Parent Thread

I read those parenting books, most of its common sense, some "don't panic your kid is fucking fine" shit, and some nonsense. It's not so bad.

Gavinmad said:

While I don't have kids of my own, I believe my keen observations have led me towards the single greatest rule of being a parent, and I will share it with you now.

Loud toys are toys that get kept at grandpa and grandma's house.

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I have fed this often as an uncle. No idea if mom and dad or grandma ended up with them.
Considering both of them live several hours away it most likely ended up in the trash. Maybe ticking off the kid.

Oblio said:

If you believe this I have an investment opportunity that would be perfect for you.

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The data on this is extremely strong. Steven Pinker covered some in The Blank Slate, but Judith Rich Harris was the one who did the bulk of the research. Her book is on my list as well.

Most studies on how parenting affects children make the same critical mistake, they don't account for genetics. When you start controlling for genes using twin studies the affect of "shared environment" (i.e. Household) disappears. You find that about half of behavior and personality is accounted for by genes, and the other half by influences outside the household, primarily peers.

This does not apply to the things you can do to screw up a kid like abuse and neglect. Those are obvious demonstrable harms. It applies to the kinds of things middle class parents fret over like whether you read to your kid or how much TV they watch, stuff like that.

I am currently reading Crib Sheet which is a parenting book written by an economist (she also wrote an excellent pregnancy book), and she similarly tears apart the studies by showing that they also don't control for tons of things. For example, you frequently hear that breastfeeding increases a child's IQ because breastfed babies have higher IQs. Of course those studies just take the average IQ of babies whom are breast fed and those that aren't, they don't account for parent's educational attainment, zip code, or income level. When you start controlling for that the IQ benefits disappear.

Studies on TV watching are nearly the same, more TV equals stupider kid with more behavior problems by the raw numbers. Lots of people leap to the conclusion that TV watching causes these problems, but that is only a correlation that once again ends up most measuring the few things we know have causative effects (parent's genes and where the kid grows up).

Kiroy said:

nice mine is at 10 we can be battle buddies

we're not reading parenting books tho

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Incoming Pokémon friend codes

I read books about everything, I probably get through 20 non-fiction books a year. There is a running joke at work where every time some obscure topic comes up I've read a book about it. Public transportation and 5 weeks of vacation are a big help when it comes to reading. I also didn't have a smart phone for the longest time (only got one about 2 years ago), the amount of reading I do has really dropped since I got. Honestly I still think about dumping it, or at least leaving it at home much more.

chaos said:

Yeah idk, early intervention and prek education alone are hugely dramatic markers for success in a person's life. Not to mention nutrition, behavior modeling, medical treatment and vaccinations, etc etc. Parents control way too much shit in a kids life. I'm sure it's possible, but it is just doubtful.

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Most of that falls into "Make sure they don't die or kill themselves" category, which of course matters. Except for the very beginning of a child's life behavior modeling is done by peers and not parents, any effect parent's have through social conditioning is gone pretty quickly once the kid interacts with the world. The most obvious example of this being that the kids (say of immigrants) don't have their parent's accent, but the one of their peers and the community they grow up in.

Now, you could in theory almost totally socially isolate a child, in which case you would be their behavior model. Crazy religious cults do this kind of thing (e.g. Westboro Baptist Church). But I think most of us would put that in the abuse category. And even then it frequently fails, last I recall most of the young members are leaving and the church is dying.

Early educational intervention and pre-k, when controlled for genes, have little to no individual impact on a child. Education in general matters surprisingly little on an individual level. How they matter is in a community building, social network effect kind of way and it is also why they have a much bigger benefit for low income children.

Now how does autism fit into this study

I gotta admit, kid has me worried

Denaut said:

Except for the very beginning of a child's life behavior modeling is done by peers and not parents

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Kids behave according to the boundaries and social structures in which they live. This includes peers and family. To the extent that they spend more time with peers, it shouldn't be surprising that a great deal of modeling comes from that source.

However, to take that and use it to assert that parents don't have important causal impact on a child's behavior is ludicrous. For one, the modeling done at an early age sets trajectories that have momentum for the rest of their lives. Second, parents hold a unique relationship of love and trust which heavily weights their input compared to time exposure as kids age. Third, the idea that parental influence drops to zero outside of "the very beginning" is simply false. My kids (8, 5) could win awards for mirroring back various parts of my and my wife's idiosyncratic behavior patterns, and that becomes more sophisticated over time. Sense of humor, problem solving approaches, how they conduct an argument, you name it. The uptake is dynamic and continuing. Tactics and methods of discipline and boundary-setting in particular are ongoing sources of input. This is blindingly obvious to anyone who has raised children of their own.

Which, importantly, Pinker has not. We should be highly skeptical of strong assertions made by someone who has no personal experience in the subject, especially on what is probably the most common human activity behind sleeping and the three F's. It's like a virgin telling me the best way to have sex after studying porn. You can't really know what it's like until you've done it.

There no doubt is a macro level where certain broad outcomes on which we have passable data are predictable by ZIP code, but those findings aren't extendable to "parents don't matter short of keeping kids alive". Humans are more complicated than that.

Denaut said:

when controlled for genes

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And how does one do that? We don't know anything about the genetics of the people in the data beyond grossly superficial aspects. And even if you had everyone's complete genome we still know almost nothing about how genetic inheritance works for complex behavior over a lifetime. Plus, you couldn't construct a controlled experiment if you wanted to. The closest we've got are the "separated twins" studies, which show large environmental drivers.

Denaut said:

but otherwise almost nothing you directly do really matters in the long run.

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And even if this were true, it has got to be the worst possible foundational premise from which to approach parenting.

ToeMissile said:

It was the same for me except 11pm, 2am, 4am? something like that anyway. Stupid teething.

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Sleep in seperate room from wife and baby, take turns. Did that for a while. It was the only way to keep sane, and not fuckup at work.

I get 3 months paternity if we have another. Looking forward to not working during the shit months

Denaut said:

The most reliable stuff I've read (from before as well) says that as a parent you have basically zero positive direct influence on how your kid actually turns out via parenting. You can screw them of of course (like abusing them), but otherwise almost nothing you directly do really matters in the long run. The only real influence you have is where you choose to live and which school you send them to.

I actually find that pretty comforting.

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Consequences of parenting might not be as long lasting as commonly thought, but short term consequences are very real, and bad parenting will easily turn your life into hell for one or two decades...

I mean cool though, that means that you can save a lot of money on food and buy fancy watches instead.

This genetic determinism gets ridiculous quick.

Lendarios said:

I'm supposed to get that... but what am i going to do? help around the house? Fuck that. ill rather work. (im doing remote work for the next month)

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It's for bonding my dude. If you're serious that's a piece of shit move

"I have to work" , you literally don't

Captain Suave said:

Kids behave according to the boundaries and social structures in which they live. This includes peers and family. To the extent that they spend more time with peers, it shouldn't be surprising that a great deal of modeling comes from that source.

However, to take that and use it to assert that parents don't have important causal impact on a child's behavior is ludicrous. For one, the modeling done at an early age sets trajectories that have momentum for the rest of their lives. Second, parents hold a unique relationship of love and trust which heavily weights their input compared to time exposure as kids age. Third, the idea that parental influence drops to zero outside of "the very beginning" is simply false. My kids (8, 5) could win awards for mirroring back various parts of my and my wife's idiosyncratic behavior patterns, and that becomes more sophisticated over time. Sense of humor, problem solving approaches, how they conduct an argument, you name it. The uptake is dynamic and continuing. Tactics and methods of discipline and boundary-setting in particular are ongoing sources of input. This is blindingly obvious to anyone who has raised children of their own.

Which, importantly, Pinker has not. We should be highly skeptical of strong assertions made by someone who has no personal experience in the subject, especially on what is probably the most common human activity behind sleeping and the three F's. It's like a virgin telling me the best way to have sex after studying porn. You can't really know what it's like until you've done it.

There no doubt is a macro level where certain broad outcomes on which we have passable data are predictable by ZIP code, but those findings aren't extendable to "parents don't matter short of keeping kids alive". Humans are more complicated than that.

And how does one do that? We don't know anything about the genetics of the people in the data beyond grossly superficial aspects. And even if you had everyone's complete genome we still know almost nothing about how genetic inheritance works for complex behavior over a lifetime. Plus, you couldn't construct a controlled experiment if you wanted to. The closest we've got are the "separated twins" studies, which show large environmental drivers.

And even if this were true, it has got to be the worst possible foundational premise from which to approach parenting.

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I am not going to shit up this thread by arguing with everyone, especially since I don't even have kids yet. So this is the last I will say on the subject.

The research says you are wrong.

It clearly shows that our intuitions are incorrect since we don't instinctively account for the genetic contribution we and our partners have on our kid's personalities. We also tend to grow up in somewhat similar social circumstances. Parenting style has somewhere between zero and an unmeasured small amount of direct influence on our kid's behavior and personality. Our influence as parents is determined by our genes and the community we select for them.

Beyond that our power to affect their personality is to damage them (abuse, neglect, letting them die, etc), make their life miserable (albeit not permanently), or improve our children's community in general which benefits the other children in the community as much as our own.

We control for genetics by doing rigorous twin studies. You take 4 cohorts; identical twins reared together, identical twins reared apart, fraternal twins, adopted siblings; and then you measure the differences between them using their genetic relatedness to draw data points. Once you do this the data is pretty clear; between genes, shared environment (household), and unique environment (community outside household) there is a 50/50 split between genes and unique environment. Shared environment might be in there somewhere riding in the measurement error, but if there is an influence it is extremely small.

You don't have to believe me but the literature is there for anyone to read. You can start with The Nurture Assumption or read the relevant chapters in The Blank Slate which summarize it. There is also a Very Bad Wizards Episode that discusses it starting at about 39 minutes.