The New York Times has a piece up, Raising a Moral Child, which does a run through on the various orthodoxies and heresies about child-rearing and inculcating values floating around the upper middle class Zeitgeist of modern America. There are plenty of references to research and the like. Literature reviews or not, it always helps to know some history, and realize that many ‘orthodox’ opinions seem to be a manner of fashion, not science (in fact, this is clear when you look at cross-cultural mores; France is today different from the USA when it comes to views on how to raise a good child). But there are things I think that are known, and should be reiterated. So, the author states that:
Genetic twin studies suggest that anywhere from a quarter to more than half of our propensity to be giving and caring is inherited. That leaves a lot of room for nurture, and the evidence on how parents raise kind and compassionate children flies in the face of what many of even the most well-intentioned parents do in praising good behavior, responding to bad behavior, and communicating their values.
Two insights from behavior genetics can shed light here. First, shared-environmental effects are often the smallest proportion of the variation in behavior. This is the part which is due to the family home and the parental influence. Second, the proportion of variance explained by shared-environment tends to go down as people get older. So parental influence tends to diminish.
Obviously part of the reason you behave as you do can be put down to genes. Or more precisely genetic dispositions which express themselves. And another portion can be chalked up to what your parents teach you. But a large proportion, in fact in many cases the largest proportion, is accounted for by factors which we don’t have a good grasp of. We don’t know, and term this “non-shared environment.”* In The Nurture Assumption Judith Rich Harris posited that much of non-shared environment was one’s peer group. This is still a speculative hypothesis, but I do think it is part of a broader set of models which emphasize culture and society, and how it shapes your mores and behaviors, as opposed to the nuclear family.
The research cited in the piece shows how modeling by parents or people in positions of authority can affect short-term changes in the behavior of children. I am sure that these effects are real, what I am skeptical about is that these effects maintain themselves in a non-congenial social environment. To illustrate what I am getting at, imagine two children who are given up for adoption, and whose biological parents are alcoholics. Imagine that you know the biological parents are both carrying genes which are strongly correlated with alcoholism. Both these hypothetical children are adopted into conservative white upper middle class families, one in Orange county California, and another in an affluent suburb of Salt Lake City. Both families are socially conservative, and do not tolerate drinking among their children. My prediction is that the child adopted into a Mormon culture which is far less tolerant of individual choice on the issue of alcohol consumption will have lower risks of being an alcoholic simply because the whole landscape of decisions is going to be altered throughout their whole life. An adopted child with a family history of alcoholism is still going to have a higher risk within their population, but the nature of the population is likely to shift the baseline odds.
Contemporary child-rearing advice and literature has a focus on the nuclear family because parents are the ones buying the books, reading the magazines, and attending the workshops. They want to believe that they have control on the outcomes of their offspring decades after they their leave home. Reality is not congenial to this. Parents do have control, but it is far more a case of establishing frameworks through choice in nationality and cultural identification, and loading the die with genetic dispositions.
* This might actually be genetic or more broadly biological; epigenetics, epistasis, and developmental stochasticity.
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