What every parent needs to know about negotiating, incentives,
outsourcing, and other strategies to solve the economic management
problem that is parenting. Like any new parent, Joshua Gans felt
joy mixed with anxiety upon the birth of his first child. Who was
this blanket-swaddled small person and what did she want? Unlike
most parents, however, Gans is an economist, and he began to apply
the tools of his trade to raising his children. He saw his new life
as one big economic management problem-and if economics helped him
think about parenting, parenting illuminated certain economic
principles. Parentonomics is the entertaining, enlightening, and
often hilarious fruit of his "research." Incentives, Gans shows us,
are as risky in parenting as in business. An older sister who is
recruited to help toilet train her younger brother for a share in
the reward given for each successful visit to the bathroom, for
example, could give the trainee drinks of water to make the rewards
more frequent. (Economics later offered another, better toilet
training solution: outsourcing. For their third child, Gans and his
wife put it in the hands of professionals-the day care providers.)
Gans gives us the parentonomic view of delivery (if the mother
shares her pain by yelling at the father, doesn't it really create
more aggregate pain?), sleep (the screams of a baby are like an
offer: "I'll stop screaming if you give me attention"), food (a
question of marketing), travel ("the best thing you can say about
traveling with children is that they are worse than baggage"),
punishment (and threat credibility), birthday party time
management, and more. Parents: if you're reading Parentonomics in
the presence of other people, you'll be unable to keep yourself
from reading the funny parts out loud. And if you're reading it
late at night and wake a child with your laughter-well, you'll have
some guidelines for negotiating a return to bed.
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