DR. RUSSELL BARKLEY ON PARENTING: your child is born with more than 400 psychological traits that will emerge as they mature and they have nothing to do with you

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.  

DR. HEATH: I was trying to show him that he's welcome to choose his behavior, but the behavior he chooses may have no effect on his getting what he wants.

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— Johnny Vedmore (@JohnnyVedmore) December 6, 2024

00:00.  Dr. Heath, my week is always made brighter by your psychological cherries which adorned my proverbial cake how are you today?

00:10.  I'm great and my week would not be complete without a Johnny Vedmore interview so I'm just happy to be here on a day or two before Father's Day.

00:20.  Indeed, Father's Day is upon us, Dr. Heath.  Have you any ancient wisdom for the modern dads? 

00:30.  I actually have a surprise for your listeners . . .  Book titled, The Enchiridion of Epictetus: Handbook of Epictetus, written about 2,000 years ago, and here he is, none other than Epictetus, sitting at his desk with his walking stick, his crutch. And we're going to talk about him today because I raised my son on a steady diet of 2000 year old philosophy from Epictetus and the first thing that I taught him was an opportunity I will remember his mother had gone to Walmart he did not want to be separated from her he threw himself down on the parquet wood floor of the kitchen and started crying.  So I asked him if that was what he was going to do, "Are you going to lay here and cry?" and he said yes, and I said "That's fine.  I'll be in the living room.  When you're done, you can come and join me."   And one of my favorite quotes from Epictetus is, "It's not what happens to you, but how you react that matters."  So what I was trying to do there, dads, is I was trying to show him that he's welcome to choose his behavior, but the behavior he chooses may have no effect on his getting what he wants.  Throwing yourself down on the kitchen floor and crying only gets you dirty pants, and so I raised him on that and he learned that it is not things that are out there that decide our thinking and decide our mentality and decide our mindset, but what we decide to think.  And so he began choosing healthier behaviors, not because I slapped him around because we didn't do that, not because I yelled at him, but because I showed him that his behavior, that particular behavior, didn't get him what he wanted.  And so it's not what happens to you that you don't get your way or something like that, but it's really how you decide to act to those things that really decides a course of your life.  

03:31. There are a lot of people who react to that a lot differently it's really emotional bringing up children of course it's a very emotional experience being a child in the relationships you have with your parents too so it's always a mail what advice would you like to give to fathers about how to be a positive influence in their children's lives on a day like this?

04:00.  That's a fabulous question because one thing I didn't do as a dad, I did not catastroph-ize or awful-ize his emotions.  I actually invited him to experience every single one of those.  I told the story of a very tragic incident where a friend of his died of a gunshot wound, and there's no way I could take that hurt away from him.  It would be unfair of me to do so because I said to him you were going to have to experience every single drop of those difficulty emotions.  And that's what's really going to carve your future.  And indeed, that's what has made him very successful is that he has learned that emotions are not our enemies.  Emotions are normal.  Emotions aren't just things for women.  I watched him cry.  I sat with him while he cried.  He has seen me cry.  He has sat with me as I've cried, and we've come to embrace that part of our humanity.  But what we make decisions on are not the presence of emotions but the direction of our thinking and he's in fact very good at that; that's why this was such a meaningful gift to me of old Epictetus because it really cements how major a role men older men dads teaching boys not what to think but how to think. 

05:35. And so I didn't but show to think I didn't catch the fish for my son.  I taught him how to fish for thoughts so that he would be a more effective thinker.

Yeah, by the sounds of it how to feel and process the emotions that emotions exist as well that is something I have to say my dad wasn't the best at you know I only saw my dad cry a couple of times but when that was so you knew that times were bad because he was someone who used to be he would give the "Let's suck it up," taking your emotion and just take in your emotions and just hold it with him.  Is that something that you hear a lot from grown men that that's what their fathers were like, fathers who thought they had to be strong characters, we're strong men that didn't show emotions?

Oh yeah that