Parents should relax. There’s nothing much they can do, beyond the basics, beyond being the best selves they can be, to effect their kids’ lives in a statistically meaningful way. The primary thing they give their children is an attachment style and this primarily depends on the parents coming to terms with their life narrative, not on anything the parents do to or for their kids (with the possible exception of abuse and deprivation, etc, even then that is usually less influential on the children than their genes).
I don’t have kids, but I’ve been a kid and I’ve lived in different homes and I’ve known dozens of families and I’m impressed with this New York Times book review by Carol Tavris about The Nurture Assumption:
First, researchers have been unable to find any child-rearing practice that predicts children’s personalities, achievements or problems outside the home. Parents don’t have a single child-rearing style anyway, because how they treat their children depends largely on what the children are like. They are more permissive with easy children and more punitive with defiant ones.
Second, even when parents do treat their children the same way, the children turn out differently. The majority of children of troubled and even abusive parents are resilient and do not suffer lasting psychological damage. Conversely, many children of the kindest and most nurturing parents succumb to drugs, mental illness or gangs.
Third, there is no correlation — zero — between the personality traits of adopted children and their adoptive parents or other children in the home, as there should be if ”home environment” had a strong influence.
Fourth, how children are raised — in day care or at home, with one parent or two, with gay parents or straight ones, with an employed mom or one who stays home — has little or no influence on children’s personalities.
Finally, what parents do with and for their children affects children mainly when they are with their parents. For instance, mothers influence their children’s play only while the children are playing with them; when the child is playing alone or with a playmate, it makes no difference what games were played with mom…
The first problem with the nurture assumption is nature. The findings of behavior genetics show, incontrovertibly, that many personality traits and abilities have a genetic component. No news here; many others have reported this research, notably the psychologist Jerome Kagan in ”The Nature of the Child.” But genes explain only about half of the variation in people’s personalities and abilities. What’s the other half?
Harris’s brilliant stroke was to change the discussion from nature (genes) and nurture (parents) to its older version: heredity and environment. ”Environment” is broader than nurture. Children, like adults, have two environments: their homes and their world outside the home; their behavior, like ours, changes depending on the situation they are in. Many parents know the eerie experience of having their child’s teacher describe their child in terms they barely recognize (”my kid did what?”). Children who fight with their siblings may be placid with friends. They can be honest at home and deceitful at school, or vice versa. At home children learn how their parents want them to behave and what they can get away with; but, Harris shows, ”These patterns of behavior are not like albatrosses that we have to drag along with us wherever we go, all through our lives. We don’t even drag them to nursery school.”
Harris has taken a factor, peers, that everyone acknowledges is important, but instead of treating it as a nuisance in children’s socialization, she makes it a major player. Children are merciless in persecuting a kid who is different — one who says ”Warshington” instead of ”Washington,” one who has a foreign accent or wears the wrong clothes. (Remember?) Parents have long lamented the apparent cruelty of children and the obsessive conformity of teen-agers, but, Harris argues, they have missed the point: children’s attachment to their peer groups is not irrational, it’s essential. It is evolution’s way of seeing to it that kids bond with each other, fit in and survive. Identification with the peer group, not identification with the parent, is the key to human survival. That is why children have their own traditions, words, rules, games; their culture operates in opposition to adult rules. Their goal is not to become successful adults but successful children. Teen-agers want to excel as teen-agers, which means being unlike adults…
Others, however, may reject this book because of concerns about its potential misuses. If children ”naturally” exclude ”outsiders,” why should schools make any effort to integrate children of different ethnicities, sexes or abilities? Why should we pay for prenatal care or better schools if smart, resilient kids will turn out all right whatever we do, and troubled ones will be lost to deviant peer groups?
There is one powerful way that parents can influence their children and that is through their attachment style. So far there has been no genetic component found for attachment style. So whether a kid is secure or anxious or avoidant or disorganized in his attachment style, that is largely up to the parenting style and parents can’t help but act out their own style of attachment and level of differentiation. Differentiation — the ability to securely hold on to yourself and to calm your own anxieties while in relationship to the people you love — does not tend to change over generations.
* A bad habit I developed in childhood was to always clean my plate. It has led to a lifelong pattern of over-eating.
