How intellectual pollution has crippled America's children

Some countries are smarter than others.

You can tell it in a million ways. By the books people are buying. By the conversations they're having in their classrooms. By the politicians they elect. By the stories in their media. By the laws they enact, their rates of crime, and how they treat their prisoners.

Some countries seem capable of creating sensible policy through intellectually honest debate. Whereas in America and Great Britain, this hasn't happened for decades. Rather, our laws emerge from a haze of ignorance, apathy, and misdirection.

Why?

It all goes back to Dr. Spock and the industrial revolution. Let me explain.

In 1946, Dr. Benjamin Spock wrote a book that would change the course of history. His book, Baby and Child Care, became internationally famous for promoting the idea that when it comes to raising children, "you know more than you think you do." In other words, when it comes to raising your children you should follow your intuition. This idea proved revolutionary, and remains the dominant advice from pediatricians to this day.

The only problem is that it's completely wrong.

Think about it. When deciding how much calcium to give your kids, would you just eyeball the container of Tums and pick an amount that feels right? Of course not. And yet there are many other parenting best-practices that have been determined in exactly this way.

It's not that parents weren't raising their children this way before. They were, but since the 40's the wealth of scientific best practices have been largely ignored thanks to Spock's influence.

Which brings us to the industrial revolution.

As it turns out, a person's work environment affects much more than just their satisfaction at work. It alters their intuition and perception, their rhythms and routines.

Parents naturally raise their children according to their intuition, and as farmers left the fields for the factories their intuition about how best to raise their children dramatically changed. That is, factory workers began to raise their children using methods that echoed the way they were being managed in the workplace.

Sociologists have long suspected that, for example, children of factory workers would be implicitly taught that the best way to succeed was to keep your head down and obey authority. And while this might in fact make them more likely to succeed in a factory, it would also stifle their chances of upward social mobility.

There is no doubt that the worldview parents impart on their children vastly affects their chances of future success. But this is where the damage was thought to end. Experts assumed that because the effect of parenting styles on cognitive, physical, and emotional development is less salient than with the example of calcium above, parenting styles didn't really matter. It was all just a matter of preference. And that while the children of factory workers may lack certain advantages, this could be largely ameliorated later given enough school intervention.

But thanks to modern early childhood development research, we now know that the effects of factory-style parenting are much more toxic than previously assumed.

For example, the research of Hart & Risley has shown that over half of the variance in a child’s vocabulary at age 3 can be attributed to the ways in which a parent talks to their child, and the way parents talk to their children varies dramatically depending on socioeconomic status. Specifically, they estimate that by age 4 the children of professional parents have been exposed to about 45 million words, whereas the children of welfare parents have been exposed to only about 13 million words. Because of this by time children are 3 years old, parents in less economically favored circumstances have said fewer different words in their cumulative monthly vocabularies than the children in the most economically advantaged families in the same period of time.

"Even if we have overestimated by half the differences between children in amounts of cumulative experience the gap is so great by age 4 that the best that can be expected from education or intervention is to keep children from falling still farther behind. For an intervention to keep an average welfare child's experience equal in amount to that of an average work-class child would require that the chid be in substitute care comparable to the average professional home for 40 hours per week from birth onward." That is, already by pre-school the low-SES children are so far behind in language development that it is impossible for them to catch up.

Similarly, Hart & Risley found that the average child in a professional family was accumulating 32 affirmatives and 5 prohibitions per hour, a ratio of 6 encouragements to 1 discouragement. The average child in a working-class family was accumulating 12 affirmatives and 7 prohibitions per hour, a ratio of 2 encouragement to 1 discouragement. The average child in in a welfare family, though, was accumulating 5 affirmatives and 11 prohibitions per hour, a ratio of 1 encouragement to 2 discouragements.

(For more on how language exposure and the ratio of encouragements to prohibitions affects childhood outcomes, c.f. Hart & Risley's excellent book Meaningful Differences in the Everday Experience of Young American Children.)

There's no especially good reason for low-SES parents to talk less with their children and use more prohibitions. They're just following Dr. Spock's advice and raising their children according to their intuition. Which, as it happens, is to manage their children the way their employers manage them at work. Raising children like employees has benefits that are immediate and hugely salient, whereas the harms created are subtle and visible only in aggregate through statistical analysis.

These harms are longitudinal; even as societies transition toward knowledge work, these flaws in parenting remain and reproduce themselves in future generations. When figuring out how to raise their children, parents look to the way their parents raised them. Parenting styles which caught on overnight may take hundreds of years to be displaced, because in each case the benefits are more salient than the drawbacks.

What's more, as white-collar jobs have replaced factory work an entirely new set of parenting flaws has arisen. Once again parents are raising their children according to their intuition, intuition which has been shaped and molded by their experience in the workplace. Success as a white-collar worker largely means developing the skill of being chosen: for the soccer team, for college, for internships, employment, promotions, and so on. This is the mindset underlying the methodology that high-SES parents adopt when raising their children.

Are these parenting practices good for a high schooler? Perhaps. But when applied to infants they're empirically damaging.

• Many high-SES parents over-schedule and overstimulate their pre-k children in an attempt to impart an early educational advantage. By depriving their children of time for self-directed play they may be undermining executive function, the best predictor of future success. source
• By forcing their children to read before they're ready, they may well be robbing their children of intrinsic motivation to read and contributing to future alliteracy. source
• By letting their infants watch baby videos they are at worst contributing to future cognitive and behavioral problems, and at best dramatically decreasing their children's rate of learning. source

Again, these parenting practices stem largely from the intuitions parents pick up from their workplaces. Compared with using intuition to decide how much calcium to give a child, using intuition to make decisions like how much TV to allow an infant to watch is equally absurd and equally damaging, but largely ignored because the intangibility makes these decisions less salient and seemingly less important.

You can't measure bad parenting in parts per million. But the effects are just as real as lead poising, obesity, or thalidomide. And as with factory workers, these parenting mistakes will be passed on long after these working environments are gone.

I don't know why it is that certain countries seem so incapable of setting rational and coherent policy. I'm sure there are dozens of reasons. But I suspect a good percentage of the problem stems from a series of specific parenting flaws largely attributable to parents raising their children with intuition acquired in the workplace. The reason then that these social problems are most pervasive in countries like America and Great Britain is because these countries were the earliest and most extensively industrialized.

Every time we buy a cell phone, a flat screen TV, or anything produced in a factory, the damages are more than just the environmental contaminants and individual suffering. Rather, we're imposing a cultural shadow on ourselves, one which cripples our children and our children's children. This is a negative externality of the way we choose to structure society, a form of intellectual pollution far more harmful than anyone could have predicted.

This suggests a market opportunity for teaching parents to separate their parenting styles from the way they spend their day. But what's more, it suggests new modes of civic responsibility, and new answers to the age-old question of what it means to be a good person.

Comments

[NT]

"Every time we buy a cell phone, a flat screen TV, or anything produced in a factory, the damages are more than just the environmental contaminants and individual suffering."

Is that really your conclusion? Advocate not buying products built in factories because the "poor uneducated souls" who work there are not raising their children properly?

I personally find that children from professional families have a far higher tendency towards unreasonable self-entitlement, disregard for authority, and general selfishness. I'd be interested to see studies done on the negative aspects of growing up in a professional home (living in daycare, 2 working parents, raised by the TV, etc.) and their ramifications on early development.

[Diones]

So this means that parenting IS a rocket science ?

[Alex Krupp]

@NT

What I'm actually advocating is that employers treat their employees humanely. Basically, it's no longer acceptable to say that if someone agrees to work for $8 an hour it's ok to treat them any way you like, because their work environment has an effect on others who aren't able to consent.

[Gabriel Kent]

Alex... I don't think you understand the conclusions of your statements here. While it seems you did a bit of research and used some big words, I think you lost the forest for the trees.

"Some countries seem capable of creating sensible policy through intellectually honest debate."

orly?

The calcium analogy is poor... read the label.

The issue is that children don't come with labels (wasn't there a PSA campaign with that slogan?). Are you really stating that parents don't know best? That they, dare say, use their own experiences to raise a child? That every child may be a product of their parent's wisdom or lack thereof? These poor parents are ignorant, should we not take their children for a 'proper' upbringing? Screw diversity, right? Everyone should be exposed to 40m words by age 4 dammit!

"Basically, it's no longer acceptable to say that if someone agrees to work for $8 an hour it's ok to treat them any way you like, because their work environment has an effect on others who aren't able to consent."

Bah... do you know what you really just stated there? That one should not have the freedom to consent to a workplace because it may screw up their child (then who makes that choice?). Or put another way, a business owner doesn't have the freedom to succeed or fail by setting his/her own workplace standards in the business that they created with their own wealth (again, who makes that choice?).

The ideal conclusion of what you advocate here is that we take children from parents and decide who should work where and how businesses should be formed all for the good of said children.

While your intentions seem good... your policy is shortsighted (or maybe your intentions are evil, then your policy isn't shortsighted).

If your main issue is how poor workplace standards have an effect on children, then you are correct, they probably do. Then one must ask, how are workplace standards raised?

The answer: increased competition for employees.

How do you increase competition for employees? More businesses naturally.

How might we increase the number of businesses? One sure fire way would be to abolish minimum wage laws.

So there we have it... abolish minimum wage laws... for the children!

Or... you could continue to blame Dr. Spock for poor workplace standards... wait what?

[S'chn T'gai Spock]

Here's what schools don't teach kids:

1. Anything about money.

2. How businesses work, so that they enter the game with no knowledge of how it's played.

3. Basic psychology, so that even if they understand the game, they can be effectively gamed. Obviously, psychology would be very useful in raising kids.

4. Parenting, other than what they learned by living (courtesy of parents, teachers, ministers, coaches, police ..) so they repeat all prior mistakes.

5. Collaboration and team effort.

Here's what they learn.

1. There is only one right answer to each question.

2. Your success is entirely based on your grades and obedience/attendance.

3. There are no new ideas. Everything you know is in books, according to a curriculum approved by committee.

4. Creativity, taking your time and questioning authority and status quo are punishable offenses.

5. Sharing information with others is punishable by expulsion.

6. Ethics are OK to talk about, but in real life, everything's fair; just don't get caught.

You can see the result. Roughly 10% of people are "successful" and innovation comes from roughly 1%. 90% of work is meant to make the boss happy, and 10% towards customers, teamwork is unheard of and requires expensive consultants to achieve at a minimal level, and you're paid almost entirely for your paper certificates and longevity.

Read the book "Children Learn What They Live" by Dorothy Law Nolte.

[Junior]

That person (I will refer to as "Responder") who started their reply with the following sentence "Alex... I don't think you understand the conclusions of your statements here." is a perfect example of what Alex is talking about. Responder, not because you can put together some sentences and paragraphs in what seem to you a logical argument refuting what Alex wrote does not make it the case. You missed by almost a mile most of the points Alex was making. You seem to product of the type of parenting discussed in Alex's posting. I know a of a great number of people who in place of developing actual skills and abilities, the learn how to be "chosen", in fact, it might just be part of the culture.

[Michael]

Steven Pinker criticizes studies of the kind that Hart and Risley did, where they measured language used with children and assumed that affected development. He says that causation is not established, and points to twin adoption studies that indicate that the causal factor is genetic. Can you address that?

[Betsy]

"Some countries seem capable of creating sensible policy through intellectually honest debate."

Which countries would those be?

"The average child in in a welfare family, though, was accumulating 5 affirmatives and 11 prohibitions per hour, a ratio of 1 encouragement to 2 discouragements. "

But, in a welfare family, are the parents working? Or are they referring back to a distant point of reference when they or their forebears did work? Or are you assigning a collective class-based intuitive parenting style? Isn't there a danger in such discriminatory stereotyping? How does that type of casting reconcile with the creation of "sensible policy?"

Actually, I think underlying your overall premise is one that you didn't state - and that is, prior to the advent of the Industrial Revolution, people for the most part were more self-determined and entrepreneurial - artisans, guild members, traders, farmers, etc. The application of a military-style hierarchy to the workplace is a fairly recent phenomenon (within the last few hundred years).

However, further study of historical parenting styles, ranging from religious sacrificial infanticide to separation/isolation via indentured servitude or apprenticeship, might even further belie your premise. While Spock remains one of the best-selling authors on child care and parenting of all times, how many working and welfare families actually studied his evil book?

I think you should be congratulated on writing a provocative, controversial post, but, seriously, the conclusive aspects deserve further study.

[Mark Essel]

Interesting thoughts on work affecting infant education. We have to advocate parenting responsibilities to the parents, without that we are left with a the void of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

Here's my take, our ideas no matter how good intentioned shouldn't impinge on the rights of others to make "wrong" decisions. We have to trust each other to learn and collaborate effectively.

The psychological and developmental affects of work life on children is a fascinating topic though, and I look forward to more of your writing on the subject. My personal passions lay in social optimization of our creativity/workforce. My main suggestion is to realign the majority of people with jobs they absolutely love, and to open up communication (social media/social design) about the really hard problems we can no longer wait to solve in walled gardens.

ps: Sounds like you guys had a heckuva an experience with Seth G's alternative MBA. I wrote up some thoughts on potentially broadening programs like the one Seth ran, and something like YCombinator as potential alternatives to higher education (and hopefully a much cheaper one), here's the link: http://www.victusspiritus.com/2009/06/06/hacking-startups-a-declaration-of-institutional-independence/.

[Mongols Glingckler]

Michael brings up a good point, as the research of Hart & Ripley (you never cited any specific papers, btw) uses entirely correlational methods. Even they are careful to never claim that there is any causation demonstrated in their work, preferring to say things are "correlated" and "associated". So no, it is not clear, probably not even likely, that the amount of verbalization between parent and child is even a driving force at all when it comes to the cognitive development of children. They use intelligence as measured by IQ as an outcome measure, but intelligence could easily be the cause, and verbal interaction style the outcome, especially given the high heritability of intelligence. And there is almost certain to be a variety of other factors contributing to the effect, but I doubt that parental verbalization style is a big one. Unfortunately this would make most of your policy suggestions moot.

[Alex Krupp]

@Mongols

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Vocabulary size is the dependent variable, not IQ. In fact, IQ is one of the variables that is being controlled for. And as for not citing any papers, I linked to several. The entire Hart & Risley book is the story behind a scientific paper they wrote.

[Mongols Glingckler]

I understood that the implication was that vocabulary size was an indirect predictor of academic success; so too is intelligence, and my point is that it is likely the more relevant predictor (along with SES, which is always tied to intelligence). This mix-up arose because I wasn't sure which paper you were SPECIFICALLY referring to (I never accused you of not having citations); the one I'm referring to is this one: http://data.psych.udel.edu/rrubin/Shared%20Documents/Cognitive%20Development%20and%20Intelligence.pdf. In any case, the point still stands that their correlational methods provide only a very rough sketch and falls short as a rigorous explanation.

[Ambrose Mnemopolous]

And yet we are told that children are not just "little adults."

Thanks for the informative article!

This reminded me of some thinking I was doing recently about how sex is treated as a medical or biological (rather than emotional or social) process in sex education curricula.

I also find it striking how our standardized education is oriented towards creating a homogenous population that is somehow supposed to compete effectively in the economy. As we are told that the emphasis of our economy is shifting from industrial production to knowledge production (or service, perhaps), it seems increasingly relevant that there can be no competition without difference -- unless differences are assigned or imposed arbitrarily. The knowledge-base and cultural assumptions of individuals are made to be quite uniform; ethnic groups are pressured to "assimilate." Our social system provides many rewards and incentives that limit the relevance of individual differences to matters of task-oriented types of specialization.

Cheers!

[Jason Bennett]

Your theory is that the factory mentality has led to a production line of sub-standard childbots with "limited executive functioning" and stifled "chances of upward social mobility" and that we need to build a social factory that produces childbots with better specs.

Read Technopoly. You can't use the ideas of mass production to mass produce a better human.

[Jason]

What is a 'baby video'? The link you provide just links back to a mindmap on yoursite that expands but does not hotlink to anything.

My son watched videos of trucks when he was a baby -- he loved it and it seemed to encourage his interest in machinery years later....

[Gavy]

Jason, I don't know Alex, or the baby videos that he speaks of personally, but the ones that immediately came to mind were those of the "Baby Einstein" persuasion. Even though there's been no conclusive positive result when it comes to sitting your kids in front of the television to watch colorful clips of children's toys set to classical music, parents are buying it up. And this is (I believe) his point.

We, as human beings, have never done this before. In fact, we're only just learning how to parent children, have successful marriages, make sure everyone has equal rights, etc. A hundred years ago, things were so drastically different, that your single example that your son watching movies about trucks encouraged his interest in machinery is not demonstrative of the whole. While it may have worked for your son, it's not a perfect model, and certainly any parent that advocates sitting their child in front of a plastic box to train them to be passive and submissive because Mommy's got a headache is doing it very, very wrong.

We live in a time of individuality, when parents (and really, all people in first world Western countries) are taught their beliefs are valid and that they can be strong competent parents. Do you really think the 16 year old single mother who lives in a shelter is a competent mother? Do you think the boy who grew up watching his father be henpecked by a domineering mother who doted on her favourite son is going to innately understand what it takes to be a father, much less a husband?

I think we have so much more work left to do when it comes to the job of parenting, and I don't think we'll ever get better if we keep under the assumption that we've got it down perfectly already.

[Mark Essel]

Children can only learn so much from their parents. Life outside of home, exploration of the world around them, new experiences and self guided interactions are the most potent teachers.
During the younger years there is a heavy influence of how information is shared and problem solving is handled by parents. Even at 4-6 years our young are experiencing so much outside of their parent's information. There's a hierarchical top down approach to knowledge transfer but I think we can all agree this is an outdated and limited communication structure. The architecture of future education relies on the social mixing of ideas, opening our minds to new possibilities from valuable, genuine outside perspectives. As parents one of the most powerful things you can aid your children with is a powerful sense of curiosity, and self confidence tempered by experience and prediction.

[R J Keefe]

I'm with Junior. Responder's brain has been killed (or at least rendered terminally naive) by the Kool-Aid from "Human Resources."

[Tom]

I have just a couple of comments….

1. All hierarchies are not them same and equating industrial organization to military organization is problematic. Prussian mass education was the first educational system to instill “military” style organization as a way of generating Nationalism. Contrary to the infusion of loyalty, market capitalism focuses on isolated exchanges which discourage loyalty (even though the market itself is a problematic concepts). You cannot equate military and economic forms of organization because they are geared towards disparate ends.
2. Your discussion of authority/subordinate relationships is accurate, but sociologists have not thought this is surmountable. Look at the work of Bourdieu or other who have studied cumulative disadvantage and it is clear that the durability of educational/occupational stratification is not something that sociologists think is easy to overcome
3. Your overall view assumes there are appropriate ways to parent and these are universal. This is false. Societies around the world vary in terms of kinships structures. Not all cultures share our nuclear family structure and non-industrial societies also have nuclear families. Now if we then differentiate by modes of production, while we’ll be tempted to conclude it’s industrial capitalism creating subordinate mentalities – we must recall that: (1) the division of labor has become greatly complicated as the many people occupy both authority/subordinate roles and (2) the rigid authority structures common to industrial modes of production have been exported to semi-periphery and periphery countries and therefor are less prevalent in the U.S.