Struggling to raise your kids right? Here’s a counter-intuitive scientific finding: really, what parents do doesn’t matter. Children come to resem

Social science versus common sense

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2021-07-06 21:00:06

Struggling to raise your kids right? Here’s a counter-intuitive scientific finding: really, what parents do doesn’t matter. Children come to resemble their parents, but that is all driven by their genes. Once you control for that, there are few systematic effects of upbringing.

That’s a big result and it has had a suitably big reception. Judith Rich Harris wrote an entire book on it in 1998 called The Nurture Assumption — a great example of clear, witty science writing, with a foreword by Steven Pinker. More recently Robert Plomin’s Blueprint pushed the idea:

In essence, the most important thing that parents give to their child is their genes. Many parents will find this hard to accept…. Parents differ in how much they guide their children in all aspects of development…. But in the population, these parenting differences don’t make much of a difference in their children’s outcomes….

Guess what, it’s wrong: parenting does matter. We know this because Ben Sacerdote studied Korean adoptees to the US. These were assigned to the first parents they were matched with, creating a nice natural experiment, and they share no more genes with their adoptive parents than with anyone else. From the paper:

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