Lost Parent Diary

In the Freakonomics chapter entitled, “What Makes a Perfect Parent?” (I’ll be drawing on this from time to time), the authors make a series of interesting comparisons. They give us a series of factors and ask us to guess which have an effect on our child’s test scores in school, and which don’t. As usual with Freakonomics, the answer is sometimes surprising.

Lets take the following two:

The child has many books in the home.
The child’s parents read to him nearly every day.

Which one of these factors matters in getting high tests scores? The answer is that it’s the first! Yes, that’s right, reading to a child doesn’t affect early childhood test scores. In other words, if the child has a lot of book in his home, and his parents don’t read to him, he will do better on his reading tests than a child who doesn’t have a lot of books in the home, but his parents borrow library books and read to him every night.

But wait… you mean to say that all those hours of reading to my child are worthless? Do you mean to tell me I’ve been wasting my time? Well, yes and no…. please read on (it gets better, I promise!) :-

Early Childhood

Freakonomics based its data on the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS) which took into account kids from K-5 (for non-US readers, kids from 6 to 11 years old). So, everything said here applies to kids within those ranges. The authors later go on to say that things change as kids become teens and this data is no longer accurate.

Not-so-common Sensical

Common knowledge leads us to think that reading to our kids helps them. Well… it does, but not how we may think. You will build a stronger relationship with your child if you read to him. You will help the child associate books positively and later on in their teenage years they may feel more naturally around them, hence encouraging better study habits. But, you will not make them smarter in the short term. That’s what’s so counter-intuitive about this whole thing.

Dusty books = smart kids?

Yes… but why? Having books in the home is reflection of the parents, not the children. A correlation exists that Freakonomics spends much of the chapter demonstrating and re-proving: educated parents lead to smart kids; less educated parents lead to not-as-smart kids.

There’s a reoccurring theme in this chapter: it’s often more important who the parents ARE rather than what they DO in determining the child’s intelligence. If the parents are educated, they tend to pass it on to the child. If the parents are not so educated, they too pass that on to the child.

Conclusion

The bad news: If you are born to parents with a low level of education, your early childhood test scores won’t be as good as those born to more highly educated parents. Reading to you nightly will not have any affect on your test scores.

The good news: Even if you are born to uneducated parents, you can study hard, go to college, fill your home with books and your children will reap the benefits by having higher test scores than you did when you were their age.

Plus, lets not forget that reading to your child is fun, helps build a stronger relationship between parent and child, and may help your kids out in their later childhood and teenage years.

Some final thoughts

This topic fascinated me because it beckons to a great debate: nature vs. nurture in childhood development. This correlations makes a strong case for nature. In fact, the whole chapter of Freakonomics drives towards this idea.

One last thing, there are interesting implications on genetics here. It seems that intelligence in transfered via DNA (I guess). So, does that mean going to school changes our DNA? I’m not an authority of any sort, so perhaps someone with real credentials could chime in on this (make a comment!).

Bookmark and Share

Close Bookmark and Share This Page

Save to Browser Favorites / Bookmarks