TOW #16

I really enjoyed reading Freakonomics. It caused me to develop a new perspective on everything, especially on the way things are connected. The book explains seemingly crazy reasoning behind the correlation of events, or why something occurs, which is all very interesting. One of the chapters I found really interesting was on "What Makes a Perfect Parent." Upon first reading the title, I almost laughed because, I doubt it is possible to have a PERFECT parent, more or less have a scientific formula for what makes one. However after reading through the chapter I realized a lot more plays into parenting than I originally thought. Levitt and Dubner include theoretical anecdotes and lists in order to show how certain factors contribute to the parenting of a child. In the beginning of this chapter, the idea of how people make decisions out of fear rather than shock is introduced. These sort of decisions can negatively effect a child. The authors express this through a theoretical anecdote. The anecdote explains a story where the parents of a child ban their child from going to friend A's house because friend A's parents have a gun. However they allow their child to go to friend B's house, even though friend B has a pool. Through statistics, Levitt and Dubner explain that the chances of their child dying from a gun is far less likely than dying from drowning in a swimming pool. In fact, the chances of dying from drowning are significantly higher than the chances of a gun accident. This anecdote is an example of how a decision made based on fear could negatively effect a child. The anecdote shows the extreme way children can be impacted from a simple decision by their parents. The child's chances of dying actually increased based on the parents decision, because their child would be spending more time at the pool. Through the use of this theoretical anecdote, the authors are able to exemplify that even simple decisions contribute to the effectiveness of a parent. Dubner and Levitt also included a series of lists to help explain the factors. They start off with explaining how some factors contribute to the way a child performs on a test. They began with one list of all the possible factors in the life of a good test taker. The list was shortly followed by a second list that showed only the factors that actually contributed to the child's success. Next, the authors made up short lists directly comparing one factor that contributes and one factor that doesn't. For example, "Matters: The child has highly educated parents. Doesn't: The child's family is intact" (page 170). By including these lists, the authors are able to compare different life factors in order to show what really matters in parenting. It was very interesting to see that having educated parents can alter the performance of a child, but the family being intact, which seems more important, does not. Through the lists, Dubner and Levitt expressed the number of factors that contribute to a child's life. Along with this, it showed how many factors are not even choices made by the parent. Yet, something out of their control could make someone a good or bad parent. This chapter was extremely interesting to me, because I never realized how many factors there are in parenting, or how they can effect a child. Now looking at my own life it is interesting to see if any of these factors are apparent. Next time I fail a test, maybe I can blame the factors of my parenting!