The hidden world our parents give us
An intuitive reason I disbelieve the "parents make no difference" thesis
Oana Borcan and I already wrote about the “no difference” theory of modern parenting, which uses evidence from twin studies to argue that parents make surprisingly little effect on their offspring’s outcomes:
No wait stop it matters how you raise your kids
This is co-written with Oana Borcan, a fellow economist at the University of East Anglia. It has appeared in The Psychologist. I thank the editor and Oana for allowing me to post it here.
That article gathers a lot of evidence from different strands academic research on parental influence. As a new parent, I want to share a more personal, informal line of reasoning.
I sing in a classical choir. Reading music is a basic requirement (not for all choirs, but it is for this one). I can read music because I spent ten years playing the piano as a child. I had no talent, and I was very lazy and barely ever practised, so I did not become a concert pianist. But I did learn to read the notes. This happened to me because my parents got me piano lessons at an early age and then didn’t let me give up until I was sixteen.
I can read Ancient Greek. This wasn’t down to family tuition. I chose, for inscrutable reasons, to study it at school. But I could only do that because I went to a fancy private school, the kind that in England are paradoxically called Public schools. Maybe I went there partly for genetic reasons (I got a scholarship). But part of it was due to family choices and resources (my father paid the remaining fees).
No need to multiply examples. These and many other characteristics of mine have intuitively obvious explanations involving my parents’ choices. I bet that you and most people can think of similar facts about themselves: stuff that you obviously learnt from your parents.
Maybe religiosity is genetic, but your parents will almost certainly determine your first religious affiliation (and the first one tends to stick).
People whose mums (or dads, fine) taught them to cook, and the exact style of cooking they taught.
Tiny little habits, turns of phrase, verbal tics, et cetera. (“The fidelity of a habit which got spoiled at our place, liked it and stayed around” says Rilke.) Could they be genetic? Sure, except I can identify some that I get from my stepfather.
In short there is a whole layer of facts about us that are obviously influenced by our parents. Also, the facts are rather specific and particular, not the kind of things that get captured in survey questions or administrative data: for instance, which school you went to and what you learned, rather than a summary measure of educational attainment. So from the social scientist’s point of view, it’s a hidden layer.
For the scientist, this leaves a question: why don’t all these individual differences add up to something we can measure? If parents can influence whether you learn French or physics, say, then it seems weird that they don’t influence how much you learn in total. Maybe the different micro-influences balance out to zero in the aggregate. But that seems weird and kind of knife-edge.
One possibility is that parents are responding to children’s innate capabilities. The geneticists call this evoked gene-environment correlation. It seems quite plausible — aren’t we all trying to do that — and it will get captured in heritability statistics, rather than showing up as a shared family environment. There are different ways to think about this. On the one hand, indeed this is an effect of someone’s genetics, since the genes are the start of the causal pathway! On the other hand, the effect is mediated by parents’ choices, so presumably the parents could do things differently if they wanted to. On the other other hand, plausibly parents are responding “optimally” to their children’s differences, in some sense — like from the point of view of nurturing their unique talents. So changing their response might not improve outcomes for anyone (except maybe social scientists, who would get to see what happened).
So much for the scientist. As a parent, what do I want to pass on to my son? I thought about it this morning, lying in bed and gazing at the Crocodile Dentist, with its huge eyes and teeth, and I think what matters to me is that he should keep hold of the mystery of the world, which he has hold of now.
That seems vague, and I probably won’t improve it much by quoting Robert Conquest on poets:
The sensitive construct their screens of fantasy
And those who watch the world allow their hearts to harden,
But there are always a few
The world’s water always dripping on whose faces
Does not encase their eyes in globes of frozen stone…
Anyway, I was surprised by this thought. Before I had children, I thought that what I wanted to pass on from my own mother was her strict Protestant rules about how to behave:
It turns out that instead I want to hand on her poetry and playfulness (one of her own poems, about childrearing, is at the end of this piece).
(Of course there’s a subtle relationship between the two, the rules and the poetry. I’ve quoted this bit of Nietzsche before:
The essential and invaluable element in every morality is that it is a protracted constraint: to understand Stoicism or Port-Royal or Puritanism one should recall the constraint under which every language has hitherto attained strength and freedom - the metrical constraint, the tyranny of rhyme and rhythm. … the strange fact is that all there is or has been on earth of freedom, subtlety, boldness, dance and masterly certainty, whether in thinking itself, or in ruling, or in speaking and persuasion, in the arts as in morals, has evolved only by virtue of the ‘tyranny of such arbitrary laws’…
and Yeats called innocence a “ceremony”, which I think captures the huge effort the civilization of his time made to construct the innocence of childhood; and the innocence of Edwardian childhood was partly a reaction to, but also partly an outgrowth of, the strictness of Victorian upbringing. Yes, innocence is one word for what I want to give him.)
Mystery or innocence, whatever you call it, it has much more to do with the “hidden layer” than with the visible layer of years of education, occupational class et cetera. (I have met plenty of people with large salaries and impressive educations that I would absolutely hate my son to be.) True, it also doesn’t have much to do with Ancient Greek, but it does have a bit to do with reading music, and more to do with another part of my hidden layer, the fact that I can tell a buttercup from a celandine…. So even if the “no difference” thesis turns out to be true on its own terms, it seems irrelevant to what I care about and what I will try to focus on as a father.
STRAW, FLATTENED WARM GRASS, FEATHERS – RANDOM
splash of living gesture – scarlet, ochre, green
behind the bricks and litter – broken screen
of branch and leaf – there, the head – mouth caught
tight – and forehead shadowed – lifting in fright
a paw – tensed and still – the eyes fixed bright
on who has trapped it in its hidden kingdom:
look at the animal prepared to fight.O friend or foe, take care, the eyes consent
to the invasion, not knowing to resent
the world they seek that seeks them. Powerful stranger,
what have you lost by finding in that intent
brave face the future manager?
Whose fear, child, showed you danger?
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