This link has been bookmarked by 5 people . It was first bookmarked on 28 Mar 2008, by Pat Sine.
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07 Dec 09
Jim BrinlingChapter 5: What Makes a Perfect Parent?
Several years before Freakonomics was published, author Steven Levitt lost
his infant son Andrew to a sudden, fatal bout of pneumococcal meningitis. In the
aftermath of this tragedy, Levitt and his wife became active in several support
groups for bereaved parents. Even as he sought help and guidance for the
terrible loss, Levitt noticed the disproportionate number of parents in the
groups whose children had drowned in backyard swimming pools. This prompted him
to research the issue, as well as a number of other aspects of parenting, from
an economic point of view. His research uncovered the high risk of allowing
children to play in swimming pools: Levitt estimates that a child is more than
100 times more likely to die in a swimming pool than playing with a gun.
In a series of subsequent articles, Levitt explored other facets of
parenthood and their outcomes. He determined that in spite of the cottage
industry of parenting and the millions of how-to books on the subject sold every
year, who you are matters much more than what you do. In other words, positive
parenting outcomes are linked more strongly to factors such as socioeconomic
status and parental education than any specific parenting practices. Key to
determining which parenting factors really make a difference to a child's
upbringing, Levitt analyses data from the Chicago School Choice Program, a
longitudinal study of Chicago school students in 60 schools since 1980, a huge
data-set. Factors that
are important
in determining high standardized
test scores in children include: highly educated parents, high socioeconomic
status, maternal age of greater than thirty when the child was born, low birth
weight, English as the primary language spoken in the home, parental involvement
in the PTA, and many books in the home environment. Also, adopted children
tended to have lower standardized test scores than their non-adopted peers.
Factors that are
not important
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07 Jul 09
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19 Jun 07
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