Re: The One Parenting Decision That Really Matters

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Why is this showing up third after yesterday's posts?


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 06-29-22 7:05 AM
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I originally posted this yesterday, then pulled it down to save. Then forgot to update the time stamp at first.


Posted by: heebie | Link to this comment | 06-29-22 7:08 AM
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https://clickhole.com/fighting-gentrification-this-white-family-refuses-to-l-1825121378/


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 06-29-22 7:09 AM
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3 is so perfect.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 06-29-22 7:14 AM
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I just can't see why this entire study isn't just a massive correlation-vs-causation fallacy.

Chetty and his team focused on siblings who'd moved as kids. Take a hypothetical family of two children, Sarah and Emily Johnson. Suppose that when Sarah was 13 and Emily was 8, the family moved from Los Angeles to Denver. Suppose that Denver is a better place to raise a kid than Los Angeles. If this is the case, we would expect grown-up Emily to do better than Sarah, because she had five more years in Denver's good-for-children air...Three of the biggest predictors that a neighborhood will increase a child's success are the percent of households in which there are two parents, the percent of residents who are college graduates, and the percent of residents who return their census forms. These are neighborhoods, in other words, with many role models: adults who are smart, accomplished, engaged in their community, and committed to stable family lives.

And, they say, the study does indeed find this. But I am baffled how you can differentiate this from a simple finding that "growing up rich is good".

Let's say I'm Mr Johnson. In 2000 I'm not well off (and in LA) and Sarah is born. In 2005 Emily is born. In 2013 I get a great job and become rich (and move to Denver).
I'd expect Emily to do better than Sarah because being rich is good, and Emily has had more of her life being rich than Sarah has.
Now, true, when I got the great job, I moved somewhere nice. But it does not necessarily follow that it's good to live somewhere nice rather than it simply being good to be rich!


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 06-29-22 7:57 AM
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I mean, one could equally well have found that being taken to school in a BMW is a really good predictor of a child's success.


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 06-29-22 8:00 AM
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Let's say I'm Mr Johnson.

I'm not learning new pseuds just for a single thread.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 06-29-22 8:05 AM
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5: I think there are studies that control for that by comparing people of similar backgrounds who moved to better neighborhoods, or didn't, because of voucher programs alone.


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 06-29-22 8:10 AM
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The big thing I take from which is, we should build tons of housing preferentially in the "nice" neighborhoods so they don't hoard that opportunity and new people can get in on it, via schools, less pollution, whatever the mechanism is. (Not limit it elsewhere, of course.)


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 06-29-22 8:17 AM
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I can teach the newly middle class how to park like an asshole so they fit in here.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 06-29-22 8:23 AM
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At LGM I believe they call this the Maddie and Connor problem.
My mom was one of five kids, and the youngest is 16 years after the oldest (surprise!) He did grow up with a lot more opportunities, to the point that his siblings call him "my brother the only child." And he did in fact end up by far the most economically successful. But that might also because he measures success more in terms of material goods since he had a higher expectation of living standards and therefore prioritized those things in his education and career choices.


Posted by: SP | Link to this comment | 06-29-22 8:28 AM
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Jammies' family is similar - he had a different biological father, and his siblings are all half-siblings, and his adoptive father married his mother when Jammies was 5. The adoptive father was low-level then, and worked his way up in the oil industry over the course of Jammies' siblings lives, so they grew up with a much different yardstick of wealth. (The youngest is 12 years younger than Jammies.)

The last three sentences of 11 fit Jammies to a T.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 06-29-22 8:39 AM
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My youngest sister graduated high school in an actual city instead of the small town of our birth. She's the fanciest of us by far.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 06-29-22 9:01 AM
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Or this is all horseshit.

"the percent of households in which there are two parents, the percent of residents who are college graduates, and the percent of residents who return their census forms."

These are all correlated with SES. Basically they find that being in a high SES neighborhood improves life outcomes. No Shit. And they probably attempted to control for SES directly, so god knows what they are actually modelling.

W.r.t. the argument that parenting doesn't matter: another possibility is that good parenting involves a host of small decisions, each with a minor impact. So investigating any particular decision will not yield a statistically significant effect. But these small decisions are correlated with each other and derive from the mores and prejudices of a particular milieu. So you will get a stronger statistical signal by treating some random signifier of the milieu as the independent variable, even when that signifier has no direct causal impact on the outcome measures. For example, I'm fairly certain that a positive relationship exists between the percentage of children breastfed in a neighborhood and child life outcomes, even when the analysis is restricted to children that are not themselves breastfed.


Posted by: Nope@nope.com | Link to this comment | 06-29-22 10:27 AM
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Or this is all horseshit.

"the percent of households in which there are two parents, the percent of residents who are college graduates, and the percent of residents who return their census forms."

These are all correlated with SES. Basically they find that being in a high SES neighborhood improves life outcomes. No Shit. And they probably attempted to control for SES directly, so god knows what they are actually modelling.

W.r.t. the argument that parenting doesn't matter: another possibility is that good parenting involves a host of small decisions, each with a minor impact. So investigating any particular decision will not yield a statistically significant effect. But these small decisions are correlated with each other and derive from the mores and prejudices of a particular milieu. So you will get a stronger statistical signal by treating some random signifier of the milieu as the independent variable, even when that signifier has no direct causal impact on the outcome measures. For example, I'm fairly certain that a positive relationship exists between the percentage of children breastfed in a neighborhood and child life outcomes, even when the analysis is restricted to children that are not themselves breastfed.


Posted by: Nope@nope.com | Link to this comment | 06-29-22 10:27 AM
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Or this is all horseshit.

"the percent of households in which there are two parents, the percent of residents who are college graduates, and the percent of residents who return their census forms."

These are all correlated with SES. Basically they find that being in a high SES neighborhood improves life outcomes. No Shit. And they probably attempted to control for SES directly, so god knows what they are actually modelling.

W.r.t. the argument that parenting doesn't matter: another possibility is that good parenting involves a host of small decisions, each with a minor impact. So investigating any particular decision will not yield a statistically significant effect. But these small decisions are correlated with each other and derive from the mores and prejudices of a particular milieu. So you will get a stronger statistical signal by treating some random signifier of the milieu as the independent variable, even when that signifier has no direct causal impact on the outcome measures. For example, I'm fairly certain that a positive relationship exists between the percentage of children breastfed in a neighborhood and child life outcomes, even when the analysis is restricted to children that are not themselves breastfed.


Posted by: Nope@nope.com | Link to this comment | 06-29-22 10:27 AM
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Counterpoint: making statistical models is fun.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 06-29-22 10:32 AM
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Three of the biggest predictors that a neighborhood will increase a child's success are the percent of households in which there are two parents, the percent of residents who are college graduates, and the percent of residents who return their census forms

This made me wonder if there is a neighborhood with a high percentage of two-parent families, a high percentage of college graduates and a low percentage of people return their census forms. A place with high SES, and also a high level of paranoid conspiracy nuts. A Trumpy ex-urb?


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 06-29-22 10:55 AM
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Because I am evil my other thought was that the most important decision a parent makes is the daily decision not to kill their child.


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 06-29-22 10:59 AM
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The place I lived from about 7 to 17 had a pretty big wealth gradient, and had a University on the rich side of town. There was a single big high school. like some others here, I grew up in a family that was poor in money, but rich in books. I always have a hard time thinking of SES as a single unified thing. Maybe that's flawed, idiosyncratic circumstances. Aside from my family, the parents of friends I spent time with mattered for me-- had I hung out with kids who didn't care about education and getting good grades in flawed place, my life would probably have been pretty different.

Cosign 3, 9, 17 basically. Mixed-income neighborhoods are becoming thin on the ground, so disentangling these effects is hard. This was IMO irresponsible to publish.


Posted by: lw | Link to this comment | 06-29-22 12:29 PM
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It strikes me that this kind of article is a huge improvement over focusing on how toilet training happened.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 06-29-22 12:50 PM
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"a pretty big wealth gradient, and had a University on the rich side of town. There was a single big high school."
That describes our city pretty well. The stupid thing is the HS is rated badly because oh noes low test scores, but if you look at various metrics people have for value add (expected test scores based on SES vs actual) it does pretty well. It also blows away the "good" suburban school where I grew up as far as course and activity offerings.


Posted by: SP | Link to this comment | 06-29-22 1:42 PM
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As someone starting adoption process, the genetics evidence is quite scary, albeit of very low quality.


Posted by: George Bush | Link to this comment | 06-29-22 1:56 PM
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24

@17 Mathematical onanism.


Posted by: Nope@nope.com | Link to this comment | 06-29-22 3:54 PM
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I prefer "consulting".


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 06-29-22 4:16 PM
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I can't tell whether 24 is disputing 17 or endorsing it.


Posted by: politicalfootball | Link to this comment | 06-29-22 4:58 PM
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27

What is best in life? To crush the frequentists, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their p-values.


Posted by: Onan the Bayesarian | Link to this comment | 06-29-22 6:35 PM
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23: Good luck!


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 06-30-22 11:00 AM
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I remember someone commenting here who had both adopted and had biological children, and they were talking about the difference between the "What to expect" books, and the biological-pregnancy books were like, "Don't you dare touch that feta cheese!" whereas the adoption books were very "eh, you can't control if your baby was exposed to meth in vitro, but here's why those risks are overstated..." I was pregnant at the time and found it reassuring.


Posted by: heebie-geebie | Link to this comment | 06-30-22 11:34 AM
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29: And then you sprinkled some feta cheese on to your meth, "mmm...delicious!"


Posted by: peep | Link to this comment | 06-30-22 11:40 AM
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27 is just fantastic.

I just wish there were a word for the broader set of statistical disasters that medical doctors make.


Posted by: yoyo | Link to this comment | 06-30-22 11:48 AM
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32

27 is just fantastic.

I just wish there were a word for the broader set of statistical disasters that medical doctors make.


Posted by: yoyo | Link to this comment | 06-30-22 11:48 AM
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33

29: lemmy caution, maybe?


Posted by: Cala | Link to this comment | 06-30-22 7:05 PM
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If your baby was exposed to meth in utero, it might gain the proportionate decongestive ability of 24 tabs of Sudafed.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 06-30-22 7:19 PM
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33: maybe? I was guessing Unimaginative?


Posted by: heebie | Link to this comment | 06-30-22 7:21 PM
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29: Exposed to meth in vitro

Those fertility docs had better watch out. The anti-choice activists are going to put them in jail for that.

32.b - definitely!


Posted by: Boatoniangirl | Link to this comment | 06-30-22 8:53 PM
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Lots of good comments above. But "how our kids turn out" That phrase is one of those fabulous phrases that means whatever the reader wants it to mean. I try to tell my custody/divorce clients that: 1.parenting is like driving on ice. We can kind of nudge them one way or the other; and 2. "Do you really think the kids in [expensive neighborhood that they are leaving bc of divorce] are happier than kids in [less expensive neighborhood]??" Also, if "how our kids turn out] means how wealthy they are, isnt that mostly determined by how wealthy you are? Finally, the President of UVa has stated that learning how to thrive with diverse people is one of the most important skills a college can help teach. I like that measure of "how our kids turn out."


Posted by: will | Link to this comment | 07- 1-22 5:57 AM
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I mean, the unspoken assumption is "turn out wealthy enough to be able to mitigate the worst aspects of the dystopia we are going to leave them with." At least that was my assumption.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 07- 1-22 6:18 AM
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I want to avoid having my kid grow up to be an unoriginal and boring twirp or worse a brown-nosing authority-worshiping creep.

Definitely the neighborhoods they're talking about are the ones to avoid.


Posted by: Ray Vinmad | Link to this comment | 07- 4-22 5:51 AM
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