Perfect Parenting Part 2

The make-up of a name is what this chapter focus' on. Here Levit continues with his parenting ideas stating styles of names are predictors of future success and can be linked with certain groups of people. He also asks whether poor blacks tend to pick more obscure names or whether picking the names help to widen the gap between the rich and the poor. In this part he essentially questions whether or not naming your child a particularly black name will result in a lower economic status, or whether they are named according to their economic status. His research resulted in one large finding. According to Levit, applicants with caucasian names tended to get jobs more frequently than those who had generally african names. In general, he thinks that having a "black name" commonly results in acheiving lower in your lifetime.
I personally believe that this whole part is bullshit. I think that anyone could give their child any name and hes has just as good of a chance of being a success/failure as anyone else in the wolrd. However, i do believe that poor and broken-apart families tend to name their children with new or obscure names. There fore, many of the children who grow up and turn out bad in this group give obscure names a bad reputation.
The auhtor aslo analyzies how names become popular among the white communtity. In his analysis he found that well-off families tend to make odd names popular. Then, the name slowly makes it down the ladder until it reaches the lower class. I believe that this trend tends to be true. My mother works as a kindergarden teacher for a community with alot of high income families, therefore she sees many very interesting names get their introduction in her class room.

What makes a perfect parent??

This chapter deals with the author analyzing the different ways in which children grow up. Some of these include socioeconomic status and even race. Oddly enough, the author found that children growing up with a swimming pool were much more likely to die young. In fact he believes that swimming pools were 100 times more dangerous than a gun. Having swam since the age of two, i dont agree with his statistics. Swimming growing up had no negeative effect on me, in fact, it pushed me to become a lifeguard for my local pool.
The author also has several other odd trends which he claims to be true. First, he says his research shows that kids with "white" names are far more likely to be hired for a job. Although getting a job depends on many other variables other than just your name,i found this to be somewhat true. Most of the successful leaders of business have standard Amreican names. On the other hand alot of the people who work at convenience stores tend to have odd, unheard of names. Further more, the author found that names that are considered to be "black" are found in many low income jobs. To me this sounds like a partially true statement. Although there are many interesting names in the lower class, it has nothing to do with how you turn out in life. For example, if i named my future child a "black" name, this doesnt mean that he/she will not succeed in life.
IN general i thought that the authors opinions in this chapter were very stereotypical. Also, i believe that this chapter could have been fueled by the fact that the author himself lost a child due to illnes. He may simply be trying to justify the death of his child.