Gobry hates the slew of internet stories about parenting:
Apparently parenting stories are the new cat photo slideshows for high(middle)brow websites (thank you Amy Chua) because I see more and more of them (the most popular story on Quartz right now is this cruel, insufferable one about how to brag on the internet about mistreating your kids). And each time it is like an ice cream headache. The parenting stories that are all the rage have all the hallmarks of why our current bourgeoisie is insane.
He singles out articles with a “ridiculous pseudo-empiricism” as “perhaps the most infuriating”:
Here’s the thing: there’s almost nothing that proves less than a parenting study because it is one of the fields where the causal density is the highest and where it is nigh impossible to isolate one potential cause from the others. The vast majority of parenting studies are just throwing darts on the wall, and the few that have some credibility merely corroborate common sense. As bad as it is that journalists seem to interpret “Study Says” as “SCIENCE PROVES” it seems to be the worst in parenting stories, both because of their overreliance on it and the intrinsic faultiness of the evidence at hand. In this sense, almost everything you read about parenting on the internet is wrong.
Of course, these trends reinforce each other. If all you accept for parenting information is “studies” then all your metrics are going to be things like income level which means that’s how you will be measuring what successful education is. But what lies at bottom of all of this is a dramatic poverty of moral imagination. It is not allowed, it is not done, it is not even considered to ask what education, what raising a child, is for and how one should raise their higher faculties. Instead, the summum bonum is tips and tricks that can get your kid into Harvard.
The Dish 