CHAPTER 5 - WHAT MAKES A PERFECT PARENT?

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 Statistically, most parents are unaware of the dangers their children face.  

  • There has been a boom in the industry of parenting experts in recent decades, many of which disagree with one another.
  • Since emotions carry more weight than rational arguments, parenting experts have the best chance of gaining attention by engaging the emotions surrounding parenting.
  • Parents often seek out experts out of fear, but they can be poor risk assessors since they fear the "wrong things."
  • It would be misguided for a parent to keep their child away from a friend's house because her parents keep a gun, but allow the child to spend a lot of time at another friend's house with a swimming pool instead since a child is 100 times more likely to die from a swimming accident than from a gun accident. In terms of risks, there is a difference between those that scare people and those that kill them.
  • Risks people believe they can control are less frightening than those they believe they cannot. Therefore, people are more afraid of flying than driving because they are more afraid of immediate danger rather than distant danger.
  •  The following equation was proposed by Peter Sandeman, an expert on fear and risk: Risk = hazard + outrage. In situations where there is a high level of danger and low levels of outrage, people tend to underreact. In situations where a hazard is low but outrage is high, people tend to overreact.
  • The majority of child safety innovations rely on marketing products that capitalize on parents' fears of harming their children, but most of these products are ineffective. Swimming pool precautions may save hundreds of children every year, but parents seem to be focusing more on expensive car seats, child-resistant packaging, etc., which save fewer lives.
  • In light of the link between abortion and crime, and the effects of an unwanted child being raised in an abusive and neglectful environment, it becomes clear that bad parenting plays a significant role. 
  • In the nature-nurture debate, however, the question is more about how much a good parent determines what their child becomes.
  •  In her 1998 book called The Nurture Assumption, Judith Rich Harris argued that peers had a much greater influence on a child's personality than parents.
  • It is difficult to quantify a child's success in areas such as personality or creativity, but school performance can be measured.
  • By offering parents school choices through a lottery system in 1980, Chicago Public Schools integrated its disparate student populations.
  • School choice barely affected a student's academic achievement, according to the data. In comparison to equivalent students who lost the lottery but stayed at their neighbourhood school, students who won the lottery and went to a "better" school did no better. It's true that students who opted out of their neighbourhood schools were more likely to graduate, but that only means that the students and parents who opted out were smarter and more academically inclined in the first place.
  • The achievement gap between blacks and whites begins long before high school and is evident when analyzing the economic gap between black and white adults.
  • Black-white education gaps, reflected in black-white test score gaps, maybe the cause of the economic gap.
  • During the late 1990s, the Department of Education initiated the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study to assess the academic progress of more than 20,000 kindergartens to fifth-grade students.
  • The data show no significant disparity when black and white children first enter school, but it widens after two years because many black children come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. The reason for this may be the segregation of schools and the poor learning environments in black schools.
  • A black school has a higher rate of non-academic troubles, such as gang problems and low parental support, creating a school atmosphere that does not foster learning.
  • It is not the white-black gap that is significant, but rather the performance gap between students in bad schools versus good schools.
  • In Levitt's paper, he presents 16 variables that are assessed by the ECLS. There are eight factors strongly correlated with academic success, either positively or negatively, and eight factors with no correlation at all. A parent's education level, socioeconomic status, age, language spoken at home, involvement in the PTA, the child's birth weight, adoption status, and the number of books in the home are important factors. On the other hand, it did not matter if the mother stayed at home from work, whether or not the child attended Head Start, or if the parents read to the child.
  • Even though parenting techniques matter, many factors affecting a child's performance on school tests are determined before they are born by their parent's education, age, wealth, and involvement.
Economics is a fascinating subject because it touches on almost every aspect of life. This makes it a very broad field, but also a very challenging one. If you want to get a good understanding of economics, then you'll need to spend some time reading about it. You can start by looking at these book summaries and recommendations.

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