Peter Gray

Now, of course, it's well known that if you just look at Harvard graduates compared to, say, this local state university, the Harvard graduates are making more money.

They're at more high status jobs.

But they're also coming from people who make more money and whose parents have more high standards.

They have all kinds of privileges.

So these researchers said, what if we control for that?

What if we use statistical means to create the equivalent of identical twins in terms of their background?

And we compare those who went to the elite college and those who went to the less elite college, which might be a

state university.

It might be a small liberal arts college that isn't on the map of one of the great.

And what they found in both of these studies is that it made no difference.

So I think that would help.

I think that parents who recognize that, some of that pressure gets taken off.

Yes.

So I would say that the prototype of fuel injector parenting is the kind of parenting which is to really subject your child to competitions quite deliberately to kind of require excellent achievement and so on and so forth.

There is a researcher who was interested in why are some parents spending huge amounts of money

and lots of time to put their children into competitive activities, and then to put a lot of effort into making sure that those children do very well in those competitive activities.

What this researcher did was to look at families.

She took three different categories of activities.

One of them was competitive chess, one was competitive dance, and one was soccer.

And what she found was the parents put the kids into these when she asked them, why are you putting them?