Should we raise children the way we run businesses? I say we, though I have no idea how to run a business. Yet the number of books on the market that discuss parenting in terms one might use to discuss maximising an investment – to approach one’s child as one might any other product launch – is simultaneously completely depressing and almost impossible to resist. Why wouldn’t one want to turn out successful children? On the other hand: stuffing them from the age of three with skills best suited to careers in corporate law is surely an expensive and self-defeating insanity.
In a new book, Love, Money and Parenting: How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids, two economists try to untangle the long-term impact of what has come to be known as “helicopter parenting” – the high-investment, high-involvement approach that, on the evidence of the book, increases test scores and the likelihood of kids graduating from college, even as other data suggests it stresses kids out.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2tnS6G0
