Star Parker: Increasing Opportunity and Hope for Our Children

An age-old conundrum regarding raising children is the issue of nature versus nurture.

That is, do genes determine a child’s success in life, or is it the environment in which that child is raised?

Or, even more fundamentally, is intelligence genetic, or can education increase IQ?

James J. Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist from the University of Chicago, poses his own variant of this question.

It’s not an issue of nature versus nurture, but rather what kind of nurture.

In a departure from what one usually expects to hear from an economist, Heckman’s life’s work is about the importance of early education and the great return on investment of early education and intervention in a child’s life. By early, we’re talking about from birth to 5 years old. Per Heckman, the earlier the intervention, the greater return on investment.

Heckman emphasizes that it’s not just what is taught but also who does the teaching. He emphasizes the importance of family and parents, and, from what I discern, he seems to particularly emphasize the role of the mother.

Regarding what is taught, per Heckman, “Develop cognitive AND character skills early. … Cognition and character drive education, career and life success — with character development often being the most important factor.”

In a recent Wall Street Journal column, Heckman contrasts his approach with what he calls the “ZIP code is destiny” approach, which claims that the main factor that determines a child’s outcome in life is the neighborhood where that child grows up.

The most influential work in this “ZIP code is destiny” approach, per Heckman, is research done by economists from Harvard and MIT, using IRS data over a 42-year period.

This has given rise to various programs moving low-income families to better neighborhoods.

Heckman challenges the methodology of these studies.

Regardless, I shudder to think of government programs moving families to better neighborhoods when commonly the forces behind bad neighborhoods are various and sundry government housing and welfare programs.

A widely circulated recent video of HUD Secretary Scott Turner captures Turner explaining to a reporter the rationale of the HUD introducing time limits to residence in government housing. He talks about a woman who is one of three generations in her family living in the same government housing project. Turner justifies a period of assistance from government but, he maintains, welfare should not be a lifestyle.

Heckman insists that data show his approach in fostering early childhood education and “policies to bolster the quality of family decision-making and strengthen the quality of family life” is the most compelling approach.

Nevertheless, issues remain.

For one thing, why must it be one or the other? We don’t need Harvard to teach us the traditional understanding that the neighborhood where a child grows up influences that child. Programs, such as Economic Opportunity Zones, that generate tax incentives for investment in distressed ZIP codes, can turn around blighted neighborhoods that are the laboratory results of bad government policy.

It is also traditionally understood that the right education, given early, with a healthy family environment, is critical.

But we have a chicken and egg problem. Poor families and neighborhoods are already dominated by single-parent, non-traditional broken households. How do we fix this?

And let’s hope what Heckman means by character development is not what our public schools think of as character development — woke thinking devoid of traditional values.

It seems clear that this is not what he means. He notes that the Bible was the initial source of character education. He calls it “unfortunate” that as the country became more diverse in its population, there was pressure to remove the Bible and religion from public schools.

What is not clear is how he teaches character without religion.

My answer is don’t remove the Bible; remove the public schools. Give parents choice.

Photo credit: By Carlos Delgado, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Star Parker is the founder of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education and author of “What Is the CURE for America?” She is CURE’s social policy consultant.

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