Parenting is a complicated issue that we all will eventually grapple with. In this portion of the book we will take a look at some aspects of parenting that may or may not be effective in influencing success in a child’s life. The first thing that the chapter looks at is risk. As parents we tend to assess risk for our children’s activities. Even the most mundane and everyday task is assessed in terms of risk and potential for harm. The example the book illustrates is a risk assessment of letting your child with a friend in a house with a gun versus playing at a house with a swimming pool. Parents tend to evaluate situations based not on statistics but on a magnitude of how horrifying a situation can become. Having a child, especially your child getting shot versus drowning will make you think of the most vivid outcome. In this case it is or would be the bullet wound from the gun. This is a fallacy that is explained away by statistics, and we see that childhood drowning’s a much more likely occurrence than getting shot with a gun. Parents tend to evaluate situations risk based on the worst possible outcome. We then take a look at another important aspect of parenting, and that is raising your child. Parents always want to raise the best possible child they can but the book raises the question of how much influence a parent actually has in the process of determining how successful their child will be. Various factors are explored such as socioeconomic status of parents, education of parents, and age of the mother when she had children and involvement in the PTA among other factors. Correlations can be strong with some of these factors but causality with child success is a little harder to find when evaluating these factors. It is found that only a few factors matter when raising a child to be successful and they are as follows: Child has educated parents, child’s parents have a high socioeconomic status, child’s mother was thirty or older at the time of the child’s birth, the child’s birth weight, the parents ability to speak English, whether or not the child is adopted, the parents involvement in the PTA, and finally whether the child has many books in the home. These factors were the traits that could be controlled for in determining a child’s success or not. Some are more symptoms than cause of a particular child’s success however they point in a direction that may hint at whether your child will succeed or not.
The last chapter in the book wraps up the parenting discussion by showcasing another aspect of parenting which is naming your child. We start off by looking at the naming gap between black and white families. African American children tend to have unique names compared to white children who have more mainstream names. Naming a child in this instance may be an indicator of parent education, class or any number of other factors that may contribute to a child’s success rate in life. We also tend to see varying names between blacks and whites as a culture gap. A more segregated neighborhood may be more inclined to name their children based on immediate cultural and social values. If those values are not mainstream or in this case “white” then of course they will be different. Ill-educated parents may also believe that naming their offspring something that may predict their success or describe it also contributes. This is seen not only in black communities in lower class neighborhoods but in lower class white neighborhoods as well. A wider naming convention is also at work according to the data gathered in the book. “Once a name catches on among high-income, highly educated parents, it starts working its way down the socioeconomic ladder. (Freakonomics pg201)” This naming framework has been at play more years and it may even be able to predict future names of children. However, “an overwhelming number of parents use a name to signal their own expectations of how successful their children will be.(Freakonomics pg204)” This means that the naming of the child is something that doesn’t really matter in terms of the child’s success. A parent can only leave their mark and hint at how the child should be successful but they children over all will have to create their own successes.
Work Cited
Levitt D. Steven, Dubner J. Stephen. “Freakonomics”. 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022: HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2005, Print.
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