A few years ago, a student came up to me after the second day of my class on parenting
and child development. She hesitated for a second and then she confessed, "I'm really
interested in this material, but I was hoping your class would help me to become
a better parent if I have kids someday." She was disappointed. We were going to talk
about how parents do not have control in shaping who their children become. She jumped
to the conclusion that my class wouldn't help her.
I was caught off guard. Would confronting the science of parenting and child development not be relevant to being a good parent?
I hope that my class changed her mind.
Parents want what's best for their children. Young and old parents, rich and poor,
married and divorced. And parenting books promise to show how to achieve the best
outcomes to address the difficult decisions that parents face every day. And in the
process, to reveal why each of us turned out the way we did. The problem is that
parenting books send conflicting messages: tiger parenting, or free-range parenting?
Parent like the Dutch to raise the happiest kids in the world, or like the Germans
to raise self-reliant children? The one consistent message is that if your child
isn't succeeding, you're doing something wrong. There's good news, though. The science
supports a totally different message that is ultimately empowering.
Trying to predict how a child will turn out based on choices made by the parents is
like trying to predict a hurricane from the flap of a butterfly's wings.
Do you know the butterfly? The proverbial one that flaps its wings in China, perturbing
the atmosphere just enough to shift wind currents that make their way to the skies
over tropical white beaches, intensifying the water evaporating from the ocean in
a spiral of wind and fueling a hurricane in the Caribbean six weeks after that flutter
of wings. If you are a parent, you are the butterfly flapping your wings. Your child
is the hurricane, a breathtaking force of nature.
You will shape the person your child becomes like the butterfly shapes the hurricane:
in complex, seemingly unpredictable, but powerful ways. The hurricane wouldn't exist
without the butterfly. "Wait," you might ask, "What about all the successful parents
with successful children? Or the struggling parents with struggling children?" They
might seem to show the simple power of parenting, but children can be shaped by many
forces that are often intertwined, like successful parents, successful genes, successful
peers, and a culture of success that they grow up in. This can make it hard to know
which forces influence who children become. "Okay," you might think, "Yes, it's hard
to pull apart all these possible forces, but we can make pretty good guesses about
the importance of parents." Perhaps. Well, how many of you know how a bicycle works?
Right? You've seen people riding bikes, maybe you've ridden one yourself, or tried
to teach someone how to do it. Just like parenting, you've seen people doing it.
Maybe you've done it yourself or even tried to teach someone else how to do it. We feel confident about what we know.
When we say we know how a bicycle works, we think we have something in our heads like
this. Something that relates the pedals to the chain and to the wheels. But when
you ask people to explain how a bicycle works, they produce drawings like this.
And like this.
People have no idea how bicycles work. Or zippers, or rainbows, or even topics they
argue passionately about. When you push people to explain how these things work,
they usually can't. Just caring about something like parenting or feeling confident
about it doesn't guarantee that we understand it. And everyone can't possibly be
right about how parenting works given how wildly beliefs have varied. Some societies,
like the Javanese in Indonesia, viewed biological parents as too lenient, so children were better off with foster parents.
Mothers in a hunter-gatherer society regretted when their children cut themselves
while playing with knives. But they thought the cuts were worth the freedom to explore.
Even within one society like ours, parenting wasn't a common term until the 1970s.
Before then, parents weren't viewed as active shapers of children's futures.
Years from now people may look back on today's views and feel just as amazed as we
feel when hearing about other times and places.
The science could help parents, and potential parents like my student, to understand
how they actually shape who their children become. Millions of children have been
studied to disentangle all those shaping forces that are usually intertwined. These
studies follow identical twins and fraternal twins and plain old siblings growing
up together or adopted and raised apart. And it turns out that growing up in the
same home does not make children noticeably more alike and how successful they are,
or how happy or self-reliant and so on. Imagine if you had been taken from birth
and raised next door by the family to the left and your brother or sister had been
raised next door by the family to the right. By and large, that would have made you
no more similar or different than growing up together under the same roof.
On the one hand, these findings seem unbelievable. Think about all the ways that parents
differ from home to home and how often they argue, and whether they helicopter, and
how much they shower their children with love. You would think that would matter
enough to make children growing up in the same home more alike than if they had been raised apart. But it doesn't.
In 2015, a meta-analysis, a study of studies, found this pattern across thousands
of studies. Following over 14 million twin pairs across 39 countries, they measured
over 17,000 outcomes, and the researchers concluded that every single one of those
outcomes is heritable. So genes influence who children become, but genes didn't explain
everything. The environment mattered too, just something in the environment that
didn't shape children growing up in the same home to be more alike. Some people have
looked at these findings and concluded that parenting doesn't matter, that you would
have become the same person you are today, regardless of who raised you. On the other
hand, and really I should say on the other hands--because there are many caveats to that story--but I'll focus on one.
On the other hand, these findings are not all that shocking if you think about how
the same parent could shape different children in different ways.
One child finds it helpful when her mother provides structure. Her sister might find it stifling.
One child might think his parents are caring when they ask questions about his friends.
His brother might think they're being nosy. One child might view a divorce as a tragedy
while his sister sees it as a relief. Same event, different experience.
My husband and I experienced this concept 20 years ago when we were 30,000 feet over
the Atlantic flying from Chicago to Stockholm to work on a research project. The
flight attendants were clearing the dinner trays. People were getting ready to sleep.
We hit a patch of bumpy air and a bunch of teenagers whooped in excitement.
Then all of a sudden the plane was plummeting. Children and food carts hit the ceiling.
The plane seemed to stabilize, but then plummeted again. The ceiling panels flew
up into their compartments from the force revealing wiring inside. Debris came crumbling
down on us. People were screaming and sobbing. The plane plummeted again.
After an eternity the pilot came on and announced we don't know what that was. We
don't know what's coming. Stay in your seats.
My husband came away from that experience feeling like planes are incredibly safe.
The airline sent a letter informing us that we hadn't simply been falling across those
thousands of feet of clear air turbulence. The plane had been subjected to forces
greater than 2 g. We learn that planes can withstand forces many times larger. So
my husband feels safe flying. He seems genuinely baffled by how anyone could feel
otherwise. I get that concept, but only in the abstract. I've never been able to
fly the same way since. Same event, different experience.
Just because an event doesn't shape people in the same way, that doesn't mean it had
no effect. Your parenting could be shaping your children, just not in ways that lead
them to become more alike. Your parenting could be leading your first child to become
more serious, your second child to become more relaxed. Your first child to want
to be like you, your second child to want to be nothing like you. You are flapping
your butterfly wings to your hurricane children.
This isn't how we typically think about parenting. It doesn't make for simple advice.
How could parenting books tell people how to raise successful, happy, self-reliant
children if the same parenting can lead to different outcomes for children in the
same home? At this point, you might be thinking like students in my class sometimes
say, "Okay we get it. Development is complicated and maybe it's not worth studying because it's too complicated."
But meaning can be made from chaos. Scientists now understand how babies go from these
apparent lumps to become walking, talking, thinking, social, independent beings.
They understand this process well enough to intervene, to test newborns, for example,
and treat them for a genetic condition that used to lead to mental retardation.
Scientists are developing ever more sophisticated understanding of how parents could shape their children's futures.
Science can tell us a lot, but it will never tell us everything. So what can we do
with this? First, know that parents matter. That might seem obvious, but smart people
are arguing otherwise. And what seems obvious is not always true as we've seen. Second,
know that how parents matter is complex and difficult to predict. For anyone who
has ever been a parent, stop blaming yourself as if you are in control of your child's
path. You have influence, but you don't have control. For anyone who has ever been a child,
stop blaming your parents.
At least for the idea that you are defined by them. Stop blaming other parents. A
recent survey of thousands of parents revealed that 90% of mothers and 85% of fathers
feel judged. Close to half feel judged all the time or nearly all the time by people they know and by complete strangers.
These judgments probably don't reflect what's best for the kids. How could they given
how profoundly parenting is, varied around the world and across time? And given how
the same parents can shape children under the same roof in such different ways? Even
when parents try their best, they can't satisfy everybody. There's only so much time.
This is especially true for dragon parents.
The author Emily Rap came up with this term after her baby was diagnosed with Tay-Sachs disease.
She knew then that Ronan would never walk or talk. He would likely die before turning 4.
I did not know
that this could also be the fate of my first born son.
He was born with a condition that prevents the intestine from absorbing nutrients or water for the body.
It affects 1 in 5 million babies.
One in five million.
It is so rare that one doctor felt confident telling us that we would be screwed if that's what our baby had.
He was the one who had to break the news to us later.
Dragon parents have a lot to say about parenting even though they know their children
will die young or in my case, even if we have no idea whether our babies will live.
Emily Rap wrote:
"We will not launch our children into a bright and promising future but see them into early graves.
This requires a new ferocity, a new way of thinking, a new animal. We are dragon parents fierce and loyal and loving as hell.
Our experiences have taught us how to parent for the here and now, for the sake of
parenting, for the humanity implicit in the act itself. Parenting I've come to understand is about loving my child today."
Now, in fact for any parent anywhere, that's all there is.
I had thought that my expertise in child development would help prepare me for becoming
a parent. Instead, becoming a parent helped me to see the science in a whole new
light. So, third, appreciate how powerful the moments can be because of what they
mean for you and your child right now. Not because of what they mean for your child long-term, which you do not know.
The activist Andrew Solomon noted, "Though many of us take pride in how different
we are from our parents, we are endlessly sad at how different our children are from us."
Maybe we could be less sad if we were more realistic. If we let go of the notion that
our children's futures are in our control, if we can embrace the complexity of our
children's development, that can transform how we approach those parenting decisions
we face each day, and empower us to realize how much more there is to having a child
than trying to shape a specific outcome. So much more, which I appreciate every day
in moments with my firstborn son, who is thriving and with his younger brother, and
the unique paths they are taking. We are not screwed.
The science of parents and children, butterflies and their hurricanes, can free people
to focus on what is most important and meaningful in our lives. This can make the
experience of being a parent, and the experience of having been a child, more realistic
and satisfying for everyone involved. And that, I think, is very relevant to being a good parent.