Choices of schools can matter to some degree because of peer group, however, there are two factors to consider. One, they matter far less than parents believe. Second, most of the effect is due to accidental marketing. Two, most of why they work is merely due to ignorance from parents about what’s really important with life outcomes. There are far cheaper ways than relocating to expensive suburbs, or private schools – like public magnet schools – which still cause a child to have a more studious peer group.

38 -

We certainly can channel human nature in many ways which dramatically changes behavior. Read Stephen Pinker’s latest book for numerous examples.

Speaking as a parent, I think parenting invariably involves having to do a lot of things you don’t want to, even if you’re actually doing so in an aware (nature-leaning) fashion. If you “lean towards nurture” it’s much worse.

A good example, which I’ve mentioned in other threads, is parents think when they have kids they need to move to suburbs “for the schools.” There’s no evidence this is actually needed. Repeated studies have shown there is no difference between life outcomes, once family background is taken into account, between public schools and private schools, or “elite” public schools and plain old urban neighborhood schools.

Many parents perhaps want to make the change to a suburban area. But others just do so because it’s expected of them, and actually dislike some aspect of it, be it the high mortgage for somewhere with “a good school,” the lack of amenities in their area, or the long commutes. But they suffer through it because they think it’s good for their child. It may be good in the narrow sense that being in a suburban area makes it slightly less likely your child hangs out with delinquents, but that’s about it.

There are tons of other examples – pushing children to get into “the best day care” for example, no matter the cost. Or putting them in tons of afterschool programs like art, music, and sports, even if they don’t have a strong interest in them. There is a strongly negative undercurrent in all of this, because the ultimate rationale is not only that you can boost your child’s outcomes, but also that they are competing against all the other children in a zero-sum fashion towards eventual enrollment in a “good college,” which is the penultimate achievement of “proper” parenting.

I understand that, but if there’s hope to improve, there’s also hope to screw up. It seems to me the downside from the anxiety of “doing something wrong” and accepting blame for your child’s stumbles is greater than the positive emotional benefit. This is especially true given the latter is counterbalanced by the incredible amount of effort modern upper-middle class parents put into trying to give their kids “a leg up,” or to put them in “an enriching environment.”

And I suggest that is because it gives parents something to do, it gives them a sense they can move forward, improving on nature, that is, they want to feel their baby is not stuck with merely himself and there is something beyond the nine months they’ve already invested in which they can still add in fine tuning and improvement and therefore ‘there’s still hope’.

Arguing from a naturist standpoint, it could be just the U.S. wasn’t as meritocratic in the time of your grandparents, so the working class was more leavened with people of high IQ?

Both of my grandfathers were of above-average intelligence, but neither one went to college. One dropped out of school in 9th grade because he was so poor that the kids made fun of the holes in his clothes. The other finished high school, got a full scholarship to college – but was told by his parents he had to go into the plumbing businesses with his father, in order to help fund his sister’s budding art career (admittedly, choosing the daughter over the son for success was a rare thing in those days). Both of them still read voraciously despite being working class and having no smart friends – my maternal grandfather had a passion for Alexander the Great, and picked up biographies of him whenever possible, and also had an early copy of Churchill’s A History of the English Speaking People.

I have no doubt both would have been broadly successful if they grew up in upper-middle class families, although my maternal grandfather was also someone with a pretty low level of conscientiousness. Fortunately he married a woman of average intelligence but high conscientiousness (my grandmother) and my mother ended up both bright and an overachiever – the combination you probably need to work your way from dirt poor to upper-middle class.

It should be easy to design a relatively short, thrifty, and fetching experiment, that can test this sentiment.

By raising, training, and testing puppies of various breeds, we can remove the effect of nurture. Lists of breed intelligence are already well established to select from. Food, shelter, and education can be easily controlled. Most formal training could given without human intervention through automation once the puppy is past a certain age. Once an education baseline is established, experimenters can provide extra homework for the least skilled dogs to determine what’s necessary to become a 1 percenter. The experiment could last 3-4 years.

PBS Nova’s ‘How Smart are Dogs’ with Neil Degrasse Tyson, and ‘Dogs Decoded’ have probably done more to establish the relative importance of an individual’s innate qualities than anything else the last ten years.

I think that parenting plays comparably little role in striving for personal wealth. Everything I’ve read suggests the strongest indicator of whether the amount of money you make is “enough” is based upon your comparative wealth of your peer group. Simply put, you don’t ever want to be below average within your circle of friends.

Thus I’d expect, assuming equal talents, the working-class child whose parents harp on how he needs to make a lot of money will actually achieve less financial reward than the guy whose parents didn’t care much, but managed to get into an Ivy League school and started socializing with a very wealthy subset.

26 -

Yes, I think parents ought to be fine with that. Maybe this sounds conceited of me, but I really like myself, and think that even my stumbles and shortcomings played a big role in me getting to where I am today, to the point that I wouldn’t want them taken back. I don’t set higher standards for parenting than I lived in my own life. I’m glad, for example, I didn’t do any drugs as a teenager (hell, I didn’t even get drunk until I was in grad school), because if I did, I know I could not advise her not to do them, because to do so would be hypocritical (the most I could do would be to explain the risks and the tradeoffs).

Also, risk mitigation is a crazy thing. Nobody wants a high consequence event with their kid even if it has a really really low probability of occurrence. (or have many many kids and increase our risk tolerance?)

# 22,
Do you think parents should be happy with the child having average of their IQ?
What if they feel their own potential was mitigated as children? Also, health?

That takes a lot of nurture.

The nature/nuture debate is largely moot, as it seems obvious to me it’s the interplay of both that shapes us. And, in any event, what really matters is that we humans chose neither our nature nor our nuturers.

I’m sorry, but that makes no sense. In no way are the lives of the children whose parents show undue interest in “enrichment” hopeless.

Absent any major genetic flaws, or incredible trauma (like sexual abuse from a family member), the biological offspring of high IQ upper-middle class parents should trend to the average between the two. Indeed, if I was going to simplify, the lessons of “Nature” parenting are: Do what comes natural to you, and don’t sweat your child’s future.

Of course, it’s different if you adopt, in which case it’s probably hopeless to expect your children to track with you. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be happy, which is really what parents should be concerned about.

I think culture is an often overlooked (and hard to control for) environmental variable which can affect sexual selection for perceived positive traits as well. Over time this would mean that this population would produce more individuals with a genetic predisposition for these ‘positive traits’ determined by their culture.

60% Nature 40% Nurture?