Description: Parenting is overrated.

Transcript:

People often asked me how my parents influenced me, and I can’t give a neutral answer to that because I very much influence by the saying by Hans Isaac that the biggest influence that parents have on their children is at the moment of conception. I think that people often attribute far too much to parental upbringing. There’s a fair amount of data from my field not widely know that suggests that the effect of parents in shaping intellect and personality might even be overrated. You see this in children of immigrants. Even if their parents never acquired the language and culture of the adopted country, as long as the kids who were immersed in a peer group, they end up as fully competent citizens – something indeed that happened to my own father, the children of immigrants who are culturally, utterly inept; never managed to speak the language. In the case of my grandmother, they were constantly at sea in figuring out the culture, and my father grew up highly successful. So if you would ask the question of him, “How did your parents shape you?” he would have laughed. He shaped himself. I don’t want to deny credit to my parents who brought me up in a rich and stimulating household, but I think I’d be kind of inventing a novelistic autobiography, which is what I think what most people do when asked, “How did your parents influence you?” That having been said, it was a house with books, with discussion, with arguments, with people coming in and challenging us with interesting ideas. So I wouldn’t have traded it for anything, but the scientist in me says that . . . warns against my tendency to tell a story, and how to explain who I am today.

It’s natural to credit who you are with your parents. It seems like an act of decency or gratitude. In fact I often have to apologize to my parents saying I really do appreciate everything you did to me. It’s just that the scientific data leads me to think that parents don’t shape children as much as most people think. And that attitude is . . . I should give them credit for their attitude, which is, “We wouldn’t want you to say anything but what you believe based on the best scientific evidence that you take seriously. So don’t try to fashion your answer to flatter us.” I think that is a sign of the kind of people that they are. They are, I think, as interested in ideas and in providing good reasons for your ideas as I am. I don’t know whether I inherited that, whether they fostered it in me, but they deserve full credit for that even if perhaps by the standards of their friends I seem to be denying them credit in talking about theories of the shaping of personality.

I think the only way to make sense of nature and nurture is _______ obviously to point out that these are not alternatives; that you couldn’t have nurture – that is the creation and transmission of culture – without a rich system of emotion and learning to make sense of it; to create the culture; to acquire the culture if you’re faced with learning it as a child. And in the other direction, it would be a pretty useless kind of innate human nature if it couldn’t take in information from the environment; if it couldn’t figure out the kind of physical and social world that it had been placed in; and soaked up information as to how to prosper in it. In order to . . . So you need both. How do they interact? Well you have to specify, I think, the innate motivational systems, the innate learning mechanisms that make learning and transmission of culture possible. So something is innate. What is innate is not concrete behaviors or chunks of knowledge. What is innate is an ability to analyze the world and to learn in certain ways. Language makes it concrete where we certainly could not possibly be born with English. On the other hand, just an ability to learn generically isn’t enough because you could take a baby, or you could take a cat or a parrot, give them the same environment – the baby will learn to speak, the cat won’t. So something innate must be there as well. In the case of language, it would be a motive and an ability to analyze the signals coming out of someone else’s mouth as being formed out of units that have fixed meanings within a community and combinatorial rules that allow new ideas to be expressed by arranging these fixed signals in different orders and combinations. The brain mechanism that is equipped to do that – to find the words, the nouns, the verbs, the phrases – to analyze speech as having that logic . . . that’s what’s innate, not just a generic ability to learn at one extreme, not knowledge of English at the other extreme.