Raising Kids as a Hereditarian

What you can give your children, and what you can't

One of the reasons I hate social science as it is practiced today is that social science when done right can be extremely powerful and tell us fundamentally important things about the world. Behavioral genetics is one of its crowning jewels. When children are adopted, they turn out more like their biological relatives than their adopted families, and identical twins are significantly more similar than fraternal twins. This didn’t necessarily have to be the case, but in fact it is. There are some caveats to keep in mind, such as that this alone does not tell us much about the sources of cross-cultural variation, nor what happens in extreme environments. But the finding of genes mattering more than home environment within the normal range of parenting methods and circumstances conclusively settles what had previously been more of a philosophical question.

That said, as this excellent review shows, genes mattering more than parenting does not imply that parenting means nothing. It’s tempting to downplay the effects of family environment because public discourse allows no role for genes in explaining inequality. Set aside race, the most controversial social question, and consider how no mainstream politician or thought leader would say in a debate that rich people’s kids are naturally smarter than poor people’s kids, and this explains differences in crime rates, SAT scores, etc. It’s actually weirder than pure blank slatism, as many people will admit heredity is important in the abstract, at least within races, but learning lessons from behavioral genetics and saying its findings explain class differences or why certain regions of the country are failing is taboo. All of this is why I don’t get mad when people say parents don’t matter, because even if you take that statement literally it’s closer to the truth than the vast majority of what is said about the causes of inequality.

If you know about behavioral genetics, it’s natural to wonder what, if anything, it implies about raising kids. First, to get the obvious out of the way, as Bryan Caplan tells you, it means that you should have more children. Imagine what it would be like going through life like this.

So just relax! Your kids will be somewhat like you and your partner, but each act of creation is a roll of the dice. The majority of what you can do has mostly been decided at the moment of fertilization, and this is for me a quite soothing thought. It lets me ignore my kids sometimes and get back to tweeting. By the time you have actually met someone and decided to have children, the most important part is over. You can enjoy the ride guilt free.

I don’t really even believe in discipline as anything but a way to make the lives of parents easier. Bryan notes in his book that you’ll sometimes see a toddler hit his father, but the kid is already disciplined enough not to strike anyone else at the party. So stopping the child “for his own good” seems completely unnecessary. He has already learned what he needs to know in life, which is that you can beat people up when there are no consequences to doing so. I let my kids hit me because I find it very cute, unless it interferes with something I’m doing, and this has not turned them into playground bullies. Most things are like this.

I do try to limit screen time. But otherwise I mostly take a hands-off approach. It’s doubtful that forcing kids to say practice playing the piano will make them more disciplined as a general matter. They’ll still respond to internal and external incentives as soon as they are able to shape their own environment. One of the things Judith Rich Harris points out in No Two Alike is that parents are better at molding a child’s personality at home than outside of it. This is why the kids of immigrants are often able to navigate seamlessly between radically different family and non-family environments. I know many parents from foreign countries who end up shocked when finding out that their child does drugs or has premarital sex, because at home they seem to share the values of the family.

All of this doesn’t mean that as a parent you are destined to be nothing more than a chauffeur and punching bag. Here, I’ll discuss some of my thoughts on having kids as a hereditarian, and what there is left for you to do once you give biology its proper due.