This is an interesting article, but I think it's hard to form any conclusions about the correct way to parent children from this information due to the inherent selection bias.
It may be true that a lot of exceptional people were taken seriously by their parents and given serious responsibilities, but I think that also may be due to the parents realizing that their children were exceptional. If you have a child who's closer to average intellect, you might not get the same outcome.
It's also possible that these approaches just increase the variance of outcomes. So it might be that they generate exceptional people 1% of the time, but generate miserable people who accomplish nothing 99% of the time.
I don't think that this is likely to be true to that magnitude, and I think a lot of the advice seems pretty good intuitively (I feel like being treated seriously by my parents when I was young was a big benefit), but am curious if there is any more data-driven approach to the question of how to best raise your kids.
This article [1], linked from original article, looks at the effects of direct instruction and mastery learning across various studies. I did not read it all but it concludes from randomized interventions that these approaches have a beneficial outcome on students when compared to alternatives (though not as high as two standard deviations as previously suggested).
Think of how many kids were tutored by wealthy families over the past 500 years. How many achieved close to anything of noteworthiness like the examples in the article?
It may be true that a lot of exceptional people were taken seriously by their parents and given serious responsibilities, but I think that also may be due to the parents realizing that their children were exceptional. If you have a child who's closer to average intellect, you might not get the same outcome.
It's also possible that these approaches just increase the variance of outcomes. So it might be that they generate exceptional people 1% of the time, but generate miserable people who accomplish nothing 99% of the time.
I don't think that this is likely to be true to that magnitude, and I think a lot of the advice seems pretty good intuitively (I feel like being treated seriously by my parents when I was young was a big benefit), but am curious if there is any more data-driven approach to the question of how to best raise your kids.