Not everyone is going to turn out to be brilliant — any more than everyone will turn out nice and loving. And that is not necessarily because of parental failure or an impoverished environment. It is because everyday character traits, like all human behavior, have hard-wired and genetic components that cannot be molded entirely by the best environment, let alone the best psychotherapists.
“The central pitch of any child psychiatrist now is that the illness is often in the child and that the family responses may aggravate the scene but not wholly create it,” said my colleague Dr. Theodore Shapiro, a child psychiatrist at Weill Cornell Medical College. “The era of ‘there are no bad children, only bad parents’ is gone.”
I recall one patient who told me that she had given up trying to have a relationship with her 24-year-old daughter, whose relentless criticism she could no longer bear. “I still love and miss her,” she said sadly. “But I really don’t like her.”
For better or worse, parents have limited power to influence their children. That is why they should not be so fast to take all the blame — or credit — for everything that their children become.
He's focusing on genetics, but the basic idea of how much parents can influence their children reminded me irresistably of Judith Harris's 1998 book, The Nurture Assumption. In it, Harris argued that parents simply don't affect their children nearly as much as we think they do. She noted that genetics and parenting are often confused, but what I thought was most interesting was that Harris argued strongly for the influence peer groups have on children.
As the school year is just starting, I'm now going to go off on a tangent about schools. I'm wondering if I'm justified in drawing a practical conclusion from the importance of peer groups. Basically, to me that means that one of the most important parenting decisions is choosing what school to put your children in. If you want them to do well academically, you'll look for a school with good exam results. Even there, the most important factor leading to those results may well be the culture and work ethic of the students, rather than the level of teaching. I've been to some very different schools myself, and I'd argue that this is very important. Your child won't get good exam results because the school is great, but rather because other kids at that school want good exam results, so to some extent, your kid will want them too.
A wider sociological corollary of this would seem to be that there will always be "worse" and "better" schools, if only because the latter are composed largely of kids whose parents want them to do well and steer them toward that kind of environment, and the former are made up of people who aren't that interested in going to school. In my mind, this is the single biggest reason why Finland, with "free" education, also has drastically different final exam results in different schools. It's the peer group.
The way I see it, you can't really do anything about genetics, and there seems to be pretty widespread agreement that beyond some basics, the quality of your parenting also matters a lot less than people think. So really, the one big thing that you can affect is what kind of peer group your kids end up in. That comes down to choice of neighborhood and choice of school.
The fact that schools are this different, even in countries with "free" education, suggests that most parents are already thinking like this. They consider the reputation of a neighborhood before moving there, and the reputation and results of schools. This is really a feedback loop, and to me, that means that the constantly recurring discussion on how to balance differences between schools in Finland is a totally futile one. Different schools will have different "cultures" and work ethics no matter what we do to balance them out. And I don't see why that has to be a bad thing.
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