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Parentonomics: An Economist Dad Looks At Parenting (2009)

by Joshua Gans(Favorite Author)

3.14 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0262012782 (ISBN13: 9780262012782)

languge

English

genre

Middle Grade & Children's

publisher

MIT Press (MA)

review 1: When my mom saw I was reading this, she thought I was pregnant. It was really hard to convince her that I was ONLY reading it because it sounded interesting on NPR and I like applied economics. I was expecting Freakonomics with baby anecdotes, and it didn't especially deliver on that front. There were some pretty hilarious child stories, such as how Child No. 1 won't start eating her dessert until everybody else is finished so that there will never be a time when somebody else has more dessert than she does. One valuable economic child-training tip was to make sweets and TV something desirable. The more your children want them, the more concessions you'll be able to drag out of them in exchange for 30 minutes of TV or a fun-sized snickers bar.
review 2: I was s... moreo looking forward to reading this book, so maybe I damned it with too high expectations. While I appreciate the economic viewpoint of parenting, I disagreed with many of his interpretations/conclusions. The thing about econ is that you have to start with base assumptions about people, and I found some of his disturbing. There are many things that are fine to discuss in aggregate, but parenting specific, individual children based on generalizations is not one of them. I have done graduate work in econ as well as worked with children and their families, and while the concept of this book was cute I would not recommend it to anyone that I thought would take it too seriously. less

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