Much of Conley’s professional research has focused on poverty, but he has a tin ear when it comes to class, confessing at one point, as if readers will be scandalized, “Yes, I had married a high school dropout.” In another passage, he reassures his kids that “life is a marathon” and even though he wasn’t at the top of his class back in fifth grade, “one of the smartest kids . . . was now unemployed and in dire straits. Noncognitive skills strike again.” Take that, person who was smarter than Dalton Conley in fifth grade and is now unemployed!

Conley is surely attempting to be tongue in cheek in his description of a “disturbing encounter,” when his kids were in elementary school, with the young son of some economist friends who “could do cube roots and figure out large number divisions in his head.” When Giovanni, the economists’ child, “rattled off the formula for the area of a triangle, I got mad. Real mad,” Conley writes. “Panicked that my kids were being left behind in the knowledge economy, I assuaged my anxiety by posing logic riddles to humiliate Giovanni and show off my kids’ talents.” Conley then signed his own children up for a pricey online math course offered by Stanford.

It’s just one of the moments in “Parentology” that read like some Internet parody: your worst humble-bragging-undermining-Park-Slope-Parenting nightmares made manifest. Another comes when Conley explains that he and his kids read so many books about prehistoric sharks that the word “ ‘megalodon’ became slang for ‘huge’ in our household.”

“Imagine my joy,” Conley writes of his son’s steadily improving reading scores, “when, on the fourth-grade high-stakes test, Yo scored at the top of his class on the English Language Arts statewide exam. By the end of fifth grade we had, at home, read the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” . . . Coleridge; Twain; Hemingway; the complete works of Rudyard Kipling. . . .”

“Parentology” finds some ballast in its final third, when — sadly enough — Conley’s carefully calibrated (but totally improvisational) approach to family falls apart: He and his wife divorce; Yo is given a diagnosis of attention-deficit disorder and is put on medication. I don’t mean to suggest that these events are gratifying — merely that they force Conley to calm down a bit, to acknowledge the possibility that nature may have played just as much of a role as his social science experiments.

“If my kids’ chances in life are largely determined by the DNA that their mother and I have passed on, all my math drilling and insistence on reading may have been of little added value,” he writes, comforting himself by noting, “On the other hand, all the things I did to mess them up probably won’t actually matter all that much in the end either.”

And even in the familial upheaval, he assures us, the now-adolescent E has begun a novel, and “she’ll have a lot better chance getting it published since winning the National Scholastic Art and Writing Awards Scholarship for her mini-memoir about her parents’ divorce.”