Great Performance !

Or will they? Parents must matter, you tell yourself. Besides, even if peers exert so much influence on a child, isn’t it the parents who essentially choose a child’s peers? Isn’t that why parents agonize over the right neighborhood, the right school, the right circle of friends?

Still, the question of how much parents matter is a good one. It is also terribly complicated. In determining a parent’s influence, which dimension of the child are we measuring: his personality? his school grades? his moral behavior? his creative abilities? his salary as an adult? And what weight should we assign each of the many inputs that affect a child’s outcome: genes, family environment, socioeconomic level, schooling, discrimination, luck, illness, and so on?

For the sake of argument, let’s consider the story of two boys, one white and one black.

The white boy is raised in a Chicago suburb by parents who read widely and involve themselves in school reform. His father, who has a decent manufacturing job, often takes the boy on nature hikes. His mother is a housewife who will eventually go back to college and earn a bachelor’s degree in education. The boy is happy and performs very well in school. His teachers think he may be a bona fide math genius. His parents encourage him and are terribly proud when he skips a grade. He has an adoring younger brother who is also very bright. The family even holds literary salons in their home.

The black boy is born in Daytona Beach, Florida, and his mother abandons him at the age of two. His father has a good job in sales but is a heavy drinker. He often beats the little boy with the metal end of a garden hose. One night when the boy is eleven, he is decorating a tabletop Christmas tree—the first one he has ever had—when his father starts beating up a lady friend in the kitchen. He hits her so hard that some teeth fly out of her mouth and land at the base of the boy’s Christmas tree, but the boy knows better than to speak up. At school he makes no effort whatsoever. Before long he is selling drugs, mugging suburbanites, carrying a gun. He makes sure to be asleep by the time his father come home from drinking, and to be out of the house before his father awakes. The father eventually goes to jail for sexual assault. By the age of twelve, the boy is essentially fending for himself.

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Taken From : FREAKONOMICS - A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything