Not a parent, but I feel the same about myself. Having a kid at 22 would’ve been a mess to say the least. Looking back at that age halfway through my 30s, at that point I wasn’t much more than an overgrown 16 year old that could legally walk into a bar who wouldn’t get his head screwed on quite right for another 6 years or so at minimum.
the component that is getting lost in our culture, which in other cultures is still more present is that grandparents play an active role in helping the young parents to raise their children. in chinese culture for example the young couple moves in with the husbands parents, and so grandparents are always around to give advice and help.
when our first was born we moved to live a few km from the grandparents, and there was always someone nearby to help and to show us how things are done.
oh, and going with the theme of the article, great-grandpa from my wifes side was still around, but my son does not remember him now.
and as my dad was the youngest of 7 kids, i just barely remember his parents.
> in chinese culture for example the young couple moves in with the husbands parents, and so grandparents are always around to give advice and help.
Same for Indians. And 90% of Indian dramas are about mother in laws butting heads with daughter in laws.
Obviously, a daughter in law that earns sufficient money herself is not going to give up her agency, and many in laws who are expecting the deference they had to give their in laws when they were young are going to have trouble meshing with the new power dynamic.
It is due to those Indian women not having the opportunity to earn money. If you look at American women who are children of Indian immigrants, the rate is much higher, because women have a far easier time obtaining higher income jobs in the US (or UK/Aus/Can/other developed countries).
But that is rapidly changing amongst the upper classes in India too, almost everyone will support their daughter to get as good of an education as they can and secure as good income earning opportunities as they can.
28% of Indian students are enrolled in higher education. The gender split is 52:48 in favor of males.[1] For the US those numbers are 39% and 45:55 (more women than men).[2] Since they're from different sources the participation rates might not be directly comparable shrug but the gender stats should still be applicable.
At least going by that, there doesn't appear to be a great deal of "lock your girls and women away" going on over in India.
> in chinese culture for example the young couple moves in with the husbands parents, and so grandparents are always around to give advice and help
That's a common mode. Another common mode in Chinese culture is that the young couple lives separately from their parents, and the child is raised by the grandparents, rarely seeing its parents.
> the component that is getting lost in our culture, which in other cultures is still more present is that grandparents play an active role in helping the young parents to raise their children. in chinese culture for example the young couple moves in with the husbands parents, and so grandparents are always around to give advice and help.
That's great if the grandparents are good people. Not so much if they aren't.
This retort is true of literally everything involved in raising kids.
Substitute "parents" "preschool teachers" "sports coach" &c. for "grandparents" in the sentence and it's still true for the domain for the children. It's true that with grandparents you have a maximum of 4 to choose from, but you might not have more than 4 preschools to choose from either.
The best part about being a mature parent is that you have much more control over how you raise your kids. No way in hell did I ever trust teachers, grandparents, coaches, etc. over my actual parents.
My parents were in their 30s when I was born. Their skepticism not only decoupled them from depending on people they didn't trust, but their perspective rubbed off on me and set me up for success. Older parents have no problem showing their kids the reality of the world early on.
Individualism is not a bad thing at all if only you could convince all these people stuck in the past. This world will fall apart if we don't focus on higher quality parenting from the actual parents. Since long ago we've been saying we don't want "kids raising kids". My parents weren't the only ones thinking this way.
Sorry to nitpick this, but there is a subtle flaw in this thinking. The main argument of the article is that our experiences in the world (e.g. having a good teacher, getting bullied, parenting, etc) don't account for much difference in our personalities and genetically determined proclivities in the long term. Although the article says only half of personality / psych traits are genetically determined, which is still substantial imo, so the argument isn't strong enough to say "parents don't matter" even by the arguments in the article.
>> Research shows that inherited DNA differences account for about half of the differences for all psychological traits — including personality.
>> The notion that parents have much to do with how kids turn out is a myth
This is a much broader claim that the evidence does not support. Nourishment, physical activity, mental development, emotional support, getting a good education, avoiding the wrong paths, these are things that parents facilitate that absolutely affect "how a kid turns out". Sure, you can't force your kid to be enthusiastic about sports if they aren't, but having good parents that foster interests and development is a huge difference in "how a kid turns out".
Are you asserting low-income and neglected children have equal outcomes to those with stable households, access to resources, and good parenting? I would say your statement is a broad generalization unsupported by the flimsy article you reference, and contradicted by all available evidence. Just one small one:
Have you found any studies that show that shared environment makes a "huge difference" on broadly how a kid turns out? I haven't seen any.
And that cdc site isn't evidence. If you look through any of those studies it's all correlational. So they have literally 0 power to differentiate outcomes driven by genetics vs shared environment.
The other half is mostly unshared environment (peers, etc.) Of course the parents affect both indirectly. But parenting style matters very little compared to genetics and who your kids are around.
when people make this argument I think they mean "assuming the person has an approximately normal parenting style". Its a bit like saying the infra doesn't matter, only the app does (assuming the infra is built with best practices for availability and scale). When in reality, its missing the forest for the trees. You're essentially claiming that a parent who neglects feeding a child, drops them repeatedly, and lives in the drug-infested dangerous area of town, abusing drugs and alcohol while pregant "matters very little", when its obviously _the_ defining factor in how this child will grow up.
Your point holds when we assume most parenting styles are roughly equal (but this would also hold for environmental factors and genes, since most of those won't be too drastically different for most people).
Put another way: perhaps the most important factor is the one furthest from the mean. If your genes are basically average but your parents are horrible (abusive, neglectful), you may not live to 12. If parents and genes are average, but your environment is war-torn 3rd world, you may not make it to 12. If your parents and environment are average but your genes are horrible, you may not make it to 12. But its clear all the factors can be extremely important, and the claim of the GP only applies "all else being roughly equal".
Back to the app example: assuming sane infra, yes the app might be "more important" to the business. But if you have an average app, but your infra is terrible (long load times, constant outages, losing data, payment system failures), well, you aren't going to succeed.
I'm surprised that you are so ready to abandon your common sense in the face of a psychology book (Judith Rich Harris's book specifically, which asserts that how a parent treats a child has almost no influence on how the child turns out). Psychology papers and psychology books misuse and misapply statistics all the time. Surely someone as well educated as you knows this? (Maybe your wife is a psychologist, so you are overly accepting of psychology results?) The basic mistake being made here is to ignore the possibility that a parent has treated different children differently: one kid is shy: a good parent will nudge him into making friends, but avoid forcing him into unstructured situations with many children because that will tend to overwhelm him. I.e., a good parent is part of the so-called "unshared environment": the shy kid's non-shy sister is not treated the way I just described. (There is for example no need to nudge her into making friends.)
and from my own experience i would concur. parenting styles define the relationship parents have with their kids, and that relationship absolutely matters.
i find it worth considering however that when discussing parenting styles it gives the impression that the chosen style is a deliberate choice that parents can switch around at will, when in reality i believe most parenting styles are defined by circumstances and by the experience of the parents themselves.
On the average it may be 100% right, but of you zoom in, you will see a bunch of problems.
For example:
- kids turning out really poorly if they have bad parenting. Magnitude matters too.
- I suspect the data is not capturing kids that literally died (is the fentanyl crisis over? Are those kids counted?)
- some parenting groups likely have lopsided outcomes (Ie kids from yougest parents may turn out badly, while those from older parents may not be impacted at all)
In conclusion. Outcomes are strongly tied to genetics up to a breaking point, where if the "parenting" variable is so deficient, things go bad, fast.
My contention is that parenting doesnt matter at all on average, except that when it does, it's the main determinant for outcome.
And further, i posit that this parenting variable is increasingly worse over time.
> Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man.
If Voltaire invented it from whole cloth, that's still the 18th century.
Though on your topic, Piaget is an amazing example of someone just inventing a completely ridiculous theory, doing experiments that fail to support it, and getting it enshrined as wisdom anyway.
Can confirm, have 3 kids. Parenting doesn't have much to do with how kids turn out. The genetic factor is more important. Not just genes of the two parents, but also how they recombine and surface various traits. Best thing to do is to let the kid discover who they want to be. Observe and support their explorations.
Yeah, have 4 and 90% of my psychological strength is spent in making them not do bad things like punch their siblings in the face for looking the wrong way. I'm now resigned to the Sun Tzu principle: if you cannot lose, you'll win - just want to make sure I'm eliminating the obviously losing paths and they'll need to walk the successful paths themselves or I'll end up in an institution.
> It’s just something old white guys said in the 1960s without support
Oh please. You think the nature versus nurture argument was invented in the 60s? You think that a pop psych article from a behavioral geneticist is the last word in the matter?
> The notion that parents have much to do with how kids turn out is a myth.
This is honestly fascinating. It's obviously not true, just by taking into account the consequences of it being actually true.
Am I missing something? The study says, at some point "We would essentially be the same person if we had been adopted at birth and raised in a different family.".
Are they limiting this to the genetic composition of a person? It seems they refer to the character, behaviour, overall identity... which to me sounds unbelievably absurd.
I mean, being raised by a single mom vs. being raised by an Army dad MUST introduce some differences, right? And what about all the studies about the consequences of father absence? Oh, all criminals were going to be criminals regardless?
> "We would essentially be the same person if we had been adopted at birth and raised in a different family.".
If you look at twins that are raised apart this is freakishly true. Twins raised apart have outcomes that are far closer than 2 unrelated kids raised together.
> And what about all the studies about the consequences of father absence?
If you look at children with an absent father vs children with a dead father you find that 80% of the effect disappears in the second group. And that still doesn't entirely eliminate the genetic component because genes influence behavior that can lead to death. This strongly suggests that sharing genes with a deadbeat dad is worse for you than not being raised by a father.
> This strongly suggests that sharing genes with a deadbeat dad is worse for you than not being raised by a father.
I find that the implications of this being true are very troubling.
Maybe you could attribute the outcomes to the difference between your father abandoning you vs. your father unfortunately passing away? I'm sure both cases would have different effects on a person.
I have the hope that someone with a deadbeat dad being adopted by a caring family will have a better prospect than someone thrown into the system.
you can't choose your parents obviously, but having parents so bad that you don't want them in your life is not the norm. you have my sympathies if that is your experience.
for most people the problem is not that they don't want their parents around, but that the parents don't feel like helping as much as their kids would need it. and here the culture makes a difference.
my wife was not her mothers favorite. girls in china were always treated as secondary. and according to their tradition we should have been living with my parents. they favored their son and his wife in everything, and yet they did what they could to help their daughter, because that is simply what what grandparents in china do regardless of how well they relate to each other.
but in our culture it's not, and whether grandparents are willing to help varies a lot, and it depends on the relationship to their kids
I thought you were going to say it for a minute there - the cultural component that you speak of that I feel is missing in our US culture during the younger years is 'duty'
I was also a mess in my 20s and i had a lot of growing up to do to prepare for kids. Yet. Even after kids, I didnt really grow up quickly enough until kids forced the issue.
Having kids and being responsible for someone else who is solely deoendent on you to have a shot at decent life is a monumental duty. I did not have this imprinted on me and I can see why. Our values today are very different from those of my parents and grandparents, and I think that's the big difference.
Im not sure how we lost that as a culture. Maybe its bad leaders (bill Clinton affair etc), loss of religion, loss of community time due to diminished economic opportunity locally (flyover states, most former industrial towns and even cities), economic migration to large metros breaking family ties, all certainly played a role.
it seems correct to say that duty was the slowly boiled frog in the pan, and it looks increasingly hard for the frog to jump out
I would add to this the increasing speed and volume of news. I don't know whether today's leaders are truly worse so much as that were all just much more aware of their failings than we were in the past.
There are no secrets these days.
I also think there's an aspect of societal propaganda breaking down in the face of the internet. "Duty" is a clearly artificial term, people are only bound to it so far as they believe in it. Society has gotten less good at convincing people to believe they have a duty.
We also have a lot of infighting between political and cultural factions that ruins the sense of shared obligation underpinning duty. It's hard to feel a duty to someone Fox News or Reddit has been telling you to hate your whole life.
I personally think it stems from a strong focus on individualism in the western (and, increasingly, the wider) world. We're all taught to prioritise our own needs over those of others around us, and go it alone if necessary to achieve that.
well, i think it is or was more than duty. it was necessity because your children were there to take care of you in old age. (and i have seen that in action with the great grandfather of my kids)
and there is also a sense of purpose. with the same conviction that young people work to provide for their family, which is something they learn to do because everyone else is doing it, grandparents simply see their purpose as taking care of their grandkids. i think that's much more than just duty. its their reason to live.
this is in part demonstrated by the distraught reactions by the hopeful grandparents when there are no grandchildren coming. (based on one person sharing their experience with me)
As someone who had his first kid at 23, you grow up real quick once you become a parent. Moreover I doubt it’s even possible for a person to fully mature if they don’t have kids. Or to really understand their own parents for that matter.
I was 24 and still in college. This thread is full of people saying "I was a mess" or "I wasn't mature enough".
When we found out we were pregnant, I was working at a gas station, my off hours spent riding around in a truck with my friends yelling things at people walking by on the street for reactions. There's maturity and stability.
Now I'm "ahead" of many of those friends because I knew I needed to hurry up and get things done. Didn't have time to rage quit jobs. Didn't have time to sit around and make less because it was easier.
So I agree with you. It tells me a lot about being responsible and mature. Most won't until they have to, and a kid has that effect.
What really cracks me up is that people have this expectation that they’ll ever be “ready” to have kids. Not going to happen. The whole thing reminds me of the first few minutes of “Idiocracy”.
I think a potential problem (depending on ones point of view) is that when parents wait till they are responsible they tend to have one, maybe two kids, which is below replacement rate. When coupled with things like costs, you end up with a rapidly shrinking population.
Cost and support networks are both big factors here. 30-somethings are probably more likely to have replacement rate or more if it’s affordable to do so and there’s family/friends around to lend a hand, but few enjoy such circumstances.
Things like remote work could’ve helped here, allowing couples to live near family instead of wherever the best employment prospects exist currently, but the RTO push prevented that.
The (lack of) social prestige for pregnancy and motherhood among UMC women is a bigger factor. Women have been indoctrinated to place career first and only.
Try saying "soccer mom" with an admiring tone instead of a sneer if you want to understand this.
Of course a lot of people would like financial independence. Young working women (and men) of today normally have almost no financial independence, because they are indebted or renters. They have to work a salary job or be out on the streets.
A stay at home mother in the past with a part time job had much more financial independence together with her husband than most working young people have today, even though they get fancy titles now.
Basically the current elderly generation used indoctrination to turn their children into serfs in some kind of foolish attempt to end humanity.
Also to remember is that traditionally in most cultures, the wife in the family controlled the household's finances.
> Young working women (and men) of today normally have almost no financial independence,
A greater proportion of women today have more financial independence than they have ever had in the past.
> A stay at home mother in the past with a part time job had much more financial independence together with her husband
This is financial dependence, not independence.
> Basically the current elderly generation used indoctrination to turn their children into serfs in some kind of foolish attempt to end humanity.
Nonsense. I imagine it is pretty insulting for a woman to read that they could only be capable of wanting control of their own lives if they were fooled into it.
> Also to remember is that traditionally in most cultures, the wife in the family controlled the household's finances.
Also nonsense. In almost every culture, for almost all of time, women did not have power over the family’s assets, much less the ability to earn enough to power a family. They were and are literally married off because they were liabilities. Inheritances passed down to sons instead of daughters. And umpteen other examples.
This is ignoring that even with legal/social mechanisms that provide women equal access to power as men, biology throws them a curveball every month with the effects of menstruation cycles and the effects and risks of pregnancy/childbirth.
Do you really think that somebody who owns their own house and has supplementary income is less independent than somebody who works full time and owns nothing? The first has the option to stop working, the second will be out on the streets if they do.
> Nonsense. I imagine it is pretty insulting for a woman to read that they could only be capable of wanting control of their own lives if they were fooled into it.
Both women and men, and yes, the indoctrination is massive to convince the young generations that they want to work full time at an extremely elevated productivity and still not afford to own their homes to have families.
> Also nonsense. In almost every culture, for almost all of time, women did not have power over the family’s assets, much less the ability to earn enough to power a family.
Then you are ignorant of history regarding this, which is your problem and not mine. I trust that you will deny this even if you read about it and find out. Just say "Nonsense!" and shut it out.
We are simply living in different realities. In mine, women only (relatively) recently obtained the right to vote, and have legal systems that try to prevent discrimination against them in the labor market. And this is not even worldwide.
In the world I live in, many or most women are still contending with uneven workloads in the home:
>and grueling workplace norms that are inhospitable to family life, especially for women, who are still expected to do the bulk of housework and child care.
>Do you really think that somebody who owns their own house and has supplementary income is less independent than somebody who works full time and owns nothing? The first has the option to stop working, the second will be out on the streets if they do.
False dichotomies, and also most women did not own their own house outright and have supplementary income. Either in laws own it, or they had mortgages and had to work outside the home, or they were expected to do all the housework. There was no option to stop working (housework is work).
I think we are living in different realities yes. And also, none of us are living in the past to really know how things were. We can not rely too much on the testimony from the elderly generation, because they are known liars and cheats.
But what we can do is try to look at things today in the most logical way possible. Why should young men and women work hard and be highly productive at their careers? For financial independence and freedom says you and others, and that makes it worth foregoing having families. But the fact is that young people are more broke than ever. They are working hard and are highly productive, but all their productivity is eaten by taxes, profits and land rent (either outright rent or a mortgage). They didn't get the financial independence they were promised. So they've sacrificed everything and become erased from history and from the genome in exchange for almost nothing. To the benefit of other people who are reaping all their productivity, not least the elderly generation.
Why would somebody do that voluntarily to themselves? What sane person would forego taking care of their own family, people who love them, to instead sacrifice their life to take care of shareholders, political rulers and unrelated beneficiaries of their labour. All of them who are at best completely indifferent to the welfare of young workers who are supporting them.
It takes some indoctrination for that, most importantly schooling, which indoctrinates children to stay locked in a place for 8 hours a day, five days a week, and put obedience to authority as the most important thing in life.
> Either in laws own it
Those in-laws didn't live forever, and I think this is something crucial to the whole issue that the article brings up.
> or they were expected to do all the housework.
If you limit the definition of "housework" to anything the woman is expected to do and nothing the man is expected to do, I guess.
Independence is cool and all that, but I'd rather go with the teamwork of marriage and family.
Power over their own lives... well, I'd say both men and women give it up in marriage, at least in a functioning, idealistic one.
If you want absolute power over your own life, and your goal in life is financial independence, that's okay, but maybe marriage and family is not for you.
You can simply ask whether women really are financially independent today: You have student debt, mortgage costs, credit cards etc on one hand and the necessity of keeping that job once you're "independent" of your family and significant other on the other hand. How independent are you if you're paycheck to paycheck?
> How independent are you if you're paycheck to paycheck?
This is a useless measure of independence in the context of this discussion since it applies to men and women. When discussing differences in genders, obviously we are discussing one gender being able to achieve more financial independence than the other due to laws/customs/discrimination.
> You can simply ask whether women really are financially independent today: You have student debt, mortgage costs, credit cards etc on one hand and the necessity of keeping that job once you're "independent" of your family and significant other on the other hand.
Student debt is optional and highly variable, mortgage is irrelevant in this discussion since it applies to men and women, credit cards are also highly variable, and the job thing was also irrelevant as pointed out above.
Also, note that 99% of women (and men) in 99% of the world for 99% of history have never had or been in families with enough wealth such that they did not have to work. They simply worked for their own family, with no explicit pay, and hoped they would get a sufficient spot at the decision making table.
But all of that is irrelevant anyway. The question is does my daughter have the same opportunities available to her as my son? Or would she have to hope for having nice in laws while my son could aim for the stars and secure a high paying job?
It is possible to live well enough to raise children with "a job", requiring high school or maybe two-year technical college training, instead of a four year college degree and postgraduate degree as is required for "a career". A job with flexible hours.
Women have been indoctrinated (as have men) to see "a career" as preferable.
Independence is a complete illusion, especially in our modern globalized world. Someone has to pay you the money, so even if you go as a solo entrepreneur selling real stuff that you made yourself, you largely depend on your customers at least.
The reality is that it is extremely stressful and for most people with no guarantee of how it will work out overtime.
And the fact is that it is much better to have one person focused on getting the ressource while the other runs the household, "making" other humans in the process.
It could be the man at home, but most woman don't actually want that even if they may say so to win an argument; and there is the added problem that only woman can make other human being.
Then you have people complaining that our society doesn't make babies anymore, well maybe if we didn't push the bullshit of independence on woman we wouldn't have this problem...
The sneer of "soccer mom" isn't that she's a mother busy raising children. It's that she's too busy shuffling the kids between enrichment activities to take the downtime to be their mother. That and her children are her personality.
Yeah, same here. I don't think I was mature enough to have a kid at 22, apart from the fact that I was still studying, and when I started working I had low salary and needed to work long hours to fight for job stability in a competitive sector. However, it would likely have worked at 30, and reading through all this makes me think that it would have been better than waiting until 36 as I did.
Easier said (especially in retrospective) than done, though.
