I’m in the process of reading Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt and – apart from being great read – there is a really interesting chapter about parenting. It’s entitled “what makes a perfect parent” and the commentary is… enlightening.
What it tells us is that, yes, parents can take much of the credit (or blame) for their children’s accomplishments (or not), but not for the reasons that most parents think! At the core of this chapter are the results of the US Department of Education’s ground-breaking study called the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS), which tracked the progress of more than 20,000 American schoolchildren from kindergarten through to fifth grade (10 and 11 year olds).
What was particularly revealing were the correlations of the child’s test scores and the results of a questionnaire about the families’ habits, social-demographic and activities. Under Stephen and Steven’s rigourous analysis, they are able to make some very interesting observations about parenting technique and the effect it “really” has on the child.
For example, they claim that many of the foundational beliefs of modern parenting, don’t – according to the data – improve childhood test scores. Here are some of the parental factors that are referred to in the book and that the authors say are statistically proven to matter to the child’s test results or not:
•Matters: The child has highly educated parents.
•Doesn’t: The child regularly watches TV at home.
•Matters: The child’s parents have high income.
•Doesn’t: The child’s mother didn’t work between birth and kindergarten.
•Matters: The child’s parents speak English in the home.
•Doesn’t: The child’s parents regularly take him to museums.
•Matters: The child’s mother was 30 or older at time of the child’s birth.
•Doesn’t: The child parents are still together.
•Matters: The child’s parents are involved in the PTA.
•Doesn’t: The child is regularly spanked at home.
So, museum visits are no better than regular trips to the cinema, and whilst we are on the subject of film, watching TV doesn’t do any damage either! The most interesting conclusion is one that I find a bit disturbing; that parenting technique is actually overrated. Because what Levitt and Dubner prove is that the results your child will achieve are linked to who you as the parents are and not what you do.
OK, let me make an obvious observation here. The results are actually showing us that the children who achieve the best results come from “privileged homes”. For example, it wasn’t that they went to museums or weren’t allowed to watch TV, or that the family homestead was still intact, or even that the parents read to their child. Rather, it was that the parents took an active role in the child’s school life, that they had a higher income (it didn’t matter where they lived by the way) and that they were well educated themselves that made all the difference.
So actually, it’s not that parents don’t matter. Of course they do! The problem is that by the time most parents are thinking of having a child and start to read up on parenting techniques, it’s too late. The things that matter the most were decided long ago. What do you think?
