Example and expectation are critical

Category: Coaching Notes

The United States Department of Education recently undertook a project called the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, which tracks the progress of more than 2,000 American schoolchildren from kindergarten through the fifth grade. The researchers asked the parents a wide range of questions about their families' habits and activities. The result is an extraordinarily rich set of data that, when given a rigorous economic analysis, tells some compelling stories about parenting techniques.

A child with at least 50 kids' books in his home, for instance, scores roughly five percentile points higher than a child with no books, and a child with 100 books scores another five percentile points higher than a child with 50 books. Most people would look at this correlation and draw the obvious cause-and-effect conclusion: a child that has lots of books does well in reading tests; this must be because his parents read to him regularly.

But the ECLS data show no correlation between a child's test scores and how often his parents read to him. How can this be? Here is a sampling of other parental factors that matter and don't:

Matters: the child has highly educated parents.

Doesn't: the child regularly watches television at home.

Matters: the child's parents have high income.

Doesn't: the child's mother didn't work between birth and kindergarten.

Matters: the child's mother was 30 or older at the time of the child's birth.

Doesn't: The child attended Head Start (for pre-school children).

Matters: the child's parents are involved in the PTS.

Doesn't: the child is regularly spanked at home.

Culture cramming may be a foundational belief of modern parenting but, according to the data, it doesn't improve early childhood test scores. Frequent museum visits would seem to be no more productive than trips to the grocery store. Watching television, meanwhile, doesn't turn a child's brain into mush after all; nor does the presence of a home computer turn a child into an Einstein.

So, how can it be that a child with a lot of books in his home does well at school even if he never reads them? Because parents who buy a lot of books tend to be smart and well-educated to begin with - and they pass on their smarts and work ethic to their kids. Or the books may suggest that these are parents who care a great deal about education and about their children in general, which results in a rich environment that rewards learning. Such parents may believe that a book is a talisman that leads to unfettered intelligence. But they are probably wrong. A book is, in fact, less a cause of intelligence than an indicator.

The most interesting conclusion here is one that many modern parents may find disturbing: parenting technique is highly overrated. When it comes to early test scores, it's not so much what you do as a parent, it's who you are. So, it isn't that parents don't matter an awful lot. It's just that by the time most parents pick up a book on parenting technique, it's too late. Many of the things that matter most were decided a long time ago - what kind of education a parent got, how hard he worked to build a career, what kind of spouse he wound up with and how long they waited to have children.

What has this to do with corporate development? My take is that environment and culture are key. People respond to the aspirations, expectations and behaviour of those around them. So, how you behave as a manager and the example of personal and professional development can be more important than any training actually delivered.

The article above is based on one by Stephen J Dubner and Steven D Levit, who are authors of Freakanomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, published in USA Today.

On my journey home from CoachVille I am reading Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell. There is more content here about how we can influence behaviour by our treatment and expectations of others.

Gladwell quotes two Dutch professors who did a study in which they had groups of students answer forty-two fairly demanding questions from the board game Trivial Pursuit. Half were asked to take five minutes beforehand to think about what it would mean to be a professor and write down everything that came to mind. Those students got 55.6 percent of the questions right. The other half of the students were asked to first sit and think about soccer hooligans. They ended up getting 42.6 percent in the Trivial Pursuit questions right. The 'professor' group did not know more than the 'soccer hooligan' group. They were simply in a 'smart' frame of mind, and, clearly, associating themselves with the idea of something smart, like a professor, made it a lot easier - in that stressful instant after a trivia question was asked - to blurt out the right answer.

The difference between 55.6 and 42.6 percent, it should be pointed out, is enormous. That can be the difference between passing and failing.

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