The parents in the study were asked to keep a diary on how much time they spent with their children, explaining things to them and helping them to read, and to record the money they spent on tutoring. Using a large national longitudinal study of youth in the US, the researchers analysed data on 2318 children from 850 households.Įach household studied had at least one left-handed and one right-handed sibling.Įach child was given a battery of tests to assess their level of understanding of maths and English, their social development, interpersonal skills and their number of friends.

A proxy for cognitive abilityĪbout 10 per cent of children are left-handed and the consensus is that they are less cognitively developed than right-handed children, says Frijters - although the jury is still out on why this is the case - perhaps it's because they are living in a 'right-handed world'.īy using handedness within families as a proxy for cognitive ability, the researchers could be sure that they were identifying the natural cognitive ability of the children in the study.

To get around this problem, Frijters and colleagues used a well-known marker for natural cognitive ability - handedness, which is an attribute children are born with. How, for example, do you measure the natural cognitive abilities of children prior to any parental input? However studies that try to compare the impacts of these so-called 'Spartan' and 'Samaratin' approaches to child rearing, face challenges, says Frijters. 'The penchant of parents in the US to invest in the higher able kids will aggravate initial differences between siblings of differing cognitive ability,' says Frijters.įrijters says experts have long debated whether parents tend to invest more in children who are clever over those who are falling behind, or the other way around. Health economist Professor Paul Frijters, from the University of Queensland, and colleagues, report their findings in a recent issue of the journal Demography. Interestingly, the results go against previous findings from Australia. Playing favourites Smart kids get smarter because parents pay them more attention - at least in the US, new research suggests.

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