Not sure if you're being fun or patronizing, but I'll assume the former in good faith.
Regardless, this is a highly contrarian position. In fact a recent article [1] comes to the same conclusion, as well as how controversial said conclusion is.
Almost every study on early childhood development and later outcomes shows that how a child is raised has very little to do with outcomes compared to heredity.
Lots of identical twin and adoption studies make a very convincing case that almost none of this stuff comes from parenting style and upbringing. It's all genetics.
On the average it may be 100% right, but of you zoom in, you will see a bunch of problems.
For example:
- kids turning out really poorly if they have bad parenting. Magnitude matters too.
- I suspect the data is not capturing kids that literally died (is the fentanyl crisis over? Are those kids counted?)
- some parenting groups likely have lopsided outcomes (Ie kids from yougest parents may turn out badly, while those from older parents may not be impacted at all)
In conclusion. Outcomes are strongly tied to genetics up to a breaking point, where if the "parenting" variable is so deficient, things go bad, fast.
My contention is that parenting doesnt matter at all on average, except that when it does, it's the main determinant for outcome.
And further, i posit that this parenting variable is increasingly worse over time.
We are questioning how much the parenting has an affect on the child. The parents are self-selected and so are more likely to be similar to each other.
Agreed; this study seems to only find correlations between parenting and happiness/success in life.
What if some children grow up in certain ways regardless of how they're raised, and this is what causes them to have shitty relationships with their parents? Maybe some kids don't get good parenting simply because they became little shits? And then this carried on into their lives?
Current thought about parenting (environmental effects) vs parents (trait heritability) is that one's parents has more a role than how one is parented.
If the study reflects a reproducible effect, it could be genetic, i.e., the strictness of the parents and their kids are simply reflections of similar inherited traits.
I was amused when the "tiger mom" articles came out, and wondered about trying to be such a parent myself. I quickly realized that I don't have the self discipline and emotional stamina to pull it off, whether I think it's a good idea or not. For this reason, telling me that it's how I should raise my kids is a moot point.
The notion that parents have much to do with how kids turn out is a myth: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/blueprint/201809/par.... It’s just something old white guys said in the 1960s without support, like Jungian archetypes and things like that. Somehow it’s become part of the unexamined truth of society.
Behavioral genetics research has found that "parenting" has little or no effect on most measurable criteria. The scare quotes around parenting are because the definition of it is precise: the component of the child's environment that is shared by siblings.
Didn't listen to the podcast, but if the thesis is borrowed from Judith Rich Harris[0], then the GP's claim is still valid. To wit, parents' parenting practices have limited impact on their children (vs. peers and genetics) but their success and income do (via genetics and the influence of wealth over peer environment).
"To parents besieged by expert advice, a new scientific idea offers relief: it’s no big deal how you raise your children. Originally proposed by Judith Rich Harris in The Nurture Assumption..."
Well wait, have read a book by Judith Rich Harris (her followup to The Nurture Assumption, called "No Two Alike"). The basic thesis is that children have their own personality, and it's not the result of how their parents molded them to be this, that, or the other. She never says that it's ok to do a bad job as a parent, or denies that pathological cases of parenting can do damage.
There's an idea, going back centuries (perhaps millenia) that if you control the child's environment, you can control what kind of person they grow up to be. More recently, there's the idea that if you make any mistakes in parenting, your child will be scarred for life. Judith Rich Harris was saying that there is such a thing as "good enough parenting", and it does not require perfection, and moreover children are not blobs of clay that you can mold into whatever you want. If it were so, then generations of parents would not have been trying desperately to force their homosexual children to be straight, and nonetheless fail, and you would not have so many cases where one sibling is the black sheep of the family while the others overachieve. Children have their own nature, and no two are alike, is what JRH said, and it was in contradiction to what Skinner and other behaviorists had said. The evidence is overwhelming that she is correct.
I looked at your links, but I'm still not sure I buy it. All of these seem to quote the same study, and it doesn't involve any child under 3, which is actually where a lot of early childhood development happens. That's the time when a child who's left alone in a room will basically turn into a vegetable.
I do agree that there's no magic formula for being a great parent. The baby Beethoven phenom, best color to paint your baby's room, etc are indeed useless. But that's good parents who actually care trying to read studies and be better. These parents are involved, and care. Not all parents are like that.
From your second article:
"In fact, the study found one key instance when parent time can be particularly harmful to children. That’s when parents, mothers in particular, are stressed, sleep-deprived, guilty and anxious."
This sounds like exactly the kind of thing that would happen less with older, more established parents.
On the other hand, if the parents can't hold a job, or are addicted to drugs, I think you'd be hard pressed to say that doesn't have an effect on childhood outcomes. If anything, parents who are criminals are more likely to have children that are criminals.
If you want to say criminality is genetic, that's a fair argument. But I believe it's more likely to be about class/race/means, and is a set of learned behaviors.
I think there's a limit to how good parenting can affect outcomes to the positive (genetics). But I also think bad parenting can't be ruled out. And none of these studies talk about sub-par parenting.
Not really, it's a valid correlation that children raised well generally have better relationships with their parents.
Sometimes children are raised well and turn out to be little shits, but given that we're not drafting a scientific study in the comment section conversational generalities should be forgiven, unless you want every conversation to be so paralyzed by pedantry that no real content is discussed.
The other half is mostly unshared environment (peers, etc.) Of course the parents affect both indirectly. But parenting style matters very little compared to genetics and who your kids are around.
The author points out something he may not have even intended: that parenting might not matter at all, despite the raging discussions about which parenting style is better.
In fact, lots of research on twins and adopted children suggests that parenting matters very little in shaping a child's personality and skills, while biology and peer groups matter a lot. Identical twins turn out quite similar regardless of whether they grow up in the same family, while adopted siblings are as different as any random people. (Check "How the Mind Works" by Pinker for a great overview.) People have a hard time accepting this, since most would like to believe that they have a power to shape their children, but this does not make it any less true.
> the Immigration Act of 1965... didn't just abolish racial quotas, it also created preference categories for science, math and engineering-trained immigrants to come over.
Ah, so Asian immigrants to the US are far from an unbiased sample of their original populations! This explains a lot more than bitter fights over parenting.
reply