{"id":8040,"date":"2013-06-20T21:22:42","date_gmt":"2013-06-21T01:22:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=8040"},"modified":"2013-06-20T21:22:42","modified_gmt":"2013-06-21T01:22:42","slug":"kids-these-days-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2013\/06\/20\/kids-these-days-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Kids These Days"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>SteelyKid&#8217;s preschool &#8220;graduation&#8221; was today, and in addition to a certificate with her name on it, she got a CD of her class&#8217;s favorite songs and a composite picture of her class. I&#8217;d include an image, but it wouldn&#8217;t reproduce well, and anyway, I try not to post pictures of other people&#8217;s kids. What I will do, however, is a rundown of what it says about Kids these Days, since the picture is made up of shots of the individual kids each holding a sign declaring what they want to be when they grow up.<\/p>\n<p>The class featured six boys and seven girls, so here are the results by gender, boys first because the kid in the upper left is male:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Construction Worker<\/li>\n<li>Scientist<\/li>\n<li>Recycling Man<\/li>\n<li>Construction Worker<\/li>\n<li>Police Officer<\/li>\n<li>Baseball Player<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And the girls:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Ballerina<\/li>\n<li>Doctor<\/li>\n<li>Lifeguard<\/li>\n<li>Astronaut<\/li>\n<li>Police Officer<\/li>\n<li>Dentist<\/li>\n<li>Scientist<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>What conclusions can we draw from this? Well, clearly, this indicates that girls are way more ambitious than boys. At least two-thirds of boys plan to pursue professions requiring relatively little education (I&#8217;m not sure whether &#8220;Recycling Man&#8221; is a sanitation worker or a superhero). Meanwhile, nearly 60% of girls plan to pursue careers requiring many years of training and dedicated study (nearly 30% in the health professions), and an additional 15% plan to pursue the creative arts.<\/p>\n<p>Now, I know what you&#8217;re saying: &#8220;Dude, there are only a baker&#8217;s dozen kids in her class. Can you really draw sweeping sociological conclusions from this?&#8221; And, sure, the statistical power of this sample is basically nil. But ask yourself this: Do you think that would stop CNN? Or the <cite>New York Post<\/cite>? Of course not. So why wouldn&#8217;t I get a blog post out of it?<\/p>\n<p>(Actually, it&#8217;s a cute idea perfectly designed to make most parents say &#8220;Awwwww&#8230;&#8221; right now, and most of the kids cringe ten years from now when they run across it in a box of miscellaneous memorabilia. And the most &#8220;Awwwww&#8230;&#8221; moment for me? SteelyKid&#8217;s the girl scientist.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>SteelyKid&#8217;s preschool &#8220;graduation&#8221; was today, and in addition to a certificate with her name on it, she got a CD of her class&#8217;s favorite songs and a composite picture of her class. I&#8217;d include an image, but it wouldn&#8217;t reproduce well, and anyway, I try not to post pictures of other people&#8217;s kids. What I&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2013\/06\/20\/kids-these-days-2\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Kids These Days<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-silliness","category-steelykid","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8040\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}