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Freakonomics: How much influence does a parent have on a child's education?
A mother walks her children to school in the constituency of Britain's Chancellor George Osbourne on March 23, 2011 in Knutsford, U.K.
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Kai Ryssdal: Time now for a little Freakonomics Radio. It's that moment every couple of weeks where we talk to Stephen Dubner, the co-author of the books and the blog of the same name, about the hidden side of everything. Dubner, good to talk to you.
Stephen Dubner: Hey you too, Kai, happy summer. My kids are already out of school, how about yours?
Ryssdal: Two more days.
Dubner: All right, so I'm curious what a guy like you puts your kids through during the summer. I sent you a little checklist, I was just curious. Want to take a look at that?
Ryssdal: Yeah, it's not a bad list. So museums -- no, we will not be doing museums because that makes me do work. There will be some baseball, there will be some singing lessons, there will be tennis and language, and lots of swimming, because it's L.A. in the summertime.
Dubner: That's pretty busy. Now, you are not alone, I'm happy to say, in spending a lot of time with your kids. Check out this message from Valerie Ramey, who's an economist at the University of California, San Diego, who looked into how modern parents are spending their time.
Valerie Ramey: In the 1980s, the average young college-educated mother spent 13 hours per week on childcare. Now, it's 22 hours a week. Now what's interesting is over this same time period, the wages of college-educated women have really increased. So the opportunity cost of time has increased at the same time they've decided to spend more time taking care of their children.
Ryssdal: So that's, like 13 to 22, is like nine hours -- 75ish percent? What are the mothers doing with that time, though, Dubner?
Dubner: Well it's interesting. You've got a lot of opportunities, you've got a lot of work. And what a lot of these high-end mothers are doing is chauffeuring their kids around to things like music lessons and fencing lessons and horseback riding. Valerie Ramey -- some of it's for fun, obviously -- but Valerie Ramey calls it "the rugrat race." Her argument is that kids have to work harder to get into good colleges these days, and therefore their parents enable them by pushing them toward all these extracurricular activities that are going to look good on a college application.
Ryssdal: Which, you know, on the face of it sounds reasonable, but really is kind of ridiculous and painful.
Dubner: You know, I think it has to do with parents thinking of their children as investment vehicles a little bit, right? That's what we think about: we want to invest in them so that they will pay off -- whether for themselves or for us.
Let me let you hear from a different economist, his name is Bruce Sacerdote, he's at Dartmouth. He wanted to know how much this kind of activist-parenting -- if you want to call it that -- actually pays off. And one way to measure this, especially if you're talking about educational achievement -- which is what parents probably care about the most -- is to look at adoption studies, where you can actually measure the impact that a family, that the parents, will have on a kid.
Ryssdal: So what's his thesis, that kids adopted into, I guess, high-education homes will be more likely to go to college, is that the deal?
Dubner: Exactly right. If parents are so important, then parents can take an adopted kid who might otherwise not have gone to college, and that kid will become college material. So Sacerdote sliced and diced a lot of good data and he did find parental influence.
Bruce Sacerdote: But it's not quite as big as I expected to find.
Ryssdal: All right, so quantify for me: how big is not so big?
Dubner: If you're a child who's adopted into a high-education family -- that is where the parents both went to college -- you are about 16 percentage points more likely to go to college than a kid who gets adopted into a low-education family. So that sounds pretty good, OK?
Until you compare that to the rate for biological kids from high-education families, who are about 75 percentage points more likely to go to college than biological kids from low-education families. So on the one hand, this is a little dispiriting for parents. We don't seem to have as much influence as we might think. On the other hand, in a weird way, it kind of takes some of the pressure off, right? At least it did for Bruce Sacerdote.
Sacerdote: This notion that genes are really important and that kids are hard-wired to do certain things, I think understanding that did help me relax and not worry so much that I was going "screw them up" in some terrible way.
Ryssdal: OK, so that's a good thought. But I have two observations to make. The first, as an adoptive parent -- and maybe this says more about me than about Sacerdote's numbers -- but it is 100 percent likely that my adopted daughter is going to go to college, just like my biological boys. So I guess that probably talks about me. But the other one is: there is more to measuring the success of parenting and the resulting children than where they to go college, or even if they go to college at all, Dubner.
Dubner: Absolutely. There's love and happiness and satisfaction -- all that good stuff. But here's the thing: the data seem to suggest that a lot of parents who get wrapped up in activist-parenting, who push their kids toward accomplishment, might actually make themselves unhappy as parents and might end up sacrificing some of that good stuff. So that's really the balance. If you want to go off the balance, you might even consider the opposite end of the spectrum, the style embraced by my Freakonomics friend and co-author, Steve Levitt.
Steven Levitt: Most of the time, I'm just lazy. You know, I could be investing in the kids or I can be, you know, indulging my own hobbies and sleeping and things. And so I'm sort of lazy. The other problem is that I have four kids. If you have too many kids, you can't invest that heavily into any one of them, because you go crazy.
Ryssdal: Amen, brother. I mean, if it's good enough for Steven Levitt, it's good enough for me, that's all I have to say.
Dubner: Hey, have a nice lazy Father's Day, Kai.
Ryssdal: I will do that, you too. Stephen Dubner, FreakonomicsRadio.com is his website. We'll see you in a couple of weeks.
Dubner: Thanks Kai.
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@ Lynda - Undoubtedly a day late and a dollar short:
As I watch my own children grow up, and see how the rest of the parents in the suburb where my children live behave, I have to wholeheartedly agree with you. The economically advantged parents in said suburb spend their days living through their children.
Its particularly sad when you hear parents explaining their behavior as "providing opportuniies" for their children to "experience new things." (Likely all the things THEY wanted to do but their parents would not allow/could not afford.)
Why would you use such controversial research in such a frivolous manner ?Your audience needed to know far more about the limitations of the data and precisely what methodolgical procedures were used and assumptions made.Given the sorry history of genetic determinism theory and research you had an obligation to be far sensitive and self critical in how you used this material than you were.
The problem I have with this story is the same problem I have with a lot of the mainstream cultural commentary that comes from economists. Statistics are a broad-brush approach to the interpretation of often very complicated processes.
We don't know a lot about how these statistics were run, so we don't know if different factors were taken into account. What age were these children when they were adopted? What were their circumstances before adoption? Maternal health and behavior while children are in utero could come into play, as can a variety of environmental factors (poverty, poor health, violence, abuse, neglect) that babies and young children may experience before adoption.
Of course, we all know that raising children is a complicated business. It is hard to predict a single child's outcome with any reliability. But when we use statistics in this way, we are presenting the facts as if we can predict such things. To present statistics in this way is unfair to children and parents and is a misrepresentation of reality, which is far more nuanced and complicated than a world represented only with output from SPSS.
The Freakonomics Team would do well to hire an anthropologist.
I supppose this was really more of an entertainment piece than a scientific piece. The concluseions here are too broad. First, there are limitations to the study. Perhaps adoptive parents are not as good at helping their kids succeed as non-adoptive parents. Maybe they are more indulgent and don't push their adoptive children. On the other hand, maybe they are better and the effect of parenting is actually even less than 16 points in non-adoptive parents. Perhaps adopted children don't "succeed" as readily as their non-adopted counterparts simply because they know that they are adopted. The point is that it is extremely difficult to control for all the variables. And the strangest thing about this piece is that Mr. Sacerdote actually seems to contradict the conclusion of his own study. In the brief one paragraph conclusion of his study, his main point is expressed as follows: "In contrast to some of the existing literature, I find large treatment effects from family environment. Outcomes such as college attendance and marriage are particularly affected by characteristics of the [adoptive] parents." So why come on a program and say relax, your input hardly means a thing. Perhaps it's because Levitt and Daubner advance that thesis in their book Freaknomics and the show has their title on it. So it does not seem intellectual debate is on the agenda.
My parents were far from "activist parents," and I'm in the process of completing a Master's degree. My fiance--same deal. I have several college dropout friends who had activist parents. I also have several successful friends who had activist parents. My conclusion? Activist parenting does nothing and it's all random.
Parents project onto their poor, unsuspecting kids all the stuff that they would like to be doing if they were children again. I just took my 3 and 5 year olds to an expensive concert of two well-known children's singers, in a dark, creepy roomful of similarly eager parents with small kids. After 20 minutes, my 5 year old said she was bored and wanted to ride the elevator. At that stage, I realized that we were all suffering there because I thought that a good parent should expose their children to every cultural opportunity at hand. Luckily for my checkbook and my sanity, they are happier in a sandbox.
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