I’ve opened up this huge topic of Do parents cause their kids’ mental illnesses?

I’ve been saying: No.

You can imagine the number of comments I’ve received on this. And although many readers have disagreed with me, every single comment has been thoughtful, intelligent and respectfully expressed. They all deserve my response!

I’m going to do this by beginning back at the beginning. Over several upcoming blog posts, I’m going to retrace for you the sources upon which I base my statements.

But first, I want to assure you: I am NOT trying to be destructive or be a wise-guy. I’m NOT saying that parents don’t matter. But I am going to be making the case for more public support and societal responsibility, because I am convinced that it is the larger environment of schools, neighborhoods and community and NOT the individual home and family, which needs to be improved in order to impact the mental health and overall well-being of our children.

A second vital point: These are NOT my ideas; they come from a variety of notable researchers and scholars.

Beginning with Steven Pinker.

I’m an educator by profession, so Pinker’s book How the Mind Works was of immediate and great interest to me. It is grounded in the theory of evolutionary psychology, the first and only theory to offer answers to the whys of human nature. Why do people’s minds operate the way they do? Because natural selection has shaped them in this manner. Our emotions, our behaviors, our capacity to learn are all adaptations which help us survive and pass along our genes.

Evolutionary psychology has come into its own only over the past few decades. The psychological theories which came before, including the hugely influential ones of Freud, Piaget (I studied his learning theory extensively in my doctoral program), and Bowlby (attachment theory), were grounded in lots of observations of behaviors and then conjectures at to why those behaviors might occur. But they all lack a coherent explanatory rationale. Why should people’s heads work this way? None of these earlier theories have good answers to this question.

This doesn’t mean that the observations these theorists made were useless; on the contrary, they described many fascinating and important aspects of human nature. But, again: before evolutionary psychology came along to lend it’s explanatory base, theorists pretty much concocted their best guesses as to the whys of what they observe. These theories have been around for so long, we assume they’re backed up with lots of solid factual research, but in fact this is not the case.

In The Blank Slate, Pinker bravely takes on not one but five “Hot Buttons” of common misconception, our topic of “Children” being one of the chapters. He begins by saying:

When scientific facts come in they rarely conform exactly to our expectations; if they did, we would not have to do science in the first place  … when facts tip over a sacred cow, people are tempted to suppress the facts … And this can leave us unequipped to deal with just those problems for which new facts and analyses are most needed … The landscape of the sciences of human nature is strewn with these third rails, hot zones, black holes and Chernobyls …

I hope you’ll continue to ride this third rail with me … this is a huge topic! … please stay tuned!

Good Music for a Good Cause Check out UFO’s album, Unity Creates Strength, to benefit Chile and Haiti

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From Psych Central's website:
PsychCentral (March 15, 2010)

    Last reviewed: 15 Mar 2010