From the “duh” file: Reasoning with your child as opposed to commands gives them cognitive advantages, according to a couple studies published in Newsweek.

In one of the studies due out early next year in the journal of Developmental Psychology, researchers spent more than a year studying two dozen Mexican-American families, observing real-world mother-child interactions like those between Xenia and Paulino. Mexican-American kids were found to spend around twice as much time watching television than reading. But the study’s most striking results had to do with parenting techniques. Of the more than 1,400 exchanges that researchers documented of a mother wanting her child to do something, a mere 8 percent included “reasoning,” while just 9 percent included clarification of what the child should be doing instead. By far the biggest category was “direct verbal commands,“ which accounted for 42 percent of parenting efforts. (Incidentally, the overall success rate with these strategies was almost 75 percent.) Other studies have found that white parents deploy reasoning techniques more than a third of the time—”inviting more complex thought and language development” as they do so, according to Bruce Fuller, a UC Berkeley professor of education and public policy, who coauthored the research.

In a second article, Fuller and colleagues found that parenting by declaration rather then explanation could undermine early childhood advantages within minority cultures. The work, due to be published this week in Maternal and Child Health Journal, tracked cognitive development among 8,000 children born in 2001, and found that Latino babies start life with significant benefits over other groups—including higher birth weights and lower mortality rates (two key factors in predicting brain performance). They also have mothers who eat better, and smoke and drink less than white or black peers, regardless of socioeconomic status. And they enter school with strong social skills and emotional stability. But despite being primed for success at birth, they soon lose ground when it comes to intellectual development: Latino kids fall up to six months behind their white counterparts in basic language and thinking skills by the time they are 2 or 3 years old, the study reports.

The results, say researchers, hold true even taking into account the poverty and scarce educational opportunities that many Latina mothers face relative to other populations. Among Mexican-American mothers, almost three fifths live in households that earn less than $25,000 a year (compared to one fifth of white mothers), and less than a third have completed college (compared with almost two thirds of white mothers). Similarly, Mexican-American mothers, and mothers of Hispanic descent in general, have higher birth rates than their white counterparts, meaning they care for more children at any one time. But even when compared to white children whose mothers share the same obstacles, Latino children still develop more slowly.

So next time your kid talks back to you, just think of how cognitively advanced he is! Okay, moving right along…

Newsweek writer Po Bronson cited a new study in the UK that shows children actually make a married couple happy. These findings contradict previous studies that show children make people less happy. I will let Bronson explain it:

Luis Angeles, an economist at the University of Glasgow, pulled 15 years of data on 9,000 households from the British Household Panel Survey. Life satisfaction in a variety of domains was part of that survey. According to his analysis, life satisfaction and happiness do indeed go down for those with kids – but that’s for all parents. When Angeles separated out married couples from all the others who have kids (cohabitating couples, separated couples, single parents never married, divorced parents), then a different story emerges: Kids do make married couples a little happier. And the more kids the better (up to three).

Perhaps what’s driving this data is less about kids and more about expectations. The vast majority of people who get married (not all!) want to have kids in their family. Doing so meets that expectation, and happiness is the result. By contrast, people do not expect to get divorced, and most single parents (with some important exceptions) didn’t plan to end up that way. Happiness might go down, but it’s wrong to suggest that kids caused the drop in happiness. It makes more sense that life not going to plan is causing the drop, and having kids when life doesn’t go according to plan makes getting back on track even more complicated.

What do you think? Have children made you happy? Don’t forget to take our informal poll!