20 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Professional Parents
If a smaller number of families raise children, however, why do the children have to be their
own? Why not a system under which "professional parents" take on the childrearing function
for others?
Raising children, after all, requires skills that are by no means universal. We don't let
"just anyone" perform brain surgery or, for that matter, sell stocks and bonds. Even the lowest
ranking civil servant is required to pass tests proving competence. Yet we allow virtually
anyone, almost without... 1 
notes
notesThe idea that we should have people who work as parents because they are good at it, like we have with day-cares.
24 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
The Myth of the Educated Parent
Remarkably enough, the most obvious influence over children's language development turned out to be the mere amount of parents' talking; children whose parents addressed or responded to them more in early life had larger, faster-growing vocabularies and scored higher on IQ tests than children whose parents spoke fewer words to them overall. Parents who talk more inevitably expose their children to a greater variety of words and sentences, so a correlation also turned up between the diversity ...
1 Controlling for socioeconomic status does show that children whose parents are higher on the education ladder will have better grammar; however, parenting style is a much better predictor of a child's improvement than income.
