Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy Earle: You're listening to Talking to Teens, where we speak with leading experts from a variety of disciplines about the art and science of parenting teenagers. I'm your host, Andy Earle.

We're talking today about all of the hidden skills that parents need to teach our kids if we want them to succeed.

Research shows that the many jobs parents have to do for our children are actually a lot more complicated than we might think.

And just because we really care about our kids and really love them and want the best for them doesn't necessarily mean that we're teaching them all of the skills they're going to need to thrive.

Today's guest is Nate Hilger. He is an economist and data scientist in Silicon Valley. His work on the origins of success in children has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other media outlets, and he's the author of of The Parent Trap.

Nate. Thank you so much for coming on the Talking to Teens podcast. Really excited to have you here.

Nate Hilger: It's great to be here. Thanks for starting a conversation with me. I appreciate it.

Andy Earle: I have been reading through your book and I got to say, so much interesting stuff to talk about in here. The book is centered around this concept of the parent trap, the way that we conflate the role of what a parent is supposed to be doing. This caring versus skill building set of pressures that we put on parents.

Where did this idea come from and what inspired you to write it into a book?

Nate Hilger: I got a PhD in economics and I got a little lucky in terms of joining the field when research on this topic was exploding. We were starting to see the impacts of changing kids early learning environments, not just on their test scores or their absenteeism or these short term outcomes, but more on things that had seemed out of reach to social science, like their income decades later in adulthood. I found this whole research area fascinating.

I wound up teaching a class on the relationship between growing up rich and poor versus whether you wind up rich or poor as an adult when I was a professor. I just thought our society hadn't really digested the implications of this research. I was really motivated to try to write it up in a way that wasn't too technical, wasn't too academic, and was fun for more people to start wrapping their heads around what it means that we can create kids who are going to wind up more or less successful.

Andy Earle: I think everybody listening to this, we want to create kids who are more successful.

Nate Hilger: If there's anybody out there who wants to create kids who are less successful, technically, I can also give you advice there, but...

Andy Earle: What is exactly the parenting trap?

Nate Hilger: So the trap that I talk about in the book has three manifestations that I like to describe.

The first is these unrealistic expectations that we've come to put on ourselves as parents. We tend to find ourselves facing unrealistic expectations in terms of all the investments that kids can really benefit from.

We get public school and we think that takes care of child development in some way. But public school turns out to be a fig leaf. It turns out we're asking parents to do fairly monumental things that can really benefit kids, and that leads to a lot of confusion.

It leads to kids whose parents don't have as many resources and aren't as familiar with education and health care systems. Those kids are at huge disadvantages. Parents sometimes find themselves feeling like they're failing when what we're asking them to do is pretty unreasonable for individuals to do on their own time, on their own dollar independently.

I'm trying to nudge society towards realizing these problems are too big for individuals to handle. So that's the first trap is these unreasonable expectations we place on parents.

The second trap is we don't have a good language to talk about that problem. The moment you start talking about parents being unable to fulfill certain aspects that would benefit their kids, everybody starts freaking out and thinks you're accusing parents of failure.

You're saying these are worse parents and worse people and it gets very sensitive and unproductive. Lower income parents. Equally good parents as higher income parents. They love their kids just as much.

There's zero ambiguity about that. What I talk about as the caring side of parenting is a very egalitarian thing that everybody can access. People from all walks of life access that. The less egalitarian thing is child skill development. Lower income parents are at a big disadvantage, and it's not their fault. And there's no blame in stating that. The second trap is trying to get us better language to talk about the needs of parents in a way that doesn't feel so focused on blame or hierarchy.

The third trap is that parents are politically undercapitalized. Parents don't participate in activism in the same way that other major demographic social economic blocks do. Workers have labor unions. Not as powerful as they used to be, but still carrying substantial power.

Older folks have the American Association of Retired People, the AARP, which is a huge grassroots powerhouse political organization. Businesses have the Chamber of Commerce. I think parents are just missing something here. And because of that, politicians don't cater to their interests and don't cater to the interests of kids.

So those are the three traps that the book is focusing on.

Andy Earle: So you really walk through a lot of history in the book and paint this picture of how we got to this place where we think about parenting in this way.

And some of this started to be noticed in adoption. You talk about this man, Harold Skills, who was a psychologist at an orphanage and he started noticing some interesting things about children who were adopted into different families.

What was interesting about that?

Nate Hilger: Harold skills at the time was this researcher at this bizarre avant garde research center, the Iowa Child Welfare Research Center. I believe I'm getting a little rusty on my acronyms from the book. But they were going against the grain at the time in academic psychology.

And in broader society, there was tendency to believe that nature was surprisingly vastly more important than nurture. There wasn't necessarily much you could do to help lower income kids achieve the same kinds of opportunities in their careers and in their lives and the same kinds of accomplishments creatively and professionally as rich kids. And Harold really bucked that trend. The data he was seeing with these adopted kids was suggesting that if they got put into better environments earlier, they wound up doing dramatically better. He couldn't believe it himself. He thought, what's wrong with the data. I must be doing something wrong. That launched him onto a multi decade quest of convincing himself that the data really were supporting this idea that if we improve the environment that less advantaged kids grow up in, it can have a much bigger impact on their long term outcomes than he had been taught to believe.

I love this guy because the experiments he orchestrates in the book were so strange. I thought about naming my kid Harold because he seemed like such an admirable guy. But Harold Hilger, Harry Hilger, didn't have the right ring. But he's a great character.

And I hope the book can bring him back.

Andy Earle: You talk in the book about Ned Johnson, who's also been on the show a couple times here. A family offered to pay him so he would work only with their child and not with anybody else's child.

Which I found really funny, but isn't that how we think about it? You're so good. I want my kid to be working with you and nobody else, because I want them to have a leg up on all the other kids at their school.

Nate Hilger: Yeah.

Andy Earle: Where does that come from and what's problematic about that, you think?

Nate Hilger: There's this anecdote in the book where there was a well known college guidance counselor that could help kids get into more elite colleges. A parent reached out to them and said, not only do I want to hire you to help my kid, I want to pay you extra to promise me you won't work with any other kids at my child's school.

This kind of exemplifies what I talk about in the book as this myth of zero sum parenting, that your kid's success is my kids failure and my kids success comes at your kids expense. I think it's just wrong.

I think that view is wrong. I'm not trying to persuade you to be a better person and just have more virtuous ideas. I think that zero sum mentality is just factually wrong. Yes, there are limited numbers of slots at Harvard University and Yale University in these elite colleges, but that's such a tiny part of what we get from our fellow citizens.

If you step back and you think about, suppose you and 10 other families were on an island and you had to raise these kids. And at some point the parents couldn't help the kids anymore. And the next generation was going to have to support itself.

Is it better for your kid if those nine other kids have health problems and can't read and cooperate and have unaddressed behavioral problems and can't do math and science all that successfully and can't handle social conflict in sophisticated ways.

Is that good for your kid? To turn your island into, what's that amazing book, Lord of the Flies? It seems obvious when you get out of the mystery of a 300 million person anonymous society, and you just think about what if we were just a small group of people. Then it's obvious the stronger your kid is, the healthier your kid is, the more cushion my child will have. The more opportunities and resources my child will have.

And I like thinking that way because we really are in that situation. Still in a 300 million person country, it's just not blindingly obvious to us. We serve each other. We have an army. If the people who serve in our army are healthy and smart and capable, we're safer. If we interact with businesses, if the kids who grow up to work at those businesses are healthier and smarter and nicer, that means your kid will have a better experience with those businesses. When somebody invents a major improvement in computers so that we have better artificial intelligence that improves our military and improves our health care system and creates new medicines that save our kids lives. That is not zero sum either. Society is like 99 percent super sum. Where the better off your kids are, the better off my kid is.

And it's 1 percent zero sum. And I think because the last sort of focal point of parenting is late in those teenage years. And that happens to zero in on the most ludicrously zero sum feeling aspect of our cultural moment, which is access to elite colleges. I think that shapes and distorts the narrative around parenting and even that epicenter of zero sum parenting at age 18 when you send kids off to college or early non college careers, even that zero sum aspect is grossly exaggerated because we have such a great public University system in our country.

If your kid doesn't get into Princeton and they go to University of Massachusetts at Amherst, or they go to University of California, Santa Barbara, or they go to University of Michigan Ann Arbor, they're going to do just fine in adulthood. There was great research that came out recently from opportunity insights and Raj Chetty and that team hinted there are some more benefits of going to the fancy colleges than had been obvious in prior research, but it's pretty darn nuanced. It's not something that I think, okay, maybe parenting is not 1 percent zero sum. Maybe it's 1. 2 percent zero sum. So now it's only 98. 8 percent super sum. It's not like it shouldn't overhaul our attitudes.

Andy Earle: But that becomes something we fixate on so much as this milestone or marker of whether we did a good job as a parent, that we got our kids into the best college possible.

For some reason that looms so large, I think.

Nate Hilger: Yeah, it's interesting to think about how we could shift that culturally where parents don't have a Harvard University bumper sticker on your car when your kid gets what is allegedly this magic lottery ticket. How can that become less heightened?

It might be, yeah, actually, maybe I'll write a post on that. I have this newsletter, Kidding Around, and I'm always looking for new ways to explore themes from the book. And trying to figure out how to shift culture to be less obsessed with these elite colleges might be an interesting topic to explore.

Andy Earle: You did some interesting research with Raj Chetty and the Databank. And you looked at this data from project star and started tracking students and looking at how the quality of their kindergarten teacher affected them later in life. What were the findings there? And why is that interesting?

Nate Hilger: Yeah, that was a real formative research experience for me. I was really fortunate to be part of that incredible team with Raj Chetty and John Friedman and Danny Yagen and Diane Schanzenbach and Emmanuel Saez, all these people who are much smarter than me. And I learned a lot from all of them.

We had this incredible opportunity to work with tax data. I should mention we only were able to work with tax data because we were focusing on questions that had relevance to US tax policy. It's a really important thing to clarify. And we merged into that data some information from the Tennessee Star experiment that you mentioned, which was this remarkable experiment in the early 1980s that randomly assigned some kids to have smaller kindergarten classrooms and some kids to have bigger kindergarten classrooms.

And it was this iconic social experiment to see how much it mattered. Should we be spending a lot of money to give kids smaller classes? Or is that not a good use of our public resources? We were interested in that question, but we were really interested in, even more, a weird accidental experiment within this experiment.

Where what happened is not only did they randomize across small and large class sizes, within each of those groups, it turned out they had also randomized across teachers. So some kids got Mrs. Smith, and some kids got Mrs. Rodriguez, and some kids got Mrs. Chetty, and it was completely random. And if Mrs. Chetty had 20 years of experience, building up her expertise in teaching kindergarten kids for decades, and Ms. Smith was a rookie, seeing if she even liked teaching kindergarten kids and getting her sea legs. That was the lottery for these kids. And we matched these kids up to their income decades later, when they were in their late 20s.

This was one of the first times anybody had done something like that. And what we found was getting assigned by pure chance to a more experienced or a more proficient kindergarten teacher had long term benefits for your career. And when you added up the numbers a higher quality kindergarten teacher who was helping those kids grow and build their academic and social emotional skills, that teacher was generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional future income for the kids in her class. If we could pay much higher salaries, we would find a way to map that into more experienced, more effective teachers.

If we could do that, it would be a reasonable social investment for our country. Anyway, that was the amazing finding about research. And there's some nuance there that we can go into. It seemed like the main benefit of the kindergarten teachers was improving kids social and emotional skills, not as much their math and reading skills.

But wow, what an incredible experience to put those data sets together and then see a result that I think people had talked about forever, since for millennia, people have thought, of course, childhood matters. And you grow up to be an adult, and that might depend on the opportunities you get in childhood. But to put numbers on it in a credible, non speculative way just seemed like a miracle to me.

Andy Earle: Especially because you talk about reading Judith Rich Harris's book, which I remember reading that as well and just feeling like, man this can't be right that parents have such little impact on how we do as we grow up. And that someone who's, you know, with us for all of those formative years and help to shape all of those decisions doesn't have a lasting impact.

Nate Hilger: Yeah, it seems hard to believe. If you look at a lot of imperfect data and kind of messy research designs, you can get really weird conclusions. And you have to decide, are these super counterintuitive conclusions right? Or do they make me want to dig into the research and get better, higher quality research to really test the hypothesis?

And so now we're learning, if you really test the hypothesis, common sense is more right. The time that parents spend with their kids is almost surely having a big impact on their kids long term outcomes.

Andy Earle: But so this then brings me back to the conversation we were having earlier about the zero sum parenting and the competition approach. Because then doesn't this mean as a parent, I got to get my kid in the best kindergarten class? And there's only 20 seats in Miss Smith's class.

I don't want to get stuck in Miss Chetty's class with the teacher who's just, this is their first year teaching kindergarten, they don't know what they're doing. And it feels like there's so many of those situations throughout your kid's life where as a parent, you're advocating to get them put in the better group or get them tracked into the other thing where they could have more opportunities to do something different. Or getting someone to reconsider their application to let them into the program so they can do whatever it is.

What this says to me is those do matter. And there are only 20 seats in the one class or whatever it is.

Nate Hilger: Yeah. I can't deny that. I think the right response to that is to lower the stakes by increasing the quality that everybody gets.

We shouldn't have situations where some kids are going to wind up with experienced, seasoned, inspiring teachers for the next 5 years, and other parents are going to get unlucky and wind up with rookie, inexperienced teachers. Teachers with less domain expertise, or less of a knack for teaching for five years.

It should be much lower stakes. It should be all of our teachers are great. And, sure. Some are better than others. But the stakes aren't that high. It's not it's not like huge wins and huge losses. It's minor wins and minor losses. And if you have a minor loss this year, you might have a minor win next year, if you have a minor loss in math this year, you might have a minor win in English this year.

And it's just make it all feel more relaxing by raising the quality of all teachers in schools. And that might sound utopian, but I talk about in the book, how if we support parents more. One of the big things that comes out of it in terms of helping kids get better early education so that poor kids aren't starting school way behind helping parents get more universal, easy access to good summer and extracurricular activities.

It's not just a privilege of rich kids to go have these great formative experiences outside of school. If we make those investments, school itself is not going to feel as unequal across lower income and higher income communities. Because what those investments would do is they would make lower income kids not fall behind higher income kids. And that would make lower income schools and lower income communities much more appealing places to teach. And it would help them recruit and retain higher quality teachers.

And so I think investing in parents is a good way to level the playing field in our schools indirectly.

Andy Earle: You have a lot of great ideas in this book. I love how you lay out a proposed plan that we should really consider adopting. And the research and specific numbers and data that you presented here is really thought provoking and fascinating. I hope that people will pick up a copy of The Parent Trap: How to Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis.

Nate, thank you so much for coming on the show today and speaking with us about your work and about your book. It's been really an honor and fascinating conversation

Nate Hilger: Likewise Andy. It's been an honor to be on your great podcast. And I really appreciate you reading the book, obviously thinking about it, and asking thought provoking questions.

Andy Earle: Can you talk a little bit about where people could go to maybe engage further with this? To follow updates from you or stay up to date with what you're working on next?

Nate Hilger: You can go to my website, NateHilger. com. I am now writing a Substack called Kidding Around. A substack is a newsletter, so you can sign up to just hear from me about once every one or two months with a little piece, continuing to explore the themes in the book. The last post was about whether we should lower the voting age to let, 16, 15, 14 year olds start to get some political power, and whether we should maybe more controversially, give parents proxy votes on behalf of their younger children to increase the political power of parents as a constituency in this country.

Other posts have been on, the importance of child nutrition and a natural experiment in England that suddenly took sugar away from millions of kids. I try to keep it fun, uncontrovertible, nonpartisan, non angry, that's why it's called Kidding Around.

I'm tired of high pressure, angry discourse. I try to avoid that and keep things light and fun and driven by curiosity, not grinding an ax.

Andy Earle: And maybe we've got a post coming up soon about the zero sum mentality when it comes to colleges.

Nate Hilger: Yeah. When I talk to smart people, I get good ideas. Thanks a lot.

Andy Earle: We'll look for that one. Awesome. Nate. Really appreciate it. Yeah. Thanks again for coming on the show.

We're here today with Nate Hilger talking about the hidden skills that parents need to teach our kids and we're not done yet. Here's a look at what's coming up in the second half of the show. good tutoring by parents for six hours a week, every week, year after year, could raise children's future earnings by as much as $300, 000.

Nate Hilger: Good tutors use pretty sophisticated pedagogy.

They help kids connect with the work, gain confidence to solve problems themselves, work through the stress and the fear involved with not understanding things quickly or easily. Raising kids is really complicated and hard child development is a very advanced, sophisticated, challenging thing. Helping kids stay on track with math and reading and social and behavioral skills is not like making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It's more like making a gourmet meal for 50 people at a wedding.

Andy Earle: Want to hear the full interview? Sign up for a subscription today. It's completely affordable and your membership supports the work we do here at Talking to Teens. You can now sign up directly through Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.