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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25671 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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I have no citations nor will to dig them up (=> what follows is not a high confidence claim) but my gestalt impression of the argument "details of parenting don't matter as long as minimum standards are met" comes from studies that measure parenting and quite generic statistical measures of education, income, or perhaps questionnaires about life satisfaction on 1-5 scale. I can't escape the feeling that there are many details that are substantial to the personal lived experience that are path contingent (including parental choices), but all those dimensions are collapsed into nothing in such studies and look like random noise.

I’ve always suspected such studies are not capturing the tails of the distribution, nor do they want to.

At the 1st and 99th percentiles I expect you would see some stark differences in parenting.

There's no doubt that the lower tail sucks, that's why "as long as minimum standards are met" is there. But there's real question about whether there is an upper tail that makes a difference.

And, you also don't choose to be in the 1st or 99th percentile of parents. You are born there just as much as your kids are. No parent within two standard deviations of the mean could push their child rearing to those extremes.

Pretty much all that I've read about this comes from Bryan Caplan's book "Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids" and based on that I think you're right. A lot of these findings are from twin adoption studies (to control for genetics) so they filter out anyone who's too messed up to be allowed to adopt a child. It's not that parenting doesn't matter at all, but more that it doesn't matter much within the range of things that a normal, middle class person would do. Kids who fall below that standard can definitely get messed up by it. The problem is that a lot of people who aren't in any danger of hurting their kids spend a lot of time worrying about it and being overprotective.

I can't escape the feeling that there are many details that are substantial to the personal lived experience that are path contingent (including parental choices), but all those dimensions are collapsed into nothing in such studies and look like random noise.

This seems likely. There are also backfire effects, which makes it hard to guess what action will have the intended affect, vs sending them in the opposite direction. That especially seems to happen a lot with very strict families in liquid modernity, internet enabled cultures.

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