Freakonomics for Expecting Parents

What you do as a parent may not matter as much as who you already are..
You won't find it in the parenting section, but Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, serves up some fascinating information for moms- and dads-to-be. Though the whole book is riveting, two chapters in particular focus on parenting. Economist Levitt's analysis finds that what parents do-from what they name their children to how they mete out discipline to whether or not they read to them every day-may not matter in the ways we think.
The authors looked for correlations between a variety of parenting factors and test scores in a mountain of data that tracked 20,000 children over five years during the late 1990s as part of the U.S. Deparment of Education's Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. Some of the findings confirmed what you'd expect: test scores show a positive correlation with parents' education levels and socioeconomic status. Likewise, a negative correlation exists between low birth weights and test scores.

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