How Much Credit or Blame Do Parents Deserve?

In procreation, a woman and a man shuffle their gene decks and deal a life-forming hand to their child-to-be, who is then subjected to countless influences beyond their control. Parents, nonetheless, feel enormous satisfaction in their children’s successes or guilt and shame over their failures. They beam over the child who wins trophies and titles. They wonder where they went wrong with the child who is repeatedly in trouble.

Freudian psychiatry and psychology encouraged such ideas by blaming problems from asthma to schizophrenia on “bad mothering.” Believing that parents shape their offspring as a potter molds clay, many people praise parents for their children’s virtues and blame them for their children’s vices, and for the psychological harm that toxic parents presumably inflict on their fragile children. No wonder having and raising children can seem so risky.

This image is a cartoon of a man being pulled over by a police officer. The man says to the officer “To be frank, officer, my parents never set boundaries.”

“To be frank, officer, my parents never set boundaries.”

But do parents really produce wounded future adults by being (take your pick from the toxic-parenting lists) overbearing—or uninvolved? Pushy—or indecisive? Overprotective—or distant? Should we then blame our parents for our failings, and ourselves for our children’s failings? Or does talk of wounding fragile children through normal parental mistakes trivialize the brutality of real abuse?

Parents do matter. But parenting wields its largest effects at the extremes: the abused children who become abusive, the deeply loved but firmly handled who become self-confident and socially competent. The power of the family environment also appears in the remarkable academic and vocational successes of many children of people who leave their home countries, such as those of refugees who fled war-torn Vietnam and Cambodia—successes attributed to close-knit, supportive, even demanding families (Caplan et al., 1992). Asian-Americans and European-Americans often differ in their parenting expectations. An Asian-American mother may push her children to do well, but usually not in a way that strains their relationship (Fu & Markus, 2014). Having a supportive “Tiger Mother”—one who pushes her children and works alongside them—tends to motivate children to work harder. European-Americans, however, might see this as pushy parenting that undermines children’s motivation (Deal, 2011).

This image is a cartoon.

“So I blame you for everything—whose fault is that?“

Yet in personality measures, shared environmental influences from the womb onward typically account for less than 10 percent of children’s differences. In the words of behavior geneticists Robert Plomin and Denise Daniels (1987; Plomin, 2011), “Two children in the same family are [apart from their shared genes] as different from one another as are pairs of children selected randomly from the population.” To developmental psychologist Sandra Scarr (1993), this implied that “parents should be given less credit for kids who turn out great and blamed less for kids who don’t.” So, knowing that children’s personalities are not easily sculpted by parental nurture, perhaps parents can relax and love their children for who they are.

Law professor and author Amy Chuawith her daughter.

A controlling mom Amy Chua, law professor and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011), sparked controversy by comparing strict “Chinese” and more permissive “Western” parenting styles. In raising her two daughters, Chua came to appreciate the benefits and the costs of the more externally controlled traditional Chinese parenting.