4 Ways to Become a Better Parent, According to Science

Human caregivers must both fiercely protect each individual child and give that child up when they become an adult; they must allow play and enable work; they must pass on traditions and encourage innovations. The parent paradoxes are the consequence of fundamental biological facts.

But it is very difficult to find any reliable, empirical relation between the small variations in what parents do— the variations that are the focus of parenting— and the resulting adult traits of their children. There is very little evidence that conscious decisions about co-sleeping or not, letting your children “cry it out” or holding them till they fall asleep, or forcing them to do extra homework or letting them play have reliable and predictable long-term effects on who those children become. From an empirical perspective, parenting is a mug’s game.

Caring for children is like tending a garden, and being a parent is like being a gardener. In the parenting model, being a parent is like being a carpenter. You should pay some attention to the kind of material you are working with, and it may have some influence on what you try to do. But essentially your job is to shape that material into a final product that will fit the scheme you had in mind to begin with… Messiness and variability are a carpenter’s enemies; precision and control are her allies. Measure twice, cut once. When we garden, on the other hand, we create a protected and nurturing space for plants to flourish. It takes hard labor and the sweat of our brows, with a lot of exhausted digging and wallowing in manure.

Computer scientists and neuroscientists call it the tension between exploration and exploitation… Young brains are designed to explore; old brains are designed to exploit. One way to solve this problem is to alternate between periods of exploration and exploitation. A particularly effective strategy is to start out exploring, and then proceed to exploit. You begin by randomly generating lots of variation and then zero in on what works… A protected period of childhood is one solution to the explore/ exploit dilemma. We are allowed to explore when we are children so that we can exploit when we are adults.

In rats, and in people, too, particular parts of the frontal cortex play an especially important role in social coordination. If those areas are damaged, the affected rats look a lot like the play-deprived ones. They can master the actions of courting or fighting, but they can’t respond to other rats in a flexible and fluid way.

…rough-and-tumble play seems to help animals and children to interact with others. Exploratory play helps animals and children learn how things work. And pretend play helps children think about possibilities and understand other people’s minds.

When they saw evidence that contradicted their theories they were driven to experiment— only they did it by playing. A very recent study showed that this was true even for very young babies. Aimee Stahl and Lisa Feigenson showed systematically that eleven-month-old babies, like scientists, pay special attention when their predictions are violated, learn especially well as a result, and even do experiments to figure out just what happened.

The children played with the toy longer, tried more different actions, and discovered more of the “hidden” features when the experimenter squeaked the beeper accidentally than they did when she deliberately tried to teach them. So teaching is a double-edged sword. The children were remarkably sensitive to the fact that they were being taught… But teaching seemed to discourage the children from discovering all the possibilities the toy had to offer.

So our job as parents is not to make a particular kind of child. Instead, our job is to provide a protected space of love, safety, and stability in which children of many unpredictable kinds can flourish. Our job is not to shape our children’s minds; it’s to let those minds explore all the possibilities that the world allows. Our job is not to tell children how to play; it’s to give them the toys and pick the toys up again after the kids are done. We can’t make children learn, but we can let them learn.

The job for school-age children is to start actually becoming competent adults themselves. Their evolutionary agenda is to practice and master the particular skills of their own culture, especially social skills, while they’re still within the safe cocoon of adult caregiving…

School-age children observe and imitate like younger children. But they learn especially well when they interact with particularly skilled adults in a distinctive cycle of trial and error. The apprentice watches the master attentively, and then tries out a simplified part of the skill. It might be stirring the stockpot, cutting out a pattern, or roughing a carpentry frame. The master, in turn, comments (often quite critically) on what the apprentice has done and gets her to do it again. With each round of imitation, practice, and critique, the learner becomes more and more skilled, and tackles more and more demanding parts of the process.

…as children grow older, the prefrontal area of the brain— the brain’s executive office— exercises increasingly greater control over the rest of the brain. Babies and young children pay attention to anything that’s interesting and informative, and they learn as a result. But as we get older more and more of our learning is directed toward particular goals. Mastery learning requires a kind of controlled focus that is just not possible for younger children. Other changes also contribute to the rise of mastery learning. Neural connections are extensively “pruned”; many connections disappear. The neural connections that remain, especially the connections that are used often, become increasingly covered with a substance called myelin, which makes them more efficient conductors. At the same time the brain becomes more specialized. Younger children typically use more brain areas to solve a task than older children or adults do. All these changes contribute to transform the young brain. The preschool brain is enormously flexible and changes easily, but it is also noisy. The school-age brain is much more efficient and effective, but it is also more rigid.

This is the system that turns generally placid ten-year-olds into restless, exuberant, emotionally intense teenagers desperate to attain every goal, fulfill every desire, and experience every sensation… Studies by the neuroscientist B. J. Casey suggest that adolescents are reckless not because they underestimate risks but because they overestimate rewards— or, rather, find rewards more rewarding than adults do.

But the second system involves control; it channels and harnesses all that seething energy. In particular, the prefrontal cortex reaches out to guide other parts of the brain, including the parts that govern motivation and emotion. This is the system that inhibits impulses and guides decision-making, that encourages long-term planning and delays gratification. And this is the system, as we saw, that enables mastery. This control system depends much more on learning. It becomes increasingly effective throughout middle childhood and continues to develop during adolescence and adulthood, as you gain more experience.

In the distant (and even the not-so-distant) past, these systems of motivation and control were largely in sync. In foraging and farming societies, children have lots of chances to practice the skills that they need to accomplish their goals as adults, and so to become expert planners and actors. In the past, to become a good gatherer or hunter, cook or caregiver, you would actually practice gathering, hunting, cooking, and taking care of children, all through middle childhood and into early adolescence, tuning up just the prefrontal wiring you’d need as an adult. But you’d do all that under expert adult supervision, where the impact of your inevitable failures would be blunted. When the motivational juice of puberty arrived, you’d be ready to go after the real rewards with new intensity and exuberance, but you’d also have the skill and control to do it safely and effectively. The relationship between the systems of motivation and control has changed dramatically.

What does make a difference is having a graduated system in which teenagers slowly acquire both more skill and more freedom… Instead of giving adolescents more and more school experiences— those extra hours of after-school classes and homework— we could try to arrange more opportunities for apprenticeship. AmeriCorps, the federal community-service program for youth, is an excellent example, since it provides both challenging real-life experiences and a degree of protection and supervision. “Take your child to work” could become a routine practice rather than a single-day annual event, and college students could spend more time watching and helping scientists and scholars at work rather than just listening to their lectures. Summer enrichment activities like camp and travel, so common for children whose parents have the means, might be usefully alternated with summer jobs.