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"Contrary To Popular Opinion (Common Sense), Parents Have Only A Minimal To Negligible Effect On Their Children's Personality, Behavior, And Life Outcome. What Two Factors Have The Biggest Impact On A Child's Personality, Behavior, And Life Outcome? The Genes The Child Inherited At Conception That Code For Personality Type And Behavior And The Peer Group The Child Associated With In His Childhood, Teenage, And Adult Years. So Don't Blame My Parents For My Thoughts And Actions. Blame My Genes And My Peer Group." - Peerless Pete (Pimp On Pimp!)
Steve Stewart-Williams@SteveStuWillCommon belief in the West: Parenting strongly shapes the child.
Two complications:
1. Similarities between parents and offspring are largely due to genes. http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/three_laws.pdf…
2. Parenting may shape the child, but the child also shapes parenting. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1948550618784890… 👇
"BLAME IT ON MY MAMA, BLAME IT ON MA DADDY" - NIGGA DOGGY DOGG
Brian Holloway, The Things I Write Don't Make Sense To You Because You're Not Familiar With Evolution Or Genetics, Nor Do You Want To Be Familiar With Them Because They Contradict Everything You Were Taught To Believe. For Instance, Like Most People, You Think Parenting Plays A Large Role In A Child's Life, But This Isn't The Case. Counterintuitively And Contrary To What You've Been Taught To Believe, Parenting Has Only A Minimal To Negligible Effect On The Life Outcome Of Children.
So, Brian Holloway, You Think To Yourself, "I Took That Homeless Kid In And Raised Him Well. Why Did He Do This To Me?" He Did That To You Because Parenting Doesn't Have The Impact On A Person's Life Like You Think It Does. It Doesn't Determine The Life Outcome Of People As You've Been Taught To Believe. Know What Does? GENES.
GENES Have The Greatest Influence On One's Life Outcome, Brian Holloway, And Since That Bum Shares No Genes With You He Was Bound To Think Differently Than You, Act Differently Than You, Associate With People Who Are Different From You, And Ultimately Do What He Did To You. This Outcome Was Especially Likely Considering That His Genes Had Already Led Him To Being Homeless. So Not Only Were You Dealing With Someone Who Shared No Genes With You, But Someone Who Had Defective Genes. DOUBLE WHAMMY
So, Brian Holloway, Your Parenting Wasn't To Blame. The Fact That You Brought That Bum Into Your House Was To Blame. See, All Of You Athletes And Other Entertainers Have This Kumbaya, Love, Peace, And Happiness Outlook On The World. You Think You Can Change Lives And The World Through Social Activism And Community Involvement, But That Has Virtually No Effect Because People's Lives And The World's Problems Are Too Complex To Be Changed Much Through Non-Genetic And Non-Evolutionary Strategies.
Do You Understand, Brian Holloway? The Best Parents And The Best Parenting Style In The World Wouldn't Have Changed This Outcome Or The Homeless Kid's Life Outcome Because Parenting Doesn't Have The Impact On One's Life That You Intuitively Think It Does. The Only Things That Have A Significant Impact On One's Life Are GENES And PEER GROUP. And, Brian Holloway, That Bum Had Inferior Genes, Which Led Him To Associate With An Inferior Peer Group Who Influenced Him To Make Inferior Decisions.
Based on the results of classical twin studies, it just doesn’t appear that parenting—whether mom and dad are permissive or not, read to their kid or not, or whatever else—impacts development as much as we might like to think. Regarding the cross-validation that I mentioned, studies examining identical twins separated at birth and reared apart have repeatedly revealed (in shocking ways) the same thing: these individuals are remarkably similar when in fact they should be utterly different (they have completely different environments, but the same genes).3 Alternatively, non-biologically related adopted children (who have no genetic commonalities) raised together are utterly dissimilar to each other—despite in many cases having decades of exposure to the same parents and home environments.3
One logical explanation for this is a lack of parenting influence for psychological development. Judith Rich Harris made this point forcefully in her book The Nurture Assumption (an absolute must read). 6 As Harris notes, parents are not to blame for their children’s neuroses (beyond the genes they contribute to the manufacturing of that child), nor can they take much credit for their successful psychological adjustment. To put a finer point on what Harris argued, children do not transport the effects of parenting (whatever they might be) outside the home. The socialization of children certainly matters (remember, neither personality nor temperament is 100 percent heritable), but it is not the parents who are the primary “socializers”, that honor goes to the child’s peer group (a fascinating topic, but one that merits its own separate discussion).
8 Surprising Facts About Parenting, Genes and What Really Makes Us Who We Are
...You must remember that parents share genes with their children and that overlap must be accounted for in research design. As psychologists pointed out years ago5, because parents pass along two things to their kids: genes and an environment, it shocks virtually no one that the two would be correlated. It is not surprising, based on shared genetics, that children resemble their parents, not only in appearance, but also in temperament, behavior, intellect, athletic prowess, etc. The environments that parents construct for their children when they are young, moreover, tend to mirror their natural inclinations (bright parents provide enriched environments). So if you’re wondering whether parents might selectively foster certain preexisting skill sets (i.e., buying an instrument for a child interested in music) the answer is, sure.6 In that case, parents might also shape things further by deciding on the type of instrument (guitar over drums, etc.).6 However, when you introduce controls for that genetic overlap in studies probing the impact of parenting on some outcome more generally, the effects that we often see can vanish.
I’ll give you a concrete example to mull over. Children who are spanked (not abused, but spanked) often experience a host of other problems in life, including psychological maladjustment and behavioral problems.8 In a study led by my colleague J.C. Barnes, we probed this issue in more detail and found some evidence suggesting that spanking increased the occurrence of overt bad behavior in children.8 We could have stopped there. Yet, we went one step further and attempted to inspect the genetic influences that were rampant across the measures included in our study. What we found was that much of the association between the two variables (spanking and behavior) was attributable to genetic effects that they had in common. The correlation between spanking and behavior appeared to reflect the presence of shared genetic influences cutting across both traits.
KIDS FROM PHYSICALLY ABUSIVE HOMES TURN OUT VIOLENT IN ADULTHOOD NOT SO MUCH BECAUSE THEY WERE PHYSICALLY ABUSED, BUT BECAUSE THEY INHERITED GENES FROM THEIR PARENT(S) THAT INCLINE THEM TO VIOLENCE AND TO PERPETUATE THE CYCLE OF PHYSICAL ABUSE!
BREAK THE CYCLE, PIMP!
https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1085893103343394817
James Thompson Shared environmental effects either zero or fairly small. Family & school impact low. Reality: most PERSONALITY TRAITS inherited
In 1960 a graduate student at Harvard received a letter from George A. Miller, head of the department of psychology, dismissing her from the Ph.D. program because she was not up to the mark. Remember that name. Much later, stuck at home with chronic health problems, Judith Rich Harris took up writing psychology textbooks, books in which she faithfully relayed the dominant paradigm of psychology - that personality and that much else was acquired from the environment. Then, 35 years after having left Harvard, as an unemployed grandmother, having happily escaped academic indoctrination, she sat down and wrote an article, which she submitted to the prestigious Psychological Review. It was published to sensational acclaim. She was deluged with inquiries as to who she was. In 1997, on the strength of the article alone, she was given one of the top awards in psychology; the Geaorge A. Miller award.
The opening words of Harris's article were:
Do
parents have any important long-term effects on the development of
their child's personality? The article examines the evidence and
concludes that the answer is no.
PARENTS JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND!
From about 1910 onward psychologists had studied what they called the socialization of children. Although they were initially disappointed to find few clear-cut correlations between parenting style and a child's personality, they clung to the behaviorist assumption that parents were training their children's characters by reward and punishment, and the Freudian assumption that many people's psychological problems had been created by their parents. This assumption became so automatic that to this day no biography is complete without a passing reference to the parental causes of the subject's quirks. (It is probable that this wrenching separation from his mother was one of the prime sources of his mental instability," says a recent author, referring to Isaac Newton.")
To be fair, socialization theory was more than an assumption. It did produce evidence, reams of it, all showing that children end up like their parents. Abusive parents produce abusive children, neurotic parents produce neurotic children, phlegmatic parents produce phlegmatic children, bookish parents produce bookish children, and so on.
All this proves precisely nothing, said Harris. Of course, children resemble their parents: they share many of the same genes. Once studies of twins raised apart started coming out, proving dramatically high heritability for personality, you could no longer ignore the possibility that parents had put their children's character in place at the moment of conception, not during the long years of childhood. The similarity between parents and children could be nature, not nurture. Indeed, given that the twin studies could find almost no effect of shared environment on personality, the genetic hypothesis should actually be the null hypothesis: the burden of proof was on nurture. If a socialization study did not control for genes, it proved nothing at all. Yet socialization researchers went on year after year publishing these correlations without even paying lip service to the alternative genetic theory.
It was true that socialization theorists used another argument as well that different parenting styles coincide with different children's personalities. A calm home contains happy children; children who are nice get hugged a lot; children who are beaten a lot are hostile; and so on. But this could be confusing cause and effect. You could just as plausibly argue that happy children make a calm home; children who are nice get hugged a lot; children who are hostile get beaten a lot. Old joke: Johnny comes from a broken home; I'm not surprised - Johnny could break any home. Sociologists are found of saying that a good relationship with parents "has a protective effect" in keeping children off drugs. They are much less fond of saying that kids who do drugs do not get on with their parents.
The correlation of good parenting with certain personalities is worthless as proof that parents shape personality, because correlation cannot distinguish cause from effect. According to Harris, it is patent that socialization is not something parents do to children; it is something children do to themselves. There is increasing evidence that what socialization theorists have assumed were parent-to-child effects are often actually child-to-parent effects. Parents treat their children very differently according to the personalities of the children.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the troubled matter of gender. Parents who have children of different sexes will know that they treat these children differently. Such parents do not have to be told about the experiments in which adults rough-and-tumbled baby girls disguised in blue and cuddled baby boys disguised in pink. But most such parents will also hotly protest that the chief reason they treat their boys differently from their girls is because the boys and girls are different. They will fill the boy's cupboard with dinosaurs and swords, and the girl's with dolls and dresses, because they know this is the way to please each child. That is what the children keep asking for when in a shop. Parents may reinforce nature with nurture, but they do not create the difference. They do not force gender stereotypes down unwilling throats; they react to preexisting prejudices. Those prejudices are not in one sense innate - there is no "doll gene"- but dolls and many other toys are designed to appeal to predisposing prejudices, just as food is designed to appeal to human tastes. Besides, the parental reaction itself is just as likely to be innate: parents could be genetically predisposed to perpetuate rather than fight gender stereotypes.
Once again, evidence for nurture is not evidence against nature, nor is the converse true. I just listened to a radio program about whether boys were better at soccer than girls or whether their parents just pushed them that way. The proponents of each view seemed to agree implicitly that their explanations were mutually exclusive. Nobody even suggested that both could be true at the same time.
Criminal parents produce criminal children - yes, but not if they adopt the children. In a large study in Denmark, being adopted from an honest family into an honest family produced a child with a 13.5 percent probability of getting into trouble with the law; that figure increased only marginally, to 14.7 percent, if the adopting family included criminals. Being adopted from criminal parents to an honest family, however, caused the probability to jump to 20 percent. Where both adopting and biological parents were criminals, the rate was even higher - 24.5 percent. Genetic factors are predisposing the way people react to "crimogenic" environments.
Likewise, the children of divorced parents are more likely to divorce - yes, but only if they are biological children. Children whose adoptive parents divorce show no tendency to follow suit. Twin studies reveal no role at all for the family environment in divorce. A fraternal twin has a 30 percent probability of getting divorced if his or her twin gets divorced, about the same correlation as with a parent. An identical twin has a 45 percent probability of divorce if his twin gets divorced. About half your probability of divorce is in the genes; the rest is circumstance.
Rarely has an emperor seemed so naked as after Harris was finished with socialization theory. None of this will come as a surprise to people who have more than one child. Parenting is a revelation to most people. Having assumed you would now be the chief coach and sculptor of a human personality, you find yourself reduced to the role of little more than a helpless spectator cum chauffeur. Children compartmentalize their lives. Learning is not a backpack they carry from one environment to another; it is specific to the context. This is not a license for parents to make their children unhappy - making another person suffer is wrong, whether it alters the person's personality or not. In the words of Sandra Scarr, the veteran champion of the idea that people pick the environments to suit their characters, "Parents' most important job, therefore, is to provide support and opportunities, not to try to shape children's enduring characteristics." Truly terrible parenting can still warp somebody's personality. But it seems likely that (I repeat) parenting is like vitamin C; as long as it is adequate, a little bit more or less has no discernible long-term effects.
The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns On Nurture. Ridley, p. 251-254.
"Harris argued that parents had no lasting influence on the personalities, preferences, and temperaments of their children. Her ideas were met with incredulity, and it would take time before reflexive doubt gave way to more careful consideration." doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2
“[Judith Rich] Harris probably overstated the lack of impact of parents, but nonetheless parents do have surprisingly little effect on how their kids turn out, at least within the normal range.”
I'LL ADD SOME MORE PASSAGES FROM The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture THAT BETTER DESCRIBES THE LACK OF INFLUENCE PARENTING HAS ON OFFSPRING. (I ADDED THE ADDITIONAL PAGES BELOW. NOW, READ THEM.)
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| Examine Any Group Of Young People, And You Will Find Each Playing A Consistently Different Role: A Tough, A Wit, A Brain, A Leader, A Schemer, A Beauty. These Roles Are Created, Of Course, By Nature Via Nurture. Each Child Soon Realizes What He Or She Is Good At And Bad At - Compared With The Others In The Group. The Child Then Trains For That Role And Not For Others, Acting In Character, Developing Still Further The Talent He Has And Neglecting The Talent That Is Lacking. The Tough Gets Tougher, The Wit Gets Funnier, And So On. When A Child Specializes In A Chosen Role, That Role Becomes What He Is Good At. According To Harris This Tendency To Differentiate First Emerges At About The Age Of Eight. Until That Point, If A Group Of Children Asked "Who Is The Toughest Boy Here?" All Will Jump Up And Cry "ME!" After That Age, They Will Start To Say "Him." (I WAS BOTH ME AND HIM. PEOPLE KNEW WHO THE BEST BASKETBALL PLAYER WAS. AND THAT WAS ME.) |
The most radical shift of late in the conventional wisdom on parenting has been provoked by one simple question: how much do parents really matter?
Clearly, parenting matters a great deal. As the link between abortion and crime rates make clear, unwanted children - who are disproportionately subject to neglect and abuse - have worse outcomes than children who were eagerly welcomed by their parents. But how much can those eager parents actually accomplish for their children?
This question represents a crescendo of decades' worth of research. A long line of studies, including research into twins who were separated at birth, had already concluded that genes alone are responsible for perhaps 50 percent of a child's personality and abilities.
So if nature accounts for half of a child's destiny, what accounts for the other half? Surely it must be the nurturing - the Baby Mozart tapes, the church sermons, the museum trips, the lessons, the bargaining and hugging and quarreling and punishing that, in toto, constitute the act of parenting. But how then to explain another famous study, the Colorado Adoption Project, which followed the lives of 245 babies put up for adoption and found virtually no correlation between the child's personality traits and those of his adopted parents? Or the other studies showing that a child's character wasn't much affected whether or not he was sent to day care, whether he had one parent or two, whether his mother worked or didn't, whether he had two mommies or two daddies or one of each?
These nature-nurture discrepancies were addressed in a 1998 book by a little-known textbook author named Judith Rich Harris. The Nature Assumption was in effect an attack on obsessive parenting, a book so provocative that it required two subtitles: Why Children Turn Out The Way They Do and Parents Matter Less Than You Think and Peers Matter More. Harris argued, albeit gently, that parents are wrong to think they contribute so mightily to their child's personality. This belief, she wrote, was a "cultural myth." Harris argued that the top-down influence of parents is overwhelmed by the grassroots effect of peer pressure, the blunt force applied each day by friends and schoolmates.
The unlikeliness of Harris's bombshell - she was a grandmother, no less, without PhD or academic affiliation - prompted both wonder and chagrin. "The public may be forgiven for saying, 'Here we go again,' " wrote one reviewer. "One year we're told bonding is the key, the next that it's birth order. Wait, what really matters is stimulation. The first five years of life aer the most important; no, the first three years; no, it's all over by the first year. Forget that: It's all genetics!"
But Harris's theory was duly endorsed by a slate of heavyweights. Among them was Steven Pinker, the cognitive psychologist and bestselling author, who in his own book Blank Slate called Harris's views "mind-boggling" (in a good way). Patients in traditional forms of psychotherapy while away their fifty minutes reliving childhood conflicts and learning to blame their unhappiness on how their parents treated them," Pinker wrote. "Many biographies scavenge through the subject's childhood for the roots of the grown-up's tragedies and triumphs. 'Parenting experts' make women feel like ogres if they slip out of the house to work or skip a reading of Goodnight Moon. All these deeply held beliefs will have to be rethought.
Or will they? Parents must matter, you tell yourself. Besides, even if peers exert so much influence on a child, isn't it the parents who essentially choose a child's peers? Isn't that why parents agonize over the right neighborhood, the right school, the right circle of friends?
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores The Hidden Side Of Everything. Levitt, Dubner, p. 154-156
I CAME FROM A SOMEWHAT UNIQUE FAMILY SO MY PARENTS AND SIBLINGS PLAYED A BIGGER ROLE AND HAD A MORE SIGNIFICANT IMPACT ON MY LIFE THAN MOST OTHER PARENTS AND SIBLINGS WOULD (SOME OF IT WAS BAD (WE'D GET THE SHIT BEATEN OUT OF US FOR MINOR INFRACTIONS) AND SOME OF IT WAS GOOD (WE GOT TO EXPERIENCE THINGS MOST OTHER KIDS DIDN'T)).
MY OLDER SIBLINGS PRIMARILY ASSOCIATED WITH WHITES.
https://twitter.com/stevestuwill/status/1461639134297079809
Parenting practices seem to have little or no impact on children's personalities, contrary to some of the best-known theories in psychology. (Longitudinal study; N = 3,880) online.ucpress.edu/collabra/artic
Haloti, You Are The Way You Are Not So Much Because Your Parents Raised You A Certain Way And Inculcated Certain Values And Ethics Upon You, But Because You Share The Same Genes With Each Of Your Parents, Which Makes You Think And Behave The Same Way As Your Parents. So Your Altruistic, Compassionate, And Conscientious Behavior Is More A Reflection Of The Genes You Inherited From One Or Both Of Your Parents Than It Is A Reflection Of The Way They Raised You. In Fact, Even If They Hadn't Raised You (Even If You Were Raised By Parents Who Were Not Biologically Related To You Or If You Were Abandoned And Thrown To The Streets Like Many Poor, Polynesian Parents Do To their Children) You'd Still Turn Out The Way You Are (The Way Your Genes Inclined You To Be), Which Would Be Very Similar To The Way Those Same Genes Inclined Your Biological Parents To Be.
TO BE OR NOT TO BE! THAT IS THE QUESTION, PIMP!
TO BE OR NOT TO BE! THAT IS THE QUESTION, PIMP!
“Not only does the family home matter less than genes, but for some traits, it doesn’t seem to matter at all.
“This is a deeply counterintuitive conclusion - and one that poses a serious challenge to some of the most famous theories in psychology.”
So glad that I wasn't just "brought up"...I was RAISED!
NEVER HEARD OF THIS BROAD BUT HER BELIEFS ARE FLAWED! (YOUR UPBRINGING (THE WAY YOU WERE RAISED) DOESN'T HAVE AS BIG OF A ROLE IN YOUR LIFE OUTCOME AS SOCIETY WOULD LEAD YOU TO BELIEVE OR AS YOU WOULD INTUITIVELY BELIEVE.
RAISE THE ROOF, PIMP! PRAISE THE LORD!
RAISE THE ROOF, PIMP! PRAISE THE LORD!
