Another top-level comment asks,

Is anyone willing to contribute insight or actionable information in the interest of a better discussion? The article is steadily climbing the front page, so this is clearly a popular topic.

I'll put in an edit to my first comment here to answer that question. This is advice based on the research I did as I brought up four children, beginning in 1992:

1) The book The First Three Years of Life[A] by the late Burton White is a good book about child development. His perspective on how (to use the title of another of his books[B]) to raise a happy, unspoiled child is helpful for parents.

2) Be open to shopping for educational choices. Don't assume the school down the street will do a good job, no matter where you live. We have mostly been homeschoolers as our children have grown up, and our firstborn sent me a very kind email on Father's Day two years ago telling me he is glad I did that. He still thinks so two years later.

3) The book The Optimistic Child[C] by Martin E. P. Seligman is good for teaching children how to deal with inevitable problems and setbacks of human life.

4) The book Mindset[D] by Carol Dweck is a very good book on helping young people and people of all ages to maximize their abilities. We have seen wonderful results from "growth mindset" with our two younger children, who are young enough not to have known any other mindset in our household.

5) Develop a network of parents who are your close friends--close enough friends to be real with and to vent with when parenting becomes challenging. It's too easy for parents to isolate themselves by wanting to keep up a show of not having challenges in their parenting.

[A] http://www.amazon.com/New-First-Three-Years-Life/dp/06848041...

[B] http://www.amazon.com/Raising-Unspoiled-Parents-Develop-Secu...

[C] http://www.amazon.com/Optimistic-Child-Safeguard-Depression-...

[D] http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-Psychology-Success-Carol-Dweck...

Having written that, I'm open for more discussion. What's below is my original comment on the submitted article.

Here is the gist of the article, in the author's own words: "I think a lot about parenting. Last year, I moved to the D.C. area after 16 years in Oregon. Although I grew up on the East Coast, I hadn’t been immersed in the competitive parenting scene since I left home for college. But since my husband and I returned, I’ve caught myself fretting over whether enrolling my daughter in the “right” activities — sports or academic enrichment? Karate or Odyssey of the Mind? Or both? — will guarantee her entrance into a good college and success in life.

"I don’t have time to talk about parenting with the moms of my daughter’s friends, and, besides, they’re all going through the same thing I am. I started thinking about the people who have raised successful children, and I wanted to explore how they did it."

She then relates anecdotes about various families she has encountered, who have had children who appear to be successful by differing definitions of success. Good for them. As a parent myself (four children, one grown up and launched into adult life, and three still in my care in my household), I thought I might see some actionable information here, but I really didn't. The experiences of the families described in the article differ enough from mine that even after reading the whole article, I will seek other sources of advice on how to continually refine my parenting.

Collections of anecdotes like this suffer from problems that everyone who reads Hacker News knows about, and anecdotes about effective parenting suffer from one more problem that a lot of people miss. Any collection of anecdotes suffers from sample bias: how do we know that these families are representative of the many millions of other families who have either unsuccessful or successful children? A collection of anecdotes about people who reach some defined endpoint suffers from "survivorship bias,"[1] the tendency to look only at what the people who reach the endpoint have in common, without looking at how they differ from people who drop out of the competition to reach that endpoint. Maybe we have no idea, after looking at the successful, if any of their characteristics really make them different from the unsuccessful.

A powerful mistake in many studies of parenting is not setting up a genetically sensitive design for the study. All human beings everywhere have systematic similarities with all other human beings everywhere. But in the aspects of human life that show individual variation, usually people resemble close relatives more than they resemble random members of all humanity. If some individual differences contribute to success, and some do not, we may have observations of children who become successful not because their parents parented well, but because their parents passed on genes for success to the children. Any correlation between parent behaviors and child outcomes has to be tested for whether or not it arises from genetic similarity. (The study designs that help tease out these issues, but do NOT fully resolve them, involve including observations of identical twins and adopted children--and at best identical twins adopted into different adoptive households, who are rare--to separate upbringing influences from biological inheritance influences.) Children resemble their parents sometimes more than parents wish.

[1] http://youarenotsosmart.com/2013/05/23/survivorship-bias/

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-08-11/success-stor...