Chapters 5 & 6: Parenting

Chapters 5 & 6: What makes the perfect parent?
Answer: It’s not so much what you do; it’s who you are.

The authors looked at the Early Childhood Longitudinal Studies (ECLS) – a survey of 20,000 children’s test scores from Kindergarten through fifth grade, and information about parents – to determine what makes successful students.

So the title for this chapter is a little misleading: it’s not really about perfect parenting; it’s more like “what kind of parent has the best test-taking children?”

This section talks a bit about regression analysis, the hallmark of statistics, and reiterates the difference between correlation and causality. Statistics can establish a correlation – like the way high numbers of police officers tends to accompany high crimes rates. It can’t, however, determine causality. That’s up to interpretation – the statistician has to determine whether the police cause the crimes or whether the crimes cause the police.

So here are the things that are correlated with high test scores:

1. Parents’ high education
2. Parents’ high socioeconomic status
3. Child’s mother being 30 or older by the time of her first child’s birth
4. Child not having a low birthweight
5. Parents’ involvement with the PTA
6. High number of books in the home
7. The child not being adopted (but remember, this is only for K through 5th grade)
8. Parents speaking English at home

And here are some things not correlated with high test scores:

1. The family being intact
2. Child’s attendance in Head Start
3. The parents reading to the child nearly every day
4. The parents using corporal punishment
5. The mother working between birth and Kingergarten

Which is not to make a judgment on the non-correlated items – reading with one’s child is not pointless – it’s just that they don’t contribute to higher test scores. My parents read to both me and my sister, but we had vastly different test scores in primary school.

Chapter 6 looks at children’s names to see if they correlate with success. The long and short of it is that names don’t really make a difference. Although the parents’ choice in a name does reveal a bit about their socio-economic status (and naming trends filter down from the upper classes), a child’s name just in itself doesn’t make a difference.