Parenting In Levitt's Freakonomics

The theme of chapter five of Freakonomics is involving parenting and whether parents really do affect their children as much as it is believed; whether the parents really matter. Levitt and Dubner discuss the roles of parents in the lives of their children, including the choices they make to protect them. They provide situations to show how the conventional wisdom of parenting is constantly changing, certain beliefs going in and out of style and ideas contradicting one another arising. Parents do their best to raise their children the way the mass public believes they should be, but there is the issue of whether they truly have such a great impact on their children as is believed. Surprisingly enough, the motivating factor behind parent
This was shown with the links between abortion and crime rates. Unwanted children have worse outcomes than children who were welcomed by their parents. However, there is still the question of how much these eager parents are affecting their children. “A long line of studies, including research into twins who were separated at birth, had already concluded that genes alone are responsible for perhaps 50 percent of a child’s personality and abilities”(154). But for the other half, which is believed to be the nurturing, has been buffed by the Colorado Adoption Project. This study followed the lives of 245 babies that were put up for adoption and virtually no correlation was found “between the child’s personality traits and those of his adopted parents”(155). Other studies showed a child’s character wasn’t much affected “whether or not he was sent to day care, whether he had one parent or two, whether his mother worked or didn’t, whether he had two mommies or two daddies or one of each”(155). In Judith Rich Harris’s book, The Nurture Assumption, she argued that:
Parents are wrong to think they contribute so mightily to their child’s personality. This belief, she wrote, was a ‘cultural myth.’ Harris argued that the top-down influence of parents is overwhelmed by the grassroots effect of peer pressure, the blunt force applied each day by friends and schoolmates.(155)
“Certain facets of a child’s outcome-- personality, for instance, or creativity-- are not easily measured by data. But school performance is”(158). The provided data in the chapter concern school choice, an issue that many people feel strongly about. Almost every parent believes that their children, if attending the right school, will thrive. With the Chicago Public School system, CPS for short, school choice came early. This is because it had a disproportionate number of minority students, like most urban school districts. Despite the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, “many black CPS students continued to attend schools that were nearly all-black”(158). In 1980, the Chicago Board of Education teamed up with the U.S Department of Justice to try to better integrate the schools in the city. “It was decreed that incoming freshmen could apply to virtually any high school in the district”(158). This act threatened to create bedlam. “The schools with good test scores and high graduation rates would be rapidly oversubscribed, making it impossible to satisfy every student’s request”(159). The CPS resorted to a lottery for fairness. It was a natural experiment on a grand scale. The data showed that school choice barely mattered at all. “It is true that the Chicago students who entered the school-choice lottery were more likely to graduate than the students who didn’t-- which seems to suggest that school choice