Advice to little girls

... from Mark Twain. Delightful text, and pictures too.

I especially like the one about humoring one's parents.

Freakonomics radio on parenting

A group of economists, some of whom I know, get together with Dubner to talk about both research on raising children and about their own choices on Freakonomics radio.

The research suggests that parents matter only modestly to educational and earnings outcomes, and that much of the guilt-induced investment of time and money by striving middle and upper-middle class parents is likely a waste unless it also yields a current utility payoff. What, it seems, that parents can do is affect their children's socialization, which is to say, how well they play with others in the broad sense.

At the same time, many of the economists on the show don't follow the research and still over-invest. What can you do?

The transcript is here; I could not find the audio but maybe you can.

Aside: I'm still trying to picture Bruce Sacerdote as a hedge fund manager.

Hat tip: Tanya Byker, parent and economist-in-training

Children's stories

Via those portside.org emails that I continue to receive comes Marian Wright Edelman, boss of the Children's Defense Fund, defending Head Start.

My primary concern today is not whether or not Head Start should be cut, it is with how Edelman makes her argument. In particular, Edelman offers two sorts of evidence. The first consists of a moving anecdote about someone called Angelica Salazar:

The colors were brighter than any she had seen before. Shapes, letters, and lots and lots of colors adorned the walls. Around the room, children worked together building high rises with colored blocks and "reading" colorful picture books.

"I had never seen so much color," Angelica Salazar recalls of her first days as a Head Start preschooler in Duarte, California. She remembers her discovery of library books and spending hours curled up on the reading rug. Head Start provided her first formal English instruction. Her parents, who spoke mostly Spanish, enrolled her in the program knowing that their little girl would need to master English to succeed in school.

Anecdotes play a surprisingly large role in policymaking but they are, of course, entirely irrelevant. Anecdotes typically confuse outcomes (Y1 in the usual notation) with impacts (Y1-Y0, or the difference between the outcome with the program and the outcome without it). Put differently, anecdotes ignore the counterfactual of what would have happened in the world without the program. In the case of Angelica, her parents might have found another program, or maybe she would have done just as well with just K-12 education. The difference between outcomes and impacts is remarkably hard for people to grasp. Even in the face of experimental evidence of ineffectiveness, program operators will often insist that they know a program works because of the outcomes they have observed among participants.

The second sort of evidence offered up by Edelman consists of a brief reference to a completely different program:

Early childhood programs significantly increase a child's chances of avoiding the prison pipeline that Angie now studies as a policy expert, and investments in quality early education can produce a rate of return to society significantly higher than returns on most stock market investments or traditional economic development projects.

Edelman does not say what this program might be, but it is presumably Perry Preschool. Jim Heckman and some of his recent students have thoroughly reanalyzed the Perry data, bringing to the discussion a level of rigor and seriousness unfortunately often missing from the advocacy research of the program's developers. When they are done, Perry does indeed pass cost-benefit tests and have a positive rate of return. But Perry is not Head Start. Perry was much more expensive than Head Start, featured different sorts of instructors, served a different and more disadvantaged (particularly cognitively) population and included interventions with parents. There are also important unanswered questions about the extent to which it could be effectively scaled up. Perry is not irrelevant to Head Start, but Edelman is being dishonest by writing as though they are the same thing while ignoring the evaluation record on Head Start itself. On their own, the Perry findings certainly support expenditures on research; any relevance to Head Start funding is speculative.

On the substantive question, the literature on Head Start is mixed at best. Michael Baker of Toronto gave a very nice talk at the Canadian Economic Association meetings last weekend that reviewed the serious literature on early childhood interventions. If you are willing to wait awhile, the talk will be published in article form in the Canadian Journal of Economics. In the meantime, the experimental evaluation of "early Head Start", helpfully summarized at the Institute of Education Sciences' What Works Clearinghouse is a good place to start.

In sum, Edelman's piece has value mainly as an example of an attempt to distort evidence and mislead readers. Her closing appeal to "values", like appeals to "fairness" in similar contexts, is the last refuge of an evidence-avoiding scoundrel. And what of portside.org? Evidently scientific socialism, as they used to call it, has been tossed overboard for the simpler pleasures of sentimental socialism, in which reason and evidence are replaced by heartwarming bedtime stories. Sigh.

Thoughts on child-rearing

From a store in Palm Springs, where we spent the past few days visiting family and enjoying the warmth.

Uses for small children

One important reason for having a child is that they provide you, as an adult, with cover to do things that you remember fondly from your childhood but could not otherwise do without embarrassment.

Today at lunchtime my wonderful daughter (nearly 3.5 years old) and I took in an hour or so of classic Warner Brothers' cartoons, heavy on the Bugs Bunny, at the Michigan Theater, along with hundreds of other Ann Arbor parents and children.

Great fun was had by all, especially yours truly. But of course the inner social scientist never quite turns off, and I am left afterward thinking about how violent those old cartoons are, how politically incorrect (even cigarettes!) and about my own reaction to same. It was also interesting to see which cultural references were still current - Jack in the Beanstalk, yes, Dick Tracy and Errol Flynn, not so much.

Adventures in marketing to children

The perilous, plastic plague that is SillyBandz has come to the ECONJEFF household.

Oh dear.

On poop

My daughter is presently in the midst of the "poop" phase of linguistic development. It turns out that this phase does not entirely disappear as people get older, as evidenced by this long list of domain names continaing the word "poop".

Hat tip: Charlie Brown (who heard me describe the "poop" phase over lunch last week)

Children at risk?

Here is a nice piece on parental timidity by someone who has borne the full brunt of its pop cultural popularity.

A teaser:

What has changed in the English-speaking world that has made childhood independence taboo? The ground has not gradually gotten harder under the jungle gym. The bus stops have not crept farther from home. Crime is actually lower than it was when most of us were growing up. So there is no reality-based reason that children today should be treated as more helpless and vulnerable than we were when we were young.

The author blames the long-term trend towards parental timidity on popular culture, which I think falls flat as an explanation. While the relative importance of different media has changed, the news has always focused on the far tail of events related to children: bizarre kidnappings, satanic rituals and all the rest. Without a change in the claimed forcing variable, whence comes a change in the outcome.

Let me offer a couple of other possible explanations, neither of which I am particularly happy with but both of which at least do not fail at the level of face validity, as the popular culture explanation does:

1) The quality-quantity trade-off is one possible story. People have fewer children now and so they invest more in the ones they do have. They may also be more risk averse when they lack the diversification of risk that multiple children provide.

2) Risk of legal liability. Governments are much more likely to go after parents now than they used to be, at least that is my impression. No one wants to compound some bad event happening to their child with criminal prosecution and the media circus that goes with it.

But somehow neither of these seem like quite enough to explain the magnitude of the cultural change that has taken place between when I was growing up, and spent most afternoons wandering about the neighborhood relatively unsupervised for hours on end, and now, when the vast majority of parents would shudder in horror at the very thought of such behavior.

And good for "America's worst mom" for not caving.

Via the Agitator

Evolution of childhood

An interesting piece at the Chronicle of Higher Education based on a new book.

Hat tip: MR

Experimental evaluation of Head Start

The official reports from a random assignment evaluation of Head Start were released in January; go here for the Executive Summary. Head Start is the federal pre-kindergarten program for disadvantaged children in the US. It dates back to the War on Poverty of the 1960s. It is one version of what you get when you try and scale up, but not spend too much money on, high intensity interventions like the famous Perry Preschool project in Ypsilanti that receives so much attention in the literature and whose long term experimental impact estimates are often held up as justification for expansion of programs such as Head Start.

I have not had a chance to read over this carefully but the results are pretty important. The study has three key design elements: (1) random assignment of access to Head Start; (2) the study sites are a random sample of Head Start sites around the country, which suggests strong external validity; and (3) a large amount of substitution into other types of center-based childcare and also a surprisingly large amount of control group cross-over into Head Start. There is also a non-trivial amount of treatment group dropout.

Factor (3) is important in interpreting the rather lackluster findings. The study is comparing the offer of Head Start access to the best alternative (which in some cases turns out to be a different Head Start center not in the experiment). The study is consistent with Head Start having a positive effect relative to the child staying home with the parents, but not much in the way of effects relative to the alternatives chosen by the parents in the absence of access to Head Start.

This study should slow the rush to spend large sums on these programs and hopefully will encourage a systematic program of research aimed at learning what types of early education programs have persistent impacts that cover their costs for this age group.

The NFL at 2

I keep the kid stuff to a minimum on here as that is not the main point of the blog but I did like this exchange today with my two-year-old daughter:

ECONDAUGHTER (spotting NFL on the computer screen via the Slingbox): Football daddy!

ECONJEFF: Yes, football.

ECONDAUGHTER: Where are the dancing ladies?

There is something to the idea that kids help one see the world through fresh eyes.

Subsidizing selected consumer durables

The House has voted in favor of a bill to provide federal employees with four weeks of paid leave if they home produce or adopt a child.

Now, of course, it is for the children, so we really should not be even doing any THINKING around this because, you know, children are cute and they are the future. But, economists get paid to think when others cannot be bothered so let us do think a bit about this policy and the related article linked to above.

In terms of the article, the bit about only four countries not having paid parental leave is so ridiculous as to nearly defy description. The article dutifully links to a wikipedia page which informs us of such facts as that women in Ethiopia get 90 days of paid leave at 100 percent salary. Left out: this presumably applies only to women who work in the formal sector and is probably not enforced even there except for women working for multi-nationals and for the central government. A similar point applies to essentially every other country on the list, though perhaps less strongly, other than Japan, the US, Canada and most of Europe.

More broadly, think about the economics and the ethics. Children are a durable consumption good. Parents control (or should control) the timing and number of children they obtain. Boats are durable consumption goods. Parents control the timing and number of boats they obtain. Why should boats and children be treated differently? Why should owners of children receive a subsidy from owners of boats but not the reverse? This is clearly distortionary - welfare triangles are being tossed out.

Children are, of course, future adults, and the state bears some responsibility for them even in a liberal society. We would all, almost certainly, agree to such behind a veil of ignorance before we know our parents, as some government monitoring of parental behavior helps to solve the principal agent problem between the child and his or her parents.

I think one can make an argument for mandatory unpaid parental leave on this basis, perhaps with an exception for parents able to provide care from other family members or high quality paid care during this time. That is, I can see a case to be made for the government to forbid parents to sign contracts under which they would work immediately after obtaining a child while leaving the child without good care. The state, in this case, is limiting parental behavior that might be detrimental to the child.

On the other hand, I do not see how one can get to paid parental leave. There is a bank on every corner. All of them offer savings accounts. Even if parents fail to plan for conception, they still have nine months to save up until the birth. If they cannot manage to do this, are they really the sort of people who should be encouraged to have children? So, contra the Salon blogger, newborns should perhaps not rejoice about this legislative development, at least not the ones at the margin.

I am also uncomfortable with the implied transfer from non-parents to parents. Children are not a public good. In many contexts, like on an airplane, they are more often public bads. Moreover, there is no shortage of willing adults who would like to migrate to the US, and whose education has helpfully been paid for by others, so one cannot make an argument that we need to subsidize the production of children to pay for our badly designed (thank you FDR) pay-as-you-go pension scheme. Thus, if we decide we must have paid parental leave for federal employees (already well known in the literature to be over-compensated relative to similar workers in the private sector) I would make it into a forced savings scheme. Once a worker is aware that a child is coming, they should be able to obtain paid parental leave, with the pay they receive during the leave deducted in fixed amounts over some longish time period from their paychecks before and after the leave. If they leave the employ of the federal government before they have finished the payments, the remainder becomes due as a lump sum.

Note that my scheme has the advantage of being budget neutral, other than the additional administrative costs associated with the payment scheme (which really ought also to be charged to those who use it). It also eliminates the unfair cross-subsidy from childless couples and removes the subsidy to fertility.

Parenting advice

The piece is called "How to Be a Happier Mom" but there is plenty here for fathers as well.

It seems like everyone I know is busy creating or obtaining new units of embodied human capital. My impression from a year of parenting is that it is very easy to get caught up in crazy notions regarding social norms around parenting. There is a sort of an upper middle class cult of the child that demands complete and utter submission of your life to the child's. Actually trying to do this leads, not at all surprisingly, only to misery.

Thus, this article's seemingly trivial advice: recognize and accept that sometimes kids are a pain in the behind, get enough sleep, do things for yourself, and so on, seems obvious but in fact given the dead weight of social norms, these things can be remarkably hard to do at all, let alone to do without constant guilt and worry. I think, though, that they are very much worth doing. In my view, a happy parent is the best parent, and happy parents are parents that still have lives separate from their children - not just work lives but lives with room for friends and movies and plays (and fooling around) as well.

Children and boredom

This rant is a bit over the top but it also makes, implicitly, a couple of good points.

First, our culture makes it very difficult to be honest about children. Sometimes they are boring and sometimes they are a pain in the behind. As Penelope says, "even cute gets boring". That does not mean that they are not loved or well cared for. It is just a fact without any normative content.

Second, as much as it is fun to color again for the first time in over three decades or to play with Lincoln logs or legos, these activities are just not as interesting in your 30s and 40s as they were in your youth.

Third, it is good to be nice on-line, so that people like Penelope don't call you at work.

Book: How Babies Think

This book lays out, for the intelligent non-specialist, the recent literature on child development that adopts a cognitive focus, which is to say that it thinks about babies as little scientists, trying to sort out how the world works. Indeed, when the book was first published it bore the alternative title "The Scientist in the Crib". I suspect the current title resulted in more sales, but the earlier title gives a more direct sense of what the authors, all scientists, are up to.

I found much of the book new and quite fascinating. I had never really thought about some of the problems they discuss, such as how do you sort out objects from raw visual stimulation? How do you sort out words from a morass of sound? Babies face both problems, and do so with a mix of apparently hard-wired technology and learning. These problems are quite similar, by the way, to the problems faced by artificial intelligence researchers.

My main wish is that the book had been dumbed down a bit less than it was for a popular audience. It is not so trivial that I could not read it with pleasure, but there is more fluff around the substance than I prefer in this sort of book. Nonetheless, it is well worth the time, especially if you have or are about to have a little one around.

Recommended.

What about left-handed children from multiple births?

Look mom, I found a new instrument!

No mention of heterogeneous treatment effects, which would aid in the interpretation of the differences between the probit and IV estimates.

I am also not convinced that handedness is exogenous. My parents always claimed that I was leaning towards being left-handed but that they constrained me to be right-handed. My mother was left-handed and didn't care for the minor hassles it entailed. According to footnote 4 I suffered from "cultural censorship of left-handedness".