The Family Firm summary

What difference will it make to your children’s lives if you work full-time? Many parents – and sadly, still women most of all – grapple with this question a lot. But what does the data say? What’s really best for your kids and for you?

Of course, the data can’t tell us everything. It can’t say much about whether working or staying at home will make your child happier or improve your relationship with them. These things are just too difficult to measure. But the data can tell us about the effects of parental work on two child outcomes: academic performance and obesity.

Ever find yourself pleading with your child to eat their vegetables, or wrestling candy bars away from them? Feeding children can be a source of worry and frustration for most parents. But what does the data say about kids’ diets?

For better or for worse, the food children eat matters – even more than you probably think. Why? Because childhood diet has a huge impact on what people eat later in life. Incredibly, tastes for certain foods can even develop in the womb. One study found that children whose mothers ate a lot of carrots while pregnant later reported liking carrots much more than other children.

What kind of parent do you want to be? Are you a tiger mom, ferociously pushing your kids to achieve? Or a free-range chicken parent, taking a hands-off approach and letting your child roam free? In this blink we’ll be focusing on the helicopter parent: the type of mom or dad who constantly hovers around their kids, doing everything for them.

What does helicopter parenting look like? For starters, a parent who acts as their child’s alarm clock, making sure she gets out of bed on time. By then, the helicopter has already laid out their child’s school clothes and moved on to preparing her breakfast. Then they’ll check that her backpack is packed and walk her to school.

How much time will your child spend at school? Well, if the typical school day lasts eight hours and he attends for thirteen years, not counting holidays, then he’ll wind up spending close to 19,000 hours there! So it’s bound to be worth choosing the school that gives him the best chance of success.

But how can you identify a great school? You guessed it: let’s look at the evidence.

Dance class, soccer practice, tennis lessons: the dizzying array of athletic activities available to the 21st-century child can seem overwhelming. You could easily feel like you spend half your life dragging your kid from one sports club to the next. But what does the scientific literature say about the benefits and pitfalls of children’s love of sports?

Many parents report sending their child to after-school sports clubs for the sake of their health and fitness. But just how much do sports benefit children’s health? Maybe not as much as you think.

Are you concerned about your child’s screen time? Most modern parents worry that their kids spend too much time staring at either the television or another type of digital screen, whether it’s video games, social media, or Netflix. But how anxious should you really be about this?

Undoubtedly, some of the fear surrounding screen time is simply because screens are new. Although it’s hard to believe now, when novels became popular in the 17th and 18th centuries, people worried that they might have a bad influence, too.