DailyDirt: Good Parenting, Bad Parenting, Is There Really A Big Difference?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Tue, Mar 18th 2014 5:00pm — Michael Ho

Who can really say what effect parenting has on the development of a child? Presumably, the parents of Ted and David Kaczynski didn't raise their sons in dramatically different ways, but these brothers ultimately live very different lives. It's sometimes difficult to define what a good parent is, and it may seem like it's easier to point out bad parents, but the distinctions may not be as clear-cut as everyone thinks. (Who is qualified to judge, anyway?) Here are just a few links on the topic of raising kids.

Peter Lanza, Adam Lanza's father, is now talking about his experience with his son before the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. If there's a lesson to be learned from Adam's behavior, it may be that we don't yet know how to predict or find the motives behind these mass murder events. [url]
For some time now, there's been a trend away from parenting with physical punishment. However, it looks like about 3 out of 4 parents yell/scream/shout at their kids at least once a month (and you gotta wonder what that 4th parent is doing, if not yelling). [url]
If only parenting were as easy as this infographic makes it look. But maybe if everyone is more aware about what makes kids happy, we'll all be happier somehow. [url]

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Filed Under: adam lanza, child development, parenting, psychology, sandy hook tragedy, ted kaczynski

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Lawrence D�Oliveiro, 18 Mar 2014 @ 6:43pm

Peer Pressure
There was a study by a psychologist, reported in New Scientist a few years ago, which claimed that peer pressure was responsible for essentially 100% of the influence on a child�s upbringing�parental influence was so low as to be within the experimental error.

Peer pressure can make people do the most unbelievable things, as Stanley Milgram discovered all those years ago. How else to explain why your Congress, discovering that researchers were reporting that stricter controls on guns would be a good idea, decided to ban such research?
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Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, 18 Mar 2014 @ 6:57pm

Re: Peer Pressure
You are talking about Judith Harris. But yes, parenting is a shared environment effect, and shared environment has no effect on adult IQ or five factor personality.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nurture_Assumption
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_study

Harris is right about the shared environment being approximately 0 for many traits at adulthood. There are some that show shared environment effects, e.g. criminality, but it is not necessarily due to parenting.
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Anonymous Coward, 19 Mar 2014 @ 4:06am

Are you kidding me? I taught kindergarten for the first time this year - there was a student on day 1 whom you would think has no parents. She had no concept of acceptable social behavior, no experience with listening to others, no concept of rules...she was way behind in development compared to the other five year olds. Since she had no peers or schooling of any kind yet, this can only be the fault of the parents.

I will grant you that two completely different behaviors can arise from the same household. But let's not pretend that parenting makes no difference.
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Lance (profile), 19 Mar 2014 @ 5:09am

Re: Peer Pressure
Yes, peer pressure can be a great influence on a child; and that influence seems to grow as a child enters adolescence. That is why it is imperative upon parents to be more engaged in the early years of a child's upbringing.

A child that is raised to have a greater sense of self, and is encouraged to recognize his/her uniqueness, is not affected to the same by peer pressure. Making sure that Susie and Billy know that they are just part of the pack, and insisting that they adhere to all of the social norms, is a great way to raise a child that will succumb to peer pressure. On the other hand, raising a child with that sense of self awareness, and the license to express his/her uniqueness, are a good way to prepare a child to deal with the pressures that often are exerted by the crowd around them.
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Anonymous Coward, 19 Mar 2014 @ 7:02am

"she was way behind in development compared to the other five year olds. Since she had no peers or schooling of any kind yet, this can only be the fault of the parents."

How about genetics and/or a brain disorder arising from genetics or a head injury? From the sparse evidence you provide it's impossible to tell but surely those should be discounted? Or is that too logical ? (In at least one large state in the US teaching 'critical thinking' is deemed to be a Bad Thing)
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John Fenderson (profile), 19 Mar 2014 @ 9:25am

Parental self-perception
I've long ago noticed that parents tend to take both too much credit and too much blame for how their children turn out.
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John Fenderson (profile), 19 Mar 2014 @ 9:27am

Re:
"Since she had no peers or schooling of any kind yet, this can only be the fault of the parents."

This is clearly jumping to conclusions. There remain a lot of other possible factors that influence this -- including just plain chance.
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Carel (profile), 19 Mar 2014 @ 7:52pm

Ted Kaczynski
Kaczynski was admitted to Harvard at age 16. As freshman he was asked to volunteer for some psychological experiments, more or less based on what was understood to be "brainwashing" in those days. After having been subjected to a series of rather brutal psychological experiments, intended to mentally break the subjects, the volunteers were left to their own devices with no option for counselling/debriefing. Not an excuse for blowing people up, but surprising that it is rarely mentioned as a possible contributing factor.
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