Why most parenting advice is wrong

A quick new idea daily from the world's greatest TEDxTots. I'm your host, Itosa Leone, and this is TEDxShorts. If you want to talk about high-pressure jobs, let's talk about parenting. Not only is raising kids tough, the guidance on doing it well comes with so many mixed messages. Yuko Munakata wants to ease this child-rearing anxiety with scientific data that sends a more empowering message. Yuko is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Colorado Boulder. She hopes parents can understand how they're an important part of a child's development, but only one of many factors that go into who their kids become. Parents want what's best for their children. Young and old parents, rich and poor, married and divorced. And parenting books promise to show how to achieve the best outcomes, to address the difficult decisions that parents face every day, and in the process, to reveal why each of us turned out the way we did. The problem is that parenting books send conflicting messages. High-pressure parenting or free-range parenting? Parent like the Dutch to raise the happiest kids in the world, or like the Germans to raise self-reliant children? The one consistent message is that if your child isn't succeeding, you're doing something wrong. There's good news, though. The science supports a totally different message that is ultimately empowering. Trying to predict how a child will turn out based on choices made by the parents is like trying to predict a hurricane from the flap of a butterfly's wings. Wait, you might ask, what about all the successful parents with successful children? Or the struggling parents with struggling children? They might seem to show the simple power of parenting, but children can be shaped by many forces that are often intertwined, like successful parents, successful genes, successful peers, and a culture of success that they grow up in. This can make it hard to know which forces influence who children become. Children have been studied to disentangle all those shaping forces that are usually intertwined. These studies follow identical twins, and fraternal twins, and plain old siblings, growing up together or adopted and raised apart. And it turns out that growing up in the same home does not make children noticeably more alike in how successful they are, or how happy, or self-reliant, and so on. On the one hand, these findings seem unbelievable. Think about all the ways that parents differ from home to home, and how often they argue, and whether they helicopter, and how much they shower their children with love. You would think that would matter, enough to make children growing up in the same home more alike than if they had been raised apart. One child might find it helpful when her mother provides structure. Her sister might find it stifling. One child might think his parents are caring when they ask questions about his friends. His brother might think they're being nosy. One child might view a divorce as a tragedy, while his sister sees it as a relief. Same event, different experience. Just because an event doesn't shape people in the same way, that doesn't mean it had no effect. Your parenting could be shaping your children, just not in ways that lead them to become more alike. Your parenting could be leading your first child to become more serious, your second child to become more relaxed, your first child to want to be like you, your second child to want to be nothing like you. You are flapping your butterfly wings to your hurricane children. This isn't how we typically think about parenting. It doesn't make for simple advice. How could parenting books tell people how to raise successful, happy, self-reliant children if the same parenting can lead to different outcomes for children in the same home? So what can we do with this? Stop blaming yourself as if you are in control of your child's path. You have influence, but you don't have control. For anyone who has ever been a child, stop blaming your parents, at least for the idea that you are defined by them. Parenting, I've come to understand, is about loving my child today, now. In fact, for any parent anywhere, that's all there is. We are not screwed. The science of parents and children, butterflies and their hurricanes, can free people to focus on what is most important and meaningful in our lives. This can make the experience of being a parent and the experience of having been a child more realistic and satisfying for everyone involved. The TEDx Talk you just listened to was recorded at a TEDx event in Boulder, Colorado. All TEDx events are independently organized by volunteers who believe in TED's mission of ideas worth spreading. Special thanks to the organizing team at TEDxCU. Visit TED.com slash TEDxShorts to listen to the full talk and learn more about TEDxShorts. I'm Matosa Leone, thanks for listening, and see you tomorrow.