Most people believe that it’s important to start their children out on the right path, and that a a good foundation will have a direct, positive impact on the sort of adult they become. When someone raises a good person, they take some credit for it, and people often congratulate them for being a good parent.
So, what about in the opposite case? Does someone deserve to be blamed (even a little) if their child doesn’t grow up to be an upstanding citizen? If they are, does it matter if they really tried to give the kid a good upbringing? Are there any scenarios at all where a parent/guardian would deserve some blame? If not, does a parent deserve praise when a child turns out well? If yes in one case, and no in the other, then what’s the difference?
I’m not saying people don’t need to be held responsible for their actions. It’s obvious that they do. There are numerous examples of people who turned out fine (or great) despite having a rough time. There are also people who turned out badly despite having a good foundation. That’s not really what this is about though.
You have not met my aunt and uncle. As devoted parents they sacrificed everything to build the best family they could. It worked for the most part. Cousin Chris graduated with honors from college and just landed a great job. He has never been in trouble a day in his life. His sister is about to graduate from UT Austin. She is beautiful, smart, and has a good head on her shoulders. She has already started internships for her dream job. And…cousins Brian went somewhere very far astray late in high school. He got arrested for drugs a few times, got his teeth knocked out in a fight, and even did one stint in jail (out of a few) because he called a judge an idiot fucker when he was sentenced to community service and refused to go along with it. He is still a smart, sweet kid in a way but he about to break up his parent;s marriage as they try to do what they can. At 19, he just rides around on his motorcycle and seems to aggressively seek out trouble. Not one single person in the family can find fault with the parents. Kids are born with much of their personality and sometimes that has a big shithead component.
I haven’t met your family, but I’ve got a cousin that fits that basic description (good family, bad kid) and screw up relatives that somehow got a good kid in spite of their parenting.
So, do you give your aunt and uncle credit for the good kids that they raised or are you firmly in the nature over nurture camp?
I think it changes as the kid ages. It’s sort of a bell curve. When they’re newborns, parents have almost no control over them. It’s a crapshoot. Even the best parents may have a screaming monster on their hands. As they get a little older, I hold the parents more and more responsible. By the time the kid is three, I get very annoyed with the parents if the kid is a brat. By 5, I’m holding the parents nearly 95% responsible, and that continues until about 7. Then other influences seem to become stronger, including the child’s own personal ideas and ethics. By the time they’re young teens, I hold the kid responsible about 60% and the parents 40%. Older teens are about 90% responsible for their own actions.
Here’s the key, for me: once you’re old enough to say, “I’m spoiled because my mother always let me…” or “I have trust issues in relationships because my father…” you’re old enough and aware enough to take your own responsibility for yourself.
I cut more slack to kids of obviously abusive, neglectful or clueless parents, but at some point, even if your parents are monsters, you’re responsible for yourself.
My twin sister and I both have doctorates. We have never had a out-of-wedlock pregnancy or been arrested. Our drug/alcohol use is mild, and we are upstanding, tax-paying, straight-as-an-arrow citizens. Hopefully, we will always be.
We have an older sister by eight years who’s young life started off VERY rocky. Rebelliousness, drug use, wild parties, secret abortions, running away…very heady stuff. Her antics drove the family to counseling. Despite being bright, she dropped out of college after a semester and wandered from one low-paying job to another. At 25, she had a baby out-of-wedlock and shacked up with her boyfriend. To our religious, socially conservative parents, this was outrageous.
But now she’s very successful. She’s got a great job, a beautiful family, and owns a nice house in a nice suburb. Ten years ago, she looked like a loser. Now she’s a winner.
Do I owe my success to my parents? I would be ingrateful if I didn’t acknowledge their support, but I don’t think they made me who I am. Just like I don’t think they made my sister crazy and irresponsible back in the day. However, I do think the stable foundation they provided ensured that we would at least be able to reach our full potential, given our shortcomings. I don’t think I would have a Ph.D if my parents hadn’t seen fit to get me into “good” schools growing up. I don’t think my older sister would be doing the corporate thing if my parents hadn’t given her so many second chances during adolescence. So I guess my answer to the OP is “sorta”. A parent has only so much control over how their kids turn out–but they do have SOME control.
It’s a combination of both, of course. But I think a majority has to do with the kid, not the parents.
Take me, for example. I was never supposed to turn out the way I did. At least according to the statistics.
My mother and father are both blue collar. My father was not around much when I was a kid. He divorced my mother when I was in the 3rd grade so he could go have fun. Not a nice guy, really. My older brother has always been a lazy slob. Runs around on his wife. Very shady. A real loser. My sister has been on drugs, lots of abortions, etc. None of them – father, mother, brother, sister – ever went to college.
I was the odd ball. I stayed out of trouble, for the most part. I went to college and earned a BS in electrical engineering. I’m now getting my MSEE.
When compared to everyone else in my immediate family, I’ve been pretty successful. I owe none of it to them.
I’ve seen awful kids who have wonderful parents as well as plenty of nine year olds who have parents who can’t discipline their child, clearly control the family, and are really heading for trouble. Since your question has your answer, I’m going to average the cases I know about and say 35% of the blame.
This reminds me of a thread I wanted to start, about whether people believe in the concept of the bad seed. Loserdom is a little vague, and also subject to change; how about if we make a beeline for absolute evil?
And to answer the OP, I’m generally of the camp that says blame the parents. Even if the parents are good parents, even if they’re successful with some of their kids, they can’t entirely escape the blame if one of their kids ends up screwed up – barring external factors, of course, such as mental illness or non-parental abuse.
You know Sal, there was originally a reference to the bad seed concept in the op, but I removed it because I wanted people to draw from their own experience to answer if possible, and how many of us really know a Rhoda ? If your kid is born pure evil, and is unable to change? Well, assuming a non-supernatural world, that’s got to be some sort of mental illness, so I wouldn’t blame the parents. Unless they knew their child was Damien, and kept unleashing him on unsuspecting people.
Could it be that the black sheep in the family needed to be treated differently than the others?
I hear parents say “We treated all our kids the same, but look how Joe turned out!”
Some kids need more positive attention than their siblings, but it’s hard for parents to act on it without shorting the others, which raises a whole other problem.
You know, after I hit the “submit” button, I realized I short-changed my mom. I need to be severely beaten.
So to back-pedal a bit… my mom is a jewel. She’s a bit wacky, but she’s still a jewel. While I can’t say she distilled a lot of wisdom in me, she believed in me when no one else did.
The linear nature of this question is making me crazy.
When do we as people “turn out” exactly – fine or otherwise?
I was myself as non-upstanding a citizen as you might care to meet in my wayward youth. * I am now a respectable matron, upstanding as you like. I am occasionally bemused by this.
But I don’t think I have “turned out” yet.
Lots of people deserve to be blamed for their kids’ having to learn at the hands of life what their parents couldn’t teach them in a way they could understand. Life being usually less gentle about it.
Lots of people also deserve to be congratulated for having done so. But in my own experience, people who congratulate parents for their kids’ achievements are doing so in the same sense that people congratulate the groom at a wedding – it’s more like “I’m so happy for you” than it is like “good job clubbing her over the head and dragging her to the altar,”.
And like talking about kids it assumes that this is not The Terminus Point of the relationship.
*Allowing for gender, that is – had I been a guy, or bigger, or both, I probably would have starred in bar fights on a regular basis. But at under 5’ and too small to give blood except when I am pregnant, bar fights seemed a bad idea.
You do have a point although some of the people I have in mind will be deemed failures when they either die tragically or get sent to prison for a violent felony. I think that is a fair declaration for something like this. I know one on my wife’s side and one on mine who get discussed in that way at every family gathering. We just hope than can hang in there long enough to grow up.
I was much like Crefter Man in that I largely raised myself literally and was pretty much on my own after age 15 when I got a job and then a car. My mother was screwed up much of the time but she always had high expectations of me and that meant a lot. I am equal parts success and disaster though so that doesnt count here.
The counter-example that springs to mind is my new step-SIL. Her parents were 2 parts Austin hippie and 5 parts plain trash. Her father was so strung out on drugs that he couldn’t see straight most of the time and her mother brought back drug and food money to the trailer by waitressing and God knows what else. She had to save her parents from themselves countless times and by high school, had to get part-time jobs to support her siblings because her parents were too far gone to care. I met them at the wedding and all the stories appear to be confirmed. You would never know that child was born into those circumstances. She put herself through college, hooked up with my very responsible step-brother, got married and now they have a perfectly healthy, stable situation going on.
A good ancedotal book on this subject is Deborah Spungen’s “And I Don’t Want To Live This Life.” Deborah was the mother of the infamous Nancy Spungen, who was murdered by Sid Vicious. Nancy was simply out of control from the start, and would not or could not be disciplined to live in society. The Spungens consulted many doctors and had Nancy sent to a residential treatment facility, all for naught.
Yet the Spungens two younger children apparently turned out fine. Susan now works for Martha Stewart, and I don’t know what David does, but he isn’t making headlines.
Deborah believes some children are uncontrollable, and that is that.
I like the bell curve theory, and I think they overlap. 80% of kids are strongly influenced by their family, but 20% are not (sometimes to their detriment, but sometimes to their benefit). True evil and the real saints would have to fall in that 20%.
And from what I’ve experienced it does vary wildly by age, that’s an excellent point by WhyNot, although I’m not sure about the 3-yr-old brat part – my twins just turned 2.5 and have become mercurial, self-centered, willful - it’s like they’re on drugs. And it happened in the space of a week. I hear the “terrible twos” aren’t really over until age 5, so I think judgement should be postponed until then. By the time I was a teenager, my parents’ influence was down to maybe 25%, although it was an important 25% that helped keep me from getting too deeply into trouble.
My sister was a therapist at a group home for exceedingly troubled kids for a couple of years (until she decided she’d rather go do something else for a living). The majority of her patients reflected the illness and dysfunction in their family – but not all of them!
If we dial down the definition of “loser” to “folks who have a hard time being appying themselves in the workforce” or “folks who mismanage their money”, I think parental influence is paramount. Work ethic, personal responsibility, and money management are commonly modeled off of what was prevalent in the home (disregarding extremes).
Another way to look at it is “people who just ‘get by’ in life tend to beget more of the same”. Not necessarily all-time losers ( ) … more like a perpetuation of mediocrity.
But then, these are only general trends I speak of – loads of exceptions abound.
I totally agree, and will work that in to my Unified Theory of Personal Responsibility.
Annie-Xmas, I loved that book as a teenager, but I haven’t read it in years. One thing to keep in mind is that it was written by Deborah, Nancy’s mother, so it may not be entirely unbiased. I’m not saying it’s false, just that one always needs to consider the source. But, then again, Nancy might be one of the “20%” that’s totally uninfluencable.
Well, if you believe the research done by Judith Harris in The Nuture Assumption, Parents account for less than 10% of a child’s eventual personality. Although some of her findings are contested, she did win an APA Scholarly award for her original paper and her ideas are accepted within the psychological community.
Thats not to say parents have almost no effect, but that things like earning more money, living in a safe neighbourhood and sending your kid to a good school matter more than whether you spank him or effectively instill him with a sense of lifelong learning.
Stephen Levitt also goes into this with a bit more updated data in Freakanomics
