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Fathers don’t matter that much

Father_and_son_27Update: This is a piece from last June, so not actually timely. Rather, it was being passed around on Twitter recently. So I’m wrong in some details of when the piece as published, but I think my point about the “take home” of Wilcox’s profile as a public intellectual still holds water.

Totally on cue after my last post The Atlantic has a piece out from the omnipresent W. Bradford Wilcox, The Distinct, Positive Impact of a Good Dad. The portions of the article outlining the descriptions of how fathers interact differently with their offspring are totally unpersuasive to me for the reasons I’ve outlined earlier: I believe on average many long term life outcomes which are due to cultural influences are from one’s milieu, one’s “village” so to speak, not one’s parents. The more interesting and superficially persuasive element of Wilcox’s argument has to do with correlations. In particular:

The story told by this data, then, suggests that there is a case to make against the fathers who fail to have good-enough relationships with their children. At least on these outcomes, single mothers do about as well for their children, compared to dads who have poor-quality relationships with their children. By contrast, great, and even good-enough dads, appear to make a real difference in their children’s lives.

I accept the correlations. But I think Wilcox’s case is totally gene-blind.* To illustrate the problem, imagine that you saw a correlation between fathers and sons in terms of empathy. One hypothesis might be that children learn how to engage with others from seeing how their parents engage with others. But another model would take into account genetic dispositions in personality.** When Wilcox reports that individuals who had a bad relationship with their parents have worse life outcomes he neglects to consider that these parent-offspring pairs may share a heritable disposition toward disagreeability.

When I say fathers don’t matter that much, I mean that some of the correlation that you see in these sorts of comparisons are almost certainly due to heritable dispositions which lead to a wide range of life outcomes. For example, having a quick temper and being unable to suppress your emotional responses are going to cause problems within your family and probably diminish chances for success in the workplace. If this tendency is heritable in any way you’re naturally going to see a correlation between families with violence and strife, and offspring who have lower career success and familial stability than their intelligence or education might predict. Of course it is likely that fathers matter in substantive ways. The problem is simply to attribute all of the effect seen in these studies to the environmental shaping of paternal behavior. Sperm matters.

* More precisely, he’s heritability-blind, but you get the picture.

** For readers who are not clear on this, I believe cultural norms are probably the biggest variable which explains many personality traits. Though variation within cultures is still going to be substantially heritable.

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