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Jewish World Review May 13, 2005 / 4 Iyar , 5765 This time, parents deserve the blame By Ruben Navarrette Jr.
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
My daughter is still an infant, but when the time comes, I think I'll be strong enough to set the rules. What worries me is whether I'll be willing to set the example.
That's the key, according to Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Co- authors of "Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything," (Click HERE to purchase. Sales help fund JWR.) Levitt and Dubner are interested in, well, everything. That includes the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, in which the U.S. Department of Education surveyed parents about family activities and tracked the progress of more than 20,000 schoolchildren from kindergarten through fifth grade.
Levitt and Dubner concluded that some things matter when raising children — and others don't. They are not fond of "culture cramming," the tendency of some parents to schedule trips to the museum or stock up on educational tapes or limit the watching of television. They insist that those things don't always make a difference.
What does make a difference is whether those parents are well educated, attend PTA meetings, and have a good income. In the case of foreigners, it also makes a difference if they speak English in the home.
As Levitt and Dubner wrote in a recent op-ed piece article for USA Today, "Parenting technique is highly overrated. ... It's not so much what you do as a parent, it's who you are."
And a big part of who you are is your own life experience and the example you set for your children.
Baby Boomers came of age during the 1960s in a culture that glamorized sex and drugs. And yet, according to a New York Times article a few years ago, when Boomers had children of their own, many tried to raise them to do as they said and not as they did. The result: Kids are having sex in junior high school and anti-drug organizations insist that drug use among adolescents is on the rise.
What the Boomers didn't understand is that you can nag until you're blue in the face but nothing carries as much weight as setting the right example. So much of what children do — good and bad — they learn from their parents. And to have any sort of moral authority, those parents have to practice what they preach.
I'll have to remember that. I don't want my daughter to grow up to be materialistic, but does that really mean that I have to curtail my own spending habits? It wouldn't hurt.
Hopefully, my wife and I will have an easier time teaching our child the value of education. We take the concept seriously and that's why we tried to get all the schooling we could.
I wish I could say the same for the bulk of the Latino community in the United States. Under the Levitt/Dubner model — where the lives that parents have help shape the lives their children will have — Latinos start out at an immediate disadvantage. The authors call it a "privilege gap."
"It is obvious that children of successful, well-educated parents have a built-in advantage over the children of struggling, poorly educated parents," they wrote.
According to Catholic Charities, Latinos are three times more likely than whites to live in poverty. More than a third of Latino children grow up below the poverty line. And only about 10 percent of Latinos are college-educated, according to educational research. The percentages of college-educated Anglos, Asians and African Americans are higher.
On top of all that, Latino parents often don't do a good enough job of stressing the importance of education to their children in a convincing and meaningful way. This isn't to say that I buy into the argument constantly being advanced by public school teachers and administrators, who insist that Latino parents don't value education.
That's a lie. Latino parents put enormous value in the power of education — for their children.
Most just tend not to value it for themselves. If they did, they'd make more of an effort to learn English. They'd sign up for citizenship classes in greater numbers. And they'd enroll in community college courses that are often so affordable that just about anyone could take them.
They don't do enough of any of this. Sometimes it seems that all they do is work, work, work — and that's especially true for immigrants from Mexico and Latin America.
Don't get me wrong. It's great that Latinos take seriously the job of providing for their families. But that's no excuse for failing to educate themselves, thus setting a poor example for their children.
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Mitch Albom | |||||||||||
