Question

How did your parents influence the development of your personal constructs? Which constructs did you acquire from them and which have you discovered yourself?

Answer 1

Developmental psychologists have found themselves on the defensive since Judith Rich Harris published her 1998 book, "The Nurture Assumption" (Free Press). In it, Harris asserts that parents have little or no influence over the long-term development of their children's personality.

Putting together evidence from several areas of psychology and sociology, Harris concluded that personality is shaped by the experiences children have outside the home--in particular, experiences with peers--and that any similarities between parents and children are due to shared genes and a shared culture. Her ideas garnered widespread media attention, including an oft-cited article in The New Yorker.

In response, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation sponsored a conference on parenting last summer. The fruit of this conference is a book, "Parenting and the Child's World: Influences on Academic, Intellectual and Socioemotional Development," to be published next year by Erlbaum. Chapters by Harris and behavioral geneticist David Rowe, PhD, present data to support Harris's view, while a cadre of developmental psychologists detail decades of research that they feel demonstrates the role parents play in influencing children's development.

Their foremost conclusion?

"Parenting matters," says developmental psychologist John Borkowski, PhD, co-editor of the book with Sharon Ramey, PhD.

That's not to say that genes and peers don't, but the book makes no attempt to weigh the three in terms of which factor is more or less important.

"The idea was to figure out when, where and how parenting matters," says Borkowski, professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame.

Along with parenting style and disciplinary approaches, parents influence the schools their children attend, the foods they eat and even the neighborhood--by choice or circumstances--in which they grow up.

"Parenting influences are much more than parents' desires to mold children," says Ramey, director of the Civitan International Research Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "Can you make your child be who you want? Of course not."

But to even engage the question, "Do parents matter?"--as many journalists have since Harris published her book--is preposterous, say Ramey and other contributors to the book.

But it's equally inappropriate, as some developmental researchers have done, to even try to talk about direct effects of parenting, genes or social environment because all three are acting in conjunction with each other and influencing each other, say University of California, Berkeley, husband-and-wife research team Carolyn Cowan, PhD, and Philip Cowan, PhD, who wrote a chapter for the book.

"It's like talking about a horse race and trying to pit two horses against each other when there are 10 in the race," says Philip Cowan. "You can't isolate the two from the pack because they're inseparably linked to the other horses on the track."

Bi-directional influences

Many of the chapters in the book agree that, in the early days of child development research, the emphasis was too heavily weighted toward parental influences. Today, however, most researchers have become more sophisticated in their theories and studies and examine parenting as one of many factors influencing child development.

"We now see parenting less in terms of simple parent-to-child influence, and more as a set of interactive processes whereby parents and children react to each other and influence each other from the moment a child is born," writes Stanford University's Eleanor Maccoby, PhD, in one of the book's introductory chapters.

This model of bi-directional influences can be used to explain some of the same findings from behavioral genetics research that Harris uses to argue that parenting style has little influence on certain behavioral traits, such as personality, says Maccoby.

The behavioral genetics work finds that genes account for as much as 50 percent of the variance in certain behavioral traits and that siblings' shared environment--the home and parenting--has little influence on these traits.

But, argues Maccoby, other studies show that a given parenting style can have different effects on children with different temperaments. The result is that parenting can function to make children in the same family different rather than alike.

"In other words," she writes, "the home environment that children share is indeed having an effect, even though it is a different effect for different children and would not be computed as a shared effect in a behavior genetics analysis."

Implications from interventions

A main problem with linking parenting definitively to child development is that most of the research is necessarily correlational, say the Cowans.

That's in part why the Berkeley developmental researchers turned to intervention studies to examine the role of parenting in children's academic success. Their studies have been designed like randomized clinical trials--randomly assigning families to an intervention or control group. The intervention families participate in a type of couples group intervention in which mothers and fathers work on parenting issues as well as issues related to their relationships as couples.

In a study that targeted parents whose children were about to enter school, they found that improving either parenting practices or the marital relationship had a significant effect one, two and then four years later on children's behavior and success in school. The marital intervention had a bigger effect on lowering children's aggression and academic performance while the parenting intervention had a greater influence on reducing shy and withdrawn behavior.

Interestingly, a byproduct of the marital intervention was that, in addition to showing less conflict as a couple, parenting styles improved too--these parents were warmer and provided more structured discipline to their children. The parenting intervention, in contrast, did not influence parents' relationships. Overall, the more parents changed after the couples group intervention, the better their children did in school, says Carolyn Cowan.

Although the Cowans believe intervention studies are the best way to confirm a link between parenting and child development, they don't underestimate the power of correlational and longitudinal research. Without correlational research on parenting, there would be nothing on which to base an intervention, they say.

For example, over the past several decades University of Minnesota psychologist Alan Sroufe, PhD, and his colleagues have followed children from infancy into adulthood, documenting the link between early parent