Reply to If you are wicked smart, what about your kids?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I wonder how many of the "wicked smart" parents with kids "not as smart" are actually "wicked smart". This area has a lot of transplants and people who were extremely smart for their hometown, top of their class, always ahead of everyone else in Booberville, Indiana and grew up internalizing being the smartest kid in the class. Their children are all growing up in an area where everyone is smart and highly educated. A kid who seems OK but not incredibly smart here would stand out back in your original hometown but seem average here. In addition, IQ scores and testing have changed. A high score 20-30-40 years ago would be equivalent to a lower score today.

[quote]Its more probable that the children are in the same "smart" range as the parents but the perceptions have simply changed because who you compare against is different.[/quote] [/quote]

A PP here.  I didn't grow up in Booberville, but rather in a suburb of a major city with very strong schools and lots of very intense competition.  I think kids can turn out differently from their parents, either because they got a different set of genes or because of personality or some other reason.  My siblings didn't all have the same ability as I did, so why would all of my kids?[/quote]

I am just now reading Charles Murray's new book, Coming Apart, about the gulf between the "new upper class" (cognitively gifted/highly educated/affluent folks like many around here) and the rest of America.  He makes the point bolded above.  The kids who seem just "average" in elite schools in the DC area (public as well as private) are still well above average nationally in terms of cognitive ability.  It's an interesting read.  There is a 25 question quiz to find out how out of touch you are with mainstream America (do you buy domestic mass market beer, can you identify a NASCAR driver, do you have a close friend who is an Evangelical, etc.)  We don't realize just how rarified an environment many of us and our kids live in.[/quote]

Charles Murray was always a liberal boogey man to me in college because of the stuff he wrote about race and IQ in the 80's.  It did have the advantage of stimulating some very interesting research on the consequences of poverty.   I have not read his new book, but have heard interviews with him and I don't know what to make of it, it rings true at some level, but I am not sure how much that means I need to reexamine my thinking generally.   I do know that I spent most of my youth desperate to leave Denver because I had so much better of a vocabulary than every one around me.  My fellow students that were pretty academic all fled to a coast also, with one exception in at the U of Wisconsin and Santa Fe.  [/quote]

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