Transcript:

You need to understand something. The parents these days have long since forgot and are going to have to relearn again. Your grandparents knew this, but today's generation of parents doesn't seem to. And that is, you do not get to design your children.

Nature would never have permitted that to happen. Evolution would not have allowed a generation of a species to be so influenced by the previous generation. It hasn't happened and it doesn't happen, and it especially doesn't happen in children. You do not design your children.

And yet we have the Mozart effect. The belief that if I play classical music to my uterus when I'm pregnant, I'm going to have a genius. The fact that if I can just put enough crib toys over his crib, he is going to have all these neurons exploding with synapses and be a brilliant mathematician. You don't get that degree of power.

Does that mean stimulation doesn't matter? No, it means a stimulating environment is better than a deprived environment. But it doesn't mean that the more stimulation you add into the environment, the better it gets. It's a threshold. There is enough stimulation that every normal brain needs to develop. And once you're past that, which 98% of you are, the rest of it is out of your hands.

But this idea that if a little bit is good, a ton of it must be better is a uniquely North American perspective. Believe me, the French don't look as kindly on their children as we do. Right. That's another story for another day.

So what we have learned in the last 20 years of research in neuroimaging, behaviour genetics, developmental psychology, neuropsychology can be boiled down to this phrase: your child is born with more than 400 psychological traits that will emerge as they mature, and they have nothing to do with you.

So the idea that you are going to engineer personalities and IQ and academic achievement skills and all these other things just isn't true. Your child is not a blank slate on which you get to write. If you would like to read more about this, please read Stephen Pinker's book, *The Blank Slate*, which is a review of all of this information for parents and why it isn't true.

The better view is that your child is a genetic mosaic of your extended family, which means this is a unique combination of the traits that run in your family line.

I like the shepherd view. You are a shepherd. You don't design the sheep. The engineering view makes you responsible for everything. Everything that goes right and everything that goes wrong. This is why parents come to us with such guilt. More guilt than we've ever seen in prior generations. Because parents today believe that it's all about them and what they do. And if they don't get it right, or if their child has a disability, they've done something wrong. When in fact, the opposite is true. This has nothing to do with your particular brand of parenting.

So I would rather that you stop thinking of yourself as an engineer and step back and say, "I am a shepherd to a unique individual."

Shepherds are powerful people. They pick the pastures in which the sheep will graze and develop and grow. They determine whether they're appropriately nourished. They determine whether they're protected from harm. The environment is important, but it doesn't design the sheep. No shepherd is going to turn a sheep into a dog — ain't going to happen. And yet that is what we see parents trying to do all the time, and especially parents of children with disabilities. So step back and view yourself as the shepherd to this disabled youngster, and you get to design the pasture, and that's very important. But you don't engineer the sheep.

Now, that comes with it a profoundly freeing view of parenting. Because what it means is, although it's important to be a shepherd, recognising that this is a unique individual before you allows you to enjoy the show. Right, so open a bottle of Chardonnay, kick off your slippers, sit back and watch what takes place, right? Because you don't get to determine this. Right? So enjoy it. It doesn't last all that long anyway. They're gone before you know it. Right?

But if you think that what you did in your house is going to shape the life course of this individual, you are sadly mistaken. This is a unique individual. Let them grow. Let them prosper. Please design appropriate environments around them, but you don't get to design them.

As Judith Harris said in 1996, in the first book on this subject written for laypeople — the book is called *The Nurture Assumption* — as she said, you had more to do with your child's life by where you chose to live than by anything you will ever do inside that home, short of abuse, neglect, or malnutrition. The rest of it is just trivial variation. It's where you live.

Why? Because out-of-home influences are more powerful in shaping the life course of your child than in-home influences are, and those out-of-home influences are peer groups, other adults, neighbourhoods, resources, schools, and a larger community that you made available to this child. That is how you shape your child's life course. The second biggest influence is also out of your hands, and that's genetics. And you don't get to determine that.

But if you think parenting is so influential, let me give you two findings that have been replicated many times. When we follow up twins, we are able to calculate how much of their behaviour is due to parenting — within-family environment. And here's what we find. The peak years of parental influence are below seven. From seven on to twelve, it drops dramatically. After fifteen, it's at 6%. 6% of the variation in a teenager's behaviour is how their parents raised them. That's it. And after age 21, it's zero. There is no influence of parenting on any psychological trait after the age of 21.

Now, do not mistake what I am saying. The knowledge your child possesses, what they know, is clearly a function of exposure in the environment. But their traits, their abilities, their makeup, their personality is not.