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Genetics provide a high water mark that a human can aspire to, but there are obvious ways a bad parent could cut that short. Concussing the kid, starving the kid, locking up the kid so they never learn language before that critical period is passed.
There is a large body of work suggesting that not setting rules and limits for kids is one of these blunders that prevents a kid from reaching their full potential.
I did note that feeding and not-hitting-kid’s-head-with-rock was a non-optional part of parenting.
After that, I don’t trust this body of work about parenting styles. It sounds like another spurious explanation for group differences, of the kind that produces new and revolutionary interventions in schooling every few years.
Except it isn't. People can, and do, abuse their kids and ruin them in horrific ways. You don't get to claim "parenting doesn't matter" by gerrymandering "parenting" to exclude the sort of behavior you agree would make a difference in a child's outcomes.
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Think of it less as a parenting style, and more as a complete neglect of acculturating a child into society. If a kid never learns a word is spoken before sometime between 6 and 12, they will never understand language syntax. Never ever, no matter how smart their parents were or how dedicated their speech therapist is.
If a kid never has a single rule enforced by a grown up and is shielded from the consequences of their actions, are they capable of learning executive function and how to behave in a society which has authority over them? I'm really surprised if you think it doesn't matter, when it is clear from several fields that there are "critical periods" of brain development, and if certain stimuli are not provided during those periods that the window to learn certain skills closes.
Is this language example an analogy? I’m not proposing to lock children outside in a stall for the first 12 years of their lives and never letting them hear a human word. And if it is an analogy, I don’t think a permissible parenting style is comparable to being raised by wolves.
People used to beat their kids. My father was occasionally severely beaten with a hose. Not because my grandfather drank – he didn’t – but because that’s what the parental-educational fashion was at that time. He would know, my grandfather was a schoolmaster. Teachers back then thought they could beat the stupid and evil out of children – and they had a duty to. At some point before he retired, he got a directive from the education ministry that teachers weren’t to do that anymore. He told me he had to let go of a few of the old-timers, who could not stop beating children – they had always done it this way, this was what education was to them, teaching children how to behave in a society that has authority over them.
So after the beatings era, the experts came up with a new theory, where strictness was excoriated, damaging the child’s ‘true potential’ etc. In my opinion they were not any more correct than their predecessors (because parenting and schooling don’t really matter), but at least the unnecessary beatings stopped, and that’s a small win, because it’s unpleasant for both parties, and you could break something.
And now the experts have turned the wheel again and apparently children need strict rules or something. I am skeptical.
And if you're a teacher who is wicked (I beat my students because I enjoy it), simple (I beat my students because I'm not capable of getting them to learn any other way/it's the path of least resistance to the required outcome), or just going through the motions (I beat my students because everyone else does), what a convenient boon! Why do the work to justify anything in a house of learning when you can just let the lash do it for you?
Sure, but the problem is that once you make it a blanket rule (otherwise known as "going too far"), the wicked, the simple, and the checked-out start taking advantage of it. Fast-forward a generation, and compound that with changes in labor laws that compromise the quality of your labor pool, and you get the fart-huffing "no wrong answers, only wrong targets" education system of today that's merely cargo-culting what was once valuable about that way of doing things. So the wise are now punished for trying to mark on right answers since that's the only way students learn, the wicked teach grievance studies to get that same personal euphoria as they used to get with the beatings, the simple think having no standards... well, that's great, they don't have to do any work now, and the checked-out are happy so long as the official metrics look good.
I am too- replacing abusive men (and the ways men conduct abuse) with abusive women (and the ways women conduct abuse) didn't actually reduce the amount of abuse in the system. My skepticism rests on the degree to which the balance will tilt- if we can let the wise do their jobs and sufficiently protect them as they run into the practical challenges of the policy, delay the wicked sufficiently until it's time to change the system wholesale and knock them off balance again (I think government central planning tends to call these '5 year plans'), get a little more out of the simple, and motivate the checked out into wisdom, we're going to succeed in some way.
Changing policies always have this effect to a minor degree at first so it's hard to tell what shifted, and by the time you know, the will is gone. (This is why tech companies believe in 'moving fast and breaking things'- it is in theory an institutional policy that really hurts the wicked. But it also really hurts the customer, who can trust dishonest, self-interested men to be consistently dishonest and self-interested; it's the checked out in the process of becoming wise that really screw everything up.)
They don't to/have a negative effect on children born wise. For everyone else, it's "we know you're going to try and fuck up everything, so the best we can hope for is that those energies are channeled in at least a coincidentally-productive way", "you're too stupid to figure this out but our society is very insecure about some people being objectively better than others so we launder this through our daycare system", and "learning how to learn" for those who don't know but, if they knew, could perform very well.
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The language example is something that has happened several times in highly abusive situations, and has been studied in detail, for example, see Genie. Not enforcing any rules at all may be a similar form of neglect, lesser in severity, but still with consequences.
Yes, people used to beat their kids. As far as I can tell, that is ok, as long as the parent shows love at other times.
The experts have not turned the wheel, the experts have always said "Strictness and love," it's just interpreted through the popular self-help books differently through the generations.
Again, I consider the feral child analogy ludicrous, not carrying any weight.
Do you have studies to back that up?
So beating is optional? That is a bizarre position to take. It’s either necessary, as people used to believe, or it should be avoided, for obvious reasons.
I gave you an example of expert guidance, and it wasn’t popular interpretations of consistent ideas in a self-help book. They used to tell teachers that part of their job was beating children, and later told them to cut it out.
Yes, the large body of work on how Permissive Parenting produces kids who have decreased emotional intelligence. Baumrind followed a group of white kids from preschool to adulthood with an average IQ of 125, studying them in their homes, assessing the parenting styles and then checking back on the kids later to see what their outcomes are.
You're other question:
Beating is optional, setting and enforcing limits is not. Beating is one of several ways to enforce limits, but there are other ways to enforce limits that are equally good.
Thanks for the sauce.
So I can only read the synopsis, but it appears the strongest conclusion of that study is that the authoritarian style is the worst. Then it compares a bunch of other parenting style categories (directive, authoritative, democratic, permissive, disengaged) which seem ill-defined, prone to bias and an invitation to p-hack.
Take OP’s original example of the teenager who won’t get off the phone. Baumrind’s definition of the two dimensions she uses to define four of the categories (see table), via wikipedia :
If some parents confiscate the phone over their daughter’s tearful pleas, it’s easy for the social scientist working off this definition to count that as “not responding to their child’s needs in a supportive and accepting manner”. That by itself would make them either ‘authoritarian’ or ‘neglectful’.
Baumrind’s preferred style– “authoritativism” - is an “authoritarianism of the gaps” where you act authoritarian until someone proves a part doesn’t work, then you pretend that part was always part of the ‘bad authoritarianism’ while you’re just practicing good authoritarianism. Your secret sauce is that you love your children while the bad authoritarians of the past didn't.
So the expert advice seems to be: “be authoritarian, but not too much. Too much is definitely terrible”. Which manages to be both completely useless and maximally anxiety-inducing.
As to why some studies show ‘permissive parenting’ to be less positive than her gerrymandered position, it’s largely genetic effects, nothing causative.
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