A baby with a sluggish temperament, for example, won't respond as
readily to his parents' advances as a child with a more active nervous
system. Disappointed at their offspring's lack of engagement, parents may
respond with dwindling interest and attention. Left to his own devices,
the baby may become even more withdrawn, failing to make crucial
connections and to master developmental challenges. But if the parents
resist their inclinations, and engage the baby with special enthusiasm,
Greenspan has found that the child will change his own behavior in
response. The same principle of working against the grain of a child's
genotype applies to those who are especially active or oversensitive,
suggests Greenspan, comparing the process to a right-handed baseball
player who practices throwing with his left hand. "It feels funny at
first, but gradually you build up strength in an area in which you would
naturally be weak," he says.
Of course, honing a right-handed pitch is important, too. Parents
can improve on their children's hereditary strengths by encouraging their
tendency to seek out experiences in tune with their genes. "Parents
should think of themselves as resource providers," says Plomin. "Expose
the child to a lot of things, see what they like, what they're good at,
and go with that." By offering opportunities congenial to children's
genetic constitutions, parents are in a sense improving their "goodness
of fit" with the environment.
WILL YOUR KID GO TO YALE -- OR TO JAIL?
For those traits that could easily become either assets or
liabilities, parenting may be especially critical to the outcome. "The
same temperament that can make for a criminal can also make for a hot
test pilot or astronaut," says David Lykken, Ph.D., a behavioral
geneticist at the University of Minnesota. "That kind of little
boy -- aggressive, fearless, impulsive -- is hard to handle. It's easy for
parents to give up and let him run wild, or turn up the heat and the
punishment and thereby alienate him and lose all control. But properly
handled, this can be the kid who grows up to break the sound barrier."
Lykken believes that especially firm, conscientious, and responsive
parents can make the difference -- but not all behavioral geneticists
agree. David Rowe, Ph.D., a University of Arizona psychologist and author
of The Limits of Family Influence, claims that "much of the effort of
'superparents' may be wasted, if not counter-productive." And as for
exposing children to a variety of experiences, Rowe thinks that this can
give genetically talented children the chance they need, "but not many
children have that much potential. This may not be so in Lake Wobegon
[where every child is "above average"], but it is true in the rest of the
world."
But with an optimism worthy of Garrison Keillor, advocates of
parental influence insist that genes aren't the end of the story. "The
old idea is that you tried to live up to a potential that was set by
genes," says Greenspan. "The new idea is that environment helps create
potential." His view is supported by recent research that suggests a baby
is born with only basic neural "wiring" in place, wiring whose
connections are then elaborated by experience. Both sides will have to
await the next chapter of genetic research, which may reveal even more
complicated interactions between the worlds within and without. In the
long-running debate between genes and the environment, neither one has
yet had the last word.
THE POWER OF PEERS
It's a world out of a fanciful children's book: a place where
parents and teachers don't matter, where the company of other kids is
most meaningful, where nothing much would change if we left children in
their homes and schools "but switched all the parents around." That
doesn't describe an imagined never-never land, however, but the
environment that every one of us grows up in, contends Judith Rich
Harris. The maverick writer and theoretician believes that peers, not
parents, determine our personalities, and her unorthodox views have made
the very real world of psychology sit up and take notice.
Harris, who is unaffiliated with any university or institution,
laid out her radical theory in a 1995 Psychological Review paper, which
was later cited as one of the year's outstanding articles by the American
Psychological Association. Like behavioral geneticists, Harris believes
that heredity is a force to be reckoned with. But she sees another
powerful force at work: group socialization, or the shaping of one's
character by one's peers.
Central to this theory is the idea that behavior is
"'context-specific": we act in specific ways in specific circumstances.
"Children to day live in two different worlds: home and the world outside
the home," says Harris. "There is little overlap between these two
worlds, and the rules for how to behave in them are quite different."
Displays of emotion, for example, are often accepted by parents but
discouraged by teachers or friends. Rewards and punishments are different
too. At home, children may be scolded for their failures and praised for
their successes; outside the home, they may be ridiculed when they make a
mistake or ignored when they behave appropriately.
As children grow older and peer influence grows stronger, says
Harris, they come to prefer the ways of peers over those of their
parents. She likes to use language as an example: the children of
immigrants, she notes, will readily learn to speak the language of the
new country without an accent.
Tags:
adolescent development,
child development,
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conclusions,
david reiss,
delinquent behavior,
environment,
genes,
george washington university,
healthy kids,
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paradigm,
parent,
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