Why Most Parenting Advice is Wrong | Yuko Munakata | TEDxCU

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 what 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 promised 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 weight 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 jeans 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 okay 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 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 some societies like the Javanese in Indonesia viewed biological parents as too lenient so children were better off with foster parents mothers in a hunter-gatherer society regretted when their children cut 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 and 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 then 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 to 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 but 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 sleeeeep we hit a patch of bumpy air and a bunch of teenagers whooped an excitement then all of a sudden the plane was plummeting children and food carts hit the ceiling the planes 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 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 okay 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 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% of mothers and 85% 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 is 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 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 there Ronan would never walk or talk he would likely die before turning 4 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 1 in 5 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 the science of parents and children butterflies in 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 [Applause] you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 350,108

Rating: 4.9101024 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Science, Behavior, Childhood, Children, Cognitive science, Control, Early education, Neuroscience, Parenting

Id: 5g8tHEXtCXE

Length: 17min 14sec (1034 seconds)

Published: Mon May 06 2019