Bryan Caplan shares the Good News and Bad News on Parenting. First, the good news:
High-quality time-diary studies go back about 40 years, which makes it possible to fact-check popular perceptions about the evolution of parenting. One major finding is unsurprising: Fathers spend much more time with their children than they used to. In 1965, the average father did three hours per week of primary child care; by 2000, he did seven. The next big result, though, is amazing: Today’s average mother spends more time in primary child care, too! That is true despite the fact that fathers do a lot more, despite the fact that families have fewer children, and despite the fact that modern moms are far more likely to work outside the home.During any given era, admittedly, working moms spend less time taking care of their children than stay-at-home moms. Over time, however, both working and stay-at-home moms have sharply increased their hours of primary child care. In 2000, stay-at-home moms did 60 percent more than working moms; but working moms in 2000 did about as much as stay-at-home moms did in 1975.
Actually, that’s not particularly good news. If you thought it was, you fell for the nurture assumption:
By using — and refining — these twin and adoption methods, behavioral geneticists have produced credible answers to the nature-nurture controversy. To put it simply, nature wins. Heredity alone can account for almost all shared traits among siblings. “Environment” broadly defined has to matter, because even genetically identical twins are never literally identical. But the specific effects of family environment (“nurture”) are small to nonexistent. As Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, summarizes the evidence:“First, adult siblings are equally similar whether they grew up together or apart. Second, adoptive siblings are no more similar than two people plucked off the street at random. And third, identical twins are no more similar than one would expect from the effects of their shared genes.”
The punch line is that, at least within the normal range of parenting styles, how you raise your children has little effect on how your children turn out. You can be strict or permissive, involved or distant, encouraging or critical, religious or secular. In the long run, your kids will resemble you in many ways; but they would have resembled you about as much if they had never met you.
If family environment has little effect, Caplan asks, why does almost everyone think the opposite?
Behavior geneticists have a plausible explanation for our confusion: Family environment has substantial effects on children. Casual observers are right to think that parents can change their kids; the catch is that the effect of family environment largely fades out by adulthood. For example, one prominent study found that when adoptees are 3 to 4 years old, their IQ has a .20 correlation with the IQ of their adopting parents; but by the time adoptees are 12 years old, that correlation falls to 0. The lesson: Children are not like lumps of clay that parents mold for life; they are more like pieces of flexible plastic that respond to pressure, but pop back to their original shape when that pressure is released.
So here’s the real good news and bad news:
The really good news is that we can stop worrying about the horrible fate of the next generation. The bad news is that parents today are making large “investments” in their children that are unlikely to pay off.Now if parents enjoyed every minute of child care, there wouldn’t be any bad news. Parents’ huge time commitment would be successful consumption, not failed investment. If you study parents at the next children’s event you attend, though, you will probably notice a lot of tired, grouchy faces. Happiness researchers confirm that impression. According to a study by a team of scholars led by the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, mothers enjoy child care just a little more than housework, and a lot less than watching television. As an economist, I have to suspect that a major reason for parents’ lack of enthusiasm for their role is simply diminishing marginal utility: Average enjoyment of parenting is low because parents are overdoing it.
You might respond, “Yes, but at least parental attention makes the children happier.” It’s striking, then, that even kids don’t seem to want all this parental attention. One notable study by Ellen Galinsky of the Families and Work Institute found that while most parents believe their children want more face time, only a tiny minority of children actually do. In contrast, about a third of children wish their parents were less stressed and tired. What kids seem to want from their parents isn’t more time; it’s a better attitude.
Ironically, then, a bird’s-eye view of parenting research suggests that it would be good for the world if parents stopped trying so hard. Parents would be better off, because they would be doing less of something that — through excessive familiarity — has lost its charm. Children wouldn’t be worse off, because parental “investment” has little payoff anyway. In fact, if we take children at their word, they’d be better off. Kids know better than anyone that if mom and dad aren’t happy, nobody’s happy.