Wisdom from the 42nd Page: Why Parents Matter

On the forty-second page of “Why Parents Matter: Parental Investment and Child Outcomes” psychologist Nigel Barber wrote (emphasis added):

having failed, it is more objective, and a lot more optimistic, to recognize that people vary in how helpful or antisocial their behavior is without necessarily being "sick." On the contrary, there are some contexts in which acting "nice" is interpreted as weakness and ruthlessly exploited.

By the same token, children tend to mirror certain aspects of how they are treated by parents. Clinical psychologists often refer to the cycle of violence in families, according to which people who come from abusive homes tend to become abusive parents. A less professional formulation is, "What goes around comes around." Children who are raised by harsh, abusive parental figures are different from the unfortunate children raised without parents in orphanages. Instead of being deprived of socializing experiences, they are actually provided with some very emphatic examples of what adults do. For example, they learn that social problems may be solved by the use of force. They also learn that since their fathers are physically strong than their mothers, masculine will tends to prevail in family disputes. In addition, they learn that the social world of adults, from the family outward, is tough and competitive and that people are devious, mean, and unreliable.

Of course, these impressions of life form the perspective of an abusive home, whether it is in a poor urban neighborhood or a respectable suburb, are quire realistic. Children's brains have been designed by natural selection to keep them in efficient touch with the social environment in which they are raised. These attitudes can therefore be considered adaptive. They only come to seem like an illness when judged in terms of their bad social consequences. Such environments tend to undermine the potential of children to learn control over their impulses. They have difficulty grasphing complex rules of expected behavior and wanting to follow them. In short, they do not learn those things that they need to know to succeed in the workforce, from speaking correctly and politely to self-discipline and the work ethic, and what they have learned makes it much more likely that their personal behavior and income-generation activities will get them in trouble with the law.

Harsh and inconsistent parenting actively teaches children that there are no consistent social rules. If you cannot predict when a parent will punish you, then it makes little sense to try pleasing the parent by obeying the rules. If there is little justice—your sister is always indulged despite her bad behavior and you are punished even when you are being good—then it makes sense to be constantly vigilant to protect your selfish interests. Reduced parental investment associated with abusive homes increases the risk of the child being delinquent, using illegal drugs, dropping out of high school, joining gangs, being unemployed, and becoming the parents of an unplanned child during the teen years (particularly for girls).²¹

One very important practical consequence of reduced parental investment is that children in some ways come to treat themselves like they have