Bringing Up Children

A READER WRITES: “As a mother of two young children with lives as busy as my own, I am constantly trying to do more than I can achieve. Sometimes with all of the multitasking, school runs, thank you notes and household responsibilities, not to mention my professional life, I feel like I am doing so many things, none of them as well as I could. My main priority, far and above anything else in my life, is my children, their happiness, stability, individualism and well-being. In your opinion, what are the most effective ways to be with one’s children? What is most important in terms of their emotional and mental development? Are there specific things we can do to help them grow up to reach their full potential?”

BB SAYS: Do the children of working mothers turn out differently to the children of non-working mothers? Answer: according to the studies, on average, there is no difference.

Spend time with your children because you love them. Spend time with them because they are a joy and a blessing. But don’t expect to be able to mould them as you please. Ultimately, their destiny is not in your hands.

According to the best evidence, parenting style has little or no influence on how children turn out. People find this idea outrageous, and even get angry at the mere suggestion of it. We are accustomed to thinking that every little move by a parent is going to have some massive effect on how their children turn out. This is a modern myth, that has unfortunately made parents neurotic and nervous. But Judith Rich Harris and Steven Pinker have provided considerable evidence and arguments, to the effect that how parents rear a child has few or no long-term effects on the child's personality, intelligence, or mental health. Here is what Pinker says:

“Hundreds of studies have measured correlations between the practices of parents and the way their children turn out. For example, parents who talk a lot to their children have kids with better language skills, parents who spank have children who grow up to be violent, parents who are neither too authoritarian or too lenient have children who are well-adjusted, and so on. Most of the parenting expert industry and a lot of government policy turn these correlations into advice to parents, and blame the parents when children don't turn out as they would have liked. But correlation does not imply causation. Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate. Until those studies are replicated with adopted children, who don't get their genes from the people who bring them up, we don't know whether the correlations reflect the effects of parenting, the effects of shared genes, or some mixture. When those studies are done, the results are that the parenting style has little or no influence.

We know that genes matter in the formation of personalities. Probably about half of the variation in personality can be attributed to differences in genes. People then conclude, well the other half must come from the way your parents brought you up: half heredity, half environment, a nice compromise. Right? Wrong. The other 50% of the variation turns out not to be explained by which family you've been brought up in. Concretely, here's what the behavioural geneticists have found. Everyone knows about the identical twins separated at birth that have all of these remarkable similarities: they score similarly on personality tests, they have similar tests in music, similar political opinions, and so on. But the other discovery, which is just as important, though less well appreciated, is that the twins separated at birth are no more different than the twins who are brought up together in the same house with the same parents, the same number of TV sets in the house, same number of books, same number of guns, and so on. Growing up together doesn't make you more similar in intelligence or in personality over the long run. A corroborating finding is that adopted siblings, who grow up in the same house but don't share genes, are not correlated at all. They are no more similar than two people plucked off the street at random. So no, it's not all in the genes, but what isn't in the genes isn't in the family environment either. It can't be explained in terms of the overall personalities or the child-rearing practices of parents.

So what are the non-genetic determinants of personality and intelligence, given that they almost certainly are not the family environment? Many people, still groping for a way to put parents back into the picture, assume that differences among siblings must come from differences in the way parents treat their different children. Forget it. The best studies have shown that when parents treat their kids differently, it's because the kids are different to begin with, just as anyone reacts differently to different people depending on their personalities. Any parent of more than one child knows that children are little people, born with personalities.”

For more details of how these conclusions were arrived at, and on the real factors that determine how children turn out, check out this link:

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/harris_children/harris_p2.html