How much do parents really matter?
Clearly, bad parenting matters a great deal, but how much can those eager parents actually accomplish for their children's sake?
Judith Harris argued that parents are wrong to think they contribute so mightily to their child's personality. She thinks that the topdown influence of parents is overwhelmed by the grassroots effect of peer pressure, the blunt force applied each day by friends and schoolmates.
The black-white income gap is largely a product of a black-white education gap that could have been observed many years earlier.
Some black students have tremendous disincentives to invest in particular behaviors (education, ballet, etc) due to the fact that they may be deemed a person who is trying to act like a white person.
What are the factors that do and do not affect a child's performance in school?
Black children who perform poorly in school do so not because they are black but because they tend to come from low-income, low-education households. A typical black child and white child from the same socioeconomic background have the same abilities in maths and reading upon entering kindergarten.But gap appears soon when they grow up.
Why are the black school bad? Because these school offer an environment that is simply not conductive to learning.
What is related to kids' performance in school?
Matters: The child has highly educated parents. The parents have high socioeconomic status. Mother was thirty or older at the tine of her first child's birth. The child had low birthweight will do poorly in school. Adoptive children do poorer in the school.
Not matters: The child's family is intact. The child's parents recently moved into a better neighbourhood.
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