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Sorry, parents, you're overrated

By ROBYN E. BLUMNER
Published May 14, 2006

On this Mother's Day, I'm reminded of a baby shower I threw for a good friend a number of years ago. It was a women-only affair on a Sunday, during the day, and I gave all the invitees plenty of advance notice. Then a funny thing happened: I started getting phone calls from some of the invited guests asking if it was okay for them to bring along their children.

It made me feel guilty and awkward to say no, but I was not interested in making it a children's party. So I screwed up my courage and told every woman who asked that I would rather she didn't bring junior along.

One said that she wouldn't be able to come without bringing her 7-year-old. Sorry you won't be able to make it, I said.

She was clearly offended by this insouciance.

At the time, I remember thinking a couple of things. First, I bet I wouldn't have been burdened by such presumptuous behavior had the party been men-only; and second, how odd that these relatively affluent mothers didn't have an entire stable of babysitters to choose from. By the time a child is 7, I would hope that his parents would have left him with a babysitter at least 350 times - so they could enjoy an evening out together once a week at a minimum.

Then a horrifying thought struck me: Maybe these women never leave their children with a sitter. Maybe they think their children need to be under their direct care every waking moment.

A recent New York Times story on the modern faux pas of bringing children to a dinner party nailed this phenomenon, calling it "attachment parenting." It's a modern affliction that, from my vantage, particularly affects moms who leave successful careers to be full-time parents. Since their primary justification for being at home and out of the competitive work force is that their children need them, they validate their choice by lavishing suffocating attention on little Zach and Zoe. It's parenting through genuflection.

Amazingly, even after expressing my druthers, one of the shower guests showed up with a child in tow. If I had this woman's address today I would send her a copy of the bestselling book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. I would highlight the chapter titled "What Makes a Perfect Parent?" in which the authors describe how parenting is overrated and has relatively little impact on a child's academic success.

Written by Steven Levitt, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, and journalist Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics made headlines when it was first published in 2005 by concluding that the precipitous drop in the crime rate was directly correlated to legalized abortion. Our national crime rate fell just as the first cohort born after the 1973 decision in Roe vs. Wade was entering their teenage years. Levitt surmised that when poor, single women finally had access to safe, legal abortions, they were less likely to bring unwanted children into the world - children who statistically were more likely to become criminals. The postulate caused an uproar, but there is no getting around the sense of it.

The "perfect parent" chapter received less attention but is just as explosive. Levitt describes the factors strongly correlated with a child's test scores and those that make little difference. It turns out that the personal qualities that parents possess are far more important than what they do to nurture their children.

Here are some of the factors that are predictors for positive student achievement: The child's parents are highly educated, enjoy a high socioeconomic status or the mother was 30 or older when her first child was born.

Here are factors that strongly predict low test scores: The child has a low birth weight or was adopted. Studies have established that a child's academic ability is influenced far more by the IQs of his biological parents than by those of his adoptive parents, according to the authors, and women who give up children for adoption tend to have sharply lower IQs than people who adopt.

Now, here are factors that are not correlated to test scores: The child's family is intact, the parents recently moved into a better neighborhood, the child's mother didn't work between birth and kindergarten, the child is regularly taken to museums, the child frequently watches television or the child is read to by his parents nearly every day.

"It isn't so much a matter of what you do as a parent; it's who you are," the authors say.

You see? It doesn't much matter if you plop a kid in front of a television or you stay home with him in his formative years.

I'm not saying that good parenting doesn't have any impact on a child's development, just that parents can stop being so obsessive. And the next time you're invited to a party, call the teenager down the block to come watch the kids. They'll survive without you and we all will be better for it.

[Last modified May 14, 2006, 06:03:37]