Functional and Dysfunctional Families

The Parenting Trap (https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/the-parenting-trap)

By: Eric Houston

- Parenting (children are being raised in smaller community and usually nuclear family.
- Is there a right parenting style? Right choice? Right games?
- Small variations in family have a long-term effect on children ( no proof)
- “Implicit picture of parent”  making a child = making a child ( having the right tools and
expertise you’ll have the needed result)
- Gardening and parenting:
 It’s an exhaustive task/job/style of life
 The results don’t come out as you hoped or planned for
 Create safe environment in which the ecosystem can flourish (things to drive)
 The system will flourish no matter for how other factors might change
- Evolution Childhood:
 We have a longer childhood than animals
 Hunter-gatherer: produce= consume.
 We invest in the children – useless creatures- (keep them alive)
What is their role? To learn

- The Triple Threat:

Pair bonding & Parenting Investment
Pair bonding (mother and father love each-other, and take care of their children is
very rare in mammals.
Alloparents (ppl who are not relating to babies help in raising the babies)
Vs. Chimps (they refuse anyone to get close to their children)
Grandmothers (Why am I here?, role?)
Chimps: die at the time when they lose their fertility – Unlike women-

- Animals: How Immature babies are & parental investment & how big their brains are
E.g: Quokka (taken care by mother and father, and they stay in the pouch for long
time)
E.g.: Birds  Longer childhood & bigger brain & smarter animal
What do they do in the childhood?
Learn to do sth. new: try & fail
Childhood is the time when they can explore the possibilities and the environment
without doing things because parents are already doing it for them
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- Ages:
Age 4: use 66% of the calories
Our Age: use 20% of the calories
- Humans: Longer childhood & bigger brain & heavy parental investment)
Things get more unpredictable – adapting to unknown environment- climate change caused us.
We create our social env.

DYNAMIC RESELIENCE ECOSYSTEM (Has a lot of variability)

Adjust behavior and mind to different circumstances

- Bayseian Babies (Statistics and babies)

 The Blicket Detector
Machine (referred to as a “blicket detector”) that would activate
with lights and music when certain combinations of objects
(labeled “blickets”) were placed on it. In one experiment, for
example, the children had to figure out that two objects activated
the detector together, but that neither of the objects activated the
machine by itself. Gopnik also presented data indicating that
young children performed better than college students in making
these kinds of inferences about the way the machine operated.
Functional and Dysfunctional Families

Question: Is D a Blicker?, Is E a Blicker?, Is F a Blicker?

Functional and Dysfunctional Families

- Causal Inference and Social Theories: Seiver, Gopnik & Goodman, Child
Development 2013
 Trait vs. situation attribution (should I attribute to Trait or
situation?)
- Causal Imitation
- Exploitation vs. Exploration ( Gopnik et al. Current Directions
Functional and Dysfunctional Families

 Exploitation : I need to figure out what to do to solve a problem quickly, by

making little changes that I prev. know –low temperature search-
 Exploration: Go outside the box – High temperature search-
 Stimulated Annealing: High temperature search – children- then Low
temperature Search

The word “parenting” did not enter the popular lexicon until the 1950s, and when
it did, said APS Fellow Alison Gopnik, it added fuel to a goal-centered
perspective of how children should be raised that has evolved in the recent
decades.

“The picture is that there’s something parents can do, some kind of expertise
they can acquire, some techniques they can learn, and if they just do the right
thing, they’ll end up having the right kinds of children and then these children will
become the right kinds of adults,” Gopnik said during her Bring the Family
address at the 2016 APS Annual Convention in Chicago.

Gopnik, a professor at University of California, Berkeley, and an internationally

recognized expert in child development, indicated that the emergence of this
strongly goal-centered view of parenting stands in contrast to how children
actually have been raised for much of human history. Research provides no
evidence that the small variations in parenting approaches have any long-term
effects on the children’s outcomes, she said.

So does that mean that parents don’t matter?

On the contrary, said Gopnik. Numerous psychological studies have provided

evidence that parents are needed, just as they have been throughout human
history, to “create a safe, nurturing, stable environment.” But in her presentation,
“Parents Without Parenting,” she described how the recent development of goal-
directed “parenting” may not be ideal based on human adaptation and
evolutionary biology research. In fact, caregivers may be designed to ensure
more variability and novelty in the next generation rather than to create
predictable outcomes.
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The Evolution of Childhood

Human offspring have a much longer childhood than any other species, including
other primates. Gopnik said that as a result of this longer period of immaturity,
parents have been needed throughout history to provide care for their children as
well as to protect them from predators and other threats until they are able to
fend for themselves.

Something else happens during this period of immaturity that makes parents
vital, said Gopnik: The brain develops numerous neural connections and builds
the cognitive skills needed for adapting to unpredictable and changing
environments, varying social contexts, and other challenges that children will
face as adults.

Although the challenges experienced during the early stages of human

civilization differ markedly from those of today, childhood continues to be a time
when brain development facilitates a pattern of learning, exploring, and making
mistakes while being protected by parents and other adults, Gopnik noted.

Triple Threat
The historical role of parents in ensuring the survival of children represents one
part of what Gopnik refers to as a caregiving “triple threat.”

In contrast to other primate parents, human fathers and mothers are invested in
the outcome of their offspring. From an evolutionary perspective, the shared
involvement in raising the children was useful in that it provided human offspring
with two parents for care and protection during the long period of immaturity,
Gopnik said. In addition, Gopnik noted that human parents engage in pair
bonding in a manner that differs from our closest primate relatives and most
other mammals. She explained that the special relationship between human
parents demonstrates a relatively high level of closeness and that humans show
a greater degree of monogamy than is found in other primates.

A second part of the “triple threat” involves the presence of grandmothers. Only
among humans and killer whales do females live for years beyond fertility,
Gopnik said. Grandmothers, she notes, have historically played a significant role
in raising children, providing an additional resource in the care of human
offspring during their long immaturity.

The third factor that — again from an evolutionary perspective — may have
developed to ensure the survival and growth of human offspring and strengthen
their future adaptation was the availability of “alloparents,” or unrelated adults
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who help raise and care for children. Historically, these were often young women
who did not yet have children themselves.

Historic Differences

The goal-centered view of parenting that emerged during the latter half of the
1900s — a view bent on raising a certain kind of child who attains specific levels
of educational and professional excellence as well as  of personal interests and
characteristics — represents a departure from the way humans have approached
childrearing during much of our history, Gopnik said.

During most of human history, children were raised not only by their mothers and
fathers but also by other family members, including grandparents, aunts, uncles,
cousins, and older siblings, Gopnik said. This shared responsibility meant that
people learned about being a parent by helping to take care of other people’s
children — years before they actually became parents themselves. This method,
however, began to change during the 20th century.

“For the first time, there were people who had children after spending many
years working and/or going to school, but not taking care of kids,” Gopnik said.

And these new parents approached raising children with a perspective that
reflected how they had spent their lives approaching other unfamiliar tasks and
responsibilities: “Get a book, take a course, and things will come out well,” she
said.

But if the purpose of a long period of immaturity is to allow children to freely

explore the world, learn from mistakes, and develop adaptive skills and
knowledge, then this goal-centered parenting approach is counterproductive, she
suggested.

Bayesian Babies
During her presentation, Gopnik described her research showing how children
experiment and learn about the world in a way akin to scientists using Bayesian
reasoning: They test hypotheses and make inferences based on the data
available to them.

She presented videos of young children who participated in one of her studies,
which used a machine (referred to as a “blicket detector”) that would activate with
lights and music when certain combinations of objects (labeled “blickets”) were
placed on it. In one experiment, for example, the children had to figure out that
two objects activated the detector together, but that neither of the objects
Functional and Dysfunctional Families

activated the machine by itself. Gopnik also presented data indicating that young
children performed better than college students in making these kinds of
inferences about the way the machine operated.

What about inferences based on social situations? Gopnik showed videos of

participants in a study that addressed this question. Participants, who were either
4 or 6 years old, looked at pictures showing two dolls, Josie and Sally, engaging
in two activities and were asked to explain the dolls’ actions as portrayed in a
“person” condition (e.g., Josie would play on a bicycle or trampoline while Sally
backed away from those objects) or in a “situation” condition (e.g., both dolls
would ride a bicycle but would back away from the trampoline). Participants in
both age groups provided more person- or trait-like attributions in the person
condition (e.g., “Josie is brave,” “Sally plays it safe”) than in the situation
condition. But the 6-year-olds showed an overall bias toward “person”
attributions, whereas the younger children in the situation condition pointed to
underlying causes (e.g., “the trampoline looks like fun”).
Gopnik said findings from these studies indicate that young children demonstrate
reasoning skills typically associated with scientists.

“The young children are actually better at finding something unusual, unlikely —
better at solving problems than the older children are or than the adults are,”
Gopnik said. “It’s as if the particular kind of learning that these young children are
doing is just designed to find things that are new, to find things that are
unexpected, to find the things that aren’t the things that adults think.”

References
Seiver, E., Gopnik, A., & Goodman, N. D. (2013). Did she jump because she was
the big sister or because the trampoline was safe? Causal inference and the
development of social attribution. Child Development, 84, 443–454.
Sobel, D. M., Tenenbaum, J. B., & Gopnik A. (2004). Children’s causal
inferences from indirect evidence: Backwards blocking and Bayesian reasoning
in preschoolers. Cognitive Science, 28, 303–333.