Who needs parenting tips?

The kind of parents who follow debates about parenting may be those with the least to worry about.

First there was Amy Chua,the Yale law professor and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,who sent legions of parents into a tizzy with her exacting standards for piano practice and prohibitions against sleepovers. Now comes Bryan Caplan,an economist at George Mason University whose book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think is just out. In it,he argues that parenting hardly matters,and that we should just let our children watch more television and play video games. With parenting made so easy,he says,we should go ahead and have more children.

Caplan,who has already been dubbed the Un-Tiger Mom, writes,While healthy,smart,happy,successful,virtuous parents tend to have matching offspring,the reason is largely nature,not nurture.

Though Caplans prescription for an increased birthrate is a new twist,variations of the argument have been made before. In the mid-90s,Judith Rich Harris wrote in The Nurture Assumption that peers have a much greater impact on children than parents do. More recently,in Freakonomics,Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner wrote that it isnt so much a matter of what you do as a parent; its who you are.

Parents often worry about whether they are being too strict or not strict enough,and reading about the extremes can provide a kind of psychic comfort. Its the nature of parenting that you oscillate between poles, said Ann Hulbert,author of Raising America: Experts,Parents,and a Century of Advice About Children. You can tell yourself,Well,if Im hewing to neither extreme and wobbling around in the middle,Im probably doing just fine.

Paradoxically,the kind of parents who follow debates about parentingtypically more affluent and educatedare those who may have the least to worry about. Differences in parenting can matter a lot to poor,underprivileged children,and research shows that better parenting could help improve their opportunities in many ways.

Research has found that lifestyle differencesdiscipline,consistent mealtimes,reading and television watchingaccount for some differences between lower- and middle-income children in their readiness for school. But does a wealthier parent who forces a child to practice piano 20 hours a week make a huge difference to her overall well-being? We dont really know, said Jeanne Brooks-Gunn,a professor of child development at Columbia.

Some scholars worry that those who dismiss the role of nurture could jeopardise social programmes. We have a very solid scientific core that says that early years matter,and its not just genetics, said James Heckman,an economist at the University of Chicago.

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In an interview,Professor Caplan said he did not dispute that better parenting could change the lives of children living in abject conditions. But from the point of view of parents who are interested in a parenting book, he said,knowing that you should not send your kid to a horrible orphanage is not very interesting,because you werent thinking of doing that.

Scholars say he draws exaggerated conclusions from studies that show more nuanced findings. Looking at studies of twins,for example,he concludes that genes dominate development because identical twins are far more similar than fraternal twins,and identical twins raised apart are surprisingly similar. Yet many of these twin studies,say others,show that even identical twins have differences that are probably accounted for by the way parents treat them.

Professor Caplan,who is himself the father of 8-year-old twins,also reviews studies of adopted children. Of one study that looked at children from South Korea adopted by American families,he writes that higher education among adoptive mothers helped only slightly, and that neither family income nor neighbourhood income increased adoptees academic success. Therefore,he writes,parents who compete to get their children into better schools or pay for expensive tutors dont get what they pay for.

For his part,Professor Caplan,who also has a toddler,said he read frequently to his children and his twins now read a lot on their own. But if they sat there hating it, he said,I wouldnt make them do it. The twins play plenty of video games and watch a lot of cartoons,and they attend public school in Fairfax,Va. As for practicing musical instruments,there is no need. The twins dont take music lessons.