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jess_mango's review against another edition
3.0
Weird little book. I went into this hoping it would be akin to Freakanomics but about parenting. In each chapter the author focuses on a different area of parenting such as education, discipline and naming your child. It's hard to determine when the author is being serious and presenting research and his experiences and when he's being tongue in cheek.
jenniepicky's review against another edition
1.0
Read to the end of Chapter 4. I just didn't like the tone or style of the book at all...it seemed soft on the science and leaned more toward anecdotal evidence (I'm sure just to make the points, but I didn't like it.)
irishlibrarian's review against another edition
2.0
I thought there'd be more science and interesting studies. It ended up being mostly memoir and anecdotes about his own kids, which wasn't all that entertaining.
margaretefg's review against another edition
3.0
I am a big fan of Conley's memoir Honky, and I also appreciate several of his studies, like Pecking Order and Being Black, living in the Red, This book was lighter than any of those, but still hilariously funny, like Honky. I a found Conley's descriptions of balancing what he learns from scientific studies with what he hopes with his actual real life children endearing and funny. Although I do wonder if the book would have been different had Conley's kids not been so smart, a trait he clearly values and which is not perhaps entirely due to nurture. In the end I enjoyed reading the book...I don't really think C nlet is suggesting that others use his methods so much as he is mocking the whole notion of parental advice books, while still accepting that we modern parents will use every resource at our disposal to try to do the best by our children.
kristennd's review against another edition
2.0
He's... kind of a kook. I started having trouble with the argument to get your kids into special ed for the better teacher-student ratio, but I pretty much tuned out once he explained that it was fine for him to tease his children with the term retard because he's Italian. I love these books, usually. Brain Rules for Baby. NurtureShock. But despite being in Manhattan, this guy was just too Berkeley for me. I did read it all.
karibaumann's review against another edition
2.0
Parentology was billed as a book about the science behind parenting, maybe a little Freakonomics for child-raising. But it was actually about this weird guy and his unorthodox parenting techniques that he justifies using some statistics. I didn’t feel like I learned that much and it was disappointing overall.
babsduff's review against another edition
5.0
I loved it; Conley provides a kind of digest of recent research in parenting, written in an engaging, humorous, memoiristic style. Has already caused me to narrate everything I do in front of my child, using words as big as possible.
mvertel's review against another edition
2.5
An amusing memoir filled with scientific studies, parenting experiments, and first world problems.