Here you go

Here is that article, I happened to have emailed it to my friends so still have it:)
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*Do parents matter?* It's who you are - rather than what you do -
that makes the biggest difference in the development of children.

By Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D.Levitt

By now, the letters have landed.

The fast-track nursery schools and the "gifted and talented"
public schools and the Ivy League colleges have mailed their
acceptance letters, and parents everywhere are either a)
congratulating themselves for having shepherded their children
into the dream school or b) chiding themselves for having failed.

In the first case, the parents may tell themselves: It was those
Mozart quartets we played in utero that primed her for success.
In the second case, they might say: I knew we shouldn't have
waited so long to get him his first computer. But how much
credit, or blame, should parents really claim for their
children's accomplishments? The answer, it turns out, is a lot -
but not for the reasons that most parents think.

The U.S. Department of Education recently undertook a monumental
project called the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, which
tracks the progress of more than 20,000 American schoolchildren

from kindergarten through the fifth grade. Aside from gathering
each child's test scores and the standard demographic
information, the ECLS also asks the children's parents a wide
range of questions about the 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 technique.

A child with at least 50 kids' books in his home, for instance,
scores roughly 5 percentile points higher than a child with no
books, and a child with 100 books scores another 5 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 little boy named, say, Brandon has a lot of books
in his home; Brandon does beautifully on his reading test; this
must be because Brandon's 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 TV 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 parents speak English in the home.

*Doesn't: The child's parents regularly take him to museums.

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

*Doesn't: The child attended Head Start.

*Matters: The child's parents are involved in the PTA*

*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 TV,
meanwhile, doesn't turn a child's brain into mush after all; nor
does the presence of a home computer turn a child into Einstein.

Now, back to the original riddle: How can it be that a child
with a lot of books in her home does well at school even if she
never reads them? Because parents who buy a lot of children's
books tend to be smart and well-educated to begin with - and they
pass on their smarts and work ethic to their kids. (This theory
is supported by the fact that the number of books in a home is
just as strongly correlated with math scores as reading scores.)
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 an 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.

It is obvious that children of successful, well-educated parents
have a built-in advantage over the children of struggling, poorly
educated parents. Call it a privilege gap. The child of a
young, single mother with limited education and income will
typically test about 25 percentile points lower than the child of
two married, high-earning parents.

So it isn't that parents don't matter. Clearly, they 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 long 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.

The privilege gap is far more real than the fear that haunts so
many modern parents - that their children will fail miserably
without regular helpings of culture cramming and competitive
parenting. So, yes, parents are entitled to congratulate
themselves this month over their children's acceptance letters.
But they should also stop kidding themselves: The Mozart tapes
had nothing to do with it.

Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt are the authors of
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of
Everything.