I would think that the behavior of parents has a massive impact on the way the children grow up (but indeed, not the material stuff that so many parents fuss so much over), considering how strong of a correlation there is between the parents’ belief systems and behaviors and their children’s.
I’m not much compared to even a small survey, but from my small sample I’ve noticed a possible strong correlation between the way parents respond to questions / handle “problematic” behavior / do anything to “educate” their children and the intelligence, rational behavior and open-mindedness of the children later in life.
The most salient example (but not the most statistically significant) is that everyone I talked to about this who were on the higher end of the intelligence scale had clear memory of their parents responding “I don’t know, let’s find out” to their curiosity when they were a child, while everyone else I talked to had no such memory.
I think looking into actual pedagogical research results and how to best behave towards children would probably be very high expected utility / value of information if maximizing your child’s chances of not being stupid is something you care about.
At the very least, a parent can affect the environmental factors that the book mentioned in the parent post mentions (I haven’t read the book, only the abstract) by carefully selecting a good initial environment with these things in mind in the first place.
Obviously also worth looking into is alternative forms of education. Public schools are far from optimal both for social and intellectual development.
If any of this is of interest, I can try to help with some research on it.
The most salient example (but not the most statistically significant) is that everyone I talked to about this who were on the
higher end of the intelligence scale had clear memory of their parents responding “I don’t know, let’s find out” to their
curiosity when they were a child, while everyone else I talked to had no such memory.
You know, smart (especially academic) parents are more likely to say that :). This is not a simple issue, I think this is actually a question about how much parent-provided environment mediates the effect of the parent IQ. Mediation analysis is subtle.
everyone I talked to about this who were on the higher end of the intelligence scale had clear memory of their parents responding “I don’t know, let’s find out” to their curiosity when they were a child, while everyone else I talked to had no such memory.
Highly intelligent people tend to have better memories. If less intelligent people don’t recall something from childhood, that definitely doesn’t rule out the possibility that it did happen to them and yet had no effect, because they may just have forgotten about it.
Or, smart people had smart parents. Smart parents tend to do that kind of thing, but the main effect to the kids’ IQ comes from having the right genes, not from the actual behavior. (A lot of the things that correlate with kids having higher IQs are like this, including things like “amount of books in the house”, IIRC—control for heredity, and the effect on IQ vanishes.)
The school of thought shminux represents, though not popular in the main stream, is one I ascribe to. Bryan Caplan and a few others have books on the subject.
Shminux, this though is exactly why I see this group to be of value. I don’t want to spend a lot of time doing research. I want to examine three peoples strategies and trust that I can blindly go with the suggestions, or at least have a strong starting point.
This group is certainly a good idea, but probably not in the way you describe. Chances are, the most value you get will be from babysitting by the people you trust, as one thing new parents lack the most tends to be the time away from their young children and spent with each other. If you find yourself spending a lot of time doing research, you are probably overthinking it.
One clarification I wanted to make is that, while it is easy to royally screw up your kids by being a surly, high-strung, abusive, or even overly possessive parent, it is hard to “optimize” them by doing your absolute best at every conceivable aspect of parenting. The point of diminishing returns is reached very quickly, and all the extra effort tends to be wasted (that was the point made in the book, I believe), so spend this extra effort on something worthwhile instead. The wisdom to know the difference is probably what your group ought to keep in mind more than anything.
I would think that the behavior of parents has a massive impact on the way the children grow up (but indeed, not the material stuff that so many parents fuss so much over), considering how strong of a correlation there is between the parents’ belief systems and behaviors and their children’s.
I read Psychology Applied to Modern Life and IIRC I was appalled by the number of X for which it says “it has been found that X has very little effect on children’s development”.
Here is one study, it is fairly typical of the kind. (I can gladly dig up more for you, but this is one of the better ones.) It finds family effects, but they are much smaller than many people would expect. Of course it is more difficult to find out whether a child is “rational” as opposed to intelligent, and the same is true for parents, so there are no data (to my knowledge) on how much parenting affects scientific inquisitiveness.
Descriptions of the book mention only “insights” and “clear thinking”, so I’m assuming that the author didn’t exactly go out and present charts, graphs and reports from careful studies, experiments and analyses. If my assumption that the book is merely “good thinking” rather than actual experimental results and observations is wrong, then my model needs some updates.
I was trying to clarify and differentiate between “Some cool guy wrote a book, some LW user believes what it says” and “A researcher presented experimental results, explained the most logical cause and effect for these results, and a LW user affirms that this is not cherry-picked or biased”. I hope that makes it a bit more clear why I asked that question.
Someone tells you they know something, or they tell you something and that they can prove it. You click the link to know more, and instead of being told straight away you’re supposed to spend money. You then receive a standardized-length text, containing scattered bits of the information you wanted, lots of waffling, padding, anecdotes and forewords, and rarely any raw data dumps.
In the reasonable case, it’s also in a rather inconvenient format; text is still text, but there is no easy way of extracting data. The format contains DRM that, if you were to leave them in place, would enable a third-party company to revoke your access anytime they want, and prevent you from redistributing it. The latter is actually illegal, though it’s one of those obscure never enforced laws like “don’t fish in your pajamas”.
In the preposterous case, it’s a bunch of squiggles on organic matter. The organic lump must be physically schlepped to you, which can take days or weeks. It will then clutter your house, and is surprisingly heavy for its volume. Of course, it has no searching or exporting methods.
What’s next, going to Mount Sinai and waiting for research papers on marble tablets?
The Nurture Assumption has more summaries of existing research (and criticism of insufficiently rigorous analysis), my edition has 32 pages of references.
I have no such memory and have scored around 140 on official IQ tests.
There are complicating factors in my case that mean that it doesn’t necessarily completely invalidate your theory, but ‘my parents did that and I don’t remember it’ is not a particularly plausible one. I do have a pretty horrible episodic memory, but my parents were distant in general and it would have been very out of character for me to ask that kind of question of them or for them to answer that way. On the other hand, I was put in my school’s gifted program and explicitly taught ‘let’s find out’-type skills at a relatively early age that I still use today, so if you modify your theory to ‘someone has to do that, parents can make sure that it happens by doing it themselves’, that still works.
It seems odd to consider individuals that I saw perhaps one day out of eight, 9 months out of the year, for four or five years (the teachers in the gifted program) as ‘having raised me’, but oddness aside it is a compelling model in some ways, yes.
Is this from real data?
I would think that the behavior of parents has a massive impact on the way the children grow up (but indeed, not the material stuff that so many parents fuss so much over), considering how strong of a correlation there is between the parents’ belief systems and behaviors and their children’s.
I’m not much compared to even a small survey, but from my small sample I’ve noticed a possible strong correlation between the way parents respond to questions / handle “problematic” behavior / do anything to “educate” their children and the intelligence, rational behavior and open-mindedness of the children later in life.
The most salient example (but not the most statistically significant) is that everyone I talked to about this who were on the higher end of the intelligence scale had clear memory of their parents responding “I don’t know, let’s find out” to their curiosity when they were a child, while everyone else I talked to had no such memory.
I think looking into actual pedagogical research results and how to best behave towards children would probably be very high expected utility / value of information if maximizing your child’s chances of not being stupid is something you care about.
At the very least, a parent can affect the environmental factors that the book mentioned in the parent post mentions (I haven’t read the book, only the abstract) by carefully selecting a good initial environment with these things in mind in the first place.
Obviously also worth looking into is alternative forms of education. Public schools are far from optimal both for social and intellectual development.
If any of this is of interest, I can try to help with some research on it.
You know, smart (especially academic) parents are more likely to say that :). This is not a simple issue, I think this is actually a question about how much parent-provided environment mediates the effect of the parent IQ. Mediation analysis is subtle.
Alternate explanation for:
Highly intelligent people tend to have better memories. If less intelligent people don’t recall something from childhood, that definitely doesn’t rule out the possibility that it did happen to them and yet had no effect, because they may just have forgotten about it.
Or, smart people had smart parents. Smart parents tend to do that kind of thing, but the main effect to the kids’ IQ comes from having the right genes, not from the actual behavior. (A lot of the things that correlate with kids having higher IQs are like this, including things like “amount of books in the house”, IIRC—control for heredity, and the effect on IQ vanishes.)
The school of thought shminux represents, though not popular in the main stream, is one I ascribe to. Bryan Caplan and a few others have books on the subject.
Shminux, this though is exactly why I see this group to be of value. I don’t want to spend a lot of time doing research. I want to examine three peoples strategies and trust that I can blindly go with the suggestions, or at least have a strong starting point.
This group is certainly a good idea, but probably not in the way you describe. Chances are, the most value you get will be from babysitting by the people you trust, as one thing new parents lack the most tends to be the time away from their young children and spent with each other. If you find yourself spending a lot of time doing research, you are probably overthinking it.
One clarification I wanted to make is that, while it is easy to royally screw up your kids by being a surly, high-strung, abusive, or even overly possessive parent, it is hard to “optimize” them by doing your absolute best at every conceivable aspect of parenting. The point of diminishing returns is reached very quickly, and all the extra effort tends to be wasted (that was the point made in the book, I believe), so spend this extra effort on something worthwhile instead. The wisdom to know the difference is probably what your group ought to keep in mind more than anything.
I read Psychology Applied to Modern Life and IIRC I was appalled by the number of X for which it says “it has been found that X has very little effect on children’s development”.
Here’s some previous LW discussion of this research area.
Here is one study, it is fairly typical of the kind. (I can gladly dig up more for you, but this is one of the better ones.) It finds family effects, but they are much smaller than many people would expect. Of course it is more difficult to find out whether a child is “rational” as opposed to intelligent, and the same is true for parents, so there are no data (to my knowledge) on how much parenting affects scientific inquisitiveness.
Shminux gave a citation. What more do you want?
downvoted.
Book =/= data.
Descriptions of the book mention only “insights” and “clear thinking”, so I’m assuming that the author didn’t exactly go out and present charts, graphs and reports from careful studies, experiments and analyses. If my assumption that the book is merely “good thinking” rather than actual experimental results and observations is wrong, then my model needs some updates.
I was trying to clarify and differentiate between “Some cool guy wrote a book, some LW user believes what it says” and “A researcher presented experimental results, explained the most logical cause and effect for these results, and a LW user affirms that this is not cherry-picked or biased”. I hope that makes it a bit more clear why I asked that question.
Books are such a ridiculous concept.
Someone tells you they know something, or they tell you something and that they can prove it. You click the link to know more, and instead of being told straight away you’re supposed to spend money. You then receive a standardized-length text, containing scattered bits of the information you wanted, lots of waffling, padding, anecdotes and forewords, and rarely any raw data dumps.
In the reasonable case, it’s also in a rather inconvenient format; text is still text, but there is no easy way of extracting data. The format contains DRM that, if you were to leave them in place, would enable a third-party company to revoke your access anytime they want, and prevent you from redistributing it. The latter is actually illegal, though it’s one of those obscure never enforced laws like “don’t fish in your pajamas”.
In the preposterous case, it’s a bunch of squiggles on organic matter. The organic lump must be physically schlepped to you, which can take days or weeks. It will then clutter your house, and is surprisingly heavy for its volume. Of course, it has no searching or exporting methods.
What’s next, going to Mount Sinai and waiting for research papers on marble tablets?
The Nurture Assumption has more summaries of existing research (and criticism of insufficiently rigorous analysis), my edition has 32 pages of references.
I have no such memory and have scored around 140 on official IQ tests.
There are complicating factors in my case that mean that it doesn’t necessarily completely invalidate your theory, but ‘my parents did that and I don’t remember it’ is not a particularly plausible one. I do have a pretty horrible episodic memory, but my parents were distant in general and it would have been very out of character for me to ask that kind of question of them or for them to answer that way. On the other hand, I was put in my school’s gifted program and explicitly taught ‘let’s find out’-type skills at a relatively early age that I still use today, so if you modify your theory to ‘someone has to do that, parents can make sure that it happens by doing it themselves’, that still works.
The people who raised you are not necessarily the people who conceived you, nor the people who owned the house you slept in.
I think ‘parents’ is being used as a proxy for ‘people who raised you’.
It seems odd to consider individuals that I saw perhaps one day out of eight, 9 months out of the year, for four or five years (the teachers in the gifted program) as ‘having raised me’, but oddness aside it is a compelling model in some ways, yes.