Telegraph – Parental discipline ‘key factor’ in giving children best start, says think tank<br/> Parents who discipline their children are giving their offspring the best chance in life, according to a report by Demos, the progressive think-tank.

The report, Building Character, studied data from 9,000 households in Britain to find out what sort of upbringing produced character traits, such as application, self-regulation and empathy, which gave the best guarantee of future success.

When a whole range of factors including household income, family structure, parental education and breast-feeding for at least six months were taken into account, discipline emerged as the key indicator of likely future prosperity.

Children with parents who practised “tough love” were twice as likely to develop good character traits by the age of five as those with “disengaged” parents – and were also likely to do significantly better than those with “laissez faire” or “authoritarian” parental regimes.

Other findings included:

• Children from the richest 20 per cent of households are more than twice as likely to do better than those from the poorest 20 per cent

• Children of married parents are twice as likely to succeed as those from single-parent families or families with step-parents.

• Children of cohabiting parents ranked slightly lower than those of married parents.

Higher education levels among parents and breast feeding to six months were also good signs while girls were more likely to develop positive “character capabilities” than boys by the age of five.

Emphases mine. I included the bit about the 20% richest since it seems to me statistics about the fabulously rich always say things like “top 2%” or such, so the top 20% I’m guessing (lookit me goooo!) includes an awful lot of normal decent people. And now I’ll remind you all of that article from a couple years ago:

Telegraph – There’s no way up<br/> Social mobility has ground to a halt in modern Britain and grammar schools are part of the problem, not the solution, claims David Cameron. But what has really gone wrong, and can we fix it, asks Alasdair Palmer

To reach it, Mr Willetts had to make two assumptions. One is that intelligence is randomly distributed throughout the population, so that you would expect it to be no more or less likely for a highly intelligent child to be born to middle-class parents than it is for a highly intelligent child to be born to parents who are in the bottom 20 per cent. …

(Note that 20% statistic again.)

Most people would probably share Mr Willetts’ two assumptions. They certainly now amount to the orthodox view within much of academic sociology, which has for decades taken it for granted that differences in achievement between individuals and groups must be explained by some form of social injustice: if society were completely fair, so the orthodoxy goes, there would be no differences in what people were capable of achieving. There is, however, an increasing amount of evidence that this is not true. “Just about all the research that has been done on this topic demonstrates that intelligence is not randomly distributed across society,” says Ben Sacks, a former professor of psychiatry at Charing Cross Hospital. “Intelligent, well-educated women tend to marry intelligent, well-educated men, and they tend to have intelligent children who end up being well-educated.

“About 50 per cent of the variation in intelligence between individuals is inherited.

Meaning, of course, that the top 20% has self-selected to just be generally good, intelligent people having kids with good character. Which is a bit different than the usual venom one gets about privileged kids. But then this article goes on to discuss a lot of other things relevant to this topic. But anyway, I want to get to this, which was linked to off of the original article:

Telegraph – School discipline failure fuels crime, says Home Office<br/> A failure by schools to deal with rowdy pupils is partly to blame for half of young people turning to crime before they reach 25, a Home Office report warns

Weak discipline and “insufficient” responses to bad behaviour are increasing the likelihood of children going off the rails, researchers concluded.

The study, which examined youth offending over four years, found 49 per cent of 10 to 25-year-olds admitted to at least one offence, including robbery and burglary, and that children as young as 11 are taking Class A drugs.

But in a bid to play down the seriousness of some offences, the Home Office inadvertently dismissed theft from schools as not significant.

Overall, some 72 per cent of the age group said they had become involved in either crime, anti-social behaviour or drug abuse at least once, analysis of the Home Office’s Offending, Crime and Justice Surveys (OCJS) found.

Single parent families or households where there is a step-parent are also more likely to see youngsters turn to crime or take drugs.

The report drew a direct link between schools failing to tackle indiscipline and children turning to crime.

It warned: “Weak school discipline is related to an increased likelihood of offending and drug use.”

That’s some heavy stuff from Progressive think tanks and the Home Office.

Date: Nov 8th, 2009 · Comments RSS · Tags: People and Current Events