The Economists Guide to Parenting

Are you overthinking parenting? An economist explains why this might be a waste of time.

As you may have noticed, I’ve cut down on my posts to roughly two a week. I was contemplating just doing away with the Newsroom category altogether, but then I remembered that while my production has decreased my internet consumption has not. I’m crediting my insatiable appetite for knowledge and not my poor parenting skills for this constancy (but to be fair, I am at my parents’ house and have someone else to amuse Amelia, so it’s not like I’m neglecting her. Do you hear that Dad? I’m not neglecting her. This is my vacation). Anyway, enough inappropriate insights into my family dynamics and on to the cool stuff I’ve found online.

I have an undergraduate degree in English and History and a graduate degree in English, oh so helpful degrees for my current line of work as a stay at home mom, so of course I’m now wishing I had become a behavioral economist (or a biomechanist, but I’ll save that for another post). I can’t redo my entire education, but I can listen to the Freakonomics podcasts. I never read the book and only accidentally stumbled across the podcasts when doing an iTunes search in preparation for the long drive up to Sacramento. Now I listen to the Stephens every day as I go for a walk.

I cringed when I saw a title of an episode called “The Economists Guide to Parenting.”  I’m so sick of someone telling me how to parent, but the episode was actually pretty awesome. That’s the nice thing about economists. They crunch the numbers and leave the moralizing to a minimum. They also prove numbers are only part of the parenting equation. Even economists can’t help but do things they know have no quantifiable parenting effect (proving that not everything needs to be quantifiable to be important). Some of the more interesting tidbits include the following:

That baby sign language you are teaching little Johnnie won’t make him any smarter, but the fact that you are the type of person that would even bother with baby sign language will help him in life.

If you smoke and drink to excess, count on kids who do the same. Kicking bad habits is way more important than trying to make your kids smarter.

Be kind. Kids remember that kind of thing.

They talk about a lot more, which is why you should listen to the podcast and then subscribe to it so that I’m not the only annoying person constantly saying “I heard on the Freakonomics podcast…”