Does Parenting Really Not Matter?
My thoughts on a recent essay in The Atlantic.
The other day, a friend pointed me to Arthur C. Brooks’s new essay in The Atlantic, “The One Big Thing You Can Do for Your Kids.” Brooks is a Harvard social scientist, an Atlantic columnist, a former president of the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of 13 books, including one he co-wrote with Oprah Winfrey.
Brooks makes a lot of points in his essay that I agree with. Like that “the parenting technique that truly matters is warmth and affection” and that “you will make a lot of mistakes, but mostly they won’t matter.”
In other words, Brooks says, we don’t have to be perfect parents. Our kids will be okay.
I totally agree, but I’m not at all convinced by the premise for his argument. Brooks argues that it’s okay for us to make mistakes as parents because how we parent doesn’t matter — our children’s characteristics are shaped far more by nature (genes) than nurture (environment). “A huge amount of personality is biological and inherited,” Brooks writes, citing a couple of studies.
I think he’s overreaching here — and also overlooking other important considerations.
First, Brooks cites a study suggesting that genes play a large role in shaping personality. He writes:
One 1996 study involving 123 pairs of identical twins (who share 100 percent of their genes) and 127 pairs of fraternal twins (who, like any other pair of siblings, share about 50 percent) estimated that 41 percent of neuroticism may be inherited, as well as 53 percent of extroversion, 61 percent of openness to experience, 41 percent of agreeableness, and 44 percent of conscientiousness.
Yet when I think about who I want my kids to become, I’m not focused on broad personality traits like these. I mean, yes — I hope that my kids don’t end up neurotic, and I hope that they grow up to be conscientious, agreeable, and open to new experiences. (I couldn’t care less about extroversion.) But what I care about far more are their values and choices. Will my son treat girls and women with the respect they deserve? Will my kids be anti-racist? Will they stand up for — or at least show support and compassion for — peers who are being bullied?
These questions aren’t answered by that study. But they are addressed by others, which suggest that what we do as parents absolutely shapes kids’ values and behavior towards others. We know that the conversations parents have with kids about racism, sexism, sex, consent, and bullying make a difference in terms of what values kids hold and how they behave towards others; I cite plenty of this research in my first book. Other studies have found that broad parenting practices shape kids’ values and moral development. Some studies even suggest that the quality of the parent-child relationship affects how strongly various traits are shaped by genes versus the environment — suggesting that how we raise our kids doesn’t merely affect how our kids turn out, but it also affects just how much of an influence we have.
I want to spend a second reflecting on the numbers in that personality trait study, too. The study finds that “41 percent of neuroticism may be inherited, as well as 53 percent of extroversion, 61 percent of openness to experience, 41 percent of agreeableness, and 44 percent of conscientiousness.”
If 41 percent or 53 percent or 61 percent of a trait is inherited, that means that the rest — a substantial portion! — is not inherited. This again suggests that the environment in which kids are raised does matter.
A few years ago, for this newsletter, I interviewed Danielle Dick, a psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University who specifically studies the genetic and environmental influences on human behavior. Dick explained to me that yes, our kids’ genes absolutely shape who they will become. “The research unambiguously shows that our children’s genes play a large role in their behavior,” she told me.
But then she added: “I’m absolutely not saying that parents don’t matter.”
I was interviewing Dick because she wrote a (wonderful!) parenting book called The Child Code: Understanding Your Child's Unique Nature for Happier, More Effective Parenting — and if genes were the only thing that mattered, I daresay that she would not have penned a book full of parenting advice. In The Child Code, Dick argues that parents should consider how their kids are wired when they make parenting choices, because aligning parenting strategies with kids’ temperaments can make them more effective.
Back to Brooks’s essay again. To support his argument that parents don’t matter, Brooks also mentions a 2021 study that investigated the link between specific parenting behaviors and personality. Brooks described this study as showing that “in most aspects, parenting mattered about as much as birth order — which is to say, its effect was little to none.”
Yet in the very next paragraph, Brooks highlights two important exceptions: the personality traits of conscientiousness and agreeableness were shaped by parenting. Conscientiousness was found to be shaped by parent involvement in kids’ lives and how much cultural stimulation parents provided, and agreeableness was shaped by parental structure and goals.
Conscientiousness and agreeableness are among the personality traits I care about most because they most closely align with being a good human being — and this study, which Brooks cites as evidence that parenting doesn’t matter, suggests to me that parenting does matter for these traits. Other studies have reported that the environment plays an important role in shaping social values, too.
It’s also worth highlighting that this 2021 study only looked at how personality traits were shaped by four specific parenting factors: parental goals, parental involvement, parental structure, and parental cultural stimulation. The study didn’t investigate the impact of so many other things we as parents do, such as the conversations we have with our kids and how we engage with their emotions (which, research suggests, does matter when it comes to the development of children’s moral values).
So even if this 2021 study had found no relationship between those four parenting dimensions and child personality traits, it would still be inaccurate and misleading to conclude that parenting doesn’t matter. The study only looked at a very small slice of what parents do.
As an aside, I find it interesting that most of the recent essays I’ve come across that argue that parents don’t matter have been written by men, who are often less involved in parenting. Maybe there’s bit of rationalization going on? It’s fine that I’m not doing much at home — parenting doesn’t matter! Or maybe it makes sense: If men aren’t all that involved in childrearing, then of course they will not have that much of an influence on their children. Research does suggest that kids learn more values from their mothers and grandmothers than from their fathers and grandfathers.
Still, these essays rub me the wrong way and not just because they overgeneralize and cherry-pick the science. They feel like yet another way to undermine the hard, important work that women typically do. (Brooks also wrote an essay on marriage last year that argued that couples shouldn’t attempt to split domestic duties equally because doing so “militates against one of the most important elements of love: generosity—a willingness to give more than your share in a spirit of abundance, because giving to someone you care for is pleasurable in itself." Okay, dude.)
Let me circle back to Brooks’s overarching point. Brooks argues that it’s okay for us to make mistakes as parents because what we do doesn’t make much of a difference. I disagree: It think it’s okay for us to make mistakes because parenting does matter. Mistakes are opportunities for growth and education. When we screw up, we teach our kids many important things. We teach them that all humans are works in progress and that we should strive to learn and grow throughout our lives. We model for them how to apologize, be humble, and take responsibility for our actions. We teach them that life is often more complex and messy and beautiful than we expect it to be — and that, I believe, is a good thing.
What are your thoughts? Share in the comments!
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Thank you for this excellent piece digging into the research Brooks cites! Even though Brooks has tried to create distance between his time at AEI (where he held a very prominent leadership position in the modern conservative moment) and his current stint as happiness expert for the Atlantic/at Harvard, I have long held that his current writing is just a repackaging of conservative ideology into happiness/wellness nonsense (his piece on equality in marriage is another great example). For ex, the idea that nature matters more than nurture is also often used to justify the existence of inequality and the lack of public investment in a host of social welfare programs.
It’s almost like when you’re a white man, you don’t have to think about the importance of explicitly teaching consent or antiracism to your children, which absolutely require parental labor from an early age, because the failure of other parents to teach this has never directly impacted *your* safety or ability to thrive in the world. Thanks for taking this on. I like some of his other stuff but his recent work has made me want to pull my hair out a little.