I’d be curious to hear details on the failures.
Harris, Judith Rich Where Is the Child’s Environment? A Group Socialization Theory of Development.* Psychological Review. 102(3):458-489, July 1995.*
Bouchard, T. J., Jr. (1994, June 17). Genes, environment, and personality. Science, 264, 1700–1701
Loehlin, J. C. (1992). Genes and environment in personality development. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Plomin, R., & Daniels, D. (1987). Why are children in the same family so different from one another? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 10, 1–60.
From one of the forerunners of socialisation research, Eleanor Maccoby:
Eleanor Maccoby was a Stanford psychology professor who had spent her entire career looking for correlates between parenting and behaviour.
Reference from:
Maccoby and Martin, 1983 Review of Socialisation Research
Any you believe this is saying that environment/parenting has no effect on personality? It’s not. All it’s saying is that from 0-10% of the variance in personality can be attributed to the environment when both subjects were raised in the same environment. If you read further down you’ll see:
If you’re going to quote sources, at least quote the part that is pertinent to the discussion.
This was the quote to which I was referring. “Shared environment” does not equate to “parenting.”
Uhh, yes it does. If you’d read the article, the next bit goes on to show how the unshared environment does not equal parenting.
[edited down due to copyright concerns --Gaudere]
Not only is her approach to meta-analyses unsound, her arguments are fallacious. Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks so. Here is the logic:
- Children raised in the same home have different personalities
- Parents raise children the same way
-Therefore, parents must not be an influence on children.
If that’s not ridiculous enough she goes on to admit she might be wrong because parents might raise each child differently.
The mind boggles. Apparently my mind isn’t the only one that boggles at her theories. From a review of her book (on her own site):
From what I can gather from the rest of the review she is guilty of an Argument from Ignorance:
There is no evidence for P; therefore, not P
She does find fault with studies that do show a correlation between environment and behavior citing lack of controls or lack of proof of causality. Fine, I’m not surprised. Just because environment hasn’t been proven to influence behavior doesn’t mean it doesn’t influence behavior. Even so, her arguments appear to be mostly critical of study design.
I’ve said just about all I’m going to say on the subject.
In short, what mrsam is trying to say is that it really doesn’t matter WHAT sort of parent you are as long as your not actively being a bad parent. Even apathetic parenting seems to produce roughly the same results as the most devout adherents of AP in the long run so why bother. While theres nothing wrong with telling parents to co-sleep or breast feed, theres correspondingly nothing wrong with telling depression patients to look at aquamarine for 3 hours a day. This does not a valid theory make unfortunately.
The studies he cited studied 4 groups of people:
- People with shared environment and shared genes (identical twins living under the same household)
- People with shared environment and different genes (adopted children living in the same household)
- People with different environment and shared genes (identical twins split up from birth)
- People with different environment and unshared genes (completely random pairings, the control group).
Based on statistical data from these studies, researchers have found that people groups 1/3 and 2/4 have a roughly 50% correlation and groups 1/2 and 3/4 only have a roughly 10% correlation at most in terms of personality. The rest of the 40% is unaccounted for and is merely the random variations that every human has. However, the fact that people living in the same household ** tend to be about as different to each other as random people on the street if you remove the genetic factors** is something extremely telling and something that many people fail to comprehend fully.
btw: mrsam, I believe that your quoted piece falls rather far outside of the board’s fair use policy. Please do not quote entire chunks of the article verboten, rather, pluck out select paragraphs and summarise the rest.
That particular article won the APA George A. Miller award for best article. Here’s a cite from the APA website which demonstrates that. Ad hominem attacks are rather baseless given that, don’t you think?
Thankyou, Shamanese. That’s basically what I was trying to say. Upon re-reading the registration agreement I see I have clearly infringed the board policy, so could a mod please edit out my llast post?
No idea, technically - probably no research, at least that I’ve seen, to back this up - it would be unethical to set it up that way. But the caregiving in the existing samples would also have to be analyzed for the mechanics of the process to be certain. Basically, the process of attachment is the key, not the person. So if someone is responsive, shows reflective facial expression, responds in an attached way, I’d think it would do exactly the same thing - the neurobiology suggests that the patterns and processes are key. Who does them is not key. Technically, infants could do it with one another, because who knows of infants that do not cry when another cries, and do not laugh when another laughs, etc.? We’re wired for positive attachment initially, and it takes disruption to, well, disrupt it.
You’d have to ask someone who knows what a dyadic sociocognitive module is. However, from winging it, it seems to me that this is incorporated into current attachment theory, at least as far as terminology (you’ll see frequent mentions of mother-infant ‘dyads’ at least, in the research). Not the same thing, perhaps, in the research, but included. Most of the current attachment theory seems to be building on the synthetic science approach - that is, these things are all part of the same process, just different facets, and can be integrated in a single approach to the development of the human mind. But thats a WAG, truly.
I don’t think that this has been sufficiently researched as a separate issue to be argued one way or the other, completely. It may have to do with the risk that an adult will be less responsive, less true to the wiring (so to speak) than peers will be. That the parent alone has risk through their lifespan experience that the peers do not. More likely, the parent alone has depression because they themselves are deprived of the relationships they are now developmentally wired to expect. Depression in the adult is highly damaging in the offspring, because of the very serious impact it has on reflective behavior and attachment behavior. Being raised by a depressed parent is far worse than being raised by non-depressed peers.
As for it being the same as intuition. Again, same as your intuition, same as mine, and not at all the same as many many many others, especially those who were raised in abusive, detached, depressed, dissociated, or toxic conditions. It makes fundamental sense to you. Same to me. And others think it is absurd to not force compliance through physical punishment, think that responding to an infant under 6 months of age will ‘spoil’ it, and spending time face-to-face with your child is a huge waste of time.
I don’t consider myself AP and I generally dislike the whole idea of “child-centered parenting” that gets discussed.
I have 3 kids, ages 6, 4, and 21 months. I’m 7 months pregnant with #4.
Although I did much of the details of what is called AP, I don’t think of myself as following the philosophy.
I nursed all my kids, they slept with my for about the fist 3-4 months, I carried them around a lot as infants (although not it a sling, I could never get the hang of using one).
My main problem is the Sears (and other’s) idea of parenting being child centered. My personal child rearing philosophy is family centered.
When my baby is born in mid-January, he will be born into a family with 3 brothers and sisters. He will have to share my time and attention. I will not come running every time he cries, because I am often in the middle of doing something else. Reading his sister a book, giving his brother a bath, or even catching up on my own sleep.
Of course at first as a newborn he can’t understand the idea of waiting. But it doesn’t take long for them to realize that mommy can’t come right now, but will come soon.
I also find it hypocritical that most AP books one the one hand call for nursing as long as mom and baby find it mutually desireable, and then on the next page say it should be baby-led weaning. I find this duality rampant in many APers. They give a lot of lip service to giving mom space, but the practical advice is such that the baby’s needs and wants come first, second and third, and the mother’s are somewhere around twenty-first in priority.
I started out my mothering career thinking I would be very AP, but most of the literature and the proponant of it were so extreme that I got turned off.
I am grateful for many of the ideas of AP, I think they have contributed a lot to the dialog of what makes a good parent.
By the way, as I type this my 21 month old daughter is sitting on my lap playing with my hair and snuggling me. We are very attached.
autz - good point on the nursing/weaning thing. That’s another area where METHOD and PHILOSOPHY get confused. And certainly, Dr. Sears’ site is, IMHO, a lot about method. I’m all about the philosophy. I go to his site to explore tools to try for different situations. I don’t go there to learn how to be a parent.
The philosophy says that we raise our kids in non-violent, attachment-aware ways. But that doesn’t mean that you have to suffer as the mom, either. And the philosophy does not say ‘child-centric’, either. It is more ‘anti parent-centric’, which still leaves room for family-centric. But parents, in general, are very prone to forming ‘camps’, and a great many of them lose sight of what, exactly, they are supporting (and get hung up on the details of what worked for them that should therefore be gospel to everyone else).
The child-centric exclusive focus ad nauseum, is, IMHO, a corruption of AP, or an extension of lack of complete understanding of the underlying principles. People get focussed on ‘doing it right’, and lose sight of the changes that have to be made over time, or of the differences between kids and environments, resources, abilities, etc. Like you, I am very child-centric in infancy, because the infant has no recourse. I am very family-centric in general, because attachment is multi-factored - my other kid(s), my husband, other relatives, all play their roles. All of that has to be maintained, and sometimes something else is going to have to give.
The process is where the details flex, where one parent doesn’t use a sling, another uses daycare, another night-weans, someone else never breastfeeds at all, and people go from don’t-offer/don’t refuse management of extended nursing all the way to intentionally dropping feeds because they are done, even if the child is not, and nursing is a dyad experience, not a solo one. But the real application of the method is not in ‘always nursing until the child self-weans’ but ‘when weaning is done as a parent-led process, it is done with an awareness that the child is an emotional being, and choices are made that respect that and honor it, even if they do not necessarily cater to it.’ And if you cannot come right away when a child needs you, you say so, and talk to them about what is going on, or explain the situation, or give them some kind of response that suggests that you recognize their emotional truth as much as they functional truth that you could not get there when they wanted, for whatever reason.
Truly, parents who have normal attachment processes to start with typically use attachment parenting principles and philosophy fairly automatically, and tend to shift away from it only under pressure (stress, frustration, etc.). We talk to the baby who is crying beyond our reach, rather than just ignoring it while it cries. We respond with empathy, even when we can’t make it better or do what the baby wants. We respect the feelings involved.
Plenty of people who call themselves AP are actually inserting a few AP-approved practices into an existing philosophy of their own, often one that involves sacrifice of the mother’s life/expectations/goals for the sake of her kids. That’s where I see the mom comes 21st and baby is 1-18 on the priority list, FOR LIFE. But the forums I post on, you’ll get plenty of ‘I cannot stand this, how do I change it while respecting my child’s underlying needs’ - like, ‘I’m pregnant, and cannot cosleep anymore because my son keeps waking me and I barely sleep as it is. How do I get him into his own bed with a minimum of trauma on both our parts?’ That’s an AP question. And the answers vary, from gradual weaning to the new location, to rewards, to getting the child invested in the new space/location, to gradual movement to a new bed in the same room, and yes, also ‘wait it out, it will get better, hang in there and don’t move him if it isn’t working out’. But there’s nobody there saying that the last option is the only option, and far more people saying ‘keep trying things until you find one that works for both of you.’ Family-centric. Philosophy, not cookie-cutter method.
hedra, I’m very interested in the forums of which you speak. I know people are sometimes skittish about posting links to other boards because of the history of occasional “board wars,” but would you be willing either to post or to email me the information?
I emailed you with full details. The main one is StorkNet (paid site, have to register and pay before you can read/post). There are a few other SDMB members there, too.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by fessie *
The thing about co-sleeping that surprised me is the argument that SIDS might be reduced by sharing the parents’ bed.
See this site for some convincing arguments that co-sleeping is actually safer than crib sleeping: