In Slate there is an important piece up, The Early Education Racket, which attempts to reassure upper middle striving types that it isn't the end of the world if their children don't get into the right preschool. It is important because there are many people out there with lots of money (or perhaps more accurately, just enough money) and no common sense. Though the author, Melinda Wenner Moyer, offers that she's not "making a Bell Curve argument here," the general thesis that there are diminishing returns to inputs on childhood environment is well known to anyone with a familiarity with behavior genetics. Here's a piece in Psychology Today from 1993, So Long, Superparents:The limits of parental influence: Why good parentsneed not attempt superhuman feats:
Now comes the insult. "Good enough" parents do the child-rearing job just as well as superparents, claim psychologists Sandra Scarr, Ph.D., and David Rowe, Ph.D. Middle-class ...
