24 ms·

It matters how you raise your kids

118 points by dash2 4y ago

Havoc 4y ago
Must admit I'm a little surprised there is anyone seriously claiming it doesn't. At most I would have expected debate about the degree to which it matters
- TeaDrunk 4y ago
  I don't think anyone is claiming it doesn't. It looks more like a huge misframing of existing studies that say you are unlikely to change the fundamental aspects of an individual human, such as personality and intelligence, through raising. That is to say you can teach a child behaviors such as good study habits but you are unlikely to train your child into a self-disciplined personality. I think this article is exaggerating the danger of "maybe chill out a bit with parenting, there are some things you can't change and that's ok" by conflating it with "don't raise your kids, folks!"
- fullshark 4y ago
  You can always find someone claiming what people want to believe, market forces for ideas in action. "Kids don't need to be in school, learning from home is just as good" was something a lot of people seriously claimed and believed because everyone wanted to believe it for a 3-12 month period for example. It would be great if we didn't have to stress about a lot of the things that cause us stress wouldn't it? Edit: I meant zoom classroom meetings in my example which is what schooling became when the pandemic started, not homeschooling with a motivated parent, emphasis on motivated.
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    Motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug.
  - naveen99 4y ago
    Learning from home would be better for a lot of children who eventually go on to work from home. In an era of Uber, personal computer phones and apple watches, children have way less autonomy than they should. When I was 5 years old, I could roam my village from home to market on my own or with my cousins. Modern schools are way too jail like. It will be a sad day when they start putting artificially intelligent children in straightjackets. atleast they can roam free on twitter today.
  - cassac 4y ago
    I would argue learning from home wouldn’t be “just as good” but would often times actually be better. Especially in todays climate where academics are taking a back seat to other priorities. I find it strange you chose that as the topic, care to elaborate why you think that?
    - fullshark 4y ago
      I chose it because I found it illustrative, given the whiplash we experienced on the merits of it in the last 2 years. There's now a lot of people writing papers about learning loss and how children have fallen behind. The vast majority of parents I believe agree that learning from home was clearly inferior in a multitude of ways. And yet you want to debate it, so I guess it's also illustrative of my main point, that if people want to believe something, they will slice and dice data or subjectively add/remove nuance and skepticism to key evidence in order to reach desired conclusions.
      - cassac 4y ago
        Ohhhhhhh, I see. You are talking about distance learning and I thought you were talking about home schooling. So no need to debate as I agree distance learning is garbage for most kids and most teachers.
        fullshark 4y ago
        Yeah didn't occur to me to use "distance learning" instead of "homeschooling" and I caused some confusion, my mistake.
  - mikkergp 4y ago
    It seems like the research suggests that homeschooled students do better than public school taught students, but I wonder if there is a standard definition for homeschooled student? I'm imagining a parent with a small chalkboard and three children learning their ABC's and I don't think that's it. I could teach my kid computer science and math, but if they needed AP English or Chemistry, I'd probably need some help. Also, after reading 'educated', I wonder how the research may be biased towards parents who are comfortable enough with the system to allow their kids to be included in the research.
    - fullshark 4y ago
      Sorry I didn't mean a motivated homeschooling parent in my example, I meant calling into a classroom zoom meeting, which is what school was for the majority of children for 3-12 months during the pandemic. I ultimately believe school quality is largely driven by teacher quality, and some homeschooling parents are high quality teachers, and therefore can deliver good results for their children.
- dathinab 4y ago
  Well, I __wonder__ how likely it is that deep researching the researchers which do such claims will show links the white supremacists or other groups with extreme race theories. In the end the content the first paragraphs quote is pretty close to what Hitler Germany propagate... (except that it doesn't speak out the conclusion Hitler Germany propagated and instead subtle implies it).
febeling 4y ago
The idea that parents don't matter is far fetched. All developmental trauma is the work of parental neglect and abuse, and that's so widespread today.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Beyond just abuse, much (not all) mental illness comes down to a child's brain calibrating itself for the environment of childhood clashing with the actual experience of the adult world. Mismatch of these two is a major cause of mental illness.
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    Can you elaborate on the last part? And what leads to the conclusion that absence of value judgement is the cause of so much illness?
    - colechristensen 4y ago
      Edited the comment to remove "without value judgement", English is ambiguous and the sentence I wrote could be interpreted several ways, most of which I didn't intend. It should be more clear now.
- wffurr 4y ago
  Maybe all you can do is fuck it up to a greater or lesser degree, but there's not much you can do that matters in the other direction.
  - mantas 4y ago
    Not fucking up is the other direction.
  - mmmpop 4y ago
    I've been reliably informed for about the past year and a half that having a degenerate child is in no way a reflection of the character of a parent, unless we're talking about the 4 years before that when actually, wait, that's not the case at all.
powvans 4y ago
Of course it matters! And yes, there are many aspects of who your kids are that just are. Nature is powerful. Nurture matters too. When I first became a parent I thought that all the things that I would do would build them up and make them great. This isn’t the right viewpoint. As a parent you have much more power to screw them up than to make them great. Why? Because parenthood is subject to the same principles as all constructive endeavors. The most important to remember as a parent is that it is far easier to destroy than to create. Of course they are resilient and they are strong, but your ability to screw them up is stronger than your ability to mold them into your vision of success.
- johnwheeler 4y ago
  Every once in a while you read a comment on hacker news that crystallizes your intuition about something. Your last paragraph is especially powerful and something I will incorporate into my thinking going forward.
- geranim0 4y ago
  >Mold them into your vision of success I don't want to mold my children into anything. They can find their own way to be successful, and I'll be there to support them into whatever they choose to do.
  - trey-jones 4y ago
    I support the spirit of your declaration. I'm all for kids choosing their own life, free of their meddling parents. But: Make no mistake, by virtue of being a parent, you will mold your children into something. It's your responsibility not to allow that something to be objectively bad for society. It's possible that objectively bad for society is a very, very narrow range of behaviors. It's possible that objectively bad for society doesn't exist, and a society made up of a bunch of murdering sociopaths is just fine to some people. Certainly, support your children in (mostly) whatever they choose to do. But you're also going to need to lead their interests to some degree, providing opportunities for them to discover their interests. And the opportunities and experiences that you choose to provide are already molding them.
spicyusername 4y ago
This reminds me of that quote from Anna Karenina. > All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. One thing I think isn't being emphasized is that those authors aren't saying "parenting doesn't matter" as much as they're saying "you have little control over what kind of parental environment you provide, so relax and do the best you can". You don't control your genes, your kids genes, and you don't control your environment. Those are the (super overly simplistic) factors that comprise parenting. Another way to look at it is that, given your genes and the way you were raised, you're going to be a certain kind of parent. Given your kids genes, the way you raise them, and their experiences, they're going to be a certain kind of adult. You don't have control over any of that as a parent, so relax and enjoy the ride.
- blfr 4y ago
  But you do control your kids genes massively through mate choice. This is what Plomin captures with parents matter, but they don’t make a difference.
- jfk13 4y ago
  > and you don't control your environment Surely you do control your environment, at least to some degree. E.g. when we were house-hunting, one of the factors that weighed pretty heavily was the environment (neighbourhood, schools, etc.) that we'd be putting our kids in by choosing a given home.
  - spicyusername 4y ago
    Right, but the kinds of choices you are going to make are dictated by the kind of person you are. The kind of person you are is dictated by your genes are your past experiences. All those factors are out of your control. You were (are) only ever going to do the kinds of things you're going to do. So, in the context of parenting, stressing about what kind of parent you should be is meaningless. You're always only ever going to be the kind of parent you're going to be and your kids are only ever going to respond to that parenting in the way that they respond. Amusingly, this also means that parents who are going to stress about being the right kind of parent are always going to do that anyways.
bitcharmer 4y ago
I struggled initially to comprehend the title with no punctuation. And have to admit I'm not a fan of depriving our communication of it. A trend that seems to be getting more and more popular these days.
mikkergp 4y ago
It seems this article's point is debunking a myth that parents have no impact on their children, and I'm sure that's not true, It's not a coincidence both my parents were in tech and I'm in tech. It doesn't seem this article is really emphasizing or trying to make a point about good parenting. I think that parents impact on their children is particularly tru at the extreme ends of parenting where there are some extreme outcomes, as someone who is about to become a parent, I think my philosophy is going to be, do my best, work on myself, try to learn from my mistakes and don't obsess about it. I think like most things in life, trying too hard is just as bad as not trying hard enough. I doubt most of us are even capable of the discipline it would require to be "perfect parents" anyways.
bigodbiel 4y ago
nurture has very little upside but infinite downside, so it damn well matters.
colechristensen 4y ago
In books and lectures available on YouTube, Robert Sapolsky really goes in to nature, nurture, and the effects of both which clearly rejects "it doesn't matter how you raise your kids" but also underlines that there are also strong genetic factors that you have little opportunity to change. Your future is not written in your genetics, nor are you a blank slate, a lump of clay free to mold into anything. Genetics gives you a range of possibilities, experience gives you a path through them. There is an understandable but wrong motivation to free people from the guilt of any of their actions by saying things like "it doesn't matter". Yes, we do need to reject the extreme helicopter-parent attempt to achieve perfection, it's toxic and not all that helpful. Doing it by claiming nothing matters at all is wrong. Sapolsky has several good series of lectures on The Great Courses, an into human behavior Stanford course on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA , and a few books including Behave. (there is a lot of overlap between all of these, you'll get bored hearing the same thing if you consume multiples)
Waterluvian 4y ago
The idea is so manifestly ridiculous that I suspect those who think it is true, want it to be true. Something I notice more and more as I age is that there’s a type of person who regularly externalizes responsibility. They seem to need excuses to absolve themselves of responsibility. Parenting has been made so difficult by ever increasing standards of health and living, in conjunction with the continued fracturing of the extended family. It makes me wonder if externalization is a way to reconcile the impossible situation foisted upon many parents. My wife and I have two kids under 6. We have a lot of money but almost zero family support. We cannot even begin to comprehend how people raise larger families with less. It seems impossible given how we barely get by at a socially acceptable standard.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  > We have a lot of money but almost zero family support. Relying on family support right now with like no money . I’m amazed at parents who have little money and no family support and sometimes work multiple jobs. Lot of respect for those people as it must be hard and they power on.
- starkd 4y ago
  It may be surprising, but children care less about the extras than adults do. They may outwardly complain about not having things other children have, but when they are grown, their predominant memories are not going to be shaped by that. They are likely going to be more emotionally distressed at remembering how their parents never spent enough time with them, because they were too busy at work making the money to buy all the expensive accomodations. Kids are resilient, and have a great imagination. Much of the busy work we subject them to only suppresses the imagination. As my uncle used to say, everyone he knew grew up poor, but they didn't even know they were poor until they grew up.
  - cyberlurker 4y ago
    I think things like tiktok and instagram have made it difficult to not know/think you are poor.
dathinab 4y ago
From what I know: - The subtle interactions of the parents with the child during very early child hood can have a big effect on the child. - It's possible for parents to unknowingly partially pass trauma to their children, likely through such subtle interactions. - Even post very early childhood (but still in childhood) the subtle behavior patterns of their environment can have a massive impact. - Sometimes seemingly mundane random events can have a major impact on a child. - The behaviour of adults is often massively related to their child hood, through potentially in subtle ways. If that is true thinks which are hardly measurable (subtle behaviour pattern and random events during child hood can) have a huge impact on a adults behaviour. (Hardly measurable as anyone non-trained to recognize them will mostly only recognize this behavior patterns subconscious). I personally (from experience/what I read/what I heard from others) would say that many such things have more influence then the "raising strategy actively chosen by the parent" (assuming it's decent, non abusive). Under the assumptions that this is true studies which try to evaluate raising strategies (and e.g. comparing them to genetics) are pretty much impossible to do , as long as the strategy doesn't have extreme drastic effects, and from what I know the only strategies with extreme effects are such which extreme negative effect, i.e. child abuse. Interestingly the given bullet points do very well explain .. a lot. From the vicious cycle around slums or "dangerous" black neighborhoods in the US. To why an adopted child then the non adopted similar aged children from the same parents (from some parents trying to see the child as their own, but subconsciously slightly failing resulting in subtle behavior differences in mimic and gestic to other people, family members or foreign people having a subtle different behaviour. Children notice that, subconsciously, especially during early child hood. And it might, sometimes affect them majorly in subtle ways.)
- dash2 4y ago
  So, how do you know these things? If they're so subtle and hard to measure, it seems as if questions of causality would be very hard to answer.
  - ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
    Additionally, the decision to go to therapy and deal with your own issues so you can be a better parent is a conscious parenting decision, which would never be taken if "parenting doesn't matter".
johndevor 4y ago
The ACE study shows just how wrong this is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_childhood_experiences#Adverse_Childhood_Experiences_Study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_childhood_experiences#...
- dash2 4y ago
  So you think ACEs aren't heritable? Wanna bet? Actually, I was curious about this and found https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-021-01538-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-021-01538-w - which indeed has Plomin as a coauthor. It's a twin study, and it does argue that ACE has an independent effect from genetics. In fairness to Plomin, I don't think his argument was ever that you couldn't screw up your children if enough bad things happened to them.
  - ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
    I think it goes without saying that an experience cannot be inherited, a term which exclusively applies to genes. If we want to rhetorically expand the term "inherited" to mean "a parent may visit upon their children something visited upon themselves", then that weakens the initial premise of genetics mattering and environment (which includes the one the parents present, consciously or unconsciously) does not.
    - em-bee 4y ago
      there was a study that traced obesity in a certain group of people in sweden to a famine in a town where the ancestors of these people lived several generations earlier. if that study is accurate then some experiences can translate into genetic effects.
    - dash2 4y ago
      No, what I mean is that identical twins will be more similar on measures of ACEs than non-identical twins. Of course events aren't in the genes, but the propensity to have events happen to you can very easily be in the genes. This might be surprising, but the history of behaviour genetics is basically "everything being surprisingly more heritable than people thought". Indeed, from the article I cited: "HPA-axis function and depression are both influenced by genetic factors, which could increase the individual’s vulnerability to ACEs"; and here's an article that shows that being a victim of violent crime has heritability of around 20%: https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.159.10.1675 https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.1....
orzig 4y ago
I was interested by their mention of "A 2021 systematic review of 102 randomised controlled trials"[0] so I looked it up. The effect size was 4x bigger in mid/low income countries. So, while a valuable result, it might not generalize to the the probable readers of this comment, who are likely in high income countries (and the high income parts of those countries). The more compelling argument IMHO is that few studies capture the nuance of parenting style and outcome, having to rely on aggregate factors like education level and income. I'm willing to be convinced that my specific parenting choices won't impact my kid's adult income, but I'm pretty sure it will impact concrete things like politeness, and potentially even downstream things like overall relationship satisfaction. [0] https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1003602 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
bjt2n3904 4y ago
I used to be involved in my church's youth ministry, and wound up tutoring a middle school boy in math. He really didn't have a lot going for him, and he often wound up at my place to do chores and help out -- which I paid him for. He had a lot of potential, and was fascinated with computers. He called me up one day, and wanted to hang out -- mentioned it was his 14th birthday. I couldn't say no. He showed me places his dad used to take him, we got food, played video games -- it was a great time. But towards the end of the night he got quieter and quieter, and spontaneously burst into tears. All he wanted was a call from his dad. High school was a roller coaster, but he graduated. He's off and working a well paying job right now, and happy. I still tutor math, but the thing I've started to notice is the absolute void that's left in a young man's life when his father is absent. Samuel Sey wrote[1] a bit on this, and the statistics are staggering. 1 - https://slowtowrite.com/absentee-fathers-not-guns-are-the-problem/ https://slowtowrite.com/absentee-fathers-not-guns-are-the-pr...
- dash2 4y ago
  I really sympathize with the POV of the article you link - having grown up with an absent father myself. But I feel forced to point out that it cites exactly the kind of statistic that gets hit by the original geneticists' critique. A guy who ducks out on parenthood may have genes which drive that kind of behaviour, and those may also be associated with other forms of bad stuff. Causality isn't so easy as that.
FollowingTheDao 4y ago
It is always nature AND nurture. Why is this still being debated? Probably because it means we have to look at each person as an individual, and that's hard. It means we have to be caring, observant, and patient. You know, that thing they call loving? What is true is that parents want "perfect" kids and they have a million people offering a million different ways to accomplish that goal, and that is driving them crazy. That might seem like it is driven by love, but it is driven by fear (FOMO), and that will damage a child.
lr4444lr 4y ago
If it didn't matter how you raised your kids, then we wouldn't see reliable pathologies, but we do: abusers and emotionally dysfunctional adults strongly correlate with certain parenting styles.
- paraph1n 4y ago
  Do you have any sources to share? I know too many counterexamples to just believe that without question.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  That's (overwhelmingly commonly) a system of two overlapping variables. The observed reliable pathology could be genetic or it could be parenting style. (I happen to agree with you that parenting style matters a lot, but mere observation of genetically intact families doesn't tell you as much as adoptive studies.)
downriver 4y ago
> They’ve focused a lot on IQ and personality — both constructs which were designed to be robust, i.e. hard to change, over time. I thought this was an interesting observation that suggests that a lot of “conclusions” in this space are actually tautologies. If nurture easily affected personality, we wouldn’t call it “personality” - what we call personality is exactly that which is unchanging in the face of a dynamic environment.
- CodeSgt 4y ago
  As an adult, yes. As a child, no. Personality takes time to form, infants aren't born with strong opinions or takes on any particular subjects.
  - AussieWog93 4y ago
    Do you have kids? They absolutely have noticeable personalities before their first birthday.
- ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
  >what we call personality is exactly that which is unchanging in the face of a dynamic environment I am of the exact opposite opinion, given how much peoples personalities can change given input (think of someone spending all their time alone, and being depressed, changing their lifestyle towards going out every few days to hang out with new friends, and reportedly now having a "cheery personality", or simply someone with no passions discovering theirs, and then feeling like there is meaning to life).
photochemsyn 4y ago
The claim this article is rebutting has been relentlessly promoted for over a hundred years, and can be summarized as: Societal outcomes for human beings are genetically determined. There are a lot of co-claims that go into this, such as intelligence being genetically determined, and that there's a competitive natural selection process that results in the most intelligent humans acquiring the most monetary wealth and political power and hence ending up atop the social pyramid. If you go back a few more centuries, you'll find essentially the same argument, but presented as religious determinism, i.e. the divine right of kings. This implied the obligation of the kings to be 'wise rulers of their people' as well as their right to absolute power, and that such rights would be passed on to their children: (Burgess 1992) The Divine Right of Kings Reconsidered, Oxford Historical Review https://sci-hub.se/10.2307/574219 https://sci-hub.se/10.2307/574219 It's not hard to see that the concept of inherited divine rights in the religious era has been passed on to the concept of inherited genetic superiority in the rational science era - both being arguments in favor of the status quo when it comes to the structure of existing social power/wealth pyramids. Now, the converse argument supported largely by Marxist theory in the 20th century is: Societal outcomes for human beings are socially determined. This is widely derided in right-libertarian circles as the 'blank slate' ideology, and it's true that the likes of Lysenko used this ideology to push really poor agricultural and scientific policies in the Soviet Union that entirely ignored the realities of natural selection and basic genetic concepts in plant breeding: (Borinskya et al. 2019) Lysenkoism Against Genetics... Oxford Historical Review https://sci-hub.se/10.1534/genetics.118.301413 https://sci-hub.se/10.1534/genetics.118.301413 > "Progress in genetics and evolutionary biology in the young Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was hindered in the 1930s by the agronomist Trofim Lysenko, who believed that acquired traits are inherited, claimed that heredity can be changed by “educating” plants, and denied the existence of genes." Those are roughly the two poles of the debate, and as usual, reality falls somewhere in between. Plants may not be all the 'educatable', but human beings certainly are. There also seems to be such a thing as 'innate human ability' at the upper end of the spectrum of physical and mental prowess - i.e. if we take the same human cohort, and supply them with identical training and educational opportunities, some will do better than others. However, the notion that 'IQ tests' are a reliable measure of inherited genetic intelligence is utter nonsense. In reality, children of wealthy parents tend to have far more access to educational opportunities than children of poor parents do (with outliers on both sides related to parental involvement as this article notes), so what we see in reality is highly skewed - not so much by genetic determinism, but by unequal opportunities and parental input. This seems like a solid, rational viewpoint.
abc_lisper 4y ago
Keeping aside the content, the article is hard to read. Lot of disjointed blabbering!
adverbly 4y ago
> parents matter, but they don’t make a difference This can clearly be refuted by the following argument: 1. Human nature has changed little over the past 10000 years 2. The capability of individuals has improved massively over the past 10000 years 3. Any improvement in capability must be due to environmental changes over the past 10000 years(nurture) as nature has not changed 4. Parents are responsible for a large part of your environment I don't see how this nature vs nurture debate ever became a thing. Smells like leftover thinking from racism or something. IMO the only debate should be around which aspects of the nurture environment are the most important. One more note to add: Interestingly, in homogeneous/"equal" environments, each individual is given effectively equal opportunity and environment - which will mean that the smaller nature-based differences will start to matter. So from a certain perspective, the more we fight for equal "competitive footing" in winner-take-all situations, the more will see nature-based properties mattering more, which comes with a whole whack of other problems (see the film GATTACA).
- dahart 4y ago
  > I don't see how this nature vs nurture debate ever became a thing. Smells like leftover thinking from racism or something. IMO the only debate should be around which aspects of the nurture environment are the most important. Agreed, this argument (#3) is all the proof we need for quite a few of the social debates we’re still having, including race. Gender equality is another one, people to this day suggesting that gender disparities might be due to “natural” preferences of men and women, while those preferences are in flux and different from country to country. It cannot be genetics, obviously, because genetics isn’t changing that fast. Too bad our human nature is such that we don’t always listen to reason. I would maybe add a 1a to clarify that human behavior has changed over the past 10k years, and using this lens is a good way to identify that behaviors that change are almost certainly nurture.
  - AussieWog93 4y ago
    >Gender equality is another one, people to this day suggesting that gender disparities might be due to “natural” preferences of men and women, while those preferences are in flux and different from country to country. For real? There are plenty of sex differences that exist across cultures (a big one being that men are comparatively more interested in tools, and less interested in other people) that for whatever reason educated people in the West love to deny.
rossdavidh 4y ago
"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.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  To quote the Montessori's in a similar vein, "Children are to be discovered, not moulded".
the__alchemist 4y ago
I think a conflation of parenting with education in general can shed light on this; here are some questions to ponder along those lines: - Could someone who's never learned calculus be expect to apply it to a problem? - Could someone with little experience in reading be expected to write well? - Could someone who had little education in his or her childhood, but taught a robust education in his 20s and 30s (or later) be expected to perform as someone who learned it younger? - If someone spends his 20s in jail, would you expect him to be able to get a white-color job afterwards? - A smart person does damage to his cognitive abilities by drugs etc, both acute and chronic/permanent. Is this a nature or nurture consideration? What about the genetic and environmental factors that lead to this drug use? - A smart person learns and becomes proficient at a skill in a month. A less-smart person struggles in the first month, but keeps at it, and becomes proficient in 6 months. For that skill, (This is almost a tautology), would they perform the task at an acceptable level? My point is that we should consider a model where capabilities are based on physical qualities that are largely unchangeable (for the better). A distinction from genetics: The base is genetics, but other things like injuries also play this. However, skills and learning are linked heavily with the nurture side. Genetics etc plays an important role of how well someone can learn something, but the learning still must occur through information acquired and sorted in the brain after birth. Stated another way: It's clear that humans (And to a lesser extent other mammals) rely on a childhood full of nurture and learning. Physical touch, social interactions, learning skills, etc. This alone is enough to debunk the strawman in the article, even if you recognize the critical role of genetics.
User23 4y ago
The thesis that it doesn’t matter how you raise your children is so manifestly stupid that it’s risible. It can be falsified with a single counter example. For example, there is absolutely no way the Polgar sisters would have become a chess prodigy had their father made different parenting choices. Same for W.A. Mozart and many other prodigies. Another more common example is the Asian-American tiger moms who vigorously push their children into academics and music. There’s no doubt that those children would turn out different if they were just raised on X-box and pizza rolls.
bboylen 4y ago
While I certainly agree with the author that it matters how you raise your kids, I think his rebuttal doesn't really respond to what the people he is disagreeing with are getting at. We all agree you should give loving attention to your newborn and read to your kids, but its the helicoptering and obscene optimization that modern parents are prone to that I have found people are pushing back on. All the studies he cites seem to focus on direct attention and behavior modeling as the key parental inputs. Maybe parents should just focus on being present/loving/educative and forget about the piano lessons and prestigious private schools.
- standardUser 4y ago
  For the vast, vast majority of parents, there is no threat of being able to afford private school or piano lessons, so let's remember when we have conversations like this that we're talking about 10-20% of families and ignoring the rest.

118 points by dash2 4y ago

Must admit I'm a little surprised there is anyone seriously claiming it doesn't. At most I would have expected debate about the degree to which it matters

TeaDrunk 4y ago
I don't think anyone is claiming it doesn't. It looks more like a huge misframing of existing studies that say you are unlikely to change the fundamental aspects of an individual human, such as personality and intelligence, through raising. That is to say you can teach a child behaviors such as good study habits but you are unlikely to train your child into a self-disciplined personality. I think this article is exaggerating the danger of "maybe chill out a bit with parenting, there are some things you can't change and that's ok" by conflating it with "don't raise your kids, folks!"
fullshark 4y ago
You can always find someone claiming what people want to believe, market forces for ideas in action. "Kids don't need to be in school, learning from home is just as good" was something a lot of people seriously claimed and believed because everyone wanted to believe it for a 3-12 month period for example. It would be great if we didn't have to stress about a lot of the things that cause us stress wouldn't it? Edit: I meant zoom classroom meetings in my example which is what schooling became when the pandemic started, not homeschooling with a motivated parent, emphasis on motivated.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  Motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug.
- naveen99 4y ago
  Learning from home would be better for a lot of children who eventually go on to work from home. In an era of Uber, personal computer phones and apple watches, children have way less autonomy than they should. When I was 5 years old, I could roam my village from home to market on my own or with my cousins. Modern schools are way too jail like. It will be a sad day when they start putting artificially intelligent children in straightjackets. atleast they can roam free on twitter today.
- cassac 4y ago
  I would argue learning from home wouldn’t be “just as good” but would often times actually be better. Especially in todays climate where academics are taking a back seat to other priorities. I find it strange you chose that as the topic, care to elaborate why you think that?
  - fullshark 4y ago
    I chose it because I found it illustrative, given the whiplash we experienced on the merits of it in the last 2 years. There's now a lot of people writing papers about learning loss and how children have fallen behind. The vast majority of parents I believe agree that learning from home was clearly inferior in a multitude of ways. And yet you want to debate it, so I guess it's also illustrative of my main point, that if people want to believe something, they will slice and dice data or subjectively add/remove nuance and skepticism to key evidence in order to reach desired conclusions.
    - cassac 4y ago
      Ohhhhhhh, I see. You are talking about distance learning and I thought you were talking about home schooling. So no need to debate as I agree distance learning is garbage for most kids and most teachers.
      - fullshark 4y ago
        Yeah didn't occur to me to use "distance learning" instead of "homeschooling" and I caused some confusion, my mistake.
- mikkergp 4y ago
  It seems like the research suggests that homeschooled students do better than public school taught students, but I wonder if there is a standard definition for homeschooled student? I'm imagining a parent with a small chalkboard and three children learning their ABC's and I don't think that's it. I could teach my kid computer science and math, but if they needed AP English or Chemistry, I'd probably need some help. Also, after reading 'educated', I wonder how the research may be biased towards parents who are comfortable enough with the system to allow their kids to be included in the research.
  - fullshark 4y ago
    Sorry I didn't mean a motivated homeschooling parent in my example, I meant calling into a classroom zoom meeting, which is what school was for the majority of children for 3-12 months during the pandemic. I ultimately believe school quality is largely driven by teacher quality, and some homeschooling parents are high quality teachers, and therefore can deliver good results for their children.
dathinab 4y ago
Well, I __wonder__ how likely it is that deep researching the researchers which do such claims will show links the white supremacists or other groups with extreme race theories. In the end the content the first paragraphs quote is pretty close to what Hitler Germany propagate... (except that it doesn't speak out the conclusion Hitler Germany propagated and instead subtle implies it).

febeling 4y ago

The idea that parents don't matter is far fetched. All developmental trauma is the work of parental neglect and abuse, and that's so widespread today.

colechristensen 4y ago
Beyond just abuse, much (not all) mental illness comes down to a child's brain calibrating itself for the environment of childhood clashing with the actual experience of the adult world. Mismatch of these two is a major cause of mental illness.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Can you elaborate on the last part? And what leads to the conclusion that absence of value judgement is the cause of so much illness?
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    Edited the comment to remove "without value judgement", English is ambiguous and the sentence I wrote could be interpreted several ways, most of which I didn't intend. It should be more clear now.
wffurr 4y ago
Maybe all you can do is fuck it up to a greater or lesser degree, but there's not much you can do that matters in the other direction.
- mantas 4y ago
  Not fucking up is the other direction.
- mmmpop 4y ago
  I've been reliably informed for about the past year and a half that having a degenerate child is in no way a reflection of the character of a parent, unless we're talking about the 4 years before that when actually, wait, that's not the case at all.

powvans 4y ago

Of course it matters! And yes, there are many aspects of who your kids are that just are. Nature is powerful. Nurture matters too. When I first became a parent I thought that all the things that I would do would build them up and make them great. This isn’t the right viewpoint. As a parent you have much more power to screw them up than to make them great. Why? Because parenthood is subject to the same principles as all constructive endeavors. The most important to remember as a parent is that it is far easier to destroy than to create. Of course they are resilient and they are strong, but your ability to screw them up is stronger than your ability to mold them into your vision of success.

johnwheeler 4y ago
Every once in a while you read a comment on hacker news that crystallizes your intuition about something. Your last paragraph is especially powerful and something I will incorporate into my thinking going forward.
geranim0 4y ago
>Mold them into your vision of success I don't want to mold my children into anything. They can find their own way to be successful, and I'll be there to support them into whatever they choose to do.
- trey-jones 4y ago
  I support the spirit of your declaration. I'm all for kids choosing their own life, free of their meddling parents. But: Make no mistake, by virtue of being a parent, you will mold your children into something. It's your responsibility not to allow that something to be objectively bad for society. It's possible that objectively bad for society is a very, very narrow range of behaviors. It's possible that objectively bad for society doesn't exist, and a society made up of a bunch of murdering sociopaths is just fine to some people. Certainly, support your children in (mostly) whatever they choose to do. But you're also going to need to lead their interests to some degree, providing opportunities for them to discover their interests. And the opportunities and experiences that you choose to provide are already molding them.

spicyusername 4y ago

This reminds me of that quote from Anna Karenina. > All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. One thing I think isn't being emphasized is that those authors aren't saying "parenting doesn't matter" as much as they're saying "you have little control over what kind of parental environment you provide, so relax and do the best you can". You don't control your genes, your kids genes, and you don't control your environment. Those are the (super overly simplistic) factors that comprise parenting. Another way to look at it is that, given your genes and the way you were raised, you're going to be a certain kind of parent. Given your kids genes, the way you raise them, and their experiences, they're going to be a certain kind of adult. You don't have control over any of that as a parent, so relax and enjoy the ride.

blfr 4y ago
But you do control your kids genes massively through mate choice. This is what Plomin captures with parents matter, but they don’t make a difference.
jfk13 4y ago
> and you don't control your environment Surely you do control your environment, at least to some degree. E.g. when we were house-hunting, one of the factors that weighed pretty heavily was the environment (neighbourhood, schools, etc.) that we'd be putting our kids in by choosing a given home.
- spicyusername 4y ago
  Right, but the kinds of choices you are going to make are dictated by the kind of person you are. The kind of person you are is dictated by your genes are your past experiences. All those factors are out of your control. You were (are) only ever going to do the kinds of things you're going to do. So, in the context of parenting, stressing about what kind of parent you should be is meaningless. You're always only ever going to be the kind of parent you're going to be and your kids are only ever going to respond to that parenting in the way that they respond. Amusingly, this also means that parents who are going to stress about being the right kind of parent are always going to do that anyways.

bitcharmer 4y ago

I struggled initially to comprehend the title with no punctuation. And have to admit I'm not a fan of depriving our communication of it. A trend that seems to be getting more and more popular these days.

mikkergp 4y ago

It seems this article's point is debunking a myth that parents have no impact on their children, and I'm sure that's not true, It's not a coincidence both my parents were in tech and I'm in tech. It doesn't seem this article is really emphasizing or trying to make a point about good parenting. I think that parents impact on their children is particularly tru at the extreme ends of parenting where there are some extreme outcomes, as someone who is about to become a parent, I think my philosophy is going to be, do my best, work on myself, try to learn from my mistakes and don't obsess about it. I think like most things in life, trying too hard is just as bad as not trying hard enough. I doubt most of us are even capable of the discipline it would require to be "perfect parents" anyways.

bigodbiel 4y ago

nurture has very little upside but infinite downside, so it damn well matters.

colechristensen 4y ago

In books and lectures available on YouTube, Robert Sapolsky really goes in to nature, nurture, and the effects of both which clearly rejects "it doesn't matter how you raise your kids" but also underlines that there are also strong genetic factors that you have little opportunity to change. Your future is not written in your genetics, nor are you a blank slate, a lump of clay free to mold into anything. Genetics gives you a range of possibilities, experience gives you a path through them. There is an understandable but wrong motivation to free people from the guilt of any of their actions by saying things like "it doesn't matter". Yes, we do need to reject the extreme helicopter-parent attempt to achieve perfection, it's toxic and not all that helpful. Doing it by claiming nothing matters at all is wrong. Sapolsky has several good series of lectures on The Great Courses, an into human behavior Stanford course on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA , and a few books including Behave. (there is a lot of overlap between all of these, you'll get bored hearing the same thing if you consume multiples)

Waterluvian 4y ago

The idea is so manifestly ridiculous that I suspect those who think it is true, want it to be true. Something I notice more and more as I age is that there’s a type of person who regularly externalizes responsibility. They seem to need excuses to absolve themselves of responsibility. Parenting has been made so difficult by ever increasing standards of health and living, in conjunction with the continued fracturing of the extended family. It makes me wonder if externalization is a way to reconcile the impossible situation foisted upon many parents. My wife and I have two kids under 6. We have a lot of money but almost zero family support. We cannot even begin to comprehend how people raise larger families with less. It seems impossible given how we barely get by at a socially acceptable standard.

philliphaydon 4y ago
> We have a lot of money but almost zero family support. Relying on family support right now with like no money . I’m amazed at parents who have little money and no family support and sometimes work multiple jobs. Lot of respect for those people as it must be hard and they power on.
starkd 4y ago
It may be surprising, but children care less about the extras than adults do. They may outwardly complain about not having things other children have, but when they are grown, their predominant memories are not going to be shaped by that. They are likely going to be more emotionally distressed at remembering how their parents never spent enough time with them, because they were too busy at work making the money to buy all the expensive accomodations. Kids are resilient, and have a great imagination. Much of the busy work we subject them to only suppresses the imagination. As my uncle used to say, everyone he knew grew up poor, but they didn't even know they were poor until they grew up.
- cyberlurker 4y ago
  I think things like tiktok and instagram have made it difficult to not know/think you are poor.

dathinab 4y ago

From what I know: - The subtle interactions of the parents with the child during very early child hood can have a big effect on the child. - It's possible for parents to unknowingly partially pass trauma to their children, likely through such subtle interactions. - Even post very early childhood (but still in childhood) the subtle behavior patterns of their environment can have a massive impact. - Sometimes seemingly mundane random events can have a major impact on a child. - The behaviour of adults is often massively related to their child hood, through potentially in subtle ways. If that is true thinks which are hardly measurable (subtle behaviour pattern and random events during child hood can) have a huge impact on a adults behaviour. (Hardly measurable as anyone non-trained to recognize them will mostly only recognize this behavior patterns subconscious). I personally (from experience/what I read/what I heard from others) would say that many such things have more influence then the "raising strategy actively chosen by the parent" (assuming it's decent, non abusive). Under the assumptions that this is true studies which try to evaluate raising strategies (and e.g. comparing them to genetics) are pretty much impossible to do , as long as the strategy doesn't have extreme drastic effects, and from what I know the only strategies with extreme effects are such which extreme negative effect, i.e. child abuse. Interestingly the given bullet points do very well explain .. a lot. From the vicious cycle around slums or "dangerous" black neighborhoods in the US. To why an adopted child then the non adopted similar aged children from the same parents (from some parents trying to see the child as their own, but subconsciously slightly failing resulting in subtle behavior differences in mimic and gestic to other people, family members or foreign people having a subtle different behaviour. Children notice that, subconsciously, especially during early child hood. And it might, sometimes affect them majorly in subtle ways.)

dash2 4y ago
So, how do you know these things? If they're so subtle and hard to measure, it seems as if questions of causality would be very hard to answer.
- ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
  Additionally, the decision to go to therapy and deal with your own issues so you can be a better parent is a conscious parenting decision, which would never be taken if "parenting doesn't matter".

johndevor 4y ago

The ACE study shows just how wrong this is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_childhood_experiences#Adverse_Childhood_Experiences_Study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_childhood_experiences#...

dash2 4y ago
So you think ACEs aren't heritable? Wanna bet? Actually, I was curious about this and found https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-021-01538-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-021-01538-w - which indeed has Plomin as a coauthor. It's a twin study, and it does argue that ACE has an independent effect from genetics. In fairness to Plomin, I don't think his argument was ever that you couldn't screw up your children if enough bad things happened to them.
- ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
  I think it goes without saying that an experience cannot be inherited, a term which exclusively applies to genes. If we want to rhetorically expand the term "inherited" to mean "a parent may visit upon their children something visited upon themselves", then that weakens the initial premise of genetics mattering and environment (which includes the one the parents present, consciously or unconsciously) does not.
  - em-bee 4y ago
    there was a study that traced obesity in a certain group of people in sweden to a famine in a town where the ancestors of these people lived several generations earlier. if that study is accurate then some experiences can translate into genetic effects.
  - dash2 4y ago
    No, what I mean is that identical twins will be more similar on measures of ACEs than non-identical twins. Of course events aren't in the genes, but the propensity to have events happen to you can very easily be in the genes. This might be surprising, but the history of behaviour genetics is basically "everything being surprisingly more heritable than people thought". Indeed, from the article I cited: "HPA-axis function and depression are both influenced by genetic factors, which could increase the individual’s vulnerability to ACEs"; and here's an article that shows that being a victim of violent crime has heritability of around 20%: https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.159.10.1675 https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.1....

orzig 4y ago

I was interested by their mention of "A 2021 systematic review of 102 randomised controlled trials"[0] so I looked it up. The effect size was 4x bigger in mid/low income countries. So, while a valuable result, it might not generalize to the the probable readers of this comment, who are likely in high income countries (and the high income parts of those countries). The more compelling argument IMHO is that few studies capture the nuance of parenting style and outcome, having to rely on aggregate factors like education level and income. I'm willing to be convinced that my specific parenting choices won't impact my kid's adult income, but I'm pretty sure it will impact concrete things like politeness, and potentially even downstream things like overall relationship satisfaction. [0] https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1003602 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

bjt2n3904 4y ago

I used to be involved in my church's youth ministry, and wound up tutoring a middle school boy in math. He really didn't have a lot going for him, and he often wound up at my place to do chores and help out -- which I paid him for. He had a lot of potential, and was fascinated with computers. He called me up one day, and wanted to hang out -- mentioned it was his 14th birthday. I couldn't say no. He showed me places his dad used to take him, we got food, played video games -- it was a great time. But towards the end of the night he got quieter and quieter, and spontaneously burst into tears. All he wanted was a call from his dad. High school was a roller coaster, but he graduated. He's off and working a well paying job right now, and happy. I still tutor math, but the thing I've started to notice is the absolute void that's left in a young man's life when his father is absent. Samuel Sey wrote[1] a bit on this, and the statistics are staggering. 1 - https://slowtowrite.com/absentee-fathers-not-guns-are-the-problem/ https://slowtowrite.com/absentee-fathers-not-guns-are-the-pr...

dash2 4y ago
I really sympathize with the POV of the article you link - having grown up with an absent father myself. But I feel forced to point out that it cites exactly the kind of statistic that gets hit by the original geneticists' critique. A guy who ducks out on parenthood may have genes which drive that kind of behaviour, and those may also be associated with other forms of bad stuff. Causality isn't so easy as that.

FollowingTheDao 4y ago

It is always nature AND nurture. Why is this still being debated? Probably because it means we have to look at each person as an individual, and that's hard. It means we have to be caring, observant, and patient. You know, that thing they call loving? What is true is that parents want "perfect" kids and they have a million people offering a million different ways to accomplish that goal, and that is driving them crazy. That might seem like it is driven by love, but it is driven by fear (FOMO), and that will damage a child.

lr4444lr 4y ago

If it didn't matter how you raised your kids, then we wouldn't see reliable pathologies, but we do: abusers and emotionally dysfunctional adults strongly correlate with certain parenting styles.

paraph1n 4y ago
Do you have any sources to share? I know too many counterexamples to just believe that without question.
sokoloff 4y ago
That's (overwhelmingly commonly) a system of two overlapping variables. The observed reliable pathology could be genetic or it could be parenting style. (I happen to agree with you that parenting style matters a lot, but mere observation of genetically intact families doesn't tell you as much as adoptive studies.)

downriver 4y ago

> They’ve focused a lot on IQ and personality — both constructs which were designed to be robust, i.e. hard to change, over time. I thought this was an interesting observation that suggests that a lot of “conclusions” in this space are actually tautologies. If nurture easily affected personality, we wouldn’t call it “personality” - what we call personality is exactly that which is unchanging in the face of a dynamic environment.

CodeSgt 4y ago
As an adult, yes. As a child, no. Personality takes time to form, infants aren't born with strong opinions or takes on any particular subjects.
- AussieWog93 4y ago
  Do you have kids? They absolutely have noticeable personalities before their first birthday.
ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
>what we call personality is exactly that which is unchanging in the face of a dynamic environment I am of the exact opposite opinion, given how much peoples personalities can change given input (think of someone spending all their time alone, and being depressed, changing their lifestyle towards going out every few days to hang out with new friends, and reportedly now having a "cheery personality", or simply someone with no passions discovering theirs, and then feeling like there is meaning to life).

photochemsyn 4y ago

The claim this article is rebutting has been relentlessly promoted for over a hundred years, and can be summarized as: Societal outcomes for human beings are genetically determined. There are a lot of co-claims that go into this, such as intelligence being genetically determined, and that there's a competitive natural selection process that results in the most intelligent humans acquiring the most monetary wealth and political power and hence ending up atop the social pyramid. If you go back a few more centuries, you'll find essentially the same argument, but presented as religious determinism, i.e. the divine right of kings. This implied the obligation of the kings to be 'wise rulers of their people' as well as their right to absolute power, and that such rights would be passed on to their children: (Burgess 1992) The Divine Right of Kings Reconsidered, Oxford Historical Review https://sci-hub.se/10.2307/574219 https://sci-hub.se/10.2307/574219 It's not hard to see that the concept of inherited divine rights in the religious era has been passed on to the concept of inherited genetic superiority in the rational science era - both being arguments in favor of the status quo when it comes to the structure of existing social power/wealth pyramids. Now, the converse argument supported largely by Marxist theory in the 20th century is: Societal outcomes for human beings are socially determined. This is widely derided in right-libertarian circles as the 'blank slate' ideology, and it's true that the likes of Lysenko used this ideology to push really poor agricultural and scientific policies in the Soviet Union that entirely ignored the realities of natural selection and basic genetic concepts in plant breeding: (Borinskya et al. 2019) Lysenkoism Against Genetics... Oxford Historical Review https://sci-hub.se/10.1534/genetics.118.301413 https://sci-hub.se/10.1534/genetics.118.301413 > "Progress in genetics and evolutionary biology in the young Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was hindered in the 1930s by the agronomist Trofim Lysenko, who believed that acquired traits are inherited, claimed that heredity can be changed by “educating” plants, and denied the existence of genes." Those are roughly the two poles of the debate, and as usual, reality falls somewhere in between. Plants may not be all the 'educatable', but human beings certainly are. There also seems to be such a thing as 'innate human ability' at the upper end of the spectrum of physical and mental prowess - i.e. if we take the same human cohort, and supply them with identical training and educational opportunities, some will do better than others. However, the notion that 'IQ tests' are a reliable measure of inherited genetic intelligence is utter nonsense. In reality, children of wealthy parents tend to have far more access to educational opportunities than children of poor parents do (with outliers on both sides related to parental involvement as this article notes), so what we see in reality is highly skewed - not so much by genetic determinism, but by unequal opportunities and parental input. This seems like a solid, rational viewpoint.

abc_lisper 4y ago

Keeping aside the content, the article is hard to read. Lot of disjointed blabbering!

adverbly 4y ago

> parents matter, but they don’t make a difference This can clearly be refuted by the following argument: 1. Human nature has changed little over the past 10000 years 2. The capability of individuals has improved massively over the past 10000 years 3. Any improvement in capability must be due to environmental changes over the past 10000 years(nurture) as nature has not changed 4. Parents are responsible for a large part of your environment I don't see how this nature vs nurture debate ever became a thing. Smells like leftover thinking from racism or something. IMO the only debate should be around which aspects of the nurture environment are the most important. One more note to add: Interestingly, in homogeneous/"equal" environments, each individual is given effectively equal opportunity and environment - which will mean that the smaller nature-based differences will start to matter. So from a certain perspective, the more we fight for equal "competitive footing" in winner-take-all situations, the more will see nature-based properties mattering more, which comes with a whole whack of other problems (see the film GATTACA).

dahart 4y ago
> I don't see how this nature vs nurture debate ever became a thing. Smells like leftover thinking from racism or something. IMO the only debate should be around which aspects of the nurture environment are the most important. Agreed, this argument (#3) is all the proof we need for quite a few of the social debates we’re still having, including race. Gender equality is another one, people to this day suggesting that gender disparities might be due to “natural” preferences of men and women, while those preferences are in flux and different from country to country. It cannot be genetics, obviously, because genetics isn’t changing that fast. Too bad our human nature is such that we don’t always listen to reason. I would maybe add a 1a to clarify that human behavior has changed over the past 10k years, and using this lens is a good way to identify that behaviors that change are almost certainly nurture.
- AussieWog93 4y ago
  >Gender equality is another one, people to this day suggesting that gender disparities might be due to “natural” preferences of men and women, while those preferences are in flux and different from country to country. For real? There are plenty of sex differences that exist across cultures (a big one being that men are comparatively more interested in tools, and less interested in other people) that for whatever reason educated people in the West love to deny.

rossdavidh 4y ago

"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.

vorpalhex 4y ago
To quote the Montessori's in a similar vein, "Children are to be discovered, not moulded".

the__alchemist 4y ago

I think a conflation of parenting with education in general can shed light on this; here are some questions to ponder along those lines: - Could someone who's never learned calculus be expect to apply it to a problem? - Could someone with little experience in reading be expected to write well? - Could someone who had little education in his or her childhood, but taught a robust education in his 20s and 30s (or later) be expected to perform as someone who learned it younger? - If someone spends his 20s in jail, would you expect him to be able to get a white-color job afterwards? - A smart person does damage to his cognitive abilities by drugs etc, both acute and chronic/permanent. Is this a nature or nurture consideration? What about the genetic and environmental factors that lead to this drug use? - A smart person learns and becomes proficient at a skill in a month. A less-smart person struggles in the first month, but keeps at it, and becomes proficient in 6 months. For that skill, (This is almost a tautology), would they perform the task at an acceptable level? My point is that we should consider a model where capabilities are based on physical qualities that are largely unchangeable (for the better). A distinction from genetics: The base is genetics, but other things like injuries also play this. However, skills and learning are linked heavily with the nurture side. Genetics etc plays an important role of how well someone can learn something, but the learning still must occur through information acquired and sorted in the brain after birth. Stated another way: It's clear that humans (And to a lesser extent other mammals) rely on a childhood full of nurture and learning. Physical touch, social interactions, learning skills, etc. This alone is enough to debunk the strawman in the article, even if you recognize the critical role of genetics.

User23 4y ago

The thesis that it doesn’t matter how you raise your children is so manifestly stupid that it’s risible. It can be falsified with a single counter example. For example, there is absolutely no way the Polgar sisters would have become a chess prodigy had their father made different parenting choices. Same for W.A. Mozart and many other prodigies. Another more common example is the Asian-American tiger moms who vigorously push their children into academics and music. There’s no doubt that those children would turn out different if they were just raised on X-box and pizza rolls.

bboylen 4y ago

While I certainly agree with the author that it matters how you raise your kids, I think his rebuttal doesn't really respond to what the people he is disagreeing with are getting at. We all agree you should give loving attention to your newborn and read to your kids, but its the helicoptering and obscene optimization that modern parents are prone to that I have found people are pushing back on. All the studies he cites seem to focus on direct attention and behavior modeling as the key parental inputs. Maybe parents should just focus on being present/loving/educative and forget about the piano lessons and prestigious private schools.

standardUser 4y ago
For the vast, vast majority of parents, there is no threat of being able to afford private school or piano lessons, so let's remember when we have conversations like this that we're talking about 10-20% of families and ignoring the rest.