Thanks for posting another interesting and thought-provoking article, Bostonian.
This snippet from the article ("
our unequal era"), also echoed in the headline ("
today’s unequal world"), sends a strong message and I think it's the wrong message. It is my observation and experience that our era has more equality than any previous era... and more equality than many/most/all other countries today. To clarify, I am speaking of the plain, ordinary meaning of equality: in the sense of the Declaration of Independence (..."all men are created equal"...) and the US Constitution as amended (with voting rights added for women, etc); equal in the eyes of the law. The article seems to be speaking of receiving different levels of pay for different work, based on supply-and-demand in the labor force, as being "unequal."
I find these parts of the article especially interesting:
... “authoritative.” They use reasoning to persuade kids to do things that are good for them. Instead of strict obedience, they emphasize adaptability, problem-solving and independence — skills that will help their offspring in future workplaces that we can’t even imagine yet.
To me, this is not helicopter parenting or hyper-involved parenting. It is good old-fashioned appropriate parenting. Coaching to develop life skills including self-discipline. IMO, there is a dangerous trend today toward leaving these tasks of character formation to the schools... largely to public (government) schools which are all too glad to take on the role of a nanny-state while collecting Big Data on children and families.
... hyper-parenting backfires — creating a generation of stressed-out kids who can’t function alone.
IMO, being an "authoritative" parent is positive and very different than hyper-parenting which may resemble coddling and/or being "authoritarian," two different types of taking over... unwittingly fostering continued dependence, rather than sparking the growth of self-reliance and healthy independence or interdependence.
offspring of “authoritative” parents were more likely to graduate from college and graduate school, especially compared with those with authoritarian parents. This was true even when they controlled for the parents’ education and income.
It seems it would be obvious that positive parenting for self-reliance would tend to yield more positive results.
When some parents learned that talking to toddlers helps to develop their young brains, they began monologuing at them constantly.
(and others since then) have made it abundantly clear that it is talking WITH toddlers, role modeling the give-and-take in conversation, that is helpful... showing care and extending engagement by responding to what a child is paying attention to, demonstrating interest in what a child just did, elaborating on what a child just said. While this might sometimes take the form of being like a sports announcer in describing to a child the play-by-play of what is occurring around them... giving it context and meaning... this is not monologuing at them constantly.
Adoption studies have found that adoptees resemble their biological parents more than their adoptive parents in personality and educational achievement...
Wow! More "nature" than "nurture." Not to derail your thread, but I am very interested in this thought as I may be unaware of these studies/results, and still had the impression that nature/nurture was still "six of one, half-dozen of the other"... Would you point me to a source such as an article, previous thread, etc?
