What Makes A "Good Parent"

I was glad when I read that Christopher Jencks would be using Ms. Higgins in an elementary classroom as his model on philosophies of equal educational opportunity. Finally, an example that I can completely relate to as an early childhood education student.

Although I understood much of the article, there are some things I found troubling. For instance, at the end of page 245, where Jencks is describing the weak variant of human justice, he says “If a student has incompetent parents… most advocates of humane justice see the home at least in part as an educational environment, most feel that Ms. Higgins owes children extra help if their parents are unable to do as much for them as a good parent should.” I think that students who don’t get the help they need at home should be given extra attention by their teacher. But what bothered me is the definition of “good parent.” Whether Jencks is asserting his own definition of a “good parent” or whether he is asserting humane justice supporters’ definition is unclear. If a parent is “incompetent,” does that mean that they’re not a good parent? According to this definition, a good parent is one who aids their child in her educational pursuits, or academics. So does that mean that an incompetent parent does not help their child academically, or that a parent who doesn’t help their child is incompetent? Surely this isn’t what Jencks meant. Surely he knows that there are some parents who work two or three jobs to put food on the table and never see their children for more than minutes at a time. Are those parents incompetent because they do not help their children with their homework? If so, the only “good parents” are the ones who have time to spend helping their children.

The section on Humane Justice and Socioeconomic Inequality was another section that I found troubling. Jencks says that although “most liberals seem to assume that children from different socioeconomic backgrounds are genetically indistinguishable…logic suggests that a child’s genes must have some influence on his or her adult socioeconomic position,” and “adults in different socioeconomic positions must differ genetically. It follows that their children must differ genetically.” So Jencks is saying that genes affect academic achievement, which affects socioeconomic position, so genes must affect socioeconomic position. Jencks’ logic here seems faulty to me. If genes to indeed affect socioeconomic position, then it sounds like Jencks predestines some students for failure as adults.

Jencks was directly involved with the research that he uses to support this idea and gives only one other article that supports this thought. And the research is all from the late 1970s. We’ve come a long way, baby, in genetic research since the late 1970s. Perhaps Jencks, who is currently a professor of social policy at Harvard Kennedy School of Government, knew what he was talking about. But he didn’t explain it convincingly enough for me to buy it.