The NewMass Times

Op-Ed: We Human Beings Are Getting Too Predictable

“As a parent, I know what it means to see a child to go off and be independent. I remember exactly what my first thought was as he took those first few steps away from my grasp: “Is there something that I could have done that could have them go off in a more successful direction?” My older one is in college now and I miss him. I’m immensely proud of the progress he’s made. I raised him. He video calls us every week and sends a daily voice recording every day, but it’s hard not wondering what choices I could’ve made to maybe start him off better as an adult.” The paragraph above is a direct quote from my mother. She sent this into a group chat that includes other mothers with children in college and my friend’s mother sent me this to show how much my mother misses and expects me to be great. Some of these words are roughly translated from the Chinese that she originally wrote in, but they stand the same meaning. I can see the pressure that parents are under as they raise a full human being, much less those parents that have more than one child.

But the question that popped into my mind when I read the lovely sentiment was how much are we as children affected by our family as we develop into adults. As children, we are first introduced to our parents. They are the first thing we interact with as human beings and they teach us our morals and ethics as we develop into adults. Do we follow what is taught to us or are we born with an innate path to develop towards? This is the question that the debate between nature and nurture strives to answer on a broad scale. While there is no formal answer to that question, I believe that families as a whole do affect what path we lead as an adult.

Without a doubt, the longest rabbit hole was discovering the number of associations that were found between family structures and the eventual adult development in children. So the answer to the question is that families are capable of raising the greatest people in the world but are also capable of raising the murderers that are written in our history books.

One of these intriguing associations was that within households that lived multigenerational families or regularly had multigenerational meetings, a child develops into the adult role mentally much faster than one would with a regular 2-parent household. It’s because with the introduction of grandparents, the role of an adult is mixed between the grandparents and the parents, who in turn are also expressed as children compared to the grandparents. High school completion was also a measure that a number of scientific articles used to determine the detrimental and positive effects of their family structure. In education, parental involvement is obviously very important, but the type of family structure also produces certain effects on parental involvement that conclusively affects the child. In one experiment, professors devised it in such a way that they could determine the number of parents, the quality of involvement, and the intactness in each family and compare the student’s success rate to find an association. While teenagers with single parents scored considerably lower than those with two parents, they still scored higher than those with stepparents. It is suspected that with single parents families, the teenagers find their emotional attachment being boosted due to the confidant within their single parent, while stepparents are usually preoccupied with another family, thereby decreasing parental involvement in their life.

Other researchers attempted to specifically look for associations that deviated what past researchers have found. Different types of families should have different categories and tests to distinguish between them and other types. For specific trends, children born to co-parents or non-resident parents were supported by little evidence to have any association between child development and family structure. The associations that are more popularly known are more likely to occur to children born to married parents, though this does depend on whether the parents do go through a parental detachment. And when such detachment occurs, little evidence has been found that the emotional developments differ between the different family types after the fallout.

While there is no guide to parenting, research like that above proves that there is an alleged “best way” to raise children. It’s interesting that such research has come to such a stage where experts can determine the best family to raise a child. And it’s not only a particular group of us, but rather our society as a whole. It means that we as human beings follow a trend, somehow unknowingly. It begs the question what else do we do that can connect us to a family directly opposite of us on the globe? While at it, it also adds to the question of whether it is nature vs nurture that we find ourselves following. In this topic of whether family structures affect our future development, we find that our social interactions at the beginning of our lives fully affect how we develop, thereby supporting nurture. But at the same time, we find that parenting is more of an instinctual process. But that’s a question for later.

- Corwin Lee (not at all related to C.K.Lee's)