
Raising Successful Children - aakil
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/opinion/sunday/raising-successful-children.html
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ChuckMcM
_"HANGING back and allowing children to make mistakes is one of the greatest
challenges of parenting."_

I would agree with this, you (as the parent) know its a mistake and you want
them not to suffer for something they could avoid but you can't teach what the
mistake does.

That said, I am a big fan of having your kids make their mistakes and failures
early and often. It is so easy to help your child avoid failing at some task,
and yet doing so robs them of the value of not failing. Or more succinctly
Success is measured in failures. If you try to do something and fail at it
several times and then succeed, that success is that much sweeter than trying
something and exceeding without ever failing. Thus success without failure is
hollow.

So like the example of watching and encouraging your kid to walk, responding
to failure with compassion and support is just as important.

~~~
einhverfr
Mistakes for any of us should be early, often, and not particularly severe.

Also I wonder how smaller family size plays into it. As one friend of mine put
it, your first child is made out of glass, your second out of wood, and your
third out of rubber.

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freshhawk
Well argued and the right time to make the case for the harm that comes from
helicopter parenting, with good evidence.

This made me laugh though: "If there’s a predator loose in the neighborhood,
your daughter doesn’t get to go to the mall.". Is that because I'm from
somewhere that spells it neighbourhood instead of from the US or just because
I understand statistics? Do the kinds of people reading an NYT article about
raising successful children actually think that "predator on the loose" is a
real thing outside of _very_ rare events?

~~~
Daniel_Newby
Mountain lions and bears are reasonably common in some areas.

~~~
einhverfr
I have spotted mountain lion scat in my parents' driveway.

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tokenadult
A readable account of Carol Dweck's research (mentioned in the interesting
submitted article) is a Stanford alumni magazine article

[http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?articl...](http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=32124)

that was shared here on HN a while ago.

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gscott
My children have been successful with the main thing that I do is to put them
to bed at night we talk for about 20-30 minutes about their day, we diagnose
any problems that day and come up with solutions they can try. I did this with
the kids for many years now they are both old enough and mostly do this on
their own.

My daughter (14) has straight A grades at her High School.

My son is at High School but on a 2 year college campus where he takes college
classes instead of regular high school classes (he is 16 the website is
middlecollege.guhsd.net)

~~~
Evbn
My parents didn't do anything like that and I was as academically successful
as your kids.

What you're doing probably helps their happiness, though.

My mom graduated young though, and I gave myself pressure to prove I was
smarter than her. Not sire if that's a point in the "nurture" column or the
"peer competitive pressure" column.

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technology
I think the article should also include the theory of "The Nurture Assumption:
Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do" developed by Judith Rich Harris

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nurture_Assumption>

• The assumption that child-rearing practices are responsible for how children
develop is a myth of modern western culture. • Most socialization research
ignores the effect of genetics and peer groups on personality and behavior. •
Research into the results of different pa renting styles may confuse cause and
effect; do parents spank difficult kids or do kids become diffi cult because
they are spanked? • Human beings naturally form groups. They are social
animals and excellent imitators. • Children learn by identifying with a peer
group and imitating its members. • Peer groups are more influential than
parents in determining children's behavior. • Among his or her peers, a
child's goal is child success – not adult success. Negative peer influence
may, for instance, undermine programs intended to fi ght juvenile delinquency.
• The ability of parents to determine how children turn out is decidedly
limited. • The family can become the peer group that affects a child, but
that‘s rare. • Perhaps the most that parents can do to infl uence children's
decisions and behavior is to choose a community or school where the peer group
refl ects parental values.

The goal of a child is not adult success, but rather childhood success. Status
in a peer group is a lynchpin factor in that success. Children do not seek to
emulate their parents; instead, they want to be like their peers. This is why
children consider the prospect of being held back in school as frightening.
They lose membership in the group they know and must take the status of being
misfi ts in a group they do not know.

Group forces may be responsible for the failure of certain programs intended
to combat juvenile crime or to improve educational outcomes. It isn’t unusual,
for example, for African-American boys to consider academic success as un-
African-American – or even to scorn too-studious peers for “acting white.”
Research shows that children are more likely to smoke if their friends smoke –
but whether their parents smoke makes little difference. Some teen peer groups
value criminal behavior, toughness and a willingness to take risks. Recidivism
is particularly high among juvenile delinquents who are sent to programs where
they live with other youthful offenders. This is to be expected, given the
power of group norms. Small wonder, then, that the neighborhood where a child
grows up can have a powerful determining infl uence on how it develops. A
Danish study found that children adopted by criminals were only likely to
become criminals themselves under one circumstance: growing up in a high-crime
neighborhood.

To influence behavior and development, social programs should address groups
rather than individual children or their parents. Groups transmit language,
culture and values to children. It is noteworthy that historically black
colleges produce the majority of prominent black intellectuals, and that girls
seem to do better in science and math in all- girl schools than in co-ed
schools. In a school with an all-black or all-female population, academic
achievement is not defined as nonblack or unfeminine. Group norms do not
discourage excellence.

Clearly, parents have a limited ability to influence children’s development.
Socialization researchers have not demonstrated that such factors as birth
order, spanking or parental education are responsible for how children
develop. Genes and environment matter. However, in the long run, it is not the
parental environment, but the peer group environment that really counts.

Parents can affect the development of children most directly through the
influence they exercise over establishing a child’s peer group. Parents pick
the neighborhood where the family will live, and often choose their children’s
schools. All things considered, it is obviously better to select a
neighborhood and a school where peer pressures are likelier to push your child
in a good direction. Seek a school where students consider academic
achievement desirable and admirable – and where members of the child’s ethnic
group do not value academic failure. If possible, choose a vicinity where
juvenile crime is rare or nonexistent. Of course, almost every neighborhood
has its share of delinquency, and kids who are bent on defi ning themselves as
delinquents will somehow manage to fi nd peers. However, degrees of
delinquency differ from neighborhood to neighborhood, so it is important to
recognize that choosing a neighborhood is a decisive step toward choosing a
peer group.

Parents can help children do better within their groups, and this is crucial.
Selecting a child’s name can be key. Parents who pick bizarre names can
sentence children to ridicule and perhaps even victimization. If your child
has skin problems, go to a dermatologist. If the child has crooked teeth, get
them straightened. If the child has an obesity problem, address it. Group
status matters deeply to children, and their self-esteem grows from group
acceptance. Of course, group status also matters to adults. Many child-rearing
and child-development fashions have spread only because groups defined them as
desirable.

In the natural order of things, dominance happens. Parents are supposed to be
the dominant members of families. They aren’t entertainers or playmates. Their
job is to be in charge. In many societies, older siblings also have a dominant
and caretaking role. Consider that the arrival of a young brother or sister
displaces the older sibling as a center of attention. The middle-class
American insistence on treating children equally means that the older sibling
does not receive the perquisite that could soften the blow of this
displacement – a degree of authority and responsibility. Sibling rivalry does
not seem to happen in societies that allow older siblings to take their
“rightful” place as bosses of younger siblings. Indeed, children tend to
develop close alliances in such societies. Brotherhood and sisterhood really
mean something.

The nurture assumption has been responsible for plenty of parental anxiety and
distress. When children turn out badly, the nurture assumption says that it is
the parents’ fault. But no evidence supports the nurture assumption. It’s a
myth. So, parents should stop worrying and do the best job they can. However,
this job includes recognizing their limits, and acknowledging the power and
importance of peer groups. Children live and learn in groups. They adopt group
norms. They try hard to be good members of their groups, to achieve status and
recognition by the group’s standards. They learn, through the group, to be
members of society. So, the most important contribution that parents can make
to a child’s development may very well be the influence they wield in making
certain groups available – or unavailable – for the child to join.

~~~
Evbn
This is extremely important information, and every parent should read the wall
of text, but I have a few quibbles.

* It mentions but sort of underplays the importance of finding a good neighborhood/school.

* It underplays the role of parents in the pre-school years where parents are the child's primary social world.

* It underplays the role of teaching children how to successfully achieve peace and happiness in the home-- though I agree this may be tangential to the child's later success in life. It is key to parental happiness, though.

* It emphasizes that peers teach kids their attitudes. But adults teach kids much of their skills and strategies. Peers with skills may model and communicate those strategies better, but those peers can be hard to find.

