Parenting and the Illusion of Influence

Parenting is the only domain of power open to all, and almost everyone wields it with the conviction that their actions are not only meaningful but deterministic.

Here is a screenshotted excerpt from an apposite anecdote I imported from Twitter (To read the full thread, check here). I’m foregrounding this quote because it captures the core essence of what I’d be arguing in this article: parents are awfully ignorant about how to parent their kids but equally confident that everything they do matter. Does it?

A Firecracker of a Subject

This is perhaps one of the most delicate topics to write about. It is delicate precisely because the subject matter is messy, confounding, high-stake, and hence costly in the event of ‘failure’. Judith Harris is perhaps the bravest person to first tackle the subject from an unorthodox perspective, and it is difficult to better her well-researched and thoughtful arguments. If the assumption that parents wield a formative power in the adult outcomes of their children still prevails after what Harris did, then it's safe to conclude that she's arguing against a natural phenomenon, perhaps an immovable object. I'm, therefore, smart enough to not set for myself the aim of challenging this universal human belief in outsized parental influence, but to propose a modest redefinition of how such influence should be understood.

How we Normally Evaluate Parental Success

Every parent wants to succeed and the measure of ‘success’ is usually how successful their children are. I feel something is fundamentally misguided in this definition of parental success. Make no mistake, evolutionarily, this is the only acceptable definition and I guess it's the motive force behind high-investment parenting: the child must not only survive but must survive long enough to reproduce in turn. However, I should like to think the human species is in a post-evolution, or more precisely, a post-natural selection age wherein behaviors are no longer solely or largely dictated by the blind forces of evolution. We appear to have gamed natural selection already in many domains, most especially in sexual reproduction with our array of sex-related inventions such as contraceptive, artificial insemination, surrogacy, sperm donation, egg freezing, puberty blockers, plastic surgery, casual sex, and so on. All these and many other ‘achievements’ of the modern human significantly weakens the evolutionary pressure on quantitative survival. Thus, by the classical evolutionary definition of parental success, an overwhelming majority of parents today is going to achieve it. Majority of children born today are going to comfortably make it into adulthood, at least old enough to reproduce in turn.

However, nowadays, when parents justle for success over their kids, they seem to be fighting for just more than their survival (though that will always be paramount). They appear to be now, perhaps more than ever, concerned about their kids' competitiveness in many other domains that are believed to be contributory to qualitative survival. How is quantitative survival (how long you live) different from qualitative survival (how well you live)? I believe that the former is non-zero sum while the latter is a zero-sum affair. One's chances of survival isn't necessarily increased or decreased by the death of your neighbor's first child, but the chances of your child landing a quality mate is remotely affected if your neighbor's son is more good-looking and materially successful or his chances of landing the best job if this neighbor’s son is more intelligent and better educated. And it is in this domain parents fight dirty to ensure their children don't carry last. They would do anything to maximize their children's competitive advantage in the zero-sum market space. The primary prizes in this highly competitive domain are prestige, wealth, and power. Anyone who achieves any of these prizes would also attract the best mate.

Notice that all of these coveted prizes which are limited in supply are purely acquired. Nobody is born with prestige or wealth or power in the same sense one can be born with tall height or blue eyes or blond hair. Even if you're born into power and prestige and wealth, none of these artificial inheritances is necessarily stable and a child can very well fail to earn the same level of prestige or power that they were born into. Thus, parents without any of these coveted prizes are forever plotting and fighting to set their children up to attain them, and those parents who already possess these achievements are forever scheming to ensure the legacy is preserved in the family.

This kind of parental competition still has an evolutionary tinge because the parents most successful in the qualitative survival game are also likely to be most successful in not just spreading their genes, but also ensuring those genes flourish. Although I must observe that nowadays, the most reproductively successful humans (in purely quantitative terms) are usually poor, uneducated, and unambitious. It is the reason why fertility is highest in socioeconomically less developed countries. It would seem like quantitative survival and qualitative survival are antithetical in practice: maximizing one tends to inevitably minimize the other, sometimes unintentionally.

Also, quantitative survival is more a game of chance than qualitative survival. For instance, even people in well developed countries die by all sorts of causes (the death toll during COVID-19 is worse off, or at least as worse, in some developed countries as their less developed counterparts). Wealth doesn't always protect against death. However, qualitative survival is less a game of chance: it is more a function of intelligence (if we define intelligence in its classical sense to mean the ability to adapt to and optimize environmental resources). Everyone knows this intuitively but the mistake they make is to assume that we all begin with the same amount of this adaptive intelligence from birth or that we are all equally capable of the same level of adaptive resourcefulness. And this is precisely where parenting goes crazy. It is the domain in which parents primarily measure their success or failure. They deploy the resources in their arsenal in order to maximize their children's adaptive intelligence: the best education, the best tutor, the best exposure, the best books, the best clothes, the best other children, the best food, the best healthcare, etc. Of course, 'the best' is relative but it's usually the optimal resource that each parent can afford, and it would increase or decrease according to fluctuations in parental means.

This definition of parental success in the qualitative survival domain is the reason why parenting is unnecessarily hard (according to Bryan Caplan) and why most parents are awfully terrible. And by the way, no amount of analysis and explanation can uproot this orientation in the mind of any parents, and I assume very strongly that it is the same instinct that would likely determine my behavior if I ever became a parent. But then this should not still stop us from proposing an alternative definition of what constitutes parental success as there's no doubt that there'll always be a few individuals who are capable of internalizing this new perspective and letting it influence their parenting orientation.

There are Parents and there is Parenting

In proposing an alternative definition of what constitutes ‘parental success’, I need to reiterate one of the insights from behavior genetics which is that children generally become who they become in spite of and not because of parenting. Notice that I didn't say "in spite of and not because of parents". This is a crucial distinction. Parenting is what parents (or whoever is playing that role) do and don't do to their kids. However, being parents is much more than parenting: we already know without doubt that parents can still strongly influence their children even without any opportunity for parenting. This insight comes from adoption studies where it has been shown that adopted children still share more in common with their biological parents than their adoptive parents. And the urge to know or fantasize about one’s biological parents, when once an adoptee has found out the truth about their adoption, is crushingly irresistible.

I also need to reiterate another less well-known point: that parenting plays a huge almost deterministic role in childhood memories, but very negligible deterministic role in adult outcomes (again, I said parenting and not parents). And we often conflate the former and the latter as having a causal connection: happy childhood memories mean good adult outcomes and bad childhood memories mean unpleasant adult outcomes or vice versa. Hence, our instinctive rush to conclude that an emotionally struggling adult must be a victim of some accident in nurture, and the easiest culprit of course are parents. But parents don't deserve to be pitied for this attribution because they are ever so ready to believe they have outsized influence over the destiny of their kids. So, they really don't deserve to be exonerated when this fate goes awry. But then, it is for this reason I thought a new definition of what constitutes parental success is expedient: to amend for this injustice in attribution of outcomes.

Factors of Parental Success

There's no doubt that parenting is hard, rough, and delicate. And it's even made unnecessarily harder by parents with terrible personality or damaged psychology. But it is also true that parenting is not universally hard and rough. Some parenting experiences are pretty much smooth and blissful for all parties involved. What factors are behind these differential parenting experiences? To my understanding, there are basically two: first is who the parent is. Second is who the child is. (The second factor depends on the first to a nontrivial degree.) In other words, to the extent that a parental pair is physically, mentally, and emotionally healthy, the resulting parenting experience is also likely to be positive and satisfactory not necessarily because such parents are more skillful or more intelligent, but more because such parents are also far more likely to produce offspring that are physically, mentally, and emotionally healthy. It goes without saying that it is far easier to parent a child that is physically, mentally, and emotionally sound than it is to parent one who, by no fault of theirs, is weak, deviant, or dysfunctional in any one of these critical domains. Likewise, parenting is more effective and successful when a parent or a parental pair is physically, mentally, and emotionally stable. A parental pair has no control over the mental, physical, and emotional qualities of the offspring they produce, but we know that an offspring is extremely likely to resemble its parents when it comes to its physical, emotional, and mental attributes, especially as they become older. This is an immutable law of genetic inheritance against which even the most sophisticated environment is often powerless.

Every conception is a genetic lottery, but the gene pool from which each child draws differs at two levels: first at the level of the germ cells supplied by the reproducing pair, aka, 'the law of segregation'; and second, at the level of the random combination between the two germ cells, aka, 'the law of independent assortment'. The first is qualitative and defines the ceiling of heritable characteristics; the second is statistical and defines the variance in heritable characteristics from one child to another. These two reproductive processes are the reasons why none of the offsprings from the same biological parents are physically, mentally, and emotionally the same. It is also the reason why an offspring from two healthy parents may emerge with a constellation of attributes inferior/superior in adaptiveness to those of the individual parents that produced it and why an offspring from an unhealthy reproducing pair may also emerge with attributes superior/inferior to the source genome.

Parenting as a Weak-Link Problem

One very useful way to conceptualize every human-related problem is either as a weak-link or a strong-link problem. Here's the maverick Adam Mastroianni explaining the concept in a layman's language:

Weak-link problems are problems where the overall quality depends on how good the worst stuff is. You fix weak-link problems by making the weakest links stronger, or by eliminating them entirely.

Whereas in strong-link problems;

Overall quality depends on how good the best stuff is, and the bad stuff barely matters.

An example of a weak-link problem used by Adam is food safety, because "You don’t want to eat anything that will kill you. That’s why it makes sense for the Food and Drug Administration to inspect processing plants, to set standards, and to ban dangerous foods." Music would be a strong-link problem, according to Adam, because;

You listen to the stuff you like the most and ignore the rest.... It would be a big mistake to have an FDA for music. Imagine if you could only upload a song to Spotify after you got a degree in musicology or memorized all the sharps in the key of A-sharp minor or demonstrated competence with the oboe. Imagine if government inspectors showed up at music studios to ensure that no one was playing out of tune. You’d wipe out most of the great stuff and replace it with a bunch of music that checks all the boxes but doesn’t stir your soul, and gosh darn it, souls must be stirred.

But why is it important to separate problems into a strong-link/weak-link dichotomy (which must be admitted isn't always neat with all problems)? As per Adam again, "Figuring out whether a problem is strong-link or weak-link is important because the way you solve them is totally different":

Adam Mastroianni’s chart comparing weak versus strong link problems

Parenting is a classic weak-link conundrum, mostly. It is generally agreed that when it comes to parenting, it is desirable to minimize extreme negative outliers, gatekeep what qualifies as good parenting, seek to educate and instruct the most inexperienced, casually ignore the most successful parents, while prioritizing risk avoidance. Hence, this understanding of parenting as a weak-link problem almost completely explains humans' irrational obsession with bad parenting and its effects: we now know that it's partly because the lifetime damage one single bad parent can cause is far weightier on our sensibilities than the joys of good parenting. Many individuals are even now avoiding becoming a parent at all out of fear that they may make a bad parent. Hence, we have culturally optimized for investing disproportionately on efforts aimed at rooting out bad parenting than at promoting good parenting.

Now we perhaps understand the powerful drive behind the "Nurture Assumption", the insistence on attributing every good and bad adult outcomes alike to parenting, the swiftness and meanness with which parents whose wards aren't doing well on certain metrics are shamed and judged, the fear of many parents to disclose any unsavory attributes/behaviors/shortcomings in their kids, and their equally enthusiastic eagerness to broadcast and take credit for any exceptional talent, attribute, and accomplishment by their children. We now understand why bad parenting is punished more severely than good parenting is rewarded. Now, this is the underlying sociocultural parenting complex that one has to contend with in proposing a reconceptualization of what constitutes successful parenting. Now, the best of the average parents would frantically think and do anything - the unreasonable, the ridiculous, the untenable, and the ineffectual - just to avoid being perceived or tagged as a bad parent. If their parental efforts and merits are going to be judged by how well or poorly their kids turn out in life, then they can as well assume an omnipotent posture as early as possible. In the process, many a parent becomes unwitting dictator and paradoxically end up being in the eyes of their children exactly what they're trying not to be in the eyes of society.

Some parents quickly learn that it is not really about their petty moral institutions, some never learn, and a few have always known this inconvenient truth. The most unfortunate type of parents are those who are unlucky to have a mentally, physically, temperamentally, or characterologically blemished child. These parents labor in vain, expend themselves greatly towards reformation and reclamation of their vivid visions for their children but to little avail. They lament, they pray, they consult, they spend, they shame, they threaten, they appeal all to little or no result. And even when the rare professional counselor or wise person comes around who tells these much-aggrieved parents that it's got nothing to do with what they did or didn't do, such parents would often still prefer to hold on to the myth that there's something they could have done differently to fashion their children in the image they want. The belief in their own omnipotence dies hard.

A Modest Proposal

So, what is a more sensible and liberating way to view parental success? I’m sure there are numerous candidates for this question if posed to the general public. But from my perspective, here is my modest proposal about what good parenting should be about:

1. Physical and medical care

2. Instillation of ethical sensibility through consequential learning and conduct modelling

3. Physical and emotional availability.

I think these are the most fundamental parental duties without which every other effort is superfluous. If a child is adequately fed and reasonably protected, effectively nursed through illnesses, consistently shown and modelled the principles of what is ethically acceptable and unacceptable, and is not deprived too much of physical and emotional contact, a parent would have succeeded in discharging and achieving 90% of what is expected of them. Even many parents who excel in those superfluous regions of parenting fail woefully when it comes to some of the basic stuff, especially in cultivating principled ethical sense and being available.

Again, most parents try to ease their conscience through material substitute (for those who could afford it) and overindulgence, while some try to rationalize their physical/emotional unavailability on the grounds that whatever is taking their time is to be able to provide more material comfort for their children. Like I said, these are the regions of superfluity of parental care. More and extra don’t matter if the basic is lacking. On the contrary, some parents are too available living little to no room for the child to explore independently, make mistakes, experience the pain of over-confidence, and develop a sense of what it means to not have mummy and daddy always at my beck and call and to bail me out or smoothen the path for me at the slightest appearance of a challenge. Availability should never mean incessant chaperoning.

Here is a short excerpt from a conversation between Stephen Dubner (a New York Times Journalist and host at Freakonomics Radio) and Levitt (an Economics Professor at the University of Chicago) about the gradual change in what parenting means for Levitt over the years:

DUBNER: So at the risk of being presumptuous, I want to run what I see as Levitt-the-parent theory past you, from the older set of kids to the younger set of kids. You are a university professor — went to Harvard, went to M.I.T., teach at Chicago. Those are levels of accomplishment and credentialism that are intense. And my sense is that even though you didn’t feel that being a helicopter parent or overinvesting, especially in culture-cramming and different kinds of obsessive parenting, were the right way to parent, you admire accomplishment, and it would naturally follow to me that you would admire accomplishment in your children. I see now, not that accomplishment has gotten less important, but you embrace more — and this is where I’m being presumptuous — just unconditional love as a human and as a parent. And I’m curious whether that presumption is correct?

LEVITT: It’s certainly true that I’ve moved in the direction of unconditional love, both towards the world, but especially towards these kids. One guiding principle is I just want these kids, the young ones, to feel loved in almost whatever they do. But honestly, I don’t think it was so different with the older ones. I would say of all my children, the one who you might say, in traditional terms, has been “least successful” maybe would be Amanda, the oldest, because even though she was a straight-A student, she decided not to go to college. And I thought that was a bad idea. I tried to talk her into going to college, but she’s headstrong. And I will say watching her over the last three years, I can’t say anything but it was the right choice for her. She has worked harder, writing her own book and being an entrepreneur and marketing that book, and done it with a joy and a kindness to others that — how could I be anything but incredibly proud of what she’s doing?

Also, parents need to know and accept that even after they’ve done their best to be available for their children, there may still be some unpleasant outcomes which completely belies all the love and affection they’ve showered them with. To illustrate this fact, here is another excerpt from the same exchange between Dubner and Levitt:

DUBNER: So in that interview, Lily also talked about a serious eating disorder she has had, and she believes it stemmed from when she was very young, that she had low self-esteem. I was curious to know, Levitt, whether you knew that before that interview and how it affected you as a parent to hear that.

LEVITT: Yeah, Lily, for reasons I don’t understand, has had a lot of self-hatred from a very early age. And it wasn’t so apparent, it didn’t manifest itself in a way a parent could see. But she’s been really open about that. So I knew about it ahead of time. And I have to say, self-hatred is just one of those things, it’s hard to explain.

DUBNER: Did you feel guilty at all when she said that? Because I guess most of us like to think as parents that we are somehow responsible for our children’s self-esteem, whether that’s deserved or not.

LEVITT: I can’t say that I felt guilty about it. I’m deeply saddened by it, but I do feel — maybe it’s just making excuses after the fact, but I do feel there wasn’t a lot that could have been controlled. Do I have any idea where that self-hatred comes from? No, I don’t understand where it comes from. I think it’s just one of those complexities of the human psyche.

The obverse of the above observation is also true, that is, even when some parents have done their best to be shitty and pathetic and incompetent, some children would still just about turn out fine in a way that completely made a lie of their parents’ incompetence. It often takes many parents till after their children are no longer with them or after some shattering family disaster for them to learn the fundamental truth that most parents eventually come to quietly admit: that they are not as influential as they think or would like in shaping who their children become. Here is how Levitt describes his own tragic epiphany when Dubner asked him what he wished he knew decades ago:

LEVITT: When my son Andrew died, that really shaped my parenting. With Andrew, I was much more confident as a parent that I could control things and that I was important. And then when he died, one of the lessons I took away from it was that I couldn’t control it. I couldn’t even keep him alive. And I really was just forced to accept that I wasn’t that important. I wasn’t living their life. I couldn’t keep them safe. The universe is what it is, and I just had to offer them up to the universe and do the best I could to guide them along the way. And I think that in some sense has been so central to what I do.

The real puzzle here is why Levitt and most parents (and I believe this would include me if I were a parent) start out with the stubborn belief that they could singlehandedly engineer the outcomes of their children’s life? This is a difficult puzzle to fully illuminate but part of the reasons has already been touched in the early part of this essay. This belief cannot be eradicated or educated away once and for all precisely because it is an evolutionary code for insuring maximum parental investment. Believing that one’s roles do not matter is likely to make parents more detached and carefree as well as providing a powerful justification for parents who are already no good.

But what about those parents who succeeded in molding their children in the precise shape and direction they desired? Without doubt, such not-uncommon successes owe largely to the fact of their parenthood rather than their parenting. It is another way to say, even in the absence of concerted parental effort, most children would still turn out to reflect the qualities that define their father or their mother (and this include everything that also define their parents’ world), and this truism becomes progressively obvious as each child grows older. We behave and think more like our parents and less like our peers as we become parents ourselves.

And Finally…

The best parents (as judged by how their children turn out in life) are rarely so because they’re the most skillful or the most knowledgeable about parenting, but because more often than not, they are also exceptionally sound and healthy individuals. This is the ultimate sine qua non: a mentally and emotionally unsound and unhealthy individual would also struggle to make a good parent.