Child obedience
so the nytimes has a story describing some studies done on the effects of parenting. the researchers studied the effects on the happiness of kids who were raised either to believe they needed to submit their will to a higher authority like their parents, or raised so that they could figure things out for themselves.
the researchers found that kids raised to submit their will were not as happy as kids who were taught to find their own direction and think for themselves. this study took a novel (to me anyways) view that praise “might be just another method of control, analogous to punishment,” and that “the primary message of all types of conditional parenting is that children must earn a parent’s love.”
this is what the study found:
It turned out that children who received conditional approval were indeed somewhat more likely to act as the parent wanted. But compliance came at a steep price. First, these children tended to resent and dislike their parents. Second, they were apt to say that the way they acted was often due more to a “strong internal pressure” than to “a real sense of choice.” Moreover, their happiness after succeeding at something was usually short-lived, and they often felt guilty or ashamed.
ouch. this is a familiar refrain heard from many of my friends. there did turn out to be a difference between positive and negative conditional parenting:
The positive kind sometimes succeeded in getting children to work harder on academic tasks, but at the cost of unhealthy feelings of “internal compulsion.” Negative conditional parenting didn’t even work in the short run; it just increased the teenagers’ negative feelings about their parents.
i’ve gotta say that this was surprising to me. i’ve had plenty of negative conditional parenting when it comes to academics, and i always thought of that as a contributing factor for my academic performance. this is even after i came to believe that parenting mattered less than genetics.
the study didn’t mention how well the kids did in school however, so i turned to the gss. the gss did ask what the highest educational attainment was for the respondents’ kids, but there were no respondents that answered that question and the questions regarding parenting beliefs. i had to resort to a proxy, parental educational attainment, since the 2 are highly correlated and b/c the studies found parents who practiced conditional parenting also had conditional parenting practiced upon them.
so asking whether the respondents thought kids should respect authority and obey:
and here a related question regarding kids:
and just for good measure, i compared wordsum scores (iq proxy where respondents must correctly identify meanings of 10 words).
the results are pretty stark. the ppl w/ middling education are split, but the smartest parents let kids think for themselves and the dumbest parents don’t. in retrospect, i suppose that makes sense, but i am so used to seeing high achieving progeny of negative conditional parenting that i would not have thought it. i didn’t include the graphs, but the trend goes for all races and party affiliations. smart ppl really do think for themselves and think their kids should too. dumb ppl obey.
related post
3 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
[...] their own choice, asians were best pursing the choice of a person in a trusted position. i had previously commented on something close to this subject but had lacked the wherewithal to isolate asians b/c the gss [...]
I think the conclusion that “kids raised to submit their will were not as happy as kids who were taught to find their own direction and think for themselves” is culturally biased, it may be that case in the united states, but its certainly not the same way here. in the usa, the culture cultivates independent thought. over here, i see plenty of people who are extremely bright who are much happier appeasing and going along with the parents or another family authority figure, even if they disagree. Because thats the culture here.
i think of course if your parents teach you in a way which is counter to popular culture, that difference is what causes unhappiness. Like for instance, if everyone in China supports their children their entire life, but then one family decides that they want to sent their kid out to live by themselves in an overseas school, well that kid will probably be unhappy (real example, not me, a chinese colleague of mine who always complained about this). Its not because people innately have a need to be individual and pursue some kind of freedom of independence. we are all ROBOTS, influenced by various factors around us. if those influencing factors are all in agreement, then we are more simple and happy, if those factors are more contradicting and confusing, then we become confused and unhappy. being in China made me realize all my ideals like freedom, independence, are all just ideas that people can choose to accept or not. They are not universal truths, and they are not what makes man “Man”. Its only the western school of philosophy which “hold these truths to be self-evident.” Hey its not self-evident!!!!!!! you were just fucking told this was a universal truth since you were an infant!!!! The only thing that is self-evident is that I need to eat, shit, and fuck!!!! Granted, I still choose to live my life according to those ideals as mentioned above, but i can am fine with people who don’t believe in those things. I realize i simply choose to stick to a perspective, its as good as anything else, so why not. But im pretty sure, if i changed views and became alot more obedient, I would live a happier life, why? because China and the Bible tells me so.
yeah, cultural bias in this study is exactly what i thought of after listening to iyengar’s lecture. if i had started reading nisbett’s geography of thought earlier, i would have thought this was cultural too. it was just her lecture that reminded me of this study.