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Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything Summary at WikiSummaries: Free Book Summaries
Chapter 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
msnbc.com Video Player
How do individuals define themselves in the images they see in magazines and in other media?
01 Dec 09
Clay Shirky: How social media can make history | Video on TED.com
While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly).
Evgeny Morozov: How the Net aids dictatorships | Video on TED.com
TED Fellow and journalist Evgeny Morozov punctures what he calls "iPod liberalism" -- the assumption that tech innovation always promotes freedom, democracy -- with chilling examples of ways the Internet helps oppressive regimes stifle dissent.
Misha Glenny investigates global crime networks | Video on TED.com
Journalist Misha Glenny spent several years in a courageous investigation of organized crime networks worldwide, which have grown to an estimated 15% of the global economy
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