Also, the article segues to fostering creativity without ever coming back to the question of whether those kids are more successful as adults.

So having fewer rules supposedly leads to more creative children, but do those kids do well later in life? Article doesn't say.

I'm basically sympathetic to the more "hands off" parenting style being discussed. But the article really doesn't make its case.

>So having fewer rules supposedly leads to more creative children, but do those kids do well later in life?

Is having no rules a steadfast rule? Chew on that one for a while :)

And while you're thinking about that, realize that most children growing up in poor environments don't have many rules to follow. Few people would consider poor communities as bastions of creativity (not to say there isn't creative things happening in these communities, just they are not perceived that way).

The problem with this article and others like it is the subjects - children - are not one thing in a vacuum. Some children will thrive in a structureless home life. But most won't. Some children will thrive with rigid structure. But most won't. So what's the answer? It depends on the kid. From my experience, most children need some sort of structure in their lives. They simply don't have the faculties to deal with the complexity of how life is today. That's what the parent is for. But to go overboard with rules generally doesn't work very well either.

I feel that raising your child like so (having fewer rules) in fact parallels doing well later in life. The measure of success, especially here on hacker news, feels heavily skewed towards making money, success in the Silicon Valley, etc. But while some creative lifestyles may not make enough money (poets, writers, artists) I would argue that they would end up living more fulfilling lives, following their intrinsic motivations rather than any socially constructed notion of success.

My point was children, in the abstract, are easy to overgeneralize. In reality, it's difficult to say how any given child will react to any given stimuli. Few rules might work for one child but not the next...and there is no rhyme or reason to it.

Children are complicated things. Just as adults are complicated things.

In raising my own child in this manner, I am not so much fostering creativity, but not suppressing the person who is already there. We should enable everyone to be the best possible person. We raise or lower all of those around us.

And also consider people who win a science Nobel tend to be pretty old. Suppose you have to be ~55 or so to win one, you'd have to be born latest in ~1960, probably doing the contest in the late 1970s. And I would guess the field of finalists got bigger as the contest got older.

You may have to be 55 or so; but the work was done 20 years ago.

"What's more, after 1985 about 60% of physics, 52% of chemistry, and 49% of medicine prizes were awarded following a post-discovery delay of more than 20 years."

[ source : http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/magazine/physicstoday/n... ]

Yeah, Bill Gates never won the Nobel prize. Neither did Steve Jobs. Or Donald Trump for that matter.

Look carefully at a normal curve. If your kid is slightly above average, say C+, then they are doing better than 50% of the poulation. That is already pretty good.

By all means, encourage and assist them to do better than that, but lay off the judgements. A Happy kid who runs a daycare center in the city, is someone that you should be proud of, because believe me, society in general is proud of people like that and does not judge them because they failed to win a Nobel prize.

If your kid can wake up every morning and honestly say, every day in every way I am getting better and better and better, then you are a superlative parent.

Yes! I was a C student. I had it drummed into me that wasn't good enough. It took me many years to realise I am good enough and to work past all that negative re-enforcement that was thrown at me every day for several years. Now I have a great job, a lovely wife and two beautiful children. I live in a lovely house in west London. I am financially independent and I love going to work every morning. If that isn't "good enough" then god knows what is!

Yeah, strange thresholds for success.

They mention just 1% have won Nobel Prizes, and then in the next sentence say "For every Lisa Randall who revolutionizes theoretical physics, there are many dozens who fall far short of their potential."

Lisa Randall didn't win a Nobel Prize in physics (yet), though she is in he National Academy of Sciences. So I guess you must have one or the other honour to be judged a success.

Meanwhile her collaborator Raman Sundrum (of the Randall-Sundrum model, which Lisa Randall is most famous for) is neither a Nobel laureate nor on the National Academy of Sciences.

But one day if he does win the Nobel, his Success status changes overnight?

i dont have kids but, .4% rate of winning the nobel prize is way better than the 0.00000124% rate of the rest of the world. And "stepping back" may lead to much less success than pushing a kid to practice and i'd take that risk of .4% creativity vs the rest of the population.

Lots of people just don't get it :).

Similar to how people mention the Terman study didn't enrol two future Nobelists because they just barely missed the cutoff and so this proves IQ tests are bunk.

It would have been much better to cite the SMPY longitudinal results for a meaningful idea of how child prodigies fare.

I had to look up Terman and SMPY [1].

I scanned it, and it seems to suggest that IQ 'is kind of bunk' - that it's more effective to evaluate mathematical reasoning, alone.

But, what I find more interesting is that not all mathematically precocious achieve, and very many achievers were not mathematically precocious. So, what's going on in the middle?

It's cool to see that 2000 kids out of 400M were high achievers, but how do we get, say, 1M high achievers out of the next 400M?

[1] https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/01/Article-PS-Lubi...

Also, the data from SMPY seems odd.

I took their achievement percentages (# of individuals in top positions 40 years later), and did some rough calculations.

The SMPY cohorts seemed to perform much better than if one had randomly selected a 'top %1' individual from the total U.S. population. So, either the longitudinal study had an effect on the cohorts, or their original sampling method was biased.

By filtering out the 399M and telling them they suck (eg on standard test) so they should not even try. Then you'll have 1M of post traumatic survivors to label as high achievers.

Well that's what schools do today.

Spurious cherry-picked statistics. I'm pretty sure most Westinghouse / Intel winners are doing exceptionally well, being in the top 1-10% of the society. A couple of such articles I'm reminded of:

1. Statistician Andrew Gelman's batch of math Olympiad campers: http://andrewgelman.com/2015/03/17/1980-math-olympiad-progra...

2. Indian IIT exam toppers: http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/nation/where-are-they...

3. Famous Intel talent winners: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Science_Talent_Search

Nobel Prizes are a cherry-picked metric.

Yeah, not all prodigies become adult geniuses. But the article grossly overstates the problem.

All 8 of those Nobel Prizes were won by individuals who were finalists in 1968 or earlier. So for half of the years in that date range, not a single finalist has been awarded a Nobel Prize. Since 3 of those Nobel Prizes have been in the last 15 years, it is likely too early to tell what the final percentage of Nobel Laureates is among those 2000 finalists.

I came here to write the same =)

I see these sort of parents mostly as scumbags that accomplish little on their own and pass the burden of their own failings to their kids. Parents should expect at most their kids to achieve their level of success and no more. That's reasonable expectation. Anything more than that is a lottery and a fluke.

It's actually unreasonable for parents these days to expect that kids will achieve their own level of success, because the distribution of rewards in society now fall so much more disproportionally to the handful at the very top of any field than they did in their parent's generation, and the generation before that.

"Nobel prize or the gutter" is merely a logical conclusion in a world where only the very best at anything are valued.

I disagree. It's the same. Its just that too many people expect more of the reward, for less of the work and never realized just how much work it actually took to achieve these rewards in the first place.

I see it all the time with people trying to start businesses. They see the success stories and want a rich and profitable company in less than a year.

I believe it's the result of perceived instant gratification on the Internet and from the idea that started in the early 90s that 'everyone needs a trophy', which I saw first-hand.

I’ve met so many college graduates that either want a six-figure income right out of school, a management position within 6 months, or a flex schedule at every job. It's not just a want, they feel entitled to it.

It's why Bernie Sanders is so popular among the youth: he's promising many rewards without any of the work.

That's anecdotal at best. According to a good deal I've read, the "new generation" actually does have quite a few problems previous generations never had to deal with. My father was able to buy his parents house after a few years of work. Anecdotally, I've been working full time and going to school and I can't even put much of a dent in my loans. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/01/09/the_mos...

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/19/baby-bo...

My parents are smart people with degrees from public land-grant universities but they are not world-class at anything. They had stable, good-paying jobs with proper pensions, and could easily afford to buy a home big enough for a family. It cost about twice their annual income.

They "won the lottery" with me in that I had an innate interest in technology and got into computers and networks in the mid 1980s. I ended up at a public land-grant college, but even if I hadn't, I happened to have the right skills at the right time to ride the .com boom and acquire experience despite my lack of pedigree (and 20 years on, it no longer matters what school I went to.) I busted ass and continue to do so, but I'm not blind to my fortune. And yet, I do not and have never had a pension, and I have always spent 2-4x the fraction of my income on housing than my parents did, for worse housing. Most of my generation was not so lucky as me, but at least they were about to get jobs and build a resume.

My kids are young and if they're just as smart and hard-working as me, they're fucked. The ladder has been pulled up, and pedigree is a lot more important starting out now than it was when I was younger. (I know, I've been a hiring manager for years - and in technology which is a MUCH more egalitarian field than most due to demand.) To give my kids an advantage I've moved to a small country in Western Europe so they can grow up multilingual and have cultural exposure that might make them attractive to elite schools in the event that we've "won the lottery" with their natural abilities. And if they don't, if nothing else, they have access to less expensive housing, education and health care, and live in a society that's much more egalitarian than the US - one that might give them a shot at "just a living" without exposure to the worst predatory aspects of American poverty.

All this is to say, no, things aren't the same. Yes, one still has to work very hard to be the best (one also must be very lucky to be the very best.) The difference is, there was once "good enough to make a decent living" and now, not so much. This isn't about meritocracy, this is about the distribution of reward (across the spectrum of "merit" if you like.)

I'll be voting for Bernie Sanders, myself.

May I ask what european country and why ?

I dunno how you define "without any of the work" but I see plenty of young people graduating college with poor opportunities. Unemployment for 20-24 year olds is over 9%. The average student graduating with a 4-year degree from a public non-profit school has about $30k in debt. $100k is high, but they do need to cover that debt. They need to make more (adjusted for inflation) than their parents did at that age because their parents weren't saddled with all that debt. Instead they're sitting at 9% unemployment. Some degree programs are more rigorous than others but it seems like the current generation put in 4 years of strong work. Their parents generation didn't do that. And it wasn't the recipe for success they were told it would be.

>Its just that too many people expect more of the reward, for less of the work and never realized just how much work it actually took to achieve these rewards in the first place.

Businesses actively look for more work for less reward. I'm not sure why the other side shouldn't counter that.

Yes they will ask for those things and it's your job as a business to tell them no. They can reduce their demands or go someplace else.

I think wages have been flat anyway, so why wouldn't you expect some sort of push back when people start realizing that?

>> It's actually unreasonable for parents these days to expect that kids will achieve their own level of success, because the distribution of rewards in society now fall so much more disproportionally to the handful at the very top of any field than they did in their parent's generation, and the generation before that.

That's meritocracy.