Posts
- warm/strict (schools and parents)
- authoritative parenting and smoking
- authoritative parenting and constructivism
and, from the first ktm:
- Beyond the Classroom (Steinberg on maximal power of peers, minimal power of parents, & authoritative parenting)
- Laurence Steinberg on the adolescent brain (including graph showing power of peers)
- are homeschooled pre-teens as difficult as pre-teens attending middle school?
- Steinberg on Asian students, IQ, and achievement
6 comments:
It's a myth that parenting style substantially affects the behavior of children when they are away from their parents. "Good" parents are passing on their good genes to their children, which explains most of the differences between kids from good and bad homes.
"The Nurture Assumption" by Judith Rich Harris has the evidence for my assertions.
I still haven't read her book, but there are decades of research re: authoritative parenting. Children of authoritative parents have better grades, take fewer drugs, and on and on.
I learned this weekend, reading Baumeister & Tierney's Willpower, that children from two-parent families have greater willpower, too.
Nevertheless, children **away** from their parents are different. The environment is terrifically powerful for all people, and I assume that's especially true for adolescents, whose frontal lobes are still developing.
That's why the school has to be responsible for what is happening **on site.** Parents can't determine school environment.
The type of people who get married before having children differ the type of people who do not. Actually living with two biological parents does not make the difference. Harris cites studies finding that children raised by widows are much more similar to those raised by married couples than to children raised by unwed mothers. It is PC nowadays to group both widows and unwed mothers today as "single mothers".
Actually living with two biological parents does not make the difference. Harris cites studies finding that children raised by widows are much more similar to those raised by married couples than to children raised by unwed mothers.
I think she's got that research wrong.
The people studying two-parent families are aware that widows are different from divorcees (or never marrieds).
A core issue with one-parent families regardless of how the one-parent family came to be is that there are now just one set of eyes on the kids.
'Watching' is extremely powerful: the feeling of 'eyes on me' is meaningful, period.
I don't know if you were around when I posted that great study about the poster of a set of eyes set up over a coffee table in England ....
I think this was in a faculty lounge. Faculty were supposed to pay for their coffee on the honor system, and very few people were paying.
So some social psychologists ran an experiment.
They put up a poster with a picture of flowers over the coffee table and recorded the number of people who paid for their coffee.
Then they put up a poster of eyes -- a photograph of eyes, that was all -- above the coffee table and recorded how many people paid.
The number was much higher, and I'm pretty sure none of the professors who suddenly started paying for their coffee could have said consciously why they were suddenly paying for their coffee.
A HUGE amount of life operates outside of human consciousness.
Here's a writeup of the study: The Eyes of Honesty by Clive Thompson
WILLPOWER says that people who are religious often feel that God is watching ---- !
Religious people have higher levels of willpower ... and some of it may be due to their feeling that God is watching.
fyi: I have thought for a very long time that we need cameras in group homes & nursing homes, etc.
NOT so that we can 'spy' on employees or play 'gotcha' but because the feeling that others are present and observing your behavior helps you maintain control under stress, tiredness, etc.
Other people are a **help,** and a camera can give you a feeling of 'other people.'
Or maybe we should just put posters of eyes in all these places!
That might help more than a camera. I remember reading once that people forget about the camera after a while, which is what you don't want if your goal is prevention.
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