David Brooks not conservative

David Brooks cites some dubious observations from Annette Lareau like this:

Working-class child-rearing is different, Lareau writes. In these homes, there tends to be a much starker boundary between the adult world and the children's world. Parents think that the cares of adulthood will come soon enough and that children should be left alone to organize their own playtime. When a girl asks her mother to help her build a dollhouse out of boxes, the mother says no, "casually and without guilt," because playtime is deemed to be inconsequential ? a child's sphere, not an adult's. ...

To help the worse-off parents, we should raise the earned-income tax credit to lessen their economic stress.

It is debatable whether moms should be helping their daughters build dollhouses, but some govt handouts are not likely to change the moms' attitudes towards dollhouses. This is just leftist fuzzy thinking that ill-defined social problems can somehow be solved by throwing govt money at them.