Parental Influence: Overrated?

[Misfitsbeevers]

If I end up like my dad I'll commit suicide. Seriously.

[Jamougha]

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Keep in mind, that one of my beliefs is "the thin red line", basically that it takes one wrong decision, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, to have a major negative impact on the rest of your life.

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I wonder what you mean by this. I mean sure in one sense it's trivially true; you might have decided to accept a job with a high-powered firm in the Twin Towers, starting Sept 10th.... but in general life is unpredictable and in practice people jump from great to awful things, and vica versa, all the time.

[tarheeljks]

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Keep in mind, that one of my beliefs is "the thin red line", basically that it takes one wrong decision, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, to have a major negative impact on the rest of your life.

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I wonder what you mean by this. I mean sure in one sense it's trivially true; you might have decided to accept a job with a high-powered firm in the Twin Towers, starting Sept 10th.... but in general life is unpredictable and in practice people jump from great to awful things, and vica versa, all the time.

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committing a felony springs to mind.

[jfk]

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One of the few really concrete things we know about how children develop personality is that it matters in which order the children are born. The first child will usually be more conservative, authoritarian and conventional, since being older they benefited from the power hierarchy in the family.

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This isn't true at all. Birth order influences can be measured when the child is in the home. Out side of the home differences in birth order fall apart completely.

In other words, birth order may come into play during Thanksgiving dinner, but not Monday morning when heading to work (if an adult) or on the playground at school (if a child).

The notion that birth order is predictive of personality traits is largely a myth.

[Adebisi]

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The notion that birth order is predictive of personality traits is largely a myth.

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I'm no expert here, but I think birth order has a pretty big influence when there are like 3+ kids with a decent age gap between them. With the older kids, the parents are more likely to pay a lot of attention to them, be strict and have lots of rules, etc. By the time the younger get to their teenage years, the parents will probably have adopted a more laid-back, laissez-faire style of parenting. A 50+ year old parent that has been through everything numerous times is a lot less likely to get all worked-up and upset over typical teenage misbehavior than a 40 year old parent that is going through it for the first time. When mom and dad catch little Billy smoking pot, they're going to react a lot differently if they've already been through it with John, Steve, and Sally and the 3 of them became successful responsible adults. The younger kids will be raised differently than the older ones.

[jfk]

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I'm no expert here, but I think birth order has a pretty big influence when there are like 3+ kids with a decent age gap between them. With the older kids, the parents are more likely to pay a lot of attention to them, be strict and have lots of rules, etc. By the time the younger get to their teenage years, the parents will probably have adopted a more laid-back, laissez-faire style of parenting...The younger kids will be raised differently than the older ones.

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Everyone you've said may be true but it still ignores the basic thesis that it isn't parental methods which are the main driver of a child's personality, its the peer group.

Treating your kids differently based on birth order or a progression of parental experience may lead a parent to conclude that this should have some impact on the children, and it may in the context of how they behave and interact in the home, but it has little bearing on their lives outside the home.

Keep in mind these two paragraphs from the Gladwell article cited by the OP:

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One of the largest and most rigorous studies of this kind is known as the Colorado Adoption Project. Between 1975 and 1982, a group of researchers at the University of Colorado, headed by Robert Plomin, one of the world's leading behavioral geneticists, recruited two hundred and forty-five pregnant women from the Denver area who planned to give up their children for adoption. The researchers then followed the children into their new homes, giving them a battery of personality and intelligence tests at regular intervals throughout their childhood and giving similar tests to their adoptive parents. For the sake of comparison, the group also ran the same set of tests on a control group of two hundred and forty-five parents and their biological children. For the latter group, the results were pretty much as one might expect: in intellectual ability and certain aspects of personality, the kids proved to be fairly similar to their parents. The scores of the adopted kids, however, had nothing whatsoever in common with the scores of their adoptive parents: these children were no more similar in personality or intellectual skills to the people who reared them, fed them, clothed them, read to them, taught them, and loved them all their lives than they were to any two adults taken at random off the street.

Here is the puzzle. We think that children resemble their parents because of both genes and the home environment, both nature and nurture. But, if nurture matters even a little, why don't the adopted kids have at least some greater-than-chance similarities to their adoptive parents? The Colorado study says that the only reason we are like our parents is that we share their genes, and that--by any measures of cognition and personality--when there is no genetic inheritance there is no resemblance.

This is the question that so preoccupied Harris on that winter morning four and a half years ago. She knew that most people in psychology had responded to findings like those of the Colorado project by turning an ever more powerful microscope on the family, assuming that if we couldn't see the influence of parents through standard psychological measures it was because we weren't looking hard enough. Not looking hard enough wasn't the problem. The problem was that psychologists weren't looking in the right place. They were looking inside the home when they should have been looking outside the home. The answer wasn't parents; it was peers.

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Taking that example and applying it to your post, it would stand to reason that to you, inside the home, you may see or project birth order differences based on real or perceived differences in how you raised your kids over a wide span of years. That there may be a difference to you or when the kids are in the home doesn't mean that such influences will be carried with them into their outside life.

[tarheeljks]

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The notion that birth order is predictive of personality traits is largely a myth.

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I'm no expert here, but I think birth order has a pretty big influence when there are like 3+ kids with a decent age gap between them. With the older kids, the parents are more likely to pay a lot of attention to them, be strict and have lots of rules, etc. By the time the younger get to their teenage years, the parents will probably have adopted a more laid-back, laissez-faire style of parenting. A 50+ year old parent that has been through everything numerous times is a lot less likely to get all worked-up and upset over typical teenage misbehavior than a 40 year old parent that is going through it for the first time. When mom and dad catch little Billy smoking pot, they're going to react a lot differently if they've already been through it with John, Steve, and Sally and the 3 of them became successful responsible adults. The younger kids will be raised differently than the older ones.

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that depends so much on the personality of the parents. some parents will loosen up on the younger kids, but some will tighten up b/c they don't want their younger kids to have a more conservative experience than their older kids.

[BPA234]

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I'm no expert here, but I think birth order has a pretty big influence when there are like 3+ kids with a decent age gap between them. With the older kids, the parents are more likely to pay a lot of attention to them, be strict and have lots of rules, etc. By the time the younger get to their teenage years, the parents will probably have adopted a more laid-back, laissez-faire style of parenting...The younger kids will be raised differently than the older ones.

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Everyone you've said may be true but it still ignores the basic thesis that it isn't parental methods which are the main driver of a child's personality, its the peer group.

Treating your kids differently based on birth order or a progression of parental experience may lead a parent to conclude that this should have some impact on the children, and it may in the context of how they behave and interact in the home, but it has little bearing on their lives outside the home.

Keep in mind these two paragraphs from the Gladwell article cited by the OP:

[ QUOTE ]
One of the largest and most rigorous studies of this kind is known as the Colorado Adoption Project. Between 1975 and 1982, a group of researchers at the University of Colorado, headed by Robert Plomin, one of the world's leading behavioral geneticists, recruited two hundred and forty-five pregnant women from the Denver area who planned to give up their children for adoption. The researchers then followed the children into their new homes, giving them a battery of personality and intelligence tests at regular intervals throughout their childhood and giving similar tests to their adoptive parents. For the sake of comparison, the group also ran the same set of tests on a control group of two hundred and forty-five parents and their biological children. For the latter group, the results were pretty much as one might expect: in intellectual ability and certain aspects of personality, the kids proved to be fairly similar to their parents. The scores of the adopted kids, however, had nothing whatsoever in common with the scores of their adoptive parents: these children were no more similar in personality or intellectual skills to the people who reared them, fed them, clothed them, read to them, taught them, and loved them all their lives than they were to any two adults taken at random off the street.

Here is the puzzle. We think that children resemble their parents because of both genes and the home environment, both nature and nurture. But, if nurture matters even a little, why don't the adopted kids have at least some greater-than-chance similarities to their adoptive parents? The Colorado study says that the only reason we are like our parents is that we share their genes, and that--by any measures of cognition and personality--when there is no genetic inheritance there is no resemblance.

This is the question that so preoccupied Harris on that winter morning four and a half years ago. She knew that most people in psychology had responded to findings like those of the Colorado project by turning an ever more powerful microscope on the family, assuming that if we couldn't see the influence of parents through standard psychological measures it was because we weren't looking hard enough. Not looking hard enough wasn't the problem. The problem was that psychologists weren't looking in the right place. They were looking inside the home when they should have been looking outside the home. The answer wasn't parents; it was peers.

[/ QUOTE ]

Taking that example and applying it to your post, it would stand to reason that to you, inside the home, you may see or project birth order differences based on real or perceived differences in how you raised your kids over a wide span of years. That there may be a difference to you or when the kids are in the home doesn't mean that such influences will be carried with them into their outside life.

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Thank you for providing some clarification and definition to the thread. The whole point of the article and my op was expressed in those several paragraphs.

For me, the conclusion that I have reached is that parental influence, in comparison to peer influence, is largely a self-perpetuating myth.

[Jamougha]

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[ QUOTE ]
One of the few really concrete things we know about how children develop personality is that it matters in which order the children are born. The first child will usually be more conservative, authoritarian and conventional, since being older they benefited from the power hierarchy in the family.

[/ QUOTE ]

This isn't true at all. Birth order influences can be measured when the child is in the home. Out side of the home differences in birth order fall apart completely.

In other words, birth order may come into play during Thanksgiving dinner, but not Monday morning when heading to work (if an adult) or on the playground at school (if a child).

The notion that birth order is predictive of personality traits is largely a myth.

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Interesting, it looks like the effects are at least much smaller than I had been lead to believe. Teach me to listen to a psychiatrist. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] ty

[Jamougha]

jfk,

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Keep in mind these two paragraphs from the Gladwell article cited by the OP:

[ QUOTE ]
One of the largest and most rigorous studies of this kind is known as the Colorado Adoption Project. Between 1975 and 1982, a group of researchers at the University of Colorado, headed by Robert Plomin, one of the world's leading behavioral geneticists, recruited two hundred and forty-five pregnant women from the Denver area who planned to give up their children for adoption. The researchers then followed the children into their new homes, giving them a battery of personality and intelligence tests at regular intervals throughout their childhood and giving similar tests to their adoptive parents. For the sake of comparison, the group also ran the same set of tests on a control group of two hundred and forty-five parents and their biological children. For the latter group, the results were pretty much as one might expect: in intellectual ability and certain aspects of personality, the kids proved to be fairly similar to their parents. The scores of the adopted kids, however, had nothing whatsoever in common with the scores of their adoptive parents: these children were no more similar in personality or intellectual skills to the people who reared them, fed them, clothed them, read to them, taught them, and loved them all their lives than they were to any two adults taken at random off the street.

Here is the puzzle. We think that children resemble their parents because of both genes and the home environment, both nature and nurture. But, if nurture matters even a little, why don't the adopted kids have at least some greater-than-chance similarities to their adoptive parents? The Colorado study says that the only reason we are like our parents is that we share their genes, and that--by any measures of cognition and personality--when there is no genetic inheritance there is no resemblance.

This is the question that so preoccupied Harris on that winter morning four and a half years ago. She knew that most people in psychology had responded to findings like those of the Colorado project by turning an ever more powerful microscope on the family, assuming that if we couldn't see the influence of parents through standard psychological measures it was because we weren't looking hard enough. Not looking hard enough wasn't the problem. The problem was that psychologists weren't looking in the right place. They were looking inside the home when they should have been looking outside the home. The answer wasn't parents; it was peers.

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I have a problem with this. What they specifically failed to find is similarities between the parents and the children. That doesn't equate to failing to find that the parents have an effect on their children. The parental-influence camp don't claim that parents can or do produce clones of themselves personality-wise, so it's really a strawman that's being dismissed.