Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

Yesterday I was floored after reading a parenting article by a controversial psychologist. The article is titled Parents Matter but They Don’t Make a Difference. This controversial psychologist is Robert Plomin, Ph.D. He is a professor of behavioral genetics at King’s College in London.

Plomin argues that DNA makes us who we are and that our parents have little to do with that.  What’s more, he doesn’t believe in the nurture over nature arguments at all.  In his article Plomin states:

The most important thing that parents give to their children is their genes. Many parents will find this hard to accept. As a parent, you feel deep down that you can make a difference in how your children develop…

…What looks like systematic environmental effects, such as correlations between parenting and children’s development, are mostly reflections of genetic influence. In the tumult of daily life, parents mostly respond to genetically driven differences in their children. We read to children who like us to read to them. We go along with their appetites and aptitudes…

…Parents are the most important relationship in children’s lives. But parents do not make much difference—in terms of how their children ultimately differ from others—beyond the DNA they provide at the moment of conception. Parents can control their children’s behavior, but they can’t change who they are.

Controversial Psychologist or Strengths Based Parenting Advocate?

At my first pass through his article I became upset with his research.  I was thinking to myself how dare he say that parent’s don’t matter.  However, something told me to read his article again slower.  Then, after the second time reading it I focused in on these statements from Plomin:

Instead of trying to mold children in our image, we can help them find out what they like to do and what they do well. We can try to force our dreams on our children—for example, that they become a world-class musician or star athlete. But we are unlikely to be successful unless we go with the genetic flow. If we try to swim upstream, we run the risk of damaging our relationship with them.

Parenting is not a means to an end. It is a relationship, one of the longest lasting in our lives. Just as with our partner and friends, our relationship with our children should be based on being with them, not trying to change them.

This is when I realized that this controversial psychologist wasn’t being that controversial at all.  He was simply advocating for strengths based parenting, which I am a big fan of.

I believe Plomin is simply trying to sound controversial to raise awareness about his research.  However, his research doesn’t stray far from the research of Gallup and Don Clifton. In Gallup’s “Strengths Based Parenting” book author Mary Reckmeyer states:

Our job as parents is to nurture our children’s nature, to be detectives and discover who are children already are and who they are becoming, to be coaches and create pathways  that play to their strengths and manage their weaknesses.

So yes, Plomin is controversial in saying parent’s don’t make a difference. However, what he fails to say is the difference they don’t make is changing a child’s nature after conception. Parents do indeed make a difference in how a child makes the best of that nature.