Issue 6 - Anyway
I parent like who they end up being depends on me. The research disagrees. I do not adjust.
Behavioral genetics, the body of work that runs through Robert Plomin and decades of twin and adoption studies, finds that my parenting is not the dominant force shaping who my kids end up being. Genes account for more. So does the non-shared environment they encounter without me, including the peers they end up around, the teacher who lands on them at the wrong moment, the friend who moves in next door at the right age. The variance the research calls shared environment, which contains nearly everything happening in this house, is small by adulthood. Adopted siblings raised in the same family, eating the same dinners, governed by the same rules, end up about as similar to each other on measures of personality and intelligence as two strangers off the street. That finding is durable. It is also uncomfortable.
It does not change what I do.
The same broader child development literature, when it studies extreme environments, has a different finding. Severe neglect, abuse, deprivation produce devastating effects, with consequences most children cannot fully overcome into adulthood. That carve-out is real, and it matters, and it is not the question for me. I am not parenting near that floor. Having cleared that bar, the question I am sitting with is what the science says about the broad band above it, where most of us actually live. In that band, the effects on parental outcomes are smaller than seems intuitive, allegedly. The small effects are still mine.
There is a version of reading that research that arrives as permission. Most of who they end up being is not mine to shape, the research says. Why brace then. Why bother. The simplest answer is that he is my son. His life is his, but I am his father, and that is what does not move. The percentage of influence I have is not the question. Being his father is.
I show up like it is on me. Not because the science says it is, but because the alternative is to confuse the limit of my influence with a limit on what I owe. Not they will probably be fine either way. I will be present, consistent, honest about what the work requires.
The clearest version of this is at the end of the day. He is winding down. I am winding down. He wants more. More minutes, more questions, more of me lying next to him. I love him and want to give it. I also know rest is not optional, for him or for me, and that the version of me who shows up tomorrow depends on whether I close out tonight. I tell him good night. He does teh same and we do this again tomorrow.
I don’t know how much of who my kids end up being came from me. The data suggests less than I want to believe. The small effects are the ones I get to shape? The small effects compound.
The Question
If you learned tomorrow that your effect on who your kids end up being is half what you thought, how much of what you do as a father would actually change?