Despite some recent attempts to argue that parents have far less impact than peer groups (see The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris if you really must), I do believe that parents greatly influence their children, though not always in the ways they would want. Certainly, enormous parts of personality are inborn – anyone who has two children will tell you how amazed they are that there can be so much variation between offspring of the same parents – and circumstances and peers do have an effect. But I’m of the opinion that parents are able to shape many things about how children react to and deal with their innate predelictions and their interactions with others.
Humans are social animals; it is nearly impossible for an individual to survive in isolation. Our very survival, throughout our species’ existence, has been dependent on interactions with other individuals – on understanding their motives and desires, on figuring out ways to get them to do things beneficial to us, on doing things for others in order to obligate them to reciprocate, etc. These are extremely complex cognitive tasks, tasks for which humans have an instinct, but tasks that do have to be learned (much like language). One of the reasons for the comparatively long juvenile period in humans is the need for children to learn their way around in social interactions, and they do this, especially in their early years, by watching carefully the adults they are closest to: their parents.
However, the instinct for observing and understanding behavior allows kids to be very good at sorting out the ideas and practices that their parents genuinely believe and follow from those to which the parents only pay lip service. Say whatever you want – your kids are watching what you do, and learning how to behave from that. If there’s sufficient dissonance between the parents’ words and deeds, the kids will often learn contempt for both the parents and their words.
I realize that the argument from personal experience is nearly useless scientifically, but I think it can be instructive, so long as its understood that it is merely one datum that may or may not be characteristic of the universe of possibilities. I do not recall every having been told by my parents that education is important. Very likely they did say so to me, but it made no impression. However, I have taken it for granted, for as long as I can remember, that education is of paramount importance. Why? My opinion is that it had much to do with the fact that my father drove 100 miles round trip three or four nights a week for much of my childhood to take courses at the nearest community college, with the fact that we moved at least twice so that he could advance to the next step in his pursuit of an education, and with the fact that during my junior high years he was enrolled at a major university, studying every night, until he graduated at the age of 38. I sometimes wonder if his example didn’t make the point rather too well: while he got a very technically specialized degree related to his profession, I became one of those “education for its own sake” liberal arts types, graduating from one well regarded private college and beginning a Ph.D. program in literature at another before bailing out into the world of work. My education has served me admirably and I’m very glad I took the path I did, but it was definitely not what my parents had in mind when they thought about their kids going to college.
In many other ways, having reached nearly the age at which my father graduated from college, I find that there are few of my values that cannot be in large measure ascribed to my parents: tolerance (surprising tolerance, in a pair of rural Southerners from the sharecropping classes), altruism, diligence and a strong work ethic, and a belief in the importance of good parenting. Often, these values are manifested in ways very different from the ways in which they are expressed in my parents, but the underlying values are very similar. I do not know that I would have said the same thing at 21, or even at 26 (ten years ago for me now). Then, I’d have placed much more emphasis on the apparent differences and downplayed the likenesses – and I really did run off in a lot of directions that would have appalled them had they known about them (living 700 miles away and being too broke to fly makes it easy to conceal a lot). Didn’t Mark Twain write about believing at age 14 that his father was so stupid that it was a miracle he remembered to breathe, and then being amazed at age 21 that the old man had learned so much in seven years?
I do consider myself fortunate in having had parents whom I still respect and admire. We are different people, to be sure, but much of what I like about myself I am certain is a result of their efforts. Many things about my parents’ lives I have rejected – their religion (I have converted to Judaism), their place of residence (I never much cared for Arkansas), their zeal for collegiate sports (give me baseball or give me a book), their decidedly middlebrow and lowbrow tastes in nearly everything (I am a recovering snob in most things, though I have areas where I haven’t even started to recover), etc. Nevertheless, I do consider myself fortunate in having had parents whom I respect and admire. We are different people, to be sure, but much of what I like about myself I am certain is a result of their efforts.
“Ain’t no man can avoid being born average, but there ain’t no man got to be common.” –Satchel Paige