No. Leadership skills is a looked-for skill by employers.

>i>There is a lot to be said for the meritocracy of the wild pack of kids – physical skill, wit, humor, articulacy are all advantages for making it to the head of the pack.

I went to a primary school from not the best social area. Physical skill meant bullying. Wit, humor, articulacy meant verbal bullying. Meritocracy yes. A lot to be said for it? Well, it does make me appreciate adulthood a lot more.

And ANG kids will somehow be more authors of their lives in a “meta” sense?

I am considering my friends from uni, and some of them have made choices other than ones between law school and med school and the BMW and the Hummer. Eg I have a friend who obtained the engineering degree and now spends her time working on temp admin jobs one after another while saving money for travel. I have another friend who obtained the science degree and now charges around the country on various animal-saving jobs. I have a friend with the B.Com who spent a year living with a tribe in a remote Amazonian area (he wasn’t studying them in any formal sense, just hanging out). I have a friend who quit the corporate accountant job to live in a small town and raise children. I have lost track of a university mate who went to Africa to build appliances suitable for use in deeply rural environments (presumably email wasn’t high on his list of priorities). A schoolmate was off to try and become a ballerina, a cousin quit a $90,000/year job to teach primary school.

As for me – I don’t know what a Hummer is, but I have owned a BMW. It cost a grand total of 440 pounds. :) I decided I prefer Toyotas.

But I do wonder if the supposed virtues of the CC model of parenting aren’t being overstated. How would you empirically verify whether CC partenting results in greater confidence, articulateness, etc. etc. I certainly wouldn’t trust one person’s close observation to validate this hypothesis.

I also wonder whether the distinction between CC and ANG isn’t itself being drawn too sharply. Surely parenting styles fall along a spectrum and there are lots of parents falling in the middle.

From my own observations, there are plenty of children who are allowed to run wild so to speak yet excel at organized sports or other sorts of extracaricular activities. On the other hand, there are plenty of kids who are closely monitored by the parents and yet do not excel at much or even do very much.

In short, the distinction is exaccerated.

Finally, I wonder whether many of you aren’t understated the potential advantages of a ANG parenting style. It certainly seems plausible to me that children raised in this fashion will have advantages in leadership skills, innovation, creativity, etc., while the CC kids made be disadvanted in that respect, since they are basically being raised as followers.

There is a lot to be said for the meritocracy of the wild pack of kids – physical skill, wit, humor, articulacy are all advantages for making it to the head of the pack.

This thread is an argument about what is the good life, and several interlocutors and I think that,m as far as defining the good life goes, we’d rather have the state focus on equality (of outcomes, yes!) in observable goods like income, wealth, and health, rather than trying to come up with some definition of moral, mental, or spiritual excellence (that way lies theocracy!).

And it is a fact that income and wealth give individuals certain very important positive freedoms: at a most basic level, they eliminate the need to steal, cheat, or prostitute oneself (in any number of senses) in order to make a living.

At a higher level, they provide the leisure time needed to pursue things like literature, art, and philosophy (not to mention supporting universities and similar institutions with their voluntary contributions or taces).

…or watch-makers.

Well, it could have a lot of small farmers who owned their land. Plenty of autonomy, some interest, income & status generally low.

(Unintentional humor in following tracy w’s family memory; although, thinking of people I know who quit school for farm or fishery or forest, there are some who don’t regret it. Not a majority, though.)

In what sense? As compared to what?

As compared to kids who are not expected to achieve, where the highest opening in life for a girl is to become a bank teller at a bank, where you might be expected to drop out of school at 14 to work on the family farm? (Drawing examples from my own family’s history). How does the ANG style lead to children who have more of an ability to autonomously choose a conception of the good? This is the first time I think I’ve heard the argument that education (in the form of music lessons, after-school tutoring, etc) and encouraging your kids to have their own opinions reduces a person’s ability to become authors of their own lives.

This chart of the earnings of south korean adoptees versus biological offspring starkly shows the issue. Parents don’t tranfer the ability to make money to adoptees. I don’t think it is because they don’t want to. I think it is because Harris is right.

>A crucial assumption of Harris’s book is that parents are trying to reproduce their own traits in their kids.

Ask Spencer whether parents try to reproduce their own traits in their kids.

Lareau points out in a vivid way things about modern child raising that I haven’t realized before:

Lareau is definitely worth reading, but read Harris first.

Oh I get it. Similarly virtue simpliciter is not a virtue, since if one has no brain, then one is not able to make any moral evaluations. And in general for X simpliciter. So you have managed to provide a context in which what you have said is not patently false – bravo! – but only at the expense of making it so contentless it has no relevance to anything.

Again, the Middle Class is apparently able to impart articulacy to its children. This is a virtue. It helps them later in life and in business, as well it should.

But government policy did not create and has a very limited capacity to change this situation. Keep in mind that ‘The Status Syndrome’ compared the health and longevity of varying grades of British civil servants (all of whom had at least decent wages, high levels of job security, and obviously government-provided health care).

What would a society have to look like where there was no positive correlation between income, status, interesting work, and autonomy (supposedly the critical factor in ‘the status syndrome’)?

But it is also the case that (as both CB and I keep implying) if you measured success in terms of moral character, for example, there’s no reason at all to suppose that the CC parents are preparing their kids for success in that sense, and some reason to suppose they are doing worse.

I’m also skeptical that the ANG pattern of allowing kids long stretches of time hanging around in groups without adult supervision is a spur to moral development. These groups, after all, are not exactly known for being kind, gentle, democratic, and egalitarian.

I’m not sure that you are wrong, but you’re not exactly right. All sorts of goods come packaged together in our society; income, status, interesting jobs, health insurance (in the US), and, if Michael Marmot’s The Status Syndrome is right, longevity and good health. So what the CC parents are doing is preparing their children better for the competition for those goods, which is, within a generation at least, largely positional. But it is also the case that (as both CB and I keep implying) if you measured success in terms of moral character, for example, there’s no reason at all to suppose that the CC parents are preparing their kids for success in that sense, and some reason to suppose they are doing worse.