Perspicuo
Veteran Member
TIME: You Really Can Blame Your Parents for Everything
http://time.com/3639171/parenting-blame-parents/
http://time.com/3639171/parenting-blame-parents/
-
Features
You Really Can Blame Your Parents for Everything
- Thread starter Perspicuo
- Start date
ronburgundy
Contributor
I'm not seeing where they controlled for the impact of genes on both the way parents treat their kids and the way the kids turn out. Prior research pitting genes and parenting behaviors against each other have indicated a larger causal role of genes (and even a bigger influence of peer groups than of parenting).
That's a silly headline. If you can blame your parents, then your parents can blame their parents, and so on, and wtf good does that do anyone? It's otherwise a decent article.
Perspicuo
Veteran Member
Well, yeah, there's actually no one to blame. Dependent origination.
Consider joining my crusade against stupid headlines.
DOWN WITH STUPID HEADLINES! EACH ONE WE READ MAKES US ALL A LITTLE BIT DUMBER.
J842P
Veteran Member
Headlines are simply meant to grab attention.
Ya think? lol
I still think it's worthwhile to hold science writers, media, and even researchers themselves responsible for disingenuous headlines. It's possible to write an interesting headline without hyperbole or sensationalism.
Perspicuo
Veteran Member
Well, parents do leave their imprint on you for the rest of your life, now empirically tested, and that's what Time.com was aiming at.
fromderinside
Mazzie Daius
- Joined
- Oct 6, 2008
- Messages
- 15,945
- Basic Beliefs
- optimist
Think of time as the posse surrounding the bad guy. They all miss every time.
'Imprint' is way different from 'blame'.
Nature, if anything, is to blame for onto-genetic methothylated attributes. If they could be accounted - they can't - nature would account for them. So doing would conserve energy.
So I recommend this be place in natural science if energy conservation is the bottom line, unless we concentrate on why features must be adapted on the fly by genes rather than gene selection, or, by some other adaptive mechanism like neuro-genetic process, metabolic processes, environmental interactive, or some other such.
Last edited:
ronburgundy
Contributor
It isn't empirically tested if they don't control for genetics, which could easily account for any correlation between parenting style and behaviors of the child during later adulthood.
fromderinside
Mazzie Daius
- Joined
- Oct 6, 2008
- Messages
- 15,945
- Basic Beliefs
- optimist
This a correlation study which would be of little import beyond suggesting possible epigenetic events if there weren't already studies showing such in humans. For instance: Transgenerational impact of intimate partner violence on methylation in the promoter of the glucocorticoid receptor http://www.nature.com/tp/journal/v1/n7/full/tp201121a.html and Stress and Child Development http://futureofchildren.org/futureofchildren/publications/docs/24_01_02.pdf
Now this isn't saying the article, a correlation study, is anything near definitive. It does relate to already found mechanisms having similar effects in human trans-generational behavior making.
Perspicuo
Veteran Member
ronburgundy
Contributor
Nowhere did I suggest it is "all nature". Experiences and socialization certainly matter. However, the data suggests that experiences with siblings, same age peers, larger cultural context, and just random events matter more than parenting itself. Once you account for the fact that the way people parent is itself heavily impacted by genetics, the actual direct impact of parenting upon long term aspects of the child are rather minor. Parent's are likely to have greater impact indirectly by how they control and shape the child's larger social environment, than any direct impact in how they talk to and interact with the child.
Bottom line is that the study Time is referring to is a very poor empirical test of the claim about parental influence, because it fails to show that parenting accounts for outcomes after the genetic influence on both parenting and those outcomes is controlled for. Prior research suggests parenting does account for some but still relatively small amounts of variance outside of genetics, but that means this study does not add much of anything to support that influence.
Oh, it certainly shows you're thread title is completely unscientific an bogus. At best, you can blame your parents for "a minor bit" of your life, and nowhere near "everything".
DBT
Contributor
Basically, we are an interaction of genetic makeup and environmental input acting through the medium of consciousness.
fromderinside
Mazzie Daius
- Joined
- Oct 6, 2008
- Messages
- 15,945
- Basic Beliefs
- optimist
DBT
Contributor
Sure, an effect, but none the less a part of the brain/senses process of gathering, processing, integrating and representing information in conscious form. Of course there are many forms of non conscious behaviours and responses.
ronburgundy
Contributor
Yes. The fact that we have consciousness is an effect of our particular brain biology. The particular contents of consciousness are an effect of that biology interacting with sensory inputs (experience). But our consciousness, our ability to control its focus of attention and the contexts of that consciousness all impact our future thoughts and actions in a kind of feedback loop. For example, consciousness determines how long awareness of an experience event in held in awareness and the nature of what else it re-activates, which in turn greatly determines the impact of that stimuli/experience upon our additional thoughts, emotions, and actions produced by those. Take a person and expose them to 30 seconds of their parents beating each other up. Then, either leave the person be to ruminate on it, or alter their consciousnesses in a way that drops the event out of awareness for a couple hours (such as give them a sleeping drug, a psycho-active drug, or just put them in a life or death situation where they must focus all attention on it rather than what they just saw). The effect of having seen their parents beat each other up will vary greatly depending upon on how it was processed in consciousness.
Perspicuo
Veteran Member
That makes sense. All of those factors matter.
"Minor bit" is not warranted by the evidence. All the factors you mention have an honorable place in the final result.
I would like to see you produce actual evidence from scientific research concluding all those factors are preeminent except parental rearing--whereas there is plenty evidence that upbringing is crucially important.
fromderinside
Mazzie Daius
- Joined
- Oct 6, 2008
- Messages
- 15,945
- Basic Beliefs
- optimist
Parent rearing and upbringing guidance are genetically determined......
ronburgundy
Contributor
"Minor bit" is a relative term that really only requires parenting to account for less than half the variance. It is far more consistent with the evidence than your claim that parenting accounts for "everything", which means 100% of the variance.
Let's not forget that you are the one who created a thread with the extremist and unscientific claim that parenting accounts for "everything", then gave us nothing but a link to a study with the weakest possible "evidence", namely a correlation that is very far from the perfect correlation that "everything" requires and that is just as much evidence of genetic influence and influence of other environmental factors as of any claimed causal influence of parenting itself. Given that, I am highly doubtful that your claim of "plenty of evidence that upbringing is crucially important" is actually based in sound studies using methods capable of supporting such causal assertions. Doing work in tangential areas, I keep a casual eye on this literature and I have yet to see a single study asserting large roles of parenting behaviors that make any reasonable effort to control for genetics or the countless other environmental factors known to be correlated with both parenting and child outcomes (e.g., the tons of environmental factors associated with SES and education, just for starters). Without such controls, these studies are not evidence of the causal importance of parenting, but merely correlations that are just as strongly predicted by the causal role of these other factors. There are large scale studies that make a reasonable effort to test competing causal models involving genetic factors, home environment of the sorts shared among siblings, and environmental factors unshared even among siblings in the same house. These studies consistently show that genetics accounts for about 50% of the variance, and unshared environment accounts for most of the rest, with only about 5% of the variance attributable to home environments shared by siblings (which is the category into which most parenting influences would fall. This paper in one of the top journals on personality development provides a peer-reviewed summary of the relevant empirical data of studies with methods capable of estimating the the relative % of variance tied to various sources of influence on numerous traits (from emotional temperment and agreeableness to cognitive aptitudes and career outcomes). Here is a key quote:
[P]"Individual differences are heritable, by which we mean that genetic influences make a substantial contribution to individual differences in peoples’ observable characteristics (or “phenotypes”). Indeed, this finding is so universal that Turkheimer (2000) enshrined it as the “first law” of behavior genetics. Turkheimer (2000) went on to propose second and third laws as well. The “second law” states that being raised in the same family has a smaller effect on individual differences than genetic effects. The “third law” is that a nontrivial portion of individual differences can be attributed to effects unique to each individual person, beyond genetic differences, and also beyond being raised in the same family.
These laws are well-supported by an extensive literature, and they clearly apply to personality as much as they apply to other individual differences (for recent reviews of the behavior genetics of personality, see, e.g., Krueger, Johnson & Kling, 2006; Krueger & Johnson, in press). Indeed, these laws have had a fundamental impact on thinking in scientific psychology. Our late colleague David Lykken described the impact of behavior genetic studies as “rearranging the furniture in psychology's house.” [/P]
Note that contrary to common strawman dismissals of this work, it does not presume simplistic, direct, single-gene determinism of complex traits and it allows for gene-environment interactions, such as genetically influenced past states impacting the types of future environment the person exposes themselves to, and environmental events moderating gene expression. The research is agnostic on the precise mechanisms and pathways by which these sources have the impact. Instead the research merely estimates the total % of variability in outcomes that has either a direct, interactive, mediated, or moderating relationship to those outcomes.
Shared environment, which includes parenting accounts for between 2%-10%. Also, note that parenting is only a small fraction of the "shared" environment, so it is likely to be responsible for only a fraction of that 2%-10%. Other shared factors include pretty much everything that goes in inside household ranging from actual things with the structure (moving, earthquakes, disruptive home repairs) to aspects of any person in the house that is not directly related to a parent interacting with their kid, such as their parents mood impacted by traffic, work stress, or the number and type of other siblings/relatives in the house (which while somewhat under control of parents is not itself a "parenting" behavior). In addition, the features of an adults personality that already existed in some form as a child have a causal impact upon their environment, including how others such as their parents treat them (kids that are assholes are more likely to get treated as such). Thus, much of (and plausiby half) of the covariance between parenting and traits of the adult-child is due to Y causing X. In contrast, Y cannot cause X to produce covariance with genes because variance in genetic similarity among people involved in such studies is set at conception and precedes any personality/behavioral traits of those future children. IOW, these covariance estimates between personality and the sources of influence are not direct measures of X causes Y influence, but the degree to which they over-estimate such causal influence is going to be notably greater for parenting and other environmental factors in which Y causes X is a possible contributor to the observed covariance.
Both the unshared environmental factors and the shared but non-parenting factors would seem rather minor in isolation, but they are constant and near infinite in number and thus collectively their impact outweighs the collective impact of things we would call "parenting" choices and behaviors that parents could plausibly control for the focal purpose of the way they impact their child's development.
The study I linked to actually takes issue with simplistic notions that "genes account for 50%", etc.. They rightly acknowledge that these estimates accurately capture averages and what is true under the most common contexts. However, they point out that parenting is likely to have its largest impact at the extremes, such as when there is extreme levels of conflict with parents. They present their own research in which they estimate genetic, shared, and unshared contributions to a child's emotional development. However, they compute separate estimates for statistically "typical" families versus the minority of families at the extremes, 2 standard deviations above or below the mean in terms of child-parent conflict. (look at Table 2, the lower-right quadrant). As with almost all prior research, they found that for the 97% of families who are within 2 standard deviations of the mean in term of "Conflict", the contribution of "shared" home environment to development of "negative emotionality" was small (about 1%-9%), with genetics and unshared environment splitting the remaining variance. As sensible theory would predict, the % of variance in emotional outcomes tied to "shared" home environments was at its strongest among the 3% of families with the most extremely high level of conflict (2 or more standard deviations above the mean. However, even then these extreme conflict home environments only accounted for 25% of the variance in negative emotionality. They found similar results in predicting development of positive emotionality, except it was the flipside where the 3% of families with extremely low conflict showed the greatest amount of variance tied to shared environment.
Bottom line is that this research is getting ever more sophisticated but continues to show that shared home environment among siblings is typically a very minor factor, and even in extreme cases where it does matter most, it still matters less than the combination of genes and non-parenting environmental factors. It is important to keep in mind that most people (including researchers and developmental psychologists) are parents with a strong emotional bias to want to believe in the power of parenting. The science has had an uphill battle to work against this bias.