Links: Parenting Edition

Two links. The first one is a summary of an economics paper: Tiger moms and helicopter parents: The economics of parenting style by Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti, who use cross-country data to support their conclusion that in times of rising inequality, a more authoritarian parenting style will likely be chosen by parents:

This column argues that the choice of parenting style is driven by incentives. Parents weigh the expected costs and benefits of implementing a certain parenting style. The popularity of the authoritarian style is declining because the economic returns to the independence of children have risen. The rising inequality implies higher returns to education. This calls for pushier parenting styles, such as the authoritative one. A decline in inequality is likely to prompt a more relaxed parenting.

The second is a column by Pamela Druckerman: A Cure for Hyper-Parenting.

"Notes from a Dragon Mom"

A very, very moving piece by Emily Rapp on parenting a child who she knows will likely die before his third birthday.

The mothers and fathers of terminally ill children are something else entirely. Our goals are simple and terrible: to help our children live with minimal discomfort and maximum dignity. We will not launch our children into a bright and promising future, but see them into early graves. We will prepare to lose them and then, impossibly, to live on after that gutting loss. This requires a new ferocity, a new way of thinking, a new animal. We are dragon parents: fierce and loyal and loving as hell. Our experiences have taught us how to parent for the here and now, for the sake of parenting, for the humanity implicit in the act itself, though this runs counter to traditional wisdom and advice.

[...]

I would walk through a tunnel of fire if it would save my son. I would take my chances on a stripped battlefield with a sling and a rock à la David and Goliath if it would make a difference. But it won’t. I can roar all I want about the unfairness of this ridiculous disease, but the facts remain. What I can do is protect my son from as much pain as possible, and then finally do the hardest thing of all, a thing most parents will thankfully never have to do: I will love him to the end of his life, and then I will let him go.

But today Ronan is alive and his breath smells like sweet rice. [...]

Links

1. A Silicon Valley School That Doesn't Compute:

   Schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers, and many policy makers say it is foolish to do otherwise. But the contrarian point of view can be found at the epicenter of the tech economy, where some parents and educators have a message: computers and schools don’t mix.

   This is the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, one of around 160 Waldorf schools in the country that subscribe to a teaching philosophy focused on physical activity and learning through creative, hands-on tasks. Those who endorse this approach say computers inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention spans.

2. James Fallows: Hacked! Fallows recounts the scary tale of the hacking of his wife's GMail account, and its aftermath. The second part has some solid advice about how to protect your online life.

   What about the rest of us, who are not security professionals? I asked that of every person I interviewed. Many of their recommendations boiled down to the hope that people would think more about their life online. “We’d like people to view their information life the way they view other parts of their life,” Andrew Kovacs of Google said. “It’s a good practice to review your financial situation every so often, and it’s a good practice to review your passwords and online-account information too.” Another official compared “cloud hygiene” to personal hygiene: you feel bad if you don’t brush your teeth or take a shower, and you should learn to feel bad if you’re taking risks online.

3. India Today profiles Prof. Dan Shechtman, winner of this year's Chemistry Nobel. [Copy-paste operation is broken on that site -- so, no excerpts!]

Let's round it all out with this cartoon from SMBC:

Paul Tough: What If the Secret to Success is Failure?

His fascinating article in NYTimes is about the importance of key character traits (such as grit, self-control, curiosity, and optimism), and what two different kinds of schools -- one with rich kids and the other with poor kids -- are doing to strengthen these traits in their students.

... It is a central paradox of contemporary parenting, in fact: we have an acute, almost biological impulse to provide for our children, to give them everything they want and need, to protect them from dangers and discomforts both large and small. And yet we all know — on some level, at least — that what kids need more than anything is a little hardship: some challenge, some deprivation that they can overcome, even if just to prove to themselves that they can. As a parent, you struggle with these thorny questions every day, and if you make the right call even half the time, you’re lucky. But it’s one thing to acknowledge this dilemma in the privacy of your own home; it’s quite another to have it addressed in public, at a school where you send your kids at great expense.

And it’s that problem that Randolph [the principal of the school with rich kids] is up against as he tries to push forward this new kind of conversation about character at Riverdale. When you work at a public school, whether it’s a charter or a traditional public school, you’re paid by the state, responsible, on some level, to your fellow citizens for the job you do preparing your students to join the adult world. When you work at a private school like Riverdale, though, even one with a long waiting list, you are always conscious that you’re working for the parents who pay the tuition fees. Which makes a campaign like the one that Randolph is trying to embark on all the more complicated. If your premise is that your students are lacking in deep traits like grit and gratitude and self-control, you’re implicitly criticizing the parenting they’ve received — which means you’re implicitly criticizing your employers.

Two Links

1. Anne Murphy Paul in NYTimes: The Trouble With Homework:

   Fortunately, research is available to help parents, teachers and school administrators [make homework smarter]. In recent years, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and educational psychologists have made a series of remarkable discoveries about how the human brain learns. They have founded a new discipline, known as Mind, Brain and Education, that is devoted to understanding and improving the ways in which children absorb, retain and apply knowledge.

2. Matthew Syed at BBC: Is it wrong to note 100m winners are always black?

Newborns, Paid Leave, Science Faculty

Two stories in my Google Reader stream in the last 24 hours:

1. NPR: Time With A Newborn: Maternity Leave Policies Around The World [Infographic].

2. And this one is US specific: Children they never had:

   Nearly half of female faculty members in top science departments wish they'd had more children, but didn't because of their careers, while about a quarter of their male counterparts feel the same way, according to a new study.

Derek Sivers: "Why You Need to Fail"

I like this video because it distills a lot of literature (and popular articles) on becoming an expert (deliberate practice, the 10,000 hours rule, "talent is overrated," the growth mindset, etc.), and presents it all in under 10 minutes.

Alison Gopnik: "Why Preschool Shouldn't Be Like School"

An excellent column over at Slate:

Sidebar Link

Let Kids Rule The School by Susan Engel.

Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments. We might start by saying: Suppose we gave a group of 4-year-olds exactly the same problems and only varied on whether we taught them directly or encouraged them to figure it out for themselves? Would they learn different things and develop different solutions? The two new studies in Cognition are the first to systematically show that they would.

In the first study, MIT professor Laura Schulz, her graduate student Elizabeth Bonawitz, and their colleagues looked at how 4-year-olds learned about a new toy with four tubes. Each tube could do something interesting: If you pulled on one tube it squeaked, if you looked inside another tube you found a hidden mirror, and so on. For one group of children, the experimenter said: "I just found this toy!" As she brought out the toy, she pulled the first tube, as if by accident, and it squeaked. She acted surprised ("Huh! Did you see that? Let me try to do that!") and pulled the tube again to make it squeak a second time. With the other children, the experimenter acted more like a teacher. She said, "I'm going to show you how my toy works. Watch this!" and deliberately made the tube squeak. Then she left both groups of children alone to play with the toy.

All of the children pulled the first tube to make it squeak. The question was whether they would also learn about the other things the toy could do. The children from the first group played with the toy longer and discovered more of its "hidden" features than those in the second group. In other words, direct instruction made the children less curious and less likely to discover new information.

Does direct teaching also make children less likely to draw new conclusions—or, put another way, does it make them less creative?

In Praise of ...

1. Doodling.

2. Play.

3. Sleep.

Link of the Day

Robert Mankoff in New Yorker: Tiger Mother and the Cartoon Arms Race. "Inspired" by Amy Chua's 'Chinese Mother vs. Western Mother' bombshell. Features lots of New Yorker cartoons. Fabulous.

Bonus Link: Elizabeth Kolbert's excellent review-essay on Chua's book.

In Chua’s binary world, there are just two kinds of mother. There are “Chinese mothers,” who, she allows, do not necessarily have to be Chinese. “I’m using the term ‘Chinese mothers’ loosely,” she writes. Then, there are “Western” mothers. Western mothers think they are being strict when they insist that their children practice their instruments for half an hour a day. For Chinese mothers, “the first hour is the easy part.” Chua chooses the instruments that her daughters will play—piano for the older one, Sophia; violin for the younger, Lulu—and stands over them as they practice for three, four, sometimes five hours at a stretch. The least the girls are expected to do is make it to Carnegie Hall. Amazingly enough, Sophia does. Chua’s daughters are so successful—once, it’s true, Sophia came in second on a multiplication test (to a Korean boy), but Chua made sure this never happened again—that they confirm her thesis: Western mothers are losers. I’m using the term “losers” loosely.

Links

1. Jacopo della Quercia at Cracked.com: 5 Ridiculous Things You Probably Believe About Islam.

2. Scicurious at Neurotic Physiology: Friday Weird Science: The Magnificent Mammal Menage a Trois. It's about wild whale sex.

3. Apoorva Mandavilli in Nature: Peer review: Trial by Twitter: "Blogs and tweets are ripping papers apart within days of publication, leaving researchers unsure how to react."

4. Pam Belluck in NYTimes: To Really Learn, Quit Studying and Take a Test. "Test-taking actually helps people learn, and it works better than repeated studying, according to new research."

5. Christine Carter at The Berkeley Blog: How to raise an unhappy child.

Spot the Difference: "Chinese Parenting Style" Edition

Which of these pieces of "parenting advice" is from a real author?

1. Take your children to Chuck E. Cheese's and let them play any game they choose, then make them watch as you burn their tickets.

2. When [your child] turns in a poor practice session on the piano..., [scream]: "If the next time's not perfect, I'm going to take all your stuffed animals and burn them."

Life imitating The Onion? Or, The Onion making fun of a "Tiger Mother"?

Annals of Extreme Parenting

Sports Training for Babies:

Ms. Bolhuis turned her exercises into a company, Gymtrix, that offers a library of videos starting with training for babies as young as 6 months. There is no lying in the crib playing with toes.

Infant athletes, accompanied by doting parents on the videos, do a lot of jumping, kicking and, in one exercise, something that looks like baseball batting practice.

I wonder if this fad will face the same fate as that of Baby Einstein ...

Annals of Extreme Childhood

Exhibit 1: Reality Shows:

... [O]ne of these shows, which aims to select a “vamp queen” from among young girls, drew 340 initial entries after offering Rs 1 lakh for the winner and a chance to dance with “item girls” of Telugu cinema.

Exhibit 2: Cram Schools:

Last month a Bangalore preschool made national headlines when it started accepting eight-month-old babies for an educational program called "Brain Bear". It is designed to develop communicative, aesthetic, physical and mathematical skills.

Links ...

1. Matt Taibbi at Taibblog: The Catholic Church is a Criminal Enterprise. Here's the Taibbi Treatment:

   One expects professional slimeballs like the public relations department of Goldman Sachs to pull out the “Well, we weren’t the only thieves!” argument when accused of financial malfeasance. But I almost couldn’t believe my eyes as I read through Dolan’s retort and it dawned on me that he was actually going to use the “We weren’t the only child molesters!” excuse. Dolan must have very roomy man-robes, because it seems to me you’d need a set of balls like two moons of Jupiter to say such a thing in public and expect it to fly. But this is exactly what Dolan does; he bases his entire defense of the Church on the idea that others are equally culpable.

2. Thomas Benton in The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind':

   One reason that graduate school is for the already privileged is that it is structurally dependent on people who are neither privileged nor connected. Wealthy students are not trapped by the system; they can take what they want from it, not feel pressured, and walk away at any point with minimal consequences. They do not have to obsess about whether some professor really likes them. If they are determined to become academics, they can select universities on the basis of reputation rather than money. They can focus on research rather than scrambling for time-consuming teaching and research assistantships to help pay the bills. And, when they go on the market, they can hold out for the perfect position rather than accepting whatever is available.

   But the system over which the privileged preside does not ultimately depend on them for the daily functioning of higher education (which is now, as we all know, drifting toward a part-time, no-benefit business). The ranks of new Ph.D.'s and adjuncts these days are mainly composed of people from below the upper-middle class: people who believe from infancy that more education equals more opportunity. They see the professions as a path to security and status.

3. Massimo Pigliucci at Rationally Speaking: "Anything Is Possible." No, Not Really.

   Clearly, not anything is possible. It is pretty easy to come up with examples of things that are not possible: it is not possible for me both to be and not to be (pace Hamlet); it is not possible for me to levitate; and it is not even possible for me to be in Rome at this moment, because I’m in New York writing this essay.

   Those three examples are not picked at random, they illustrate three distinct classes of impossibility recognized by philosophers: the first is an instance of something that is logically impossible; the second is an example of physical impossibility; and the last one is an illustration of contingent impossibility.

4. Live Science: Babies Are Born To Dance. Check out the video.

Links ...

1. Charu Sudan Kasturi in The Telegraph: Kendriya Vidyalayas reject girl quota proposal.

   The Kendriya Vidyalayas have rejected a central panel’s proposal to reserve 50 per cent seats for girls and suggested alternative affirmative action, exposing rare differences within the government over quotas.

   The Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan (KVS), which governs 981 schools catering to over a million children, has suggested fee waivers and scholarships instead of quotas to help girl students.

   The rejection of the quota proposal was accepted by human resource development minister Kapil Sibal, who conducted the meeting as chairperson of the KVS, top sources on the board said.

2. Sharon Begley in Newsweek: Pink Brain, Blue Brain:

   For her new book, Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps—And What We Can Do About It, Eliot immersed herself in hundreds of scientific papers (her bibliography runs 46 pages). Marching through the claims like Sherman through Georgia, she explains that assertions of innate sex differences in the brain are either "blatantly false," "cherry-picked from single studies," or "extrapolated from rodent research" without being confirmed in people. For instance, the idea that the band of fibers connecting the right and left brain is larger in women, supposedly supporting their more "holistic" thinking, is based on a single 1982 study of only 14 brains. Fifty other studies, taken together, found no such sex difference—not in adults, not in newborns. Other baseless claims: that women are hard-wired to read faces and tone of voice, to defuse conflict, and to form deep friendships; and that "girls' brains are wired for communication and boys' for aggression." Eliot's inescapable conclusion: there is "little solid evidence of sex differences in children's brains."

3. Alison Booth in Vox EU: Gender, Risk, and Competition:

   Women are underrepresented in high-paying jobs and upper management. Is that due to gender differences in risk aversion and facing competition? This column describes an experiment in which girls were found to be as competitive and risk-taking as boys when surrounded by only girls. This suggests cultural pressure to act as a girl could explain gender differences that are not innate.

   Here's another quote:

   "If risk avoidance is viewed as being a part of female gender identity while risk seeking is a part of male gender identity, then being in a coeducational school environment might lead girls to make safer choices than boys."

4. Eli Thorkelson has an interesting piece on Gender Imbalance in Anthropology.

Links ...

1. The Institute, for many years now, is degenerating into a bureaucratic corporate company well past its sell-by date (think General Motors, Air India), focussed on attracting on huge cash infusions, rather than the liberal centre of learning it was meant to be.

   Can you guess which Institute Prithwiraj is talking about, and what might have been behind that assessment?

2. Alison Gopnik: Your Baby is Smarter than You Think:

   In 2007 in my lab at Berkeley, Tamar Kushnir and I discovered that preschoolers can use probabilities to learn how things work and that this lets them imagine new possibilities. We put a yellow block and a blue block on a machine repeatedly. The blocks were likely but not certain to make the machine light up. The yellow block made the machine light up two out of three times; the blue block made it light up only two out of six times.

   Then we gave the children the blocks and asked them to light up the machine. These children, who couldn’t yet add or subtract, were more likely to put the high-probability yellow block, rather than the blue one, on the machine.

3. Anahad O'Connor in NYTimes: Stress Can Make Allergies Worse:

4. The Onion, America's Finest News Source: Film Adaptation Of 'The Brothers Karamazov' Ends Where Most People Stop Reading Book

5. Finally, on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: Unintended consequences of reading Ayn Rand to a child at bed time.

Links ...

1. Jonah Lehrer in Boston Globe: The Truth About Grit:

   Woody Allen once remarked that “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” [Angela] Duckworth points out that it’s not enough to just show up; one must show up again and again and again. Sometimes it isn’t easy or fun to keep showing up. Success, however, requires nothing less. That’s why it takes grit.

   Much of the article revolves around the study of grit in Angela Duckworth's group; on her website, you can participate in the GRIT study.

2. Gary Laderman in Inside Higher Ed: The Death Guy:

   For the last decade or so I have taught a death and dying course at Emory University. When I first offered the course there were 8 or so students; last year when I taught it, 60 students enrolled. As a teacher it is supremely gratifying to know when you’ve truly nailed a class, and this class is a blast for me and for the students ... [who[ also teach me a thing or two each year.

   It works every year and yet for some misguided reason I thought it would be good to try something new for a change, and so I decided to teach religion and sexuality next term. I imagined it would be an easy shift from the one topic to the other. Now that I’m preparing the class, I’m already longing for the death lectures, site visits (Emory Hospital morgue; local funeral home; Oakland Cemetery; you get the picture), and lugubrious images. Ironically, I’m not too sure how to spice up the sex class.

3. Perri Klass in NYTimes: Stealing in Childhood Does Not a Criminal Make:

   ... [P]arents of most young children can be confident that stealing is a pretty routine behavior. “It might be unusual for a child to go through childhood without ever stealing anything, though the parent may not know,” Dr. Stein said. [...]

   So when we found the cache of stolen cash, I did ask my pediatrician, who told me, kindly, that this was strictly routine. Take it seriously, he said, talk about consequences, extract an apology, but don’t act as if you think it means your child is a criminal.

4. Jamil Salmi in Forbes.com: What Makes A University Great?

   The bottom line here is not that low and middle-income countries should abandon dreams to set up their own world-class universities. Instead, they ought to understand that there are trade-offs involved, and that they need not hurry. Most of the world's elite institutions began as small teaching colleges that over time, with financial stability and thoughtful leadership, grew into the envied institutions they are now.

5. This cartoon by Barry Deutsch on libertarian freedom is pretty fantastic.

Hero of the day ...

Manish Pandey.

A huge fan of the Royal Challengers right from the first day of IPL-08 (what a disappointing season that was!) our seven-year old son adores Manish Pandey for his heroics yesterday. He also loves R.P. Singh for dropping that catch (when Pandey was at two) and making that fantastic century possible ...

Though my inner Chennaiyan continues to like the Super Kings (especially for their super-cool captain), he has wisely chosen to to yield to the father in me, and will be rooting for RCB in their semi-final against CSK tomorrow.

Quality time, intra-family harmony, bonding, &c ...

Delayed Gratification: The Marshmallow Experiment

First, watch these two videos. Just concentrate on Cute Overload, and ignore the commentary (especially in the second video, which misrepresents the experiment with some religious nonsense).

By way of commentary (with a discussion of the experiment's significance), you have something much, much better: Don't! The Secret of Self Control by Jonah Lehrer in New Yorker.

* * *

All the links come to us via Daniel Lende's Wednesday Round-up at the excellent Neuroanthropology blog.