Yuko Munakata The science behind how parents affect child development TED
Transcriber:
A few years ago,
a student came up to me
after the second day of my class
on parenting and child development.
She hesitated for a second
and then she confessed,
“I’m really interested in this material,
but I was hoping your class
would help me to become a better parent
if I have kids someday.”
She was disappointed.
We were going to talk
about how parents do not have control
in shaping who their children become.
She jumped to the conclusion
that my class wouldn’t help her.
I was caught off guard.
Would confronting the science of parenting
and child development,
not be relevant to being a good parent?
I hope that my class changed her mind.
Parents want what’s best
for their children,
young and old parents,
rich and poor,
married and divorced.
And parenting books promise to show
how to achieve the best outcomes,
to address the difficult decisions
that parents face every day
and in the process, to reveal why
each of us turned out the way we did.
The problem is that parenting books
send conflicting messages.
Tiger parenting or free-range parenting?
Parent like the Dutch
to raise the happiest kids in the world
or like the Germans,
to raise self-reliant children?
The one consistent message
is that if your child isn’t succeeding,
you’re doing something wrong.
There’s good news, though.
The science supports
a totally different message
that is ultimately empowering.
Trying to predict
how a child will turn out
based on choices made by the parents
is like trying to predict a hurricane
from the flap of a butterfly’s wings.
Do you know the butterfly,
the proverbial one,
that flaps its wings in China,
perturbing the atmosphere just enough
to shift wind currents
that make their way to the skies
over tropical white beaches
intensifying the water evaporating
from the ocean in a spiral of wind
and fueling a hurricane in the Caribbean
six weeks after that flutter of wings.
If you are a parent,
you are the butterfly flapping your wings.
Your child is the hurricane,
a breathtaking force of nature.
You will shape the person
your child becomes
like the butterfly shapes the hurricane
in complex, seemingly
unpredictable but powerful ways.
The hurricane wouldn’t exist
without the butterfly.
“Wait,” you might ask,
what about all the successful parents
with successful children
or the struggling parents
with struggling children?"
They might seem to show
the simple power of parenting.
But children can be shaped by many forces
that are often intertwined,
like successful parents, successful genes,
successful peers
and a culture of success
that they grow up in.
This can make it hard to know which forces
influence who children become.
“OK,” you might think,
“yes, it’s hard to pull apart
all these possible forces,
but we can make pretty good guesses
about the importance of parents.”
Perhaps.
Well, how many of you know
how a bicycle works?
Right, you’ve seen people riding bikes,
maybe you’ve ridden one yourself
or even tried to teach
someone else how to do it.
Just like parenting –
you’ve seen people doing it,
maybe you’ve done it yourself
or even tried to teach
someone else how to do it.
We can feel confident about what we know.
When we say we know how a bicycle works,
we think we have something
in our heads like this.
Something that relates the pedals
to the chain and to the wheels.
But when you ask people to explain
how a bicycle works,
they produce drawings like this.
And like this.
(Laughter)
People have no idea how bicycles work.
Or zippers or rainbows,
or even topics they argue
passionately about.
When you push people to explain
how these things work,
they usually can’t.
Just caring about something,
like parenting,
or feeling confident about it,
doesn’t guarantee that we understand it.
And everyone can’t possibly be right
about how parenting works,
given how wildly beliefs have varied.
Mothers in a hunter-gatherer society
regretted when their children
cut themselves themselves
while playing with knives,
but they thought the cuts
were worth the freedom to explore.
Even within one society like ours,
parenting wasn’t a common term
until the 1970s.
Before then, parents weren’t viewed
as active shapers of children’s futures.
Years from now,
people may look back on today’s views
and feel just as amazed as we feel
when hearing about other times and places.
The science could help parents,
and potential parents like my student,
to understand how they actually shape
who their children become.
Millions of children have been studied
to disentangle all those shaping forces
that are usually intertwined.
These studies follow identical
twins and fraternal twins
and plain old siblings
growing up together
or adopted and raised apart.
And it turns out that growing up
in the same home
does not make children noticeably
more alike in how successful they are,
or how happy or self-reliant and so on.
Imagine if you had been taken from birth
and raised next door
by the family to the left
and your brother or sister
had been raised next door
by the family to the right,
by and large, that would have made you
no more similar or different
than growing up together
under the same roof.
On the one hand, these findings
seem unbelievable.
Think about all the ways
that parents differ from home to home
and how often they argue
and whether they helicopter
and how much they shower
their children with love.
You would think that would matter enough
to make children growing up
in the same home more alike
than if they had been raised apart.
But it doesn’t.
In 2015, a meta analysis,
a study of studies,
found this pattern across
thousands of studies
following over 14 million twin pairs
across 39 countries.
They measured over 17,000 outcomes.
And the researchers concluded
that every single one
of those outcomes is heritable.
So genes influence who children become.
But genes didn’t explain everything.
The environment mattered too,
just something in the environment
that didn’t shape children growing up
in the same home to be more alike.
Some people have looked at these findings
and concluded that parenting
doesn’t matter.
That you would have become
the same person you are today,
regardless of who raised you.
On the other hand,
and really, I should say
on the other hands,
because there are many
caveats to that story,
but I’ll focus on one.
On the other hand,
these findings are not all that shocking.
If you think about how the same parent
could shape different
children in different ways.
One child might find it helpful
when her mother provides structure.
Her sister might find it’s stifling.
One child might think
his parents are caring
when they ask questions about his friends.
His brother might think
they’re being nosy.
One child might view
a divorce as a tragedy,
while his sister sees it as a relief.
Same event, different experience.
My husband and I experienced
this concept 20 years ago
when we were 30,000 feet
over the Atlantic,
flying from Chicago to Stockholm
to work on a research project.
The flight attendants
were clearing the dinner trays,
people were getting ready to sleep.
We hit a patch of bumpy air
and a bunch of teenagers
whooped in excitement.
Then all of a sudden,
the plane was plummeting,
children and food carts hit the ceiling.
The plane seemed to stabilize,
but then plummeted again.
The ceiling panels flew up
into their compartments from the force,
revealing wiring inside.
Debris came crumbling down on us.
People were screaming and sobbing.
The plane plummeted again.
After an eternity,
the pilot came on and announced,
“We don’t know what that was.
We don’t know what’s coming.
Stay in your seats.”
My husband came away from that experience
feeling like planes are incredibly safe.
(Laughter)
The airline sent a letter informing us
that we hadn’t simply been falling
across those thousands of feet
of clear air turbulence.
The plane had been subjected
to forces greater than 2G.
We learned that planes can withstand
forces many times larger.
So my husband feels safe flying.
He seems genuinely baffled
by how anyone could feel otherwise.
I get that concept,
but only in the abstract.
I’ve never been able to fly
the same way since.
Same event, different experience.
Just because an event
doesn’t shape people in the same way,
that doesn’t mean it had no effect.
Your parenting could be
shaping your children,
just not in ways that lead them
to become more alike.
Your parenting could be leading
your first child to become more serious,
your second child to become more relaxed.
Your first child to want to be like you,
your second child to want
to be nothing like you.
You are flapping your butterfly wings
to your hurricane children.
This isn’t how we typically
think about parenting.
It doesn’t make for simple advice.
How could parenting books tell people
how to raise successful, happy,
self-reliant children,
if the same parenting
can lead to different outcomes
for children in the same home?
At this point, you might be thinking,
like students in my class sometimes say,
“OK, we get it.
development is complicated.
And maybe it’s not worth studying
because it’s too complicated.”
But meaning can be made from chaos.
Scientists now understand
how babies go from these apparent lumps
to become walking, talking,
thinking, social independent beings.
They understand this process
well enough to intervene,
to test newborns, for example,
and treat them for a genetic condition
that used to lead to mental retardation.
Scientists are developing ever more
sophisticated understanding
of how parents could shape
their children’s futures.
Science can tell us a lot.
But it will never tell us everything.
So what can we do with this?
First, know that parents matter.
That might seem obvious,
but smart people are arguing otherwise,
and what seems obvious
is not always true, as we’ve seen.
Second, know that how parents matter
is complex and difficult to predict.
For anyone who has ever been a parent,
stop blaming yourself,
as if you are in control
of your child’s path.
You have influence,
but you don’t have control.
For anyone who has ever been a child,
stop blaming your parents.
(Laughter)
At least for the idea
that you are defined by them.
Stop blaming other parents.
A recent survey of thousands of parents
revealed that 90 percent of mothers
and 85 percent of fathers feel judged.
Close to half feel judged all the time
or nearly all the time
by people they know
and by complete strangers.
These judgments probably don’t reflect
what’s best for the kids.
How could they, given how profoundly
parenting has varied around the world
and across time?
And given how the same parents
can shape children
under the same roof
in such different ways.
Even when parents try their best,
they can’t satisfy everybody.
There’s only so much time.
This is especially true
for dragon parents.
The author, Emily Rapp,
came up with this term
after her baby was diagnosed
with Tay-Sachs disease.
She knew then that Ronan
would never walk or talk.
He would likely die before turning four.
I did not know
that this could also be the fate
of my firstborn son.
He was born with a condition
that prevents the intestine
from absorbing nutrients
or water for the body.
It affects one in five million babies.
One in five million.
It is so rare
that one doctor felt confident telling us
that we would be screwed
if that’s what our baby had.
He was the one who had
to break the news to us later.
Dragon parents have a lot
to say about parenting,
even though they know
their children will die young,
or in my case,
even if we have no idea
whether our babies will live.
Emily Rapp wrote,
“We will not launch our children
into a bright and promising future,
but see them into early graves.”
This requires a new ferocity,
a new way of thinking, a new animal.
We are dragon parents,
fierce and loyal and loving as hell.
Our experiences have taught us
how to parent for the here and now,
for the sake of parenting,
for the humanity
implicit in the act itself.
Parenting, I’ve come to understand,
is about loving my child today,
now.
In fact, for any parent anywhere,
that’s all there is.
I had thought that my expertise
in child development
would help prepare me
for becoming a parent.
Instead, becoming a parent helped me
to see the science in a whole new light.
So third, appreciate how powerful
the moments can be
because of what they mean for you
and your child right now,
not because of what they mean
for your child long term,
which you do not know.
The activist Andrew Solomon noted,
“Though many of us take pride in how
different we are from our parents,
we are endlessly sad at how different
our children are from us.”
Maybe we could be less sad
if we were more realistic,
if we let go of the notion
that our children’s futures
are in our control.
If we can embrace the complexity
of our children’s development
that can transform how we approach
those parenting decisions we face each day
and empower us to realize
how much more there is to having a child
than trying to shape a specific outcome.
So much more,
which I appreciate every day
in moments with my firstborn son,
who is thriving
and with his younger brother
and the unique paths they are taking.
We are not screwed.
(Laughter)
The science of parents and children,
butterflies and their hurricanes,
can free people to focus
on what is most important
and meaningful in our lives.
This can make the experience
of being a parent
and the experience of having been a child
more realistic and satisfying
for everyone involved.
And that, I think, is very relevant
to being a good parent.