answer. A baby should always be put to sleep on her back—until it is decreed that she should only be put to sleep on her stomach. Eating liver is either a) toxic or b) imperative for brain development. Spare the rod and spoil the child; spank the child and go to jail.Read more at location 2066
Gary Ezzo, who in the Babywise book series endorses an “infant-management strategy” for moms and dads trying to “achieve excellence in parenting,” stresses how important it is to train a baby, early on, to sleep alone through the night. Otherwise, Ezzo warns, sleep deprivation might “negatively impact an infant’s developing central nervous system” and lead to learning disabilities. Advocates of “co-sleeping,” meanwhile, warn that sleeping alone is harmful to a baby’s psyche and that he should be brought into the “family bed.”Read more at location 2071
What about stimulation? In 1983 T. Berry Brazelton wrote that a baby arrives in the world “beautifully prepared for the role of learning about him-or herself and the world all around.” Brazelton favored early, ardent stimulation—an “interactive” child. One hundred years earlier, however, L. Emmett Holt cautioned that a baby is not a “plaything.” There should be “no forcing, no pressure,Read more at location 2075
As Holt explained, a baby should be left to cry for fifteen to thirty minutes a day: “It is the baby’s exercise.”Read more at location 2080
An expert must be bold if he hopes to alchemize his homespun theory into conventional wisdom. His best chance of doing so is to engage the public’s emotions, for emotion is the enemy of rational argument. And as emotions go, one of them—fearRead more at location 2083
The problem is that they are often scared of the wrong things. It’s not their fault, really.Read more at location 2090
Consider the parents of an eight-year-old girl named, say, Molly. Her two best friends, Amy and Imani, each live nearby. Molly’s parents know that Amy’s parents keep a gun in their house, so they have forbidden Molly to play there. Instead, Molly spends a lot of time at Imani’s house, which has a swimming pool in the backyard.Read more at location 2094
But according to the data, their choice isn’t smart at all. In a given year, there is one drowning of a child for every 11,000 residential pools in the United States. (In a country with 6 million pools, this means that roughly 550 children under the age of ten drown each year.) Meanwhile, there is 1 child killed by a gun for every 1 million-plus guns.Read more at location 2097
The likelihood of death by pool (1 in 11,000) versus death by gun (1 in 1 million-plus) isn’t even close:Read more at location 2100
But most of us are, like Molly’s parents, terrible risk assessors.Read more at location 2102
Sandman offered a comparison between mad-cow disease (a superscary but exceedingly rare threat) and the spread of food-borne pathogens in the average home kitchen (exceedingly common but somehow not very scary).Read more at location 2106
“Risks that you control are much less a source of outrage than risks that are out of your control,” Sandman said.Read more at location 2107
I can’t tell if my meat has prions in it or not. I can’t see it, I can’t smell it. Whereas dirt in my own kitchen is very much in my own control.Read more at location 2109
Sandman’s “control” principle might also explain why most people are more scared of flying in an airplane than driving a car.Read more at location 2110
It is true that many more people die in the United States each year in motor vehicle accidents (roughly forty thousand) than in airplane crashes (fewer than one thousand). But it’s also true that most people spend a lot more time in cars than in airplanes.Read more at location 2120
The per-hour death rate of driving versus flying, however, is about equal.Read more at location 2123
But fear best thrives in the present tense. That is why experts rely on it; in a world that is increasingly impatient with long-term processes, fear is a potent short-term play.Read more at location 2124
The likelihood of any given person being killed in a terrorist attack is far smaller than the likelihood that the same person will clog up his arteries with fatty food and die of heart disease. But a terrorist attack happens now; death by heart disease is some distant, quiet catastrophe. Terrorist acts lie beyond our control; french fries do not.Read more at location 2127
Just as important as the control factor is what Peter Sandman calls the dread factor. Death by terrorist attack (or mad-cow disease) is considered wholly dreadful;Read more at location 2130
Sandman has reduced his expertise to a tidy equation: Risk = hazard + outrage.Read more at location 2133
“When hazard is high and outrage is low, people underreact,” he says. “And when hazard is low and outrage is high, they overreact.”Read more at location 2136
Swimming pools do not inspire outrage. This is due in part to the familiarity factor. Just as most people spend more time in cars than in airplanes, most of us have a lot more experience swimming in pools than shooting guns.Read more at location 2139
The data show that car seats are, at best, nominally helpful.Read more at location 2145
But the safety to be gained here is from preventing the kids from riding shotgun, not from strapping them into a $200 car seat.Read more at location 2146
Theirs is a gesture of love, surely, but also a gesture of what might be called obsessive parenting.Read more at location 2148
Compare the four hundred lives that a few swimming pool precautions might save to the number of lives saved by far noisier crusades: child-resistant packaging (an estimated fifty lives a year), flame-retardant pajamas (ten lives), keeping children away from airbags in cars (fewer than five young children a year have been killed by airbags since their introduction), and safety drawstrings on children’s clothing (two lives).Read more at location 2152
Clearly, bad parenting matters a great deal. As the link between abortion and crime makes clear, unwanted children—who are disproportionately subject to neglect and abuse—have worse outcomes than children who were eagerly welcomed by their parents.Read more at location 2161
A long line of studies, including research into twins who were separated at birth, had already concluded that genes alone are responsible for perhaps 50 percent of a child’s personality and abilities.Read more at location 2164
These nature-nurture discrepancies were addressed in a 1998 book by a little-known textbook author named Judith Rich Harris. The Nurture Assumption was in effect an attack on obsessive parenting, a book so provocative that it required two subtitles: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do and Parents Matter Less than You Think and Peers Matter More.Read more at location 2172
Harris argued that the top-down influence of parents is overwhelmed by the grassroots effect of peer pressure,Read more at location 2176
But Harris’s theory was duly endorsed by a slate of heavyweights. Among them was Steven Pinker, the cognitive psychologistRead more at location 2181
Or will they? Parents must matter, you tell yourself. Besides, even if peers exert so much influence on a child, isn’t it the parents who essentially choose a child’s peers? Isn’t that why parents agonize over the right neighborhood, the right school, the right circle of friends?Read more at location 2187
In determining a parent’s influence, which dimension of the child are we measuring: his personality? his school grades? his moral behavior? his creative abilities? his salary as an adult?Read more at location 2190
Certain facets of a child’s outcome—personality, for instance, or creativity—are not easily measured by data. But school performance is.Read more at location 2212
These data concern school choice, an issue that most people feel strongly about in one direction or another. True believers of school choice argue that their tax dollars buy them the right to send their children to the best school possible. Critics worry that school choice will leave behind the worst students in the worst schools. Still, just about every parent seems to believe that her child will thrive if only he can attend the right school,Read more at location 2214
School choice came early to the Chicago Public School system. That’s because the CPS, like most urban school districts, had a disproportionate number of minority students.Read more at location 2219
It was decreed that incoming freshmen could apply to virtually any high school in the district.Read more at location 2222
In the interest of fairness, the CPS resorted to a lottery. For a researcher, this is a remarkable boon.Read more at location 2230
the lottery offers a wonderful means of measuring just how much school choice—or, really, a better school—truly matters.Read more at location 2235
The answer will not be heartening to obsessive parents: in this case, school choice barely mattered at all.Read more at location 2237
That is, a student who opted out of his neighborhood school was more likely to graduate whether or not he actually won the opportunity to go to a new school.Read more at location 2241
students—and parents—who choose to opt out tend to be smarter and more academically motivated to begin with.Read more at location 2243
There was, however, one group of students in Chicago who did see a dramatic change: those who entered a technical school or career academy.Read more at location 2246
the black-white income gap is largely a product of a black-white education gap that could have been observed many years earlier.Read more at location 2257
In a paper called “The Economics of ‘Acting White,’” the young black Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. argues that some black students “have tremendous disincentives to invest in particular behaviors (i.e., education, ballet, etc.)Read more at location 2262
Fryer cites the recollections of a young Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, known then as Lew Alcindor, who had just entered the fourth grade in a new school and discovered that he was a better reader than even the seventh graders: “When the kids found this out, I became a target….ItRead more at location 2266
does having a lot of books in your home lead your child to do well in school?Read more at location 2304
The ECLS data do show, for instance, that a child with a lot of books in his home tends to test higher than a child with no books.Read more at location 2309
Perhaps the number of books in a child’s home merely indicates how much money his parents make.Read more at location 2312
The data reveal that black children who perform poorly in school do so not because they are black but because a black child is more likely to come from a low-income, low-education household.Read more at location 2326
even when the parents’ income and education are controlled for, the black-white gap reappears within just two years of a child’s entering school.Read more at location 2331
Why does this happen? That’s a hard, complicated question. But one answer may lie in the fact that the school attended by the typical black child is not the same school attended by the typical white child, and the typical black child goes to a school that is simply…bad.Read more at location 2333
The typical white child in the ECLS study attends a school that is only 6 percent black; the typical black child, meanwhile, attends a school that is about 60 percent black.Read more at location 2337
Just how are the black schools bad? Not, interestingly, in the ways that schools are traditionally measured. In terms of class size, teachers’ education, and computer-to-student ratio, the schools attended by blacks and whites are similar. But the typical black student’s school has a far higher rate of troublesome indicators, such as gang problems, nonstudents loitering in front of the school, and lack of PTA funding.Read more at location 2339
White children in these schools also perform poorly. In fact, there is essentially no black-white test score gap within a bad schoolRead more at location 2343
Here now are the eight factors that are strongly correlated with test scores: The child has highly educated parents. The child’s parents have high socioeconomic status. The child’s mother was thirty or older at the time of her first child’s birth. The child had low birthweight. The child’s parents speak English in the home. The child is adopted. The child’s parents are involved in the PTA. The child has many books in his home. And the eight that aren’t: The child’s family is intact. The child’s parents recently moved into a better neighborhood. The child’s mother didn’t work between birth and kindergarten. The child attended Head Start. The child’s parents regularly take him to museums. The child is regularly spanked. The child frequently watches television. The child’s parents read to him nearly every day.Read more at location 2380
Matters: The child has highly educated parents. Doesn’t: The child’s family is intact.Read more at location 2402
A family with a lot of schooling tends to value schooling. Perhaps more important, parents with higher IQs tend to get more education, and IQ is strongly hereditary. ButRead more at location 2405
Matters: The child’s parents have high socioeconomic status. Doesn’t: The child’s parents recently moved into a better neighborhood.Read more at location 2410
Socioeconomic status is a strong indicator of success in general—it suggests a higher IQ and more education—and successful parents are more likely to have successful children.Read more at location 2413
Matters: The child’s mother was thirty or older at the time of her first child’s birth. Doesn’t: The child’s mother didn’t work between birth and kindergarten.Read more at location 2418
This mother tends to be a woman who wanted to get some advanced education or develop traction in her career. She is also likely to want a child more than a teenage mother wants a child.Read more at location 2421
Matters: The child had low birthweight. Doesn’t: The child attended Head Start.Read more at location 2428
low birthweight is a strong forecaster of poor parenting, since a mother who smokes or drinks or otherwise mistreats her baby in utero isn’t likely to turn things around just because the baby is born.Read more at location 2432
Matters: The child’s parents speak English in the home. Doesn’t: The child’s parents regularly take him to museums.Read more at location 2441
Matters: The child is adopted. Doesn’t: The child is regularly spanked.Read more at location 2449
far more influenced by the IQs of his biological parents than the IQs of his adoptive parents,Read more at location 2452
But if an adopted child is prone to lower test scores, a spanked child is not. This may seem surprising—not because spanking itself is necessarily detrimental but because, conventionally speaking, spanking is considered an unenlightened practice. We might therefore assume that parents who spank are unenlightened in other ways. Perhaps that isn’t the case at all. Or perhaps there is a different spanking story to be told. Remember, the ECLS survey included direct interviews with the children’s parents. So a parent would have to sit knee to knee with a government researcher and admit to spanking his child. This would suggest that a parent who does so is either unenlightened or—more interestingly—congenitally honest. It may be that honesty is more important to good parenting than spanking is to bad parenting.Read more at location 2457
Matters: The child’s parents are involved in the PTA. Doesn’t: The child frequently watches television.Read more at location 2464
The ECLS data show no correlation, meanwhile, between a child’s test scores and the amount of television he watches. Despite the conventional wisdom, watching television apparently does not turn a child’s brain to mush. (In Finland, whose education system has been ranked the world’s best, most children do not begin school until age seven but have often learned to read on their own by watching American television with Finnish subtitles.)Read more at location 2468
Matters: The child has many books in his home. Doesn’t: The child’s parents read to him nearly every day.Read more at location 2474
To overgeneralize a bit, the first list describes things that parents are; the second list describes things that parents do.Read more at location 2522
Parents who are well educated, successful, and healthy tend to have children who test well in school; but it doesn’t seem to much matter whether a child is trotted off to museums or spanked or sent to Head Start or frequently read to or plopped in front of the television.Read more at location 2524
But this is not to say that parents don’t matter. Plainly they matter a great deal. Here is the conundrum: by the time most people pick up a parenting book, it is far too late.Read more at location 2527
In this regard, an overbearing parent is a lot like a political candidate who believes that money wins elections—Read more at location 2532
Sacerdote found that parents who adopt children are typically smarter, better educated, and more highly paid than the baby’s biological parents. But the adoptive parents’ advantages had little bearing on the child’s school performance.Read more at location 2536
Compared to similar children who were not put up for adoption, the adoptees were far more likely to attend college, to have a well-paid job, and to wait until they were out of their teens before getting married.Read more at location 2541
