I don't know who this guy is, but he gets across research findings about parenting better than anyone I've ever heard or read, and that includes the descriptions I've written. https://t.co/33i3HkvuJL
— Charles Murray (@charlesmurray) August 20, 2025
You need to understand something the parent these days have long since forgotten or 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 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, he's 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 that simulation doesn't matter no it means a stimulation environment is better than a deprived environment but it doesn't mean that the more simulation you add in the environment the better it gets it's a threshold there's enough simulation 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. What we have learned in the last 20 years of research in neuroimaging, Behavior 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 were 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 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 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 they're 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 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. Now that comes with a profoundly freeing view of parenting because what it means is that although it's important to be a shepherd, recognizing this is a unique individual before you, allows you to enjoy the show. So open a bottle of Chardonnay, kick off your slippers, sit back and watch what takes place, because you don't get to determine this. So enjoy it. It doesn't last all that long anyway. They're gone before you know it. 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.
Dr. Russell A. Barkley, PhD. His books.
He doesn't really go into what he means by engineering a child, but parents absolutely do have the power of shaping their child through behaviors and ideas. I mean of all the things that parents want to give their child it is the parents' ideas.
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