Parentology

It begins on the day our kids start to teethe, as we do backflips to distract them from the pain, and continues all the way through their teenage years, when we bribe them with video games to extract a few minutes of math. Now comes a book from a real scientist who has taken that experi­mentation further and deployed every last piece of data on his own kids so that the rest of us can benefit from the results.

Emboldened by his keen understanding of cutting-edge research, Dalton Conley makes a series of unorthodox parenting moves. Just to name a few: He bribes his kids to do math because a study in Mexico indicates that conditional cash transfers improve kids' educational achievement. He gives his children weird names to teach them impulse control because evidence shows that kids with unusual names learn not to react when their peers tease them. Conley tries a placebo on his son when the school wants to medicate him for ADHD, because studies prove the placebo effects are almost as big as those of the actual drugs.