21 August 2003, 865 words
In any discussion about social problems, there's one idea which is sure to crop up: It's the parents' fault. Doesn't matter whether we're talking about violence, drug abuse, academic underachievement, teenage pregnancy, or not saying "Good morning". Blame the parents: it's they who didn't pay enough attention to the kids, or who didn't hug them when they were infants, or who didn't give them crayons and paper when they were small or, that perennial favourite, didn't beat them enough.
It's all crap, though. And the most ironic thing about this idea is that it isn't even part of traditional cultures, most of which hold that a child's nature is either a matter of fate or of the community. Indeed, the idea of parental influence is barely a half-century old and was first popularised by American psychologists in the 1950s. Based on two now-discredited schools of psychology &endash; behaviourism and Freudanism &endash; these psychologists tried to find links between how children turned out and how their parents raised them.
Ironically, these first studies actually failed to find any significant connection. But so convinced were psychologist by behaviorism's reward-and-punishment and Freud's insistence that parents are the cause of neuroses, that they continued doing studies till they found correlations. Indeed, by the 1980s, certain psychologists were even insisting that whatever a child experiences in its first three years of life determines what kind of adult he or she would become: an idea that contradicted both common sense and evolutionary logic.
Luckily, over the past few years, more empirically-minded researchers have examined these claims and found them all to be bogus. The cognitive neuroscientist Jon Bruer, in his book The Myth of the First Three Years, shows that there is absolutely no scientific basis for claims that significant cognitive and emotional development somehow ceases after age three. And studies looking at the effects of early non-maternal care (where mothers have to put their infants in daycare centres) have found this lack to have no detrimental effects on the child. In fact, even the quality of the kindergartens themselves appears to have no significant effects.
Even the well-documented correlation between absent fathers and juvenile delinquency doesn't prove parental influence. "The absence of a father may not be a cause of adolescent problems, but a correlate of the true causes, which may include poverty, neighbourhoods with lots of unattached men (who live in de factor polygyny and hence compete violently for status), frequent moves (which force the child to start at the bottom of the pecking order in new peer groups) and genes that make both father and children more impulsive and quarrelsome," writes psycholinguist Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate.
A particularly strong refutation comes from the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which is the longest study of aging ever done. Of the sample, one group consisted of 456 men chosen from socio-economically deprived families. George E. Valliant, director of the Study and author of Aging Well, writes, "Among the Inner City men, there were 41 who came from spectacularly dysfunctional families. Such families received ten points or more on a scale of troubles so stringent that a family's being known to five social agencies was worth only half a point. Having a mentally retarded mother or alcoholic father or being separated from both parents for more than six months while still a child contributed only one point. Thus, in order for a man to have received ten points or more, a lot needed to have gone wrong when he was a child."
Nonetheless, records Vaillant, at age 47, these 41 men who got ten points or more were not more likely to be chronically unemployed or below the poverty line than men from more functional families. The psychological effects &endash; or, more precisely, the lack of them &endash; were even more striking. At age 70, only nine of these men were classified as Sad-Sick while 13 were in the Happy-Well category: the same proportion as those who came from happier families.
In 1983, psychologists Eleanor Maccoby and John Martin published an extensive study of socialisation research, concluding, "…there is little impact of the physical environment that parents provide for children and very little impact of parental characteristics that must be essentially the same for all children in a family: for example, education, or the quality of the relationship between the spouses. Indeed, the implications are either that parental behaviours have no effect, or that the only effective aspects of parenting must vary greatly between one child to the other within the same family." But even this latter option has been disproved by studies on the effects of birth order on personality (there is none).
So, if it's not parents who determine how kids grow up, what does? Judith Rich Harris, author of The Nurture Assumption, suggests that "…children would develop into the same sort of adults if we left their lives outside the home unchanged &endash; left them in their schools and neighbourhoods &endash; but switched all the parents around." And so, if we are serious about saving the present and next generation of children, that's where we have to start: by improving the schools and the neighbourhoods which produce the criminals and drop-outs and teenage mothers.
Copyright ©2003 Kevin Baldeosingh