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prompted an antibeef frenzy. “The basic reality,” Sandman told the New York

Times, “is that the risks that scare people and the risks that kill people are very

different.”

Sandman offered a comparison between mad-cow disease (a super-scary but

exceedingly rare threat) and the spread of food-borne pathogens in the average

home kitchen (exceedingly common but somehow not very scary). “Risks that

you control are much less a source of outrage than risks that are out of your

control,” Sandman said. “In the case of mad-cow, it feels like it’s beyond my

control. I can’t tell if my meat has prions in it or not. I can’t see it, I can’t smell it.

Whereas dirt in my own kitchen is very much in my own control. I can clean my

sponges. I can clean the floor.”

Sandman’s “control” principle might also explain why most people are more

scared of flying in an airplane than driving a car. Their thinking goes like this:

since I control the car, I am the one keeping myself safe; since I have no control of

the airplane, I am at the mercy of myriad external factors.

So which should we actually fear more, flying or driving?

It might first help to ask a more basic question: what, exactly, are we afraid of?

Death, presumably. But the fear of death needs to be narrowed down. Of course

we all know that we are bound to die, and we might worry about it casually. But

if you are told that you have a 10 percent chance of dying within the next year,

you might worry a lot more, perhaps even choosing to live your life differently.

And if you are told that you have 10 percent chance of dying within the next

minute, you’ll probably panic. So it’s the imminent possibility of death that

drives the fear—which means that the most sensible way to calculate fear of

death would be to think about it on a per-hour basis.

If you are taking a trip and have the choice of driving or flying, you might wish

to consider the per-hour death rate of driving versus flying. It is true that many

more people die in the United States each year in motor vehicle accidents

(roughly forty thousand) than in airplane crashes (fewer than one thousand). But

it’s also true that most people spend a lot more time in cars than in airplanes.

(More people die even in boating accidents each year than in airplane crashes; as

we saw with swimming pools versus guns, water is a lot more dangerous than

most people think.) The per-hour death rate of driving versus flying, however, is

about equal. The two contraptions are equally likely (or, in truth, unlikely) to

lead to death.

But fear best thrives in the present tense. That is why experts rely on it; in a

world that is increasingly impatient with long-term processes, fear is a potent

short-term play. Imagine that you are a government official charged with

procuring the funds to fight one of two proven killers: terrorist attacks and heart

disease. Which cause do you think the members of Congress will open up the

coffers for? The likelihood of any given person being killed in a terrorist attack

are infinitesimally smaller than the likelihood that the same person will clog up

his arteries with fatty food and die of heart disease. But a terrorist attack happens

now; death by heart disease is some distant, quiet catastrophe. Terrorist acts lie

beyond our control; french fries do not. Just as important as the control factor is

what Peter Sandman calls the dread factor. Death by terrorist attack (or mad-cow

disease) is considered wholly dreadful; death by heart disease is, for some

reason, not.

Sandman is an expert who works both sides of the aisle. One day he might help a

group of environmentalists expose a public health hazard. His client the next day

could be a fast-food CEO trying to deal with an E. coli outbreak. Sandman has

reduced his expertise to a tidy equation: Risk = hazard + outrage. For the CEO

with the bad hamburger meat, Sandman engages in “outrage reduction”; for the

environmentalists, it’s “outrage increase.”

Note that Sandman addresses the outrage but not the hazard itself. He concedes

that outrage and hazard do not carry equal weight in his risk equation. “When

hazard is high and outrage is low, people underreact,” he says. “And when

hazard is low and outrage is high, they overreact.”

So why is a swimming pool less frightening than a gun? The thought of a child

being shot through the chest with a neighbor’s gun is gruesome, dramatic,

horrifying—in a word, outrageous. Swimming pools do not inspire outrage. This

is due in part to the familiarity factor. Just as most people spend more time in

cars than in airplanes, most of us have a lot more experience swimming in pools

than shooting guns. But it takes only about thirty seconds for a child to drown,

and it often happens noiselessly. An infant can drown in water as shallow as a

few inches. The steps to prevent drowning, meanwhile, are pretty

straightforward: a watchful adult, a fence around the pool, a locked back door so

a toddler doesn’t slip outside unnoticed.

If every parent followed these precautions, the lives of perhaps four hundred

young children could be saved each year. That would outnumber the lives saved

by two of the most widely promoted inventions in recent memory: safer cribs

and child car seats. The data show that car seats are, at best, nominally helpful. It

is certainly safer to keep a child in the rear seat than sitting on a lap in the front

seat, where in the event of an accident he essentially becomes a projectile. But the

safety to be gained here is from preventing the kids from riding shotgun, not

from strapping them into a $200 car seat. Nevertheless, many parents so magnify

the benefit of a car seat that they trek to the local police station or firehouse to

have it installed just right. Theirs is a gesture of love, surely, but also a gesture of

what might be called obsessive parenting. (Obsessive parents know who they are

and are generally proud of the fact; non-obsessive parents also know who the

obsessives are and tend to snicker at them.)

Most innovations in the field of child safety are affiliated with—shock of

shocks—a new product to be marketed. (Nearly five million car seats are sold

each year.) These products are often a response to some growing scare in which,

as Peter Sandman might put it, the outrage outweighs the hazard. Compare the

four hundred lives that a few swimming pool precautions might save to the

number of lives saved by far noisier crusades: child-resistant packaging (an

estimated fifty lives a year), flame-retardant pajamas (ten lives), keeping children

away from airbags in cars (fewer than five young children a year have been

killed by airbags since their introduction), and safety draw-strings on children’s

clothing (two lives).

Hold on a minute, you say. What does it matter if parents are manipulated by

experts and marketers? Shouldn’t we applaud any effort, regardless of how

minor or manipulative, that makes even one child safer? Don’t parents already

have enough to worry about? After all, parents are responsible for one of the

most awesomely important feats we know: the very shaping of a child’s

character. Aren’t they?

The most radical shift of late in the conventional wisdom on parenting has been

provoked by one simple question: how much do parents really matter?

Clearly, bad parenting matters a great deal. As the link between abortion and

crime makes clear, unwanted children—who are disproportionately subject to

neglect and abuse—have worse outcomes than children who were eagerly

welcomed by their parents. But how much can those eager parents actually

accomplish for their children’s sake?

This question represents a crescendo of decades’ worth of research. A long line of

studies, including research into twins who were separated at birth, had already

concluded that genes alone are responsible for perhaps 50 percent of a child’s

personality and abilities.

So if nature accounts for half of a child’s destiny, what accounts for the other

half? Surely it must be the nurturing—the Baby Mozart tapes, the church

sermons, the museum trips, the French lessons, the bargaining and hugging and

quarreling and punishing that, in toto, constitute the act of parenting. But how

then to explain another famous study, the Colorado Adoption Project, which

followed the lives of 245 babies put up for adoption and found virtually no

correlation between the child’s personality traits and those of his adopted

parents? Or the other studies showing that a child’s character wasn’t much

affected whether or not he was sent to day care, whether he had one parent or

two, whether his mother worked or didn’t, whether he had two mommies or two

daddies or one of each?

These nature-nurture discrepancies were addressed in a 1998 book by a little-

known textbook author named Judith Rich Harris. The Nurture Assumption was

in effect an attack on obsessive parenting, a book so provocative that it required

two subtitles: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do and Parents Matter Less

than You Think and Peers Matter More. Harris argued, albeit gently, that parents

are wrong to think they contribute so mightily to their child’s personality. This

belief, she wrote, was a “cultural myth.” Harris argued that the top-down

influence of parents is overwhelmed by the grassroots effect of peer pressure, the

blunt force applied each day by friends and school-mates.

The unlikeliness of Harris’s bombshell—she was a grandmother, no less, without

PhD or academic affiliation—prompted both wonder and chagrin. “The public

may be forgiven for saying, ‘Here we go again,’” wrote one reviewer. “One year

we’re told bonding is the key, the next that it’s birth order. Wait, what really

matters is stimulation. The first five years of life are the most important; no, the

first three years; no, it’s all over by the first year. Forget that: It’s all genetics!”

But Harris’s theory was duly endorsed by a slate of heavyweights. Among them

was Steven Pinker, the cognitive psychologist and bestselling author, who in his

own book Blank Slate called Harris’s views “mind-boggling” (in a good way).

“Patients in traditional forms of psychotherapy while away their fifty minutes

reliving childhood con-flicts and learning to blame their unhappiness on how

their parents treated them,” Pinker wrote. “Many biographies scavenge through

the subject’s childhood for the roots of the grown-up’s tragedies and triumphs.

‘Parenting experts’ make women feel like ogres if they slip out of the house to

work or skip a reading of Goodnight Moon. All these deeply held beliefs will

have to be rethought.”

Or will they? Parents must matter, you tell yourself. Besides, even if peers exert

so much influence on a child, isn’t it the parents who essentially choose a child’s

peers? Isn’t that why parents agonize over the right neighborhood, the right

school, the right circle of friends?

Still, the question of how much parents matter is a good one. It is also terribly

complicated. In determining a parent’s influence, which dimension of the child

are we measuring: his personality? his school grades? his moral behavior? his

creative abilities? his salary as an adult? And what weight should we assign each

of the many inputs that affect a child’s outcome: genes, family environment,

socioeconomic level, schooling, discrimination, luck, illness, and so on?

For the sake of argument, let’s consider the story of two boys, one white and one

black.

The white boy is raised in a Chicago suburb by parents who read widely and

involve themselves in school reform. His father, who has a decent manufacturing

job, often takes the boy on nature hikes. His mother is a housewife who will

eventually go back to college and earn a bachelor’s degree in education. The boy

is happy and performs very well in school. His teachers think he may be a bona

fide math genius. His parents encourage him and are terribly proud when he

skips a grade. He has an adoring younger brother who is also very bright. The

family even holds literary salons in their home.

The black boy is born in Daytona Beach, Florida, and his mother abandons him

at the age of two. His father has a good job in sales but is a heavy drinker. He

often beats the little boy with the metal end of a garden hose. One night when the

boy is eleven, he is decorating a tabletop Christmas tree—the first one he has

ever had—when his father starts beating up a lady friend in the kitchen. He hits

her so hard that some teeth fly out of her mouth and land at the base of the boy’s

Christmas tree, but the boy knows better than to speak up. At school he makes

no effort whatsoever. Before long he is selling drugs, mugging suburbanites,

carrying a gun. He makes sure to be asleep by the time his father come home

from drinking, and to be out of the house before his father awakes. The father

eventually goes to jail for sexual assault. By the age of twelve, the boy is

essentially fending for himself.

You don’t have to believe in obsessive parenting to think that the second boy

doesn’t stand a chance and that the first boy has it made. What are the odds that

the second boy, with the added handicap of racial discrimination, will turn out to

lead a productive life? What are the odds that the first boy, so deftly primed for

success, will somehow fail? And how much of his fate should each boy attribute

to his parents?

One could theorize forever about what makes the perfect parent. For two

reasons, the authors of this book will not do so. The first is that neither of us

professes to be a parenting expert (although between us we do have six children

under the age of five). The second is that we are less persuaded by parenting

theory than by what the data have to say.

Certain facets of a child’s outcome—personality, for instance, or creativity—are

not easily measured by data. But school performance is. And since most parents

would agree that education lies at the core of a child’s formation, it would make

sense to begin by examining a telling set of school data.