Please excuse all the parenting topics recently, but there really is so much to it. And this isn’t math we are talking about, parenting is less conclusive than a social science. Because there is no definitive rulebook on how to parent, some parents, myself included, feel the need to research endlessly to set my child up in the best possible way.
But today I want to fight against that urge with a healthy dose of nature versus nurture. For those who dwell under rocks, the nature versus nurture debate is referring to the influences on how someone develops. Nature represents the genes someone has in them (their genetic code), given to them by their parents, while nurture is all the things that happen to someone, the environmental influences, before and after they are born. For a goofy but frightening picture of this as a dystopian future, watch Idiocracy. It’s a movie where all the people with high intelligence quotients (IQs) stop having kids while all the low IQ people have more kids, leading society to get dumber and dumber, generation after generation.
The concept of humans being born with a blank slate, or tabula rasa, has been around since Aristotle. This would be 100% nurture rather than nature. As blank slates, we would have no built-in mental content. Everything which makes us who we are would be from the environment: our parents, friends, schooling, and positive and negative experiences. This sounds wonderful and idealistic - we would all have an equal opportunity from the start, and we would all have the same starting line. But anyone who has been a child or a parent with multiple children sees through this utopia. As a high school student, why would my classmates grasp the topic of the day in pre-calculus so quickly while it was so hard for me? Or why couldn’t my friend ever really get it? Knowing how much people studied and then seeing the wide variance of test scores when I was in high school shattered the blank slate. Then there is the slap-you-in-the-face example of children with Down Syndrome or other intellectual disability. Where is their blank slate?
Here’s Steven Pinker talking about the blank slate:
Man has no nature, from the historian Jose Ortega y Gasset. Man has no instincts, from the anthropologist Ashley Montagu. The human brain is capable of a full range of behaviors and predisposed to none, from the late scientist Stephen Jay Gould.
Now, why should it have been such an appealing notion? Well, there are a number of political reasons why people have found it congenial. The foremost is that if we are blank slates, then, by definition, we are equal because zero equals zero equals zero. But if something is written on the slate, then some people could have more of it than others. And according to this line of thinking, that would justify discrimination and inequality. Another political fear of human nature is that if we were blank slates, we can perfect mankind, the age-old dream of the perfectibility of our species through social engineering, whereas if we're born with certain instincts, then perhaps some of them might condemn us to selfishness, prejudice and violence.
As science has progressed, we’ve learned not only that genes exist, but that they are instrumental in making us who we are. When it comes to IQ, they play an especially significant role. Research says that 50-95% of our IQ is determined by our genetics123. And as you might know if you have multiple children or siblings, the determination of IQ isn’t a clean average of the two parents. There is a lot of chance involved. One kid may end up with an IQ higher than both parents while another may be lower.
This is already starting to sound like parenting plays less of a role in a child’s success, or at least IQ, then some may have previously thought. But to exacerbate the situation, I want to add that most of the environmental differences in IQ aren’t from changing parenting from average to excellent - research shows that very little change in IQ comes from this. The environmental changes to IQ come from really poor parenting situations, often involving significant trauma.
What does this mean? It means that kids who aren’t spoken to for the first few years of their lives, kids who are left in a room alone in a crack house with little human interaction, and kids whose parents guzzle alcohol or shoot meth during pregnancy account for most of the environmental differences in IQ. So the first lesson is don’t do those things. They are bad. They are how you can most drastically influence your child’s IQ aside from the genes you provide them. But this advice probably doesn’t apply to you.
What does that leave for us non crack addict non genius parents?
A tiny sliver of pie
I’m sorry to say, but parents might not have as much of an impact as they imagine, at least not on IQ. And personality traits are in the same camp, being highly heritable from genes and not changing much from environment. Attempting to turn your generally grumpy child into a glass-half-full Pollyanna may be futile. Yet even as I write this, I cringe. I argue with myself, thinking of a handful of families, some famous (the Wojcicki's) and some I know personally, that seem to have undoubtedly thrived due to stellar outlierish parenting. Surely this handful of golden eggs wasn’t accounted for in statistical studies.
But then the counter-counter argument presents itself. Each of these exceptional parents was exceptional themselves, be it extremely motivated, having a high IQ, or having other standout traits or talents. So were the passed-on genes for these traits masked by what looks like excellent parenting? There is no way to know.
Why does any of this matter? Am I here to just rain on your parade? I’m only here to rain on the parades of those who are killing themselves to thrust their children to celestial heights. I know my own parade needs some rain. Parenting like this will lead to inevitable disappointment in yourself and your child while spawning guilt that if only you did better - taught them that second language, paid for that more expensive school, had them do more school work over the summer - they would have made it, they would be great.
Is the answer just to give up, not worry about it, and let them watch TV all day? Please no. Rather relax a little more, doing things you enjoy with your child. Focus more on the present moment that will never be here again. If you are the kind of parent that cares this much about your child’s success, evidence of this will bleed through even with your focus on the present. Releasing some of the built-up pressure from the parenting valve will likely make you and me better parents, and there will be less effort and frustration involved.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071016131452.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Shared_family_environment
https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Psychology/Biological_Psychology/Biopsychology_(OERI)_-_DRAFT_for_Review/14%3A_Intelligence_and_Cognition/14.03%3A_High_Intelligence-Nature_or_Nurture_Learning_Disabilities