When we become parents, we’re introduced to 20-plus years of difficult decisions. We make choices like whether or not to breastfeed, whether to let our kids watch TV, and if so, how much? Right now, there’s controversy about whether it’s safe to vaccinate, if so, when? Some parents worry about whether they should sleep in the same bed as their infant, or let them sleep alone in a crib.
Often, we make these decisions under the assumption that whatever we choose, the consequences will be important to our child. Question is, how do we know this? Yeah, there is lots of information available through the media, and especially online.
But then again, this is the same internet that tells me that alcohol causes cancer, and is great harmful for my heart, or that I should avoid carbs, but definitely not eat red meat or tofu or farm-raised fish.
There is just a ton of chattering noise out there. So what are we supposed to do when it comes to our most important life choices, like those related to parenting?
In this write up, I’ll suggest that our best hope is to bypass the chatter and go directly to the science itself. And even more importantly, to learn tools for thinking critically about the latest news or parenting trends.
Parenting itself certainly is not a science, and I can tell you right now that science doesn’t have all the answers. However, there are three big reasons why I think science may still be the best source we have for informing our parenting choices.
Let’s consider what I think these three big reasons are. Number one, we don’t have a whole lot of choice. Most of us are inundated with reports of scientific facts about parenting choices from nearly every imaginable angle, not just TV and the internet, but also random people like teachers or grandparents or Hollywood celebrities.
Who for some reason believe that they are the authorities on parenting science. If we don’t learn how to sort through this noise, it will probably seep into our brains in the form of vague and disorganized thoughts and feelings anyway, whether we like it or not.
This is especially dangerous because the factoids that are most likely to bubble up into our Facebook feed or into the press get this attention, precisely because they’re surprising, at odds with what many scientists believe, or are contrary to what we find most intuitive. For each of these reasons, we need to learn to think critically about hot new facts and trends.
Reason number two to pay attention to science. We make choices all the time, normally based on some kind of combination of facts and personal values.
Many choices we make because we believe they’ll have some kind of positive impact on our kids, but what if it turned out that we were wrong, and that our choices were actually hurting our kids? Or what if it turned out that most of the choices had no real significance at all? That our kids would turn out the same, whatever choices we made? The bottom line is that if we’re going to make choices based on some kind of belief in cause and effect, it probably makes sense to know what those causes and effects actually are.
Finally, reason number three. The truth will set us free. Although many parenting practices have important consequences for kids, many choices may not have as big an effect as we think.
In this write up, I hope to convince you that although your role in your child’s life is huge, many of your individual decisions may actually matter a lot less than you’d ever suspect. We’ll try to work through which choices likely matter a lot, and which probably matter less, and how to identify which is which.
I’ll try to tell you when science has solved a particular problem, but my main focus will be to show you how you can figure out the science on your own, and how you can scrutinize media reports and chatter to tease apart the good from the bad.
Like scientists, we’ll try to confront new facts with skepticism, but then move beyond our skepticism to decide what is most likely, given what we know. But, unlike scientists, we’ll also try to use this imperfect knowledge we have to make real-life decisions.
A sub-field of parenting research called behavior genetics. has given us some truly surprising insights into the effect that parents have on a wide range of child hood outcomes, Including things like verbal ability, personality, problems with alcohol and even things like religiosity and the likelihood of future divorce.
These studies suggest that genetics may play a much larger role than previously supposed and also that parents have less control on fundamental aspects of their child’s development than they may have suspected.
If you are a parent or even heard of parenting, you’ve probably also heard of the nature-nurture distinction and the debate that goes with it. In a nutshell, the debate is this: do we turn out the way that we do because our destiny is written in our genes or because we were shaped like clay by our environment?
The nature-nurture debate is an old one, dating back to ancient philosophers like Aristotle and Plato, and it’s an idea that’s very often misunderstood, in large part because of descriptions like the one that I just gave, which describe opposite and equally implausible extremes.
What I want convince you of here is that the debate is actually really important and can tell us a lot if we approach it carefully. However, if we aren’t careful, it can easily be misunderstood, which can lead us either to gross oversimplifications or to prematurely throwing out the idea as junk science.
To learn a language, an infant needs a distinctly human genome which makes them able to learn a human language, but they also need to be exposed to words and sentences in their environment.
Non-human animals like pigs or squirrels will never learn language no matter how much we talk to them. And by the same token, human children who aren’t exposed to language early in life end up profoundly impaired.
Even very basic biological processes like how the eye develops in infancy involve complex interactions between genes and the environment. So yes in this sense, both nature and nurture are always in play.
Okay, but is this the answer we’re looking for when we ask whether intelligence or kindness or music ability are innate or learned? I don’t think so. As frizzy-haired Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has argued, the interesting nature-nurture debate was never really about the either/or dichotomy, like whether language might arise entirely without genes or entirely without environmental inputs.
Why do some people talk a lot and others not as much? Why are some people taller than others? And why are some people more violent, more prone to anger, better at math or science or playing the guitar? In each person, both genes and environment play a role in the development of a trait.
Despite this, we can still ask whether differences between people are due to genetic differences between them or due to different experiences that they’ve had. This is the interesting nature and nurture distinction. So are differences between people, with respect to some trait, mainly due to differences in genetics, or are they primarily due to different experiences we have in the world?
The differences between people caused by genetic or environmental differences, is entirely sensible and has repeatedly led to meaningful answers that do not boil down to the mushy bit of both-type answer.
For example, whether we speak French or English is one 100 percent determined by differences in experience and 0 percent by differences in genes. Likewise, whether we play piano or flute or no instrument at all is purely a matter of experience.
However, some children may learn piano or in fact all instruments more easily than others perhaps because of an innate predisposition. And finally, although we know that traits like intelligence, aggressivity or neuroticism are obviously not possible without both genes and exposure to the world, it turns out that we can study what causes differences between people and why some people are more neurotic or aggressive than others.
As pointed out by Professor Pinker, it is tempting to align the nature-nurture debate with our moral values and politics. For example, we might think that it would be bad if genetic differences totally explain differences in traits like aggressivity or intelligence since this might suggest that some people are doomed to be violent or slow learners and that the world is therefore inherently unfair. Given this, we might insist the data be damned, these traits just have to be learned.
The science might tell us that humans vary, but it doesn’t tell us that we should therefore intervene and exploit this variability. And it certainly doesn’t dictate which traits, if any, are more desirable than others. Variability is objective fact. The choice to manipulate it s a subjective human prescription for how to act. If you think that the abuse of genetic variability is awful, stay with me for a second because things are just as terrifying on the other side of the aisle.
John B. Watson was famous for many things but among these was the notorious claim that human nature was almost entirely malleable. Watson made the following wager.
What he said is, “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select, doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors.”
Noticing that humans naturally differ might lead us to eugenics or it might also lead us to create ways to level the playing field by adapting our educational practices.
In short, the nature versus nurture debate is about trying to understand what makes us differ from each other and which traits and behaviors are malleable. This in turn opens up a world of different types of actions that we can take, noble or dubious, but not determined by the science itself.
Shabir Ahmad is a UPSC aspirant/emerging writer from Raiyar Doodhpathri.
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this article are the personal opinions of the author.
The facts, analysis, assumptions and perspective appearing in the article do not reflect the views of GK.