Adoption and twin researchers have spent the last forty years measuring the effect of parenting on every major outcome that parents care about. Their findings surprise almost everyone. Health, intelligence, happiness, success, character, values, appreciation – they all run in families. But with a few exceptions, research shows that nature overpowers nurture, especially in the long-run.
Busy fathers, pay attention: a new study finds that if your kids think you’re not spending enough time with them, they’re more likely to exhibit bullying behavior at school.
Does bribing kids work? The debate rages on, although Levitt has done it effectively on at least one occasion. A new study (summarized by the BPS Research Digest) suggests that bribery can work wonders, at least when it comes to vegetables.
When my daughter Anna was 7, she told me she desperately wanted a dog. I looked her in the eye and said, “You can have a dog if you publish an article in an academic peer-reviewed journal.” I wasn’t kidding. I really, really didn’t want a dog because I thought it would disrupt our family routine, which included large dollops of what Amy Chua’s controversial new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, refers to as Tiger parenting.
A reader named Clark Case, who lives in Aurora, Ohio, and works as a product manager, writes in with a child-rearing observation.
Tamara Audi and Arlene Chang of the Wall Street Journal dissect the global baby industry, which is growing thanks to increasingly restrictive international adoption laws.
Shankar Vedantam of Slate hypothesizes that people continue to procreate, despite overwhelming evidence that parenting isn’t very fun, for much the same reason that cocaine users can’t quit: they’re addicts.
Gary Becker and Richard Posner debate a timeless question: Will the next generation be better off than their parents’ generation? Becker’s take: “America has always been optimistic about its future. The decline in such optimism during the past couple of decades is understandable, but highly regrettable. The best way to restore this optimism is to promote faster economic growth. That is feasible with the right policies, but will not happen automatically. Even America has no destiny to be optimistic about the future without important redirection of various public priorities.”
An exceptionally neat new working paper
points out that parents’ time spent with kids has increased hugely since the early 1990’s, particularly among highly educated parents. This is a remarkable fact, and surprising; these are the same parents whose value of time (their wage rate) has increased relative to that of all parents, as, unsurprisingly, have their hours working for pay (since we know that labor supply responds to wage rates). They thus have less non-work time available and are spending even more of it with their kids. Why the surprising result?
I’m reading a biography about Buckminster Fuller written by Lloyd Steven Sieden. Fuller had a 4-year-old daughter Alexandra who caught the 1918 flu, later got meningitis, and finally was afflicted by polio. Though frail, she managed to survive all these illnesses until the age of 4. It was the fall, and Fuller headed off from New York to Boston by . . .
A while back, I wrote about the Game Theorist blog, in which my friend Joshua Gans writes about his adventures as an economist-parent (or equally, as a parent-economist). Each role seems to teach him something about the other, and his passion for both is infectious. He has collected much of this material in his new book Parentonomics, which has recently . . .
Most parents have difficulty deciding how much of the “bad stuff” (war, death, etc.) they should tell their kids about, or when they’re old enough to hear it.
New research from Ulrike Malmendier of the University of California and Stefan Nagel of Stanford identifies another kid-sensitive subject parents might want to avoid for a while: the financial crisis.
Joshua Gans, (author of the forthcoming Parentonomics), has an interesting post on “data-driven Parenting.” Turns out that there is a cool web service: Trixie Tracker, that allows parents to record and revisit information on sleep, nappy changes, feeding (both breast-milk and solids), medicines, and pumping. Keeping track of your child’s evolving sleeping patterns (via the internet or even your iPhone) . . .
My friend Joshua Gans is one of Australia’s best young economists, and he is also a parent. And as passionate as Joshua is about economics, he’s just as passionate about parenting. While it has always been fun to follow Joshua’s economic musings on his blog, Core Economics, I have been having more fun following his parenting blog, Game Theorist, devoted . . .
Gold farming to hit the big screen (Earlier) Islamic hedge funds on the rise Do we know what our kids are doing online? Recession upon us? Mac & cheese sales spike
Hannah Montana is the hottest thing going. Her concerts are all sold out and scalpers are netting thousands of dollars for her tickets, according to media reports. What is an economist who wants to see a Hannah Montana show to do? Here is the true story of one such escapade. (The economist in question has asked me to keep his . . .
Fertility has become a big business in the U.S., with Americans spending up to $3 billion a year on treatments, drugs, and methods aimed at enabling couples to conceive. Discussions of modern infertility have focused on cultural factors like the rising average age of marriage and the influx of women in the workforce, with studies linking it to environmental and . . .
… just one of the choice quotes delivered by my father in this informative article about his life’s work.
The top 10 science and technology stories of 2007. Can scientists replace sleep with a drug? The key to raising gifted kids: don’t tell them they’re gifted. (Earlier) Libraries see record attendance, computer use from “Generation Y.” (Earlier)
The Jewish Daily Forward is reporting that more and more non-Jews are calling in the mohel, or ritual circumciser, to have their sons circumcised. The reasons for this include a desire for cleanliness (mohels operate outside of hospitals) and adding a bit of spiritual pizazz, even if the pizazz comes from outside a family’s own religious tradition. An excerpt: Nearly . . .
Here’s the latest guest post from Yale economist and law professor Ian Ayres. Here are Ayres’s past posts and here is a recent discussion of standardized tests. A recent article in the Times trumpeted the results of a report that had just been released by the Educational Testing Service (E.T.S.). The E.T.S. researchers used four variables that are beyond the . . .
We wrote in Freakonomics about our views on parenting. Mostly, we were skeptical of how much parents could do to improve their kids’ futures. One can clearly be a terrible parent through neglect or abuse. The tougher question is whether being an “obsessive” parent who drags children to a never-ending procession of soccer practices, museums, and acting classes is better . . .
Until recently, I had known Katherine Ozment only as the easy-to-like wife of my good friend and former colleague Michael Greenstone. Then I discovered her Web site, which contains examples of her writing. She has an amazing gift. Check out “Winter of Discontent,” “The Last Hurrah,” and everything else in between. But make sure you have some time to spare . . .
One of my daughters recently had a second-grade friend of hers over to the house for a play date. My wife, Jeannette, was down on the first floor, while the two girls were up in our attic playroom. Suddenly, Jeannette heard screams of terror from the visiting friend. She ran upstairs, fearing the worst. “What happened?” my wife asked. The . . .
Dubner has blogged before about the difficulty of gathering accurate data from adults on subjects like racism. The problem, he noted, lies in people’s tendencies to give answers that are socially appropriate but don’t necessarily reflect their actual views. Children, however, are not often so guarded (or disingenuous, depending on how you look at it). As such, they can provide . . .
An article in today’s Wall Street Journal about online lending reports that Zopa, a British person-to-person lending market, is starting operations in the U.S. It will join, among others, Prosper.com, which the WSJ reports will issue $100 million in person-to-person loans this year, with future loan originations projected to be $1 billion in 2010 and $9 billion in 2017. Can . . .
A while back, I solicited your suggestions for great children’s books, and you responded mightily, with more than 270 comments. Your answers made me realize how many children’s books we already own, which is probably a good thing, at least according to these guys. But you also suggested a lot of books we’ve never read, and you made them sound . . .
I hadn’t worn a Halloween costume in many years until last night, when my kids — Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and a man-eating shark, respectively — encouraged me to do so. I tried to think of something that would take almost no time, effort, or money. The idea came to me in a flash. With my kids, I . . .