7 ms·

Want Smarter Kids? Space Them (At Least) Two Years Apart

118 points by mikeleeorg 15y ago

inuhj 15y ago
The most irresponsible parents don't practice family planning. That probably contributes heavily to their results.
- andrewhare 15y ago
  Be careful with terms like "irresponsible parents" and "family planning". Some people plan to have kids close together in age. For what it's worth, however, I have this to offer: * My oldest son (age 5) can read at a second grade level and can do addition. * My next son (age 4) can read at a first grade level and can also do addition. * My next son (just turned 3) knows all of his shapes (including the difference between octagons and hexagons), recognize and count all numbers from 1-20, and knows all his letters and their sounds. * My next son (almost 2) knows all his colors, can count to ten, sing his ABCs, and knows all his animal sounds. * My last son (7 months old) just figured out sitting up unsupported, and can babble on his level. Now keep in mind that my little guys also love Pixar movies, playing LEGO games on their Wii, dressing up as superheros, and hiking so they have managed to learn all these things while having a well-rounded and balanced childhood. The reason these boys know as much as they do and are so well behaved is because my wife and I have taken the time to know their hearts and minds and have invested countless precious hours teaching and training them to be men. So I want to make sure you understand that just because a family may have children close in age, it is no way has any bearing on their intelligence. My experience has shown me that the complete well-being of children directly correlates to the amount of time and love their parents invest in them, no matter how many siblings they have or far apart their ages may be. Irresponsible parenting does not mean having many kids close in age. Irresponsible parenting simply means that you aren't willing to offer the time and love your kids need to thrive. (edit for formatting)
  - glimcat 15y ago
    He's claiming that spacing is the dependent variable, not the independent variable. Parents who are not considering these issues at all are arguably more likely to cluster towards shorter spacings, but shorter spacings alone do not provide enough information to classify the cause.
    - andrewhare 15y ago
      Good point! I just wanted to make sure that the OP knew that he was too sweeping in his generalizations.
      - inuhj 15y ago
        It wasn't too sweeping--I purposefully said nothing about what responsible parents do ;).
  - username3 15y ago
    Evidence that some couples can only have one sex.
    - qq66 15y ago
      Evidence that 1 in 16 "fair" couples will have all of one sex.
  - brc 15y ago
    5 sons in a row? You should publish a book on how to father sons! That looks like a non-random result. I agree with you in that the controlling factor is really just how much parental time is spent with the children. Closer spacing of children is likely to stretch parental time, but this is something a determined parent can easily overcome, even if just by being aware of it and correcting for it. I would like to see a study which correlates future intelligence for things like time spent in childcare vs full time parenting. My personal belief is that a childcare effect would massively outweigh any child-spacing effect, particularly in boys, which in my experience seem to suffer from excessive childcare time under the age of 4 more than girls. I don't know if this is lack of male childcare workers or a biological difference in boys.
larrik 15y ago
AKA "You having another baby is bad for your toddler"
- cjfont 15y ago
  In many cases your toddler will let you know, too, in the form of jealousy.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
- jmilloy 15y ago
  The author's attribute the effect of sibling spacing in part on the attention the older sibling receives in its youngest years. This, at least, would not be changed by skipping grades.
grandalf 15y ago
Do to lactational amenorrhea, mothers who breast feed their kids until age 2 (as the World Health Organization recommends) are much less likely to get pregnant again quickly enough to have kids spaced less than two years apart. Considering that breast feeding (at all) is correlated with an 8 point IQ increase on average, the above could completely explain the study's findings.
- TheSOB88 15y ago
  Could be, but I bet the amount of people who breastfeed their kids for 2 years is dwarfed by the amount of people who don't, but due to chance have kids 2+ years apart.
  - grandalf 15y ago
    Could be, but b/c gestation takes 9 months breast feeding would only have to take place for 13 months for lactational amenorrhea to result in the 2 year spacing. Based on a quick google search of breastfeeding rates, in the US 25% of women who breast feed do so until 12 months, which may be enough to create the difference noted in the study.
angelbob 15y ago
It looks like the abstract basically says that the older child does better with a larger spacing (more dedicated time with parents, possibly), while the younger is basically unaffected. That makes sense to me.
nitrogen 15y ago
We already know that children from larger families generally have lower educational attainment and IQ scores, worse employment outcomes, and are more likely to engage in risky behavior. Has the direction of causation been determined? Do children from large rich families do worse than children from small rich families? (Also: the paper linked on the words "educational attainment" in the original article seems to contradict this quotation in its abstract: "First, neither birth order nor childhood family size significantly influences the level or growth rate of wages..."[0]) [0] http://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jlabec/v9y1991i4p413-26.html http://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jlabec/v9y1991i4p413-26.html
- dmgottlieb 15y ago
  The paper in the link includes an instrumental variable model to look at exogenously caused birth spacing (caused by miscarriages). So if the model does what the abstract says it does, then that pins down the direction of causation to some extent. Of course to be really sure you'd need to take a closer look and probably do more research.
abscondment 15y ago
If time and attention really are the determining factors, maybe we parents should just chuck our smartphones and tablets for the first 5 years. I'm only partly joking. I ditched my iPhone after my 2-year-old started saying, "Dadda, put your phone down! Come play!". It's relegated to my office now.
- kreek 15y ago
  On a recent road trip I showed my toddler how to watch model train videos on my iPhone through YouTube. Big mistake! he wants to use the phone more than me now. I think it's because he can choose another train video after one finishes. He became the master of his own domain. My phone is now locked in the office as well :)
- ehsanu1 15y ago
  In fact, if one has sufficient savings and has no worries about career, quitting the full-time job also makes a lot of time/energy for the kids. That's pretty drastic, but I'd consider it myself in the future.
  - watmough 15y ago
    I've just spent two years bringing up my daughter (and iPhone apps on the side at night), whilst my wife works. Highly recommended, if you can swing it, at least once. Now, how to get back in the work-force...
    - tomjen3 15y ago
      You can go back as a consultant for ios development.
      - watmough 15y ago
        If only I had the social skills! Yeah, hopefully something will turn up. I'm actually not that bad. I worked in an consulting shop for 4 years and commuted across the US every week.
maratd 15y ago
> The largest effect they observed suggested that a one-year increase in spacing improves reading scores for older children by 0.17 SD—which would be three times the effect of increasing annual family income by $1,000. In other words, instead of having your kids back to back, you wait a year ... and that's equivalent to $3000 of extra family income. OK. Earning 3K extra a year is ridiculously easy. Far more so than worrying about family planning. All I have to do is earn an extra $10 a day. If we split that between my wife and myself, that's an extra $5 a day. I'd rather focus on that. On top of it all, I can actually spend that money ... I can't spend 1 year.
- robrenaud 15y ago
  I'd guess that 3k of income is at levels of the median or average family, where it actually matters. 40k vs 43k, that extra $3k might buy your family something important. Whereas at competent hackers income levels, I'd bet the marginal contribution of $1k toward children achievement is a lot lower. The difference between 120k and 123k is much less important.
- lotharbot 15y ago
  > "Earning 3K extra a year is ridiculously easy. Far more so than worrying about family planning." Take the time to look up other consequences of short birth spacing. Infant and maternal mortality, low birth weight, and a whole host of other complications become dramatically more prevalent as birth spacing drops below 2 years. The academic results given here are just another part of the larger pattern: it's usually healthier to space births out 2+ years.
- hugh3 15y ago
  Parental income and child intelligence are correlated, but the direct causal relationship is (I suspect) extremely weak except at the low-end extreme. The real relationship between these two variables is dominated by parental intelligence: smarter parents have smarter children (with a very strong correlation), and smarter parents earn more money (with a reasonably strong correlation). Once the parents are picked, earning a little more money won't do much to make the children smarter. If anything it might make them dumber, since those extra hours spent at work are much better spent with your children.
aresant 15y ago
Ahhhh freakonomics, meaninglessness-mass-market-pseudo-data-into-linkbait at its finest! Their read is that "Smarter" kids = Math and Science test scores. Is that how you measure "smart"? - What about musically smart? - What about non-linear thinking (classic entrepreneur trait)? - What about decision making capabilities? Freakonmics is link-bait data drivel that, due to its mass appeal, is dangerously influential. It gets under my skin because you'll often see Freakonomics data repeated as "truth" in the media or in casual conversation. Truth is not their product.
- jeff18 15y ago
  So in other words, it is not responsible to ever use the word "smart" in a headline?
  - aresant 15y ago
    The first paragraph of the article is in conflict with the headline: "The positive effects were seen only in older siblings, not in younger ones." So the headline is false. Your "kids" won't be smarter. But maybe the older one will be. Then the rest of the article just fills space. It's linkbait, which is my expectation with anything from Freakonomics. My problem is that their headlines are disseminated as gospel and repeated verbatim thousands or millions of times, until that headline becomes a truth. And winds up in a parenting book. And causes somebody to make a decision based on false data. Maybe I have too active an imagination, but this just gets under my skin.
    - billpatrianakos 15y ago
      Your imagination is just fine. My mind went there too! This is just an entertainment fluff piece. I think I'm spending too much time on HN as I'm starting to feel like a lot of crap is getting on the front page. Who can I blame but the people who submit and then up vote it. So if that's who is to blame then maybe HN is getting diluted. or maybe I'm becoming elitist? Or I'd better get off here for a but and find something to do :)
    - eric-hu 15y ago
waratuman 15y ago
This is using a predefined standard for being "smart," higher reading and writing skills. First the basis should be established that proves that being smarter, based on this metric, is actually better for every person. I find value in being smarter, but this does not mean that others will. A better metric would be the amount of value the person derives from what he or she is doing. But this is an impossible metric to gather and even if it were it can't be used to compare individuals.
- billpatrianakos 15y ago
  I wonder why you got downvoteed? That makes sense, actually. The predefined metric is pretty standard but maybe it is flawed. Then again, everything is relative so we have to have some standard metric and can't be changing it to suit every individual either.
  - waratuman 15y ago
    Perhaps there is no need for a standard for everyone. Take any student who wishes to enter into an industry, whether it is engineering, philosophy, aviation, or sports. Is there any value for him or her being rated by a standard that does not apply? Instead the student will try to achieve the accepted standard for the industry they enter. How many years after high school will you or any employer care about your transcript? How about college? The experience you have in an industry quickly outweighs the number of years in college, at least in my industry (this may not be true when you need to go to specialized schooling, such as when you enter a medical profession, but I speak of general schooling).
- randomdata 15y ago
  You make a fantastic observation here. If I am to believe historic pop culture, athleticism was once the holy grail for child achievement. Every parent wanted a child that was the quarterback. We have now shifted to every parent wanting the smartest kid, but both are rooted in the desire to appear better than your peers, not because it is actually important to be good at either. I'm a nerd. As such, I appreciate that intellectual pursuits come fairly naturally to me, because it enables me to be a nerd. However, I am starting to grow tired of people claiming it is important for everyone to be that way. It is not. Everyone has different objectives for their life, and being a nerd is often not one of them. Motivation to create something of value is the only attribute of importance. If you are a motivated athlete, you will do something great. If you are a motivated intellectual, you will do something great. If you are a motivated person without anything else going for you, you will still do something great!
Roboprog 15y ago
Double and triple take on the title: Throw my kids out an air lock? (Space them!) Send my kids to the ISS? (Space them at least two years) OK, I got this one a bit off :-(
scrrr 15y ago
Some people are looking for meaning in everything. Perhaps they do that enough they start seeing patterns. Not saying that the study is bogus, it might well be true (e.g. the older child becomes a role model for the younger and thus tries harder or something similar), and while I like this age we live now many seemingly random things can be explained, I think it's good to stay skeptical and take such results with a grain of salt. Some people might draw conclusions that are not beneficial (for themselves and society as a whole). Just saying, now back to work.
- hugh3 15y ago
  The trouble with these articles is that they actually affect some folks' lives. No doubt, for years to come, there will be couples sitting there and planning out how they want to space their families based on a half-remembered article that they read in the New York Times one day about how they'll ruin their kids' lives if they're spaced less than three years apart. Some of these couples will no doubt go on to delay their second child until they wind up infertile. Others will probably delay their second child until they're so old that the second child winds up with Down's syndrome (that being vastly more common for older than younger mothers). And basically, it's just another one of those random factors that really don't matter much for middle-class parents to agonize over (while lower-class parents keep pumping out a dozen crack babies to get more welfare).
  - angus77 15y ago
    I just about upvoted you until you threw in that last parenthetical comment.
    - hugh3 15y ago
      Aw geez folks, are we getting so offended nowadays over a flippant piece of exaggeration? No, not all poor people are pumping out a dozen crack babies. But they do seem to find it possible to have children in rather inauspicious circumstances while those of us further up the social food chain bite our nails and prevaricate about breeding under any circumstances other than perfect. And that's not a good thing on either end.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
pessimizer 15y ago
Pure anecdote, but I and my sister (2 of 2) were born almost exactly two years apart, and I know that before she was born, there was an absurd amount of attention paid to me for the first couple of years (judging by the sheer balance of photography.) I was also read to constantly, and learned to read fairly well before kindergarten. By the time my sister was a couple of years old, it was me that was constantly reading to her. The age distance there allowed me to be able to teach her things as well as my parents, and I'm sure that the act of reading for her and showing her things helped me to strengthen my grip on those things myself. As adults, we're both 99 percentile types now, according to IQ and standardized tests and such. I'm not sure had the dynamic been different, we would have turned out the same way.
lightcatcher 15y ago
I seem to have attributed a different cause to this correlation than most other HN'ers in the comments. Is it possible that the isolation of the older child plays more of a role in the higher test scores than the 2-3 years of undivided parental attention? The older child would grow up without an always available "playmate", and this seems like it could lead to more reading and eventually higher test scores. This same effect could also apply to lone children. Note: I'm not saying this isolation is a completely good thing (child may not have as good of an opportunity to develop strong social skills).
georgemcbay 15y ago
Unless you want your own TLC reality show, in which case you should just keep popping them out as fast as you can.
carsongross 15y ago
Thank goodness association is causation, otherwise where would be?

118 points by mikeleeorg 15y ago

inuhj 15y ago

The most irresponsible parents don't practice family planning. That probably contributes heavily to their results.

andrewhare 15y ago
Be careful with terms like "irresponsible parents" and "family planning". Some people plan to have kids close together in age. For what it's worth, however, I have this to offer: * My oldest son (age 5) can read at a second grade level and can do addition. * My next son (age 4) can read at a first grade level and can also do addition. * My next son (just turned 3) knows all of his shapes (including the difference between octagons and hexagons), recognize and count all numbers from 1-20, and knows all his letters and their sounds. * My next son (almost 2) knows all his colors, can count to ten, sing his ABCs, and knows all his animal sounds. * My last son (7 months old) just figured out sitting up unsupported, and can babble on his level. Now keep in mind that my little guys also love Pixar movies, playing LEGO games on their Wii, dressing up as superheros, and hiking so they have managed to learn all these things while having a well-rounded and balanced childhood. The reason these boys know as much as they do and are so well behaved is because my wife and I have taken the time to know their hearts and minds and have invested countless precious hours teaching and training them to be men. So I want to make sure you understand that just because a family may have children close in age, it is no way has any bearing on their intelligence. My experience has shown me that the complete well-being of children directly correlates to the amount of time and love their parents invest in them, no matter how many siblings they have or far apart their ages may be. Irresponsible parenting does not mean having many kids close in age. Irresponsible parenting simply means that you aren't willing to offer the time and love your kids need to thrive. (edit for formatting)
- glimcat 15y ago
  He's claiming that spacing is the dependent variable, not the independent variable. Parents who are not considering these issues at all are arguably more likely to cluster towards shorter spacings, but shorter spacings alone do not provide enough information to classify the cause.
  - andrewhare 15y ago
    Good point! I just wanted to make sure that the OP knew that he was too sweeping in his generalizations.
    - inuhj 15y ago
      It wasn't too sweeping--I purposefully said nothing about what responsible parents do ;).
- username3 15y ago
  Evidence that some couples can only have one sex.
  - qq66 15y ago
    Evidence that 1 in 16 "fair" couples will have all of one sex.
- brc 15y ago
  5 sons in a row? You should publish a book on how to father sons! That looks like a non-random result. I agree with you in that the controlling factor is really just how much parental time is spent with the children. Closer spacing of children is likely to stretch parental time, but this is something a determined parent can easily overcome, even if just by being aware of it and correcting for it. I would like to see a study which correlates future intelligence for things like time spent in childcare vs full time parenting. My personal belief is that a childcare effect would massively outweigh any child-spacing effect, particularly in boys, which in my experience seem to suffer from excessive childcare time under the age of 4 more than girls. I don't know if this is lack of male childcare workers or a biological difference in boys.

larrik 15y ago

AKA "You having another baby is bad for your toddler"

cjfont 15y ago
In many cases your toddler will let you know, too, in the form of jealousy.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

jmilloy 15y ago
The author's attribute the effect of sibling spacing in part on the attention the older sibling receives in its youngest years. This, at least, would not be changed by skipping grades.

grandalf 15y ago

Do to lactational amenorrhea, mothers who breast feed their kids until age 2 (as the World Health Organization recommends) are much less likely to get pregnant again quickly enough to have kids spaced less than two years apart. Considering that breast feeding (at all) is correlated with an 8 point IQ increase on average, the above could completely explain the study's findings.

TheSOB88 15y ago
Could be, but I bet the amount of people who breastfeed their kids for 2 years is dwarfed by the amount of people who don't, but due to chance have kids 2+ years apart.
- grandalf 15y ago
  Could be, but b/c gestation takes 9 months breast feeding would only have to take place for 13 months for lactational amenorrhea to result in the 2 year spacing. Based on a quick google search of breastfeeding rates, in the US 25% of women who breast feed do so until 12 months, which may be enough to create the difference noted in the study.

angelbob 15y ago

It looks like the abstract basically says that the older child does better with a larger spacing (more dedicated time with parents, possibly), while the younger is basically unaffected. That makes sense to me.

nitrogen 15y ago

We already know that children from larger families generally have lower educational attainment and IQ scores, worse employment outcomes, and are more likely to engage in risky behavior. Has the direction of causation been determined? Do children from large rich families do worse than children from small rich families? (Also: the paper linked on the words "educational attainment" in the original article seems to contradict this quotation in its abstract: "First, neither birth order nor childhood family size significantly influences the level or growth rate of wages..."[0]) [0] http://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jlabec/v9y1991i4p413-26.html http://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jlabec/v9y1991i4p413-26.html

dmgottlieb 15y ago
The paper in the link includes an instrumental variable model to look at exogenously caused birth spacing (caused by miscarriages). So if the model does what the abstract says it does, then that pins down the direction of causation to some extent. Of course to be really sure you'd need to take a closer look and probably do more research.

abscondment 15y ago

If time and attention really are the determining factors, maybe we parents should just chuck our smartphones and tablets for the first 5 years. I'm only partly joking. I ditched my iPhone after my 2-year-old started saying, "Dadda, put your phone down! Come play!". It's relegated to my office now.

kreek 15y ago
On a recent road trip I showed my toddler how to watch model train videos on my iPhone through YouTube. Big mistake! he wants to use the phone more than me now. I think it's because he can choose another train video after one finishes. He became the master of his own domain. My phone is now locked in the office as well :)
ehsanu1 15y ago
In fact, if one has sufficient savings and has no worries about career, quitting the full-time job also makes a lot of time/energy for the kids. That's pretty drastic, but I'd consider it myself in the future.
- watmough 15y ago
  I've just spent two years bringing up my daughter (and iPhone apps on the side at night), whilst my wife works. Highly recommended, if you can swing it, at least once. Now, how to get back in the work-force...
  - tomjen3 15y ago
    You can go back as a consultant for ios development.
    - watmough 15y ago
      If only I had the social skills! Yeah, hopefully something will turn up. I'm actually not that bad. I worked in an consulting shop for 4 years and commuted across the US every week.

maratd 15y ago

> The largest effect they observed suggested that a one-year increase in spacing improves reading scores for older children by 0.17 SD—which would be three times the effect of increasing annual family income by $1,000. In other words, instead of having your kids back to back, you wait a year ... and that's equivalent to $3000 of extra family income. OK. Earning 3K extra a year is ridiculously easy. Far more so than worrying about family planning. All I have to do is earn an extra $10 a day. If we split that between my wife and myself, that's an extra $5 a day. I'd rather focus on that. On top of it all, I can actually spend that money ... I can't spend 1 year.

robrenaud 15y ago
I'd guess that 3k of income is at levels of the median or average family, where it actually matters. 40k vs 43k, that extra $3k might buy your family something important. Whereas at competent hackers income levels, I'd bet the marginal contribution of $1k toward children achievement is a lot lower. The difference between 120k and 123k is much less important.
lotharbot 15y ago
> "Earning 3K extra a year is ridiculously easy. Far more so than worrying about family planning." Take the time to look up other consequences of short birth spacing. Infant and maternal mortality, low birth weight, and a whole host of other complications become dramatically more prevalent as birth spacing drops below 2 years. The academic results given here are just another part of the larger pattern: it's usually healthier to space births out 2+ years.
hugh3 15y ago
Parental income and child intelligence are correlated, but the direct causal relationship is (I suspect) extremely weak except at the low-end extreme. The real relationship between these two variables is dominated by parental intelligence: smarter parents have smarter children (with a very strong correlation), and smarter parents earn more money (with a reasonably strong correlation). Once the parents are picked, earning a little more money won't do much to make the children smarter. If anything it might make them dumber, since those extra hours spent at work are much better spent with your children.

aresant 15y ago

Ahhhh freakonomics, meaninglessness-mass-market-pseudo-data-into-linkbait at its finest! Their read is that "Smarter" kids = Math and Science test scores. Is that how you measure "smart"? - What about musically smart? - What about non-linear thinking (classic entrepreneur trait)? - What about decision making capabilities? Freakonmics is link-bait data drivel that, due to its mass appeal, is dangerously influential. It gets under my skin because you'll often see Freakonomics data repeated as "truth" in the media or in casual conversation. Truth is not their product.

jeff18 15y ago
So in other words, it is not responsible to ever use the word "smart" in a headline?
- aresant 15y ago
  The first paragraph of the article is in conflict with the headline: "The positive effects were seen only in older siblings, not in younger ones." So the headline is false. Your "kids" won't be smarter. But maybe the older one will be. Then the rest of the article just fills space. It's linkbait, which is my expectation with anything from Freakonomics. My problem is that their headlines are disseminated as gospel and repeated verbatim thousands or millions of times, until that headline becomes a truth. And winds up in a parenting book. And causes somebody to make a decision based on false data. Maybe I have too active an imagination, but this just gets under my skin.
  - billpatrianakos 15y ago
    Your imagination is just fine. My mind went there too! This is just an entertainment fluff piece. I think I'm spending too much time on HN as I'm starting to feel like a lot of crap is getting on the front page. Who can I blame but the people who submit and then up vote it. So if that's who is to blame then maybe HN is getting diluted. or maybe I'm becoming elitist? Or I'd better get off here for a but and find something to do :)
  - eric-hu 15y ago

waratuman 15y ago

This is using a predefined standard for being "smart," higher reading and writing skills. First the basis should be established that proves that being smarter, based on this metric, is actually better for every person. I find value in being smarter, but this does not mean that others will. A better metric would be the amount of value the person derives from what he or she is doing. But this is an impossible metric to gather and even if it were it can't be used to compare individuals.

billpatrianakos 15y ago
I wonder why you got downvoteed? That makes sense, actually. The predefined metric is pretty standard but maybe it is flawed. Then again, everything is relative so we have to have some standard metric and can't be changing it to suit every individual either.
- waratuman 15y ago
  Perhaps there is no need for a standard for everyone. Take any student who wishes to enter into an industry, whether it is engineering, philosophy, aviation, or sports. Is there any value for him or her being rated by a standard that does not apply? Instead the student will try to achieve the accepted standard for the industry they enter. How many years after high school will you or any employer care about your transcript? How about college? The experience you have in an industry quickly outweighs the number of years in college, at least in my industry (this may not be true when you need to go to specialized schooling, such as when you enter a medical profession, but I speak of general schooling).
randomdata 15y ago
You make a fantastic observation here. If I am to believe historic pop culture, athleticism was once the holy grail for child achievement. Every parent wanted a child that was the quarterback. We have now shifted to every parent wanting the smartest kid, but both are rooted in the desire to appear better than your peers, not because it is actually important to be good at either. I'm a nerd. As such, I appreciate that intellectual pursuits come fairly naturally to me, because it enables me to be a nerd. However, I am starting to grow tired of people claiming it is important for everyone to be that way. It is not. Everyone has different objectives for their life, and being a nerd is often not one of them. Motivation to create something of value is the only attribute of importance. If you are a motivated athlete, you will do something great. If you are a motivated intellectual, you will do something great. If you are a motivated person without anything else going for you, you will still do something great!

Roboprog 15y ago

Double and triple take on the title: Throw my kids out an air lock? (Space them!) Send my kids to the ISS? (Space them at least two years) OK, I got this one a bit off :-(

scrrr 15y ago

Some people are looking for meaning in everything. Perhaps they do that enough they start seeing patterns. Not saying that the study is bogus, it might well be true (e.g. the older child becomes a role model for the younger and thus tries harder or something similar), and while I like this age we live now many seemingly random things can be explained, I think it's good to stay skeptical and take such results with a grain of salt. Some people might draw conclusions that are not beneficial (for themselves and society as a whole). Just saying, now back to work.

hugh3 15y ago
The trouble with these articles is that they actually affect some folks' lives. No doubt, for years to come, there will be couples sitting there and planning out how they want to space their families based on a half-remembered article that they read in the New York Times one day about how they'll ruin their kids' lives if they're spaced less than three years apart. Some of these couples will no doubt go on to delay their second child until they wind up infertile. Others will probably delay their second child until they're so old that the second child winds up with Down's syndrome (that being vastly more common for older than younger mothers). And basically, it's just another one of those random factors that really don't matter much for middle-class parents to agonize over (while lower-class parents keep pumping out a dozen crack babies to get more welfare).
- angus77 15y ago
  I just about upvoted you until you threw in that last parenthetical comment.
  - hugh3 15y ago
    Aw geez folks, are we getting so offended nowadays over a flippant piece of exaggeration? No, not all poor people are pumping out a dozen crack babies. But they do seem to find it possible to have children in rather inauspicious circumstances while those of us further up the social food chain bite our nails and prevaricate about breeding under any circumstances other than perfect. And that's not a good thing on either end.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

pessimizer 15y ago

Pure anecdote, but I and my sister (2 of 2) were born almost exactly two years apart, and I know that before she was born, there was an absurd amount of attention paid to me for the first couple of years (judging by the sheer balance of photography.) I was also read to constantly, and learned to read fairly well before kindergarten. By the time my sister was a couple of years old, it was me that was constantly reading to her. The age distance there allowed me to be able to teach her things as well as my parents, and I'm sure that the act of reading for her and showing her things helped me to strengthen my grip on those things myself. As adults, we're both 99 percentile types now, according to IQ and standardized tests and such. I'm not sure had the dynamic been different, we would have turned out the same way.

lightcatcher 15y ago

I seem to have attributed a different cause to this correlation than most other HN'ers in the comments. Is it possible that the isolation of the older child plays more of a role in the higher test scores than the 2-3 years of undivided parental attention? The older child would grow up without an always available "playmate", and this seems like it could lead to more reading and eventually higher test scores. This same effect could also apply to lone children. Note: I'm not saying this isolation is a completely good thing (child may not have as good of an opportunity to develop strong social skills).

georgemcbay 15y ago

Unless you want your own TLC reality show, in which case you should just keep popping them out as fast as you can.

carsongross 15y ago

Thank goodness association is causation, otherwise where would be?