The Geek Dad Blog – Garth Sundem
“There’s a lot to be said about parenting like crazy until your child is in first grade and then keeping the kid safe, active and well-fed while he/she sorts it out from there. Personality is pretty much formed by age 7. Similar is true of IQ. You can even make a case that trait creativity settles into its adult measurement around the time you’re losing your first teeth (though the expression of creativity remains very malleable). So, as you would expect, when a study just published in the journal Child Development measured math ability in 1,362 first graders and again at age 15, most of the children who were strong mathematicians in the first measurement remained the strongest mathematicians in the final one. Most but not all. While the tendency was to score the same across time, a few kids got better at math and a few kids got worse. And it turns out these kids whose math ability migrated had some things in common. It wasn’t just cognitive skills, which can counteract the influence of especially poor or (unfortunately…) especially strong parenting (researchers controlled for that). And it wasn’t just reading skills, which have been shown to boost the speed of learning in general (researchers controlled for that, too).”(more)