“IF PARENTING EFFECTS really existed, and you wanted to find them, where would you need to look?”

You know already where not to look; a correlation between a parenting style and child behavior, for instance, simply does not provide enough information to conclude that the former causes the latter. . . .

Bright parents often have bright children . . . and . . . are likely to rear their children in homes full of technology, music, art, and culture. In short, the child’s genetic propensity to be smart is reflected back in their direction from the environment. Behavioral geneticists refer to this as a passive gene-environment correlation (rGE) . . .

There’s more. . . . The reactions that children elicit are based in part on their genetically informed temperaments (known as evocative gene-environment correlation). . . . As . . . children age they actively seek to construct for themselves an environment that aligns with their natural inclinations (active gene-environment correlation). . . . If you’re going to tease apart that interaction between genes and environment (GxE), then the existence of gene-environment correlation (rGE) must also be dealt with. . . .

Real parenting effects are only to be found in research approaches like those described above, strategies that are designed to sidestep the pitfalls of traditional social science research.

The author, after describing some studies that he regards as well-designed, then turns to epigenetics:

Epigenetics, it would seem, has become a buzzword for those social scientists who are gene-phobic. . . .

The environment of organisms, humans included, can impact how genes are expressed. See, the genome isn’t superior after all, they crow. This is clearly relevant to parenting, right? Epigenetics research has shown using rodents, for instance, that maternal care can alter gene expression in rat pups; a huge finding. Could something like this be at work in humans? Sure . . . By the time two identical twins have reached adulthood, they have had a wealth of experiences that are uniquely their own . . . The embrace of epigenetics by the broader public has been swift. Epigenetic findings continue to be written about in the media fairly frequently . . . Yet, as with any nascent science, we should . . . be patient. . . .

We simply do not have a mature knowledge base regarding epigenetic effects on development. More to the point, we are still accumulating evidence as to whether certain parenting strategies exert a causal influence on gene expression, which then exert a casual effect on child development that lasts for any appreciable amount of time. Keep in mind also that to study epigenetics in humans is to do so absent the luxury of the experimental designs that can be used with non-human animals.