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You don't really understand human nature unless you know why a child on
a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around - and
why his parents will always wave back. ~William D. Tammeus

One of the things about research is that you generally get answers to the questions you ask. If you make certain assumptions, like parents are generally doing well and a few are failing, then your questions are going to be about how do we reduce failure, rather than promote success - you don't look at the whole environment that leads to failure but focus on the failure itself. We don't have research on how a success focused parent environment performs because no one has even considered parenting in those terms, let alone considered researching it.

In some very surreal discussions with Treasury officials some time ago this point was raised. Their comment was that it was too difficult to measure value for money in educating a whole society (or even a community). However, they declared with certainty that if you let a family fail completely and then spend $15,000 on them you could easily measure an improvement in the parenting - you can't do that if you proactively up skill everyone. This philosophy is guiding our governments policy on families. The opposite philosophy guides the education, business, sports, and cultural environments.

Here are just a few questions that would be useful to have answers for (in no particular order):

Where is the world's best parenting environment and how does it differ from ours?
Why are women having children later in life (The average age is 8 years older than just thirty years ago)?
What is the impact of the Student Loan Scheme on those wishing to start families?
What does a good parent friendly workplace look like.
How much do parents generally know and understand about their role?
-Age appropriate information on child development (especially with teenagers)?
-Parenting styles?
-Behaviour management techniques and discipline?
-Nutrition?
-The school system and curriculum?
Are there connections between the level of skills parents have and self esteem?
What connections are there between success (and failure) and parenting technique and knowledge?
Which tax structure (internationally) encourages more proactive parenting.
And many many more - while children are the target of extensive government research, parents are not.

Can you help - we need to find and publish existing research on family performance pre and post parent education. We need research on the impact of esteem on parenting quality (and vice versa). We need current thinking on work life balance and especially the concept of "edges of work stress" and any measurement of this.

world's best parenting environment