The handful of Indian families I’ve known put great stress on family conversations involving even the smallest kids.

Additionally, in today’s world, at least in New York, most nursemaids are immigrants, many of whom value education (for both their charges and their own children) at least as much as their employers do. I have never encountered a nursemaid who was from an American working class background.

In the aggregate, inherited inter-racial differences in g are inescapable, and inform the K end of the r-K spectrum, too. Environmental differences are not merely accidents of birth or class, but are themselves in some part rendered by
genes.

To get at the degree to which high childcare strategies effect outcomes races should be separately studied, and the resultant categories controlled for g as well as class.

This would provide a window on the linkage of IQ and r/K, and on both to to wealth, and to cross-racial similarities as well as differences.

But do they? I realise upper class/middle class means different things in Norway, but of those who are much wealthier than me, it seems to me that they generally spend very little time with their children, because they are so busy with their careers. People who are otherwise educated, wealthy and happy, and who buy a PlayStation for their kids before they are five.

By “stupid,” logicguru, I assume you mean, “unlikely to produce those results usually rewarded by the meritocracy.” According to that definition, I agree with you. But if by “stupid” you actually mean “warrantless, ignorant, without reason, irresponsible,” etc., well, I’ll have to disagree with you. I’ve no doubt at lot of people likely consider the meritocratically counterproductive emphasis on the “virtues of work” to be a bizarre and sour-grapes morality in 21st-century America, but from what I’ve observed, it is still faithfully adhered to by more than a few, and a lot of them appear to continue to find it a decent rule to live by. Normativity is not yet, I think, entirely reducible to credentialism.

Now they’re applying for college, going to college or in grad school heading for upper middle class lives. The kids they played with are in the military, in jail or working fast food and going nowhere.

I don’t think it’s parenting, or “quality time” or anything parents do in the early years so much as more amorphous things like dinner table conversation, books in the house, piano lessons, TV programs and, broadly speaking, “culture.” And beyond this, commitment to making kids get their credentials at all costs. Our rule on this is: in high school your whole job is pumping GPA—we don’t care what else you do. You have to get into the most prestigious possible college and we don’t care how much time it takes for you to get through: you have got to get at least a BS or BA in a math-heavy discipline. Math, hard sciences, Computer Science, Engineering, Economics—that’s it. We will finance you completely, we forbid you to work while you go to school—you get that piece of paper and then you can do whatever you want.

Working class parents I think aren’t focused on that goal, don’t realize the importance of such credentials, have stupid ideas about the virtues of work, and aren’t willing to push kids or finance them to get those credential at all costs.

Both styles actually emphasize the freedom and autonomy of the child in different ways. This might be characteristically American. Neither is the authoritarian style where the father’s word is law (a style which does, however, survive within the US, and should have been considered).

According to this hypothesis, one of the advantages of a middle-class education is thus that it teaches children that it is a valuable thing to enter in relation with adults about certain subjects (i.e academic ones), that these subjects are “serious” and “well-worth pursuing”.

It is of course scientifically interesting to ask the question of cause and consequence. To put it bluntly do middle-class parents (probably rather upper middle-class, actually probably a more refined subgroup) adapt their parenting style to ensure that their children will be well-suited to the changes of society or do they adapt society to ensure that it will be well-suited to the changes of their parenting style? I believe this is an important sociological problem as it connects very intimate questions to very broad ones (for the record, I am a staunch defender of the second proposition).

If anyone wants to hear Lareau and other sociologists discuss class effects, she (along with Dalton Conley and David Grusky) is putting together a conference, “Social Class: How Does it Work” in NYC on April 21 and 22. The conference, which is free and open to the public, will begin at 8:30 am (8:00 continental breakfast) at 19th West 4th Street. It ends around 1 on Saturday; presumably complete schedules will be available on site.

>The word “successful” in this sentence appears to either be completely superfluous (because synonymous with “happy”) or actively counterproductive ([...]would make a parenting style really good even if the kid grew up miserable).

Try reading “successful” to mean “promoting the happiness of the community as a whole” and see if it makes more sense then. What good is a parenting style that raises a kid to be a very happy serial killer?