Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner.

This week we are revisiting one of our favorite and most popular episodes from last year.

It's called The Economists Guide to Parenting 10 Years Later.

Hope you enjoy.

In the first Frekenomics book that Steve Levit and I wrote, there was one chapter called

What Makes A Perfect Parent.

We put forward a collage of data suggesting that much of what modern parents do or are

encouraged to do probably doesn't matter all that much.

Especially when it comes to what you might call obsessive parenting, trying to maximize

your child's potential.

With an abundance of culture cramming and extracurricular activities, there might be a strong

correlation between obsessive parents and successful kids, but it's not necessarily

a causal relationship.

In other words, the kind of parent, most likely to parent obsessively, was also likely to

have bestowed upon their kids some even more powerful tools.

A high IQ, for instance, or a strong work ethic.

A few years after that first Frekenomics book, right when I started this podcast, we

did an episode called The Economists Guide to Parenting.

We interviewed a variety of economist parents to see how they approached the task.

The results were predictably nerdy from the very beginning of parenthood.

We approached getting pregnant like any other project we've done to preparing their kids

for the real world.

...