I was so fortunate to have done my doctoral work under Dr. Constance Kamii,  a Piagetian scholar and renowned researcher in the field of education.

Dr. Kamii always said that education hadn’t yet become a proper science; it was still a folk art. Most of what we do in the classroom is still grounded in tradition and customs and politics and assumptions, as opposed to being rooted in solid research on how people really learn.

Psychology is also like this. When I was in college, psychology and sociology were referred to as “soft sciences,” as opposed to the “hard sciences” of chemistry, physics, etc. The soft sciences lacked the research base and theoretical structure of the hard sciences.

Social psychology, the science of how people behave toward one another, is often a mishmash of interesting phenomena that are “explained” by giving them fancy names. Missing is the rich, deductive structure of other sciences…(Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, p. 241)

The “best” kinds of research available, even in the 1960′s and 70′s, were correlational and qualitative studies. And so there’s tons and tons of psychological data of this sort, showing all kinds of correlations (a correlation simply means that two things occur together, NOT that one causes the other) between all kinds of factors (poverty and divorce, single parenting and mental illness, attachment and anxiety, etc, etc, etc). And there’s also tons and tons of anecdotal data on people’s recollections, impressions, interpretations of events, case studies taken by professionals, and other qualitative evidence.

None of this is “hard” science.

Here’s an excerpt from an extremely thoughtful and intelligent anonymous reader of mine:

…countless studies show that independent of other factors, these types of harmful parenting cause children to be at much higher risk for mental health problems.

Unfortunately, the studies Anonymous is referring to are, in fact, NOT “independent of other factors.” Two problems with virtually all child/parent studies is that they are merely correlational, plus they don’t account for genetic effects.

For example, depressed parents often have depressed kids, and we assume this is because the parents raise their kids in ways that cause the kids to develop depression. However, these depressed parents also gave their kids the genes for depression.

It’s also true that parents who are harsh disciplinarians tend to have unruly kids. But did the stern parenting cause the unruliness? Maybe obstreperous kids give their parents no choice but to become draconian. Or maybe tough parents pass along their obtuseness genetically, resulting in a household full of brutal people. Or maybe it’s all of the above, or none, or a variety of mixtures.

Why do we generally assume that effects runs from parent to child and not in any other directions? (An old joke has two social workers discussing a child; the first bemoans that Johnny comes from a broken home, and the second agrees that Yes, Johnny could break any home.) Freud or Bowlby or Dr. Spock created a theory which said so, and we’ve forgotten that there’s no solid research to back it up.

But these are exciting times for the “soft sciences.” Evolutionary psychology is emerging to provide an explanatory theoretical foundation. And cognitive neuroscience and behavioral genetics are providing insight into actual brain functioning.

Up-to-date studies which factor out the genetic variable find that there is zero or close to zero effect from parenting practices.

Yes, this is surprising and unsettling.

And it may even prove to be wholly or partially incorrect.

But it’s mostly a huge heads-up for the need for lots more cutting-edge research and re-evaluation of our assumptions.

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    Last reviewed: 1 Jun 2010