It begins on the day our kids start to teethe, as we do backflips to distract them from the pain, and continues all the way through their teenage years, when we bribe them with video games to extract a few minutes of math. Now comes a book from a real scientist who has taken that experi­mentation further and deployed every last piece of data on his own kids so that the rest of us can benefit from the results. 

Emboldened by his keen understanding of cutting-edge research, Dalton Conley makes a series of unorthodox parenting moves. Just to name a few: He bribes his kids to do math because a study in Mexico indicates that conditional cash transfers improve kids’ educational achievement. He gives his children weird names to teach them impulse control because evidence shows that kids with unusual names learn not to react when their peers tease them. Conley tries a placebo on his son when the school wants to medicate him for ADHD, because studies prove the placebo effects are almost as big as those of the actual drugs. Parentology reports the results of Conley’s experiments as a father, demonstrating that, ultimately, what matters most is love and engagement. 

Dalton Conley is University Professor at New York University. He holds faculty appointments in NYU's Sociology Department, School of Medicine and the Wagner School of Public Service. He also serves as an Adjunct Professor of Community Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and as a Research Associateat the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). In a pro bono capacity, he is Dean of Arts and Sciences for the University of the People--a tuition-free institution committed to expanding access to higher education. He has previously served as Dean for the Social Sciences and Chair of Sociology at NYU. Conley’s research focuses on the determinants of economic opportunity within and across generations.

Lisa Belkin has just been named Senior National Correspondent for Yahoo News, reporting on social issues and trends. Most recently she was Senior Columnist at The Huffington Post, where she covered life, work and family. She joined HuffPost in 2011 after a multi-decade stint at The New York Times, where she was variously a national correspondent a medical reporter, a Contributing Writer for The New York Times Magazine and the creator of the Life’s Work column and the Motherlodeblog. The author of three books --Life’s Work, Confessions of an Unbalanced Mom, Show Me A Hero, and First, Do No Harm-- and the editor of two anthologies, Belkin was also the host of Life’s Work with Lisa Belkin, on XM Radio, as well as a regular contributor to Public Radio’s The Takeaway and NBC’s Today Show. She is a visiting professor in the Humanities Council at Princeton University, teaching narrative non-fiction as an instrument of social change.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a Martin Luther King Visiting Associate Professor at MIT working within the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies. He is an Atlantic senior editor and writer with influential articles including, "This is How We Lost to the White Man". His Atlantic blog—a lesson in how to thoroughly engage a community of readers—was named by Time as one of the 25 Best in the World. His first book, The Beautiful Struggle, is a tough and touching memoir of growing up in Baltimore during the age of crack. Coates is currently writing his first novel, about an interracial family in pre-Civil War Virginia. He is a former writer for The Village Voice, and a contributor to Time, O, and The New York Times Magazine.