The blogger Jayman wrote: “The transmission of misery or bliss in a family is entirely due to shared genes, just like most everything else.”
Rex responds: “But what about religion? Most people take their religion from their parents. Is it totally irrelevant whether a child is brought up Muslim, Scientologist, Jain or Jewish?”
Jayman responds:
To the incredulous commenters above, yes, I realize the idea that parenting has no lasting impact on children’s outcomes is a tough pill to swallow, one that you might say defies common sense and experience. But, as I said in one of my recent tweets, science does occasionally produce counter-intuitive results. Indeed, if it did not – if it always confirmed our naive intuitions – we wouldn’t have to do science.
The case for the non-existence of lasting parental effects is borne out of overwhelming evidence. I review a good bit of it in the following two posts:
The Son Becomes The Father | JayMan’s Blog
and
More Behavioral Genetic Facts | JayMan’s Blog
To be clear: I’m not talking just some broad nebulous personality traits, or even IQ. I mean all the stuff that “really matters” – all the stuff where you’d expect parental treatment, lessons, and examples to “make a difference” , including:
Political/societal views, attitudes, and values
Religiosity
Criminality
Psychopathology (mental problems, like anxiety disorders, depression, ADD, etc.)
Marital stability/divorce risk
Promiscuity
Substance abuse
Income
Mate choice
Adult life satisfaction (happiness)Each one of these is backed by gigantic studies as discussed in the above posts. These studies span the Western world, as well as East Asia. Parents have an important task in keep their kids healthy and safe. But most of the parental efforts, beyond that which is devoted to this end (which itself was NOT any small job in the past, let’s not forget) or to pass on knowledge merely serves the end of bringing joy to parents and children. In other words, the things parents do for children should be enjoyed for their own sake.
Hmm. Over the past six months, I’ve spent hundreds of hours studying the work of UCLA psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel (who is best known for promoting mindfulness to achieve secure attachment). I’ve Googled him and read all the negative reviews of his books and I can’t find any significant debunking. Still, I want to be sure I am not studying nonsense.
I find this essay fascinating:
Five hundred people sat in a packed workshop at the Networker Symposium last March, listening to eminent developmental psychologist and researcher Jerome Kagan draw on more than four decades of research he’s conducted as he discussed the clinical relevance of inborn temperament. Midway through the session, responding to a question from the audience, he tried to clarify an earlier, seemingly disparaging, comment he’d made about attachment theory. But he soon removed any possible doubt about where he stood. “I’m glad that attachment theory is dead,” he said. “I never thought it would go anywhere.”
There was a moment of stunned silence, followed by a low hum as people shifted in their seats and murmured to each other. Whatever their imperfect understanding of the voluminous research literature of attachment theory, for most therapists in the room, the idea that the early emotional attunement of a mother/caregiver (or lack of it) profoundly affects the child’s psychological development was as self-evident as the worthiness of therapy itself. Indeed, during the last 15 to 20 years, attachment theory has exerted more influence in the field of psychotherapy than just about any other model, approach, or movement. Though not a clinical methodology, it has justified a whole range of therapeutic perspectives and practices. Among them are a particular sensitivity to the role of traumatic or neglectful ties with early caregivers; the fundamental importance of affect regulation to successful therapy; the importance of establishing relationships with clients characterized by close, intense, emotional, and physical attunement; and the ultimate goal of recreating in therapy an attachment experience that makes up, at least to some degree, for what the client missed the first time around. That attachment theory itself has amassed a vast body of empirical evidence (see p.34) is often taken, by extension, to cast a glow of scientific credibility on attachment-based therapy. So when Kagan delivered his offhand rebuke, he was raising fundamental questions about the evidence supporting findings that most therapists there considered not just theory, but well-established fact.
Suddenly, in the wordless void that followed Kagan’s bombshell, psychiatrist, brain researcher, and staunch attachment theory proponent Daniel Siegel popped out of his seat, looked for a floor microphone to respond, and, finding none, strode up the center aisle and bounded onto the
stage. As a startled Kagan looked on and the entire ballroom audience sat dumbfounded, Siegel, the conference keynote speaker from that morning, asked for a microphone and announced: “I can’t let this audience listen to your argument without hearing the other side. Have you actually read the attachment research?” he demanded of his colleague.
There followed a heated, impromptu debate between the two men that later became the talk of the conference. Part of the buzz was because it was a disagreement between two stars—Jerome Kagan, arguably the most revered developmental psychologist in the world, and Daniel Siegel, one of the most influential thinkers and teachers in the field of psychotherapy today. Each brought to bear both an impressive resume and passionately held convictions on the age-old question about human development: which counts more—nature or nurture? Beyond its sheer drama, two things stood out about this spontaneous encounter—the surprise that a discussion of research findings could generate such intellectual fervor at a psychotherapy conference and, for the majority of the audience, the shock that there was any debate at all about the role of early experience in human development. It was as if a leading biologist had gotten up at a professional conference to denounce germ theory.
…psychologist and sex therapist David Schnarch suggests that it can keep adult couples stuck in the role of perpetually needy children. Author of the bestselling Passionate Marriage and several other books, and founder of a tough-minded, differentiation-based approach to couples’ counseling, Schnarch believes that relationship failure stems not from lack of emotional connection between partners—the focus of attachment-based therapy—but too much of the wrong kind. Partners become enmeshed, lose a sense of selfhood, and depend on positive reinforcement and reassurance from each other because they can’t soothe their own anxieties, and then have relationship difficulties when both demand validation from theother but neither will give it. Each partner needs, in effect, to grow up, learn to tolerate anxiety, and take charge of him- or herself before they can fully connect with the other.
Schnarch says that couples come to see him on the brink of divorce, whose own therapists told them not to see him, since they needed to attach before they could differentiate. This is exactly backward, he says. “Adults don’t need to go back and attach—that is not the right approach and just reinforces weakness, fragility, and dependency—characteristics of the emotional fusion, connection in the absence of differentiation, that is causing the problems in the first place. The solution is not to get them even closer together. Attachment-based therapy plugs together troubled couples only as long as they mutually validate and stroke each other, move in lock step, and keep on doing it. It encourages co-dependency.
