You should enroll your kids in stuff for its own sake, to give them pleasure, not because you think their IQ will permanently increase a few points in a way that will give them an edge over other kids (a gross way to approach society, or to view children who are not yours: as competitors to be sped by on the road of life)
Hi Kathleen! Thanks for reading the piece and sharing your reactions! A lot of great evaluations of child development interventions now have indeed followed kids into adulthood and found big impacts -- often far bigger than you might have guessed from the short-term impacts on things like test scores. I think Greg Clark's work is interesting but misleading. You should check out my book The Parent Trap if you're interested in learning more about this perspective.
I don't argue for the "gross way" to approach society you describe here. I try to make clear in the piece that these ancillary impacts on cognitive and social skills can be construed as a kind of bonus over the direct enjoy-your-life benefits of doing fun stuff with good teachers and peers. In my book I describe the concern you're raising as a "myth of zero-sum parenting" and I try to convince people it's false based on evidence that helping other people's kids will primarily help your own kids because we all live in a shared society with a shared tax base and shared capacity for innovation and military security whether we like it or not.
And more directly yes, the piece I cite here at greatest length -- a study evaluating an intervention in Montreal -- does follow kids into adulthood to measure impacts on their adult income. I chose to highlight that study because it is a randomized controlled trial AND it follows kids into adulthood.
Did any of these studies follow these impacts into adulthood?
Because Gregory Clark's work suggests that no, it probably doesn't matter all that much.
https://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/
You should enroll your kids in stuff for its own sake, to give them pleasure, not because you think their IQ will permanently increase a few points in a way that will give them an edge over other kids (a gross way to approach society, or to view children who are not yours: as competitors to be sped by on the road of life)
Hi Kathleen! Thanks for reading the piece and sharing your reactions! A lot of great evaluations of child development interventions now have indeed followed kids into adulthood and found big impacts -- often far bigger than you might have guessed from the short-term impacts on things like test scores. I think Greg Clark's work is interesting but misleading. You should check out my book The Parent Trap if you're interested in learning more about this perspective.
I don't argue for the "gross way" to approach society you describe here. I try to make clear in the piece that these ancillary impacts on cognitive and social skills can be construed as a kind of bonus over the direct enjoy-your-life benefits of doing fun stuff with good teachers and peers. In my book I describe the concern you're raising as a "myth of zero-sum parenting" and I try to convince people it's false based on evidence that helping other people's kids will primarily help your own kids because we all live in a shared society with a shared tax base and shared capacity for innovation and military security whether we like it or not.
And more directly yes, the piece I cite here at greatest length -- a study evaluating an intervention in Montreal -- does follow kids into adulthood to measure impacts on their adult income. I chose to highlight that study because it is a randomized controlled trial AND it follows kids into adulthood.