Before You Hire a Tutor, Read This

It is officially back-to-school season, which means parents everywhere are once again buying 74 glue sticks, searching Amazon for the exact brand of 0.7 mm mechanical pencil specified by a teacher who apparently works for NASA, and convincing ourselves that THIS will finally be the year our child remembers where they put their water bottle. Spoiler alert: they will not. You can label it. You can AirTag it. You can have its name embroidered in giant fluorescent letters. By October, some other child named Mason will be drinking out of it.

But underneath all of the ridiculousness of back-to-school season is something parents genuinely care deeply about:

Not just get better grades. How do we help our kids pay attention, remember what they learn, manage frustration, become independent thinkers and eventually become adults capable of functioning without texting us from college to ask how long milk lasts?

This is where things get interesting, because when you dig through the research, some of the biggest predictors of academic success aren’t the things we obsess over. They’re not necessarily the expensive tutor, the “brain supplement,” the private school, the five extracurriculars or the $19.99 educational app promising to transform your second grader into a Rhodes Scholar before bedtime. Some of the strongest modifiable factors are surprisingly ordinary.

Researchers pooled 448 studies involving more than 480,000 families and found that parental involvement generally helps—but not always in the ways you might expect. In fact, one very common type of involvement was associated with worse academic outcomes. And when it comes to parenting style, the approach most consistently linked with school success isn’t being overly strict or overly permissive, but something right in the middle.

So for this upgraded article, I went much deeper than “get enough sleep and eat your vegetables.” I looked at the research on parenting styles, parental involvement, homework, reading, cognitive stimulation, exercise, sleep, breakfast, food quality, screens and the home environment to figure out something much more useful:

Because personally, I would rather know that than buy another pack of glue sticks.

For paid subscribers, let’s get into the actual playbook.