She is certainly not presenting extraordinary evidence. For example she claims that modern child rearing methods have no effect because there are still the same number of violent people in society - as if everybody is being raised according to the latest child rearing methods! I live in a rural area with a lot of poverty and trust me - what I see in the playground as far as parent-kid interaction is not what Dr Sears has in mind.
She is also terribly inconsistent. She says "The belief that parents have a great deal of power to determine how their children will turn out is actually a rather new idea" and then goes on to say in the old days, kids used to be beaten not praised. Well I have news for her - parents used to beat kids because they though they were affecting the way the kids would turn out! It was the same idea, just different methods. The idea that the parent (or whichever adult is in loco parentis - culturally not always the biological parent) goes back millenenia. Why were Spartan children taken away from their mothers, if their mothers were not thought to have influence on their upbringing?
As to the issue of adopted children not being "like" their parents - maybe not in personality, but I am willing to bet that a child adopted out of a primitive tribe by a pair of geeks will learn how to use a computer pretty damn fast. Is that of no effect on the child's life?
Obviously by now it is generally accepted that children come out the way they do through a combination of pre-desposition (genetics), adult influence (eg. parenting and teaching) and peer/social influence. But saying parents don't matter at all seems to be a step backwards.
She is also terribly inconsistent. She says "The belief that parents have a great deal of power to determine how their children will turn out is actually a rather new idea" and then goes on to say in the old days, kids used to be beaten not praised. Well I have news for her - parents used to beat kids because they though they were affecting the way the kids would turn out! It was the same idea, just different methods. The idea that the parent (or whichever adult is in loco parentis - culturally not always the biological parent) goes back millenenia. Why were Spartan children taken away from their mothers, if their mothers were not thought to have influence on their upbringing?
As to the issue of adopted children not being "like" their parents - maybe not in personality, but I am willing to bet that a child adopted out of a primitive tribe by a pair of geeks will learn how to use a computer pretty damn fast. Is that of no effect on the child's life?
Obviously by now it is generally accepted that children come out the way they do through a combination of pre-desposition (genetics), adult influence (eg. parenting and teaching) and peer/social influence. But saying parents don't matter at all seems to be a step backwards.