The latest educational controversy in Spain has as its protagonist the least suspected person: Carlos Arguiñano. The popular cook has taken advantage of one of his television programs to deal a ‘stick’ to all those who have trouble reconciling: “no matter how hard-working the parents are or they have to do lunch or dinner with the children.”
What Arguiñano says sounds good, but is it right? How much do parents really matter?
“Home education is paramount.” As our DAP colleagues explained, while he was chopping some onions to make samosas, the popular cook decided that it was a good time to talk about pedagogy and parenting. “At school or college, however expensive it may be, they can give you a good education, but education is given at home.”
He talked about issues such as “how to be as a person, how to behave with friends or classmates as a child at school.” Things that, according to Arguiñano, “at lunch or dinner, you control [y] if you are neither eating nor having dinner with them, many details escape you, many”. For this reason, he concluded, “no matter how hard-working the parents are or the lunch or dinner they have to do with the children”
Common sense. As usually happens with Arguiñano, his statements are usually “common sense”. However, it is worth giving the matter some thought and reviewing the available evidence. Not because the importance of parents in the development of children is in question, but because it should be valued in its fair measure. It is not going to be that for the sake of doing good, we are generating a totally unjustified “parental anxiety”.
What if parents don’t matter as much as we think? In 1998, Judith Harris published ‘The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out The Way They Do’ and caused an unprecedented earthquake in the field of parenting. In that book, Harris argued (provocatively) that parents “matter far less in their children’s behavior than is commonly assumed.” Harris’s arguments have been hotly contested, but her summary is clear: In essence, whatever considerations we want to throw at her, she was right.
And it is that, beyond genetics (which is already a lot), the role of parents is limited. That is, they do not have a special educational ancestry about them. Children are similar to parents because they grow up in a similar “group social environment” and, in fact, when the social elevator works (or for various reasons, children and parents do not share that environment), the differences skyrocket.
So, do parents really not matter? Actually, the conclusion we can draw is not that. It’s just that they don’t matter in the way we usually think. Of course it matters what “is sucked” at home. But if we want a more conscious and effective upbringing, parents must know that the most powerful thing is to find a socialization environment (a school, some friends, some hobbies) that generates and reinforces the behaviors, practices, and values that they want to instill in their children. Everything else is to reduce water by spoonfuls.
Arguiñano is wrong. This invalidates and does not invalidate everything that Arguiñano pontificated on television. On the one hand, no: ‘education education’ does not take place at home. Or not alone. And undervaluing the rest of the environments (which, of course, go far beyond school) is more dangerous than not having dinner at lunch because work does not allow us to.
But just a little. However, there is a sense in which Arguiñano is right: it is very difficult to know what happens to our children if we are not with them. “Group social settings” are things much more subtle than a good school, a “fine” group of friends (whatever that means), or going to the pool twice a week.
The same environment, through small and difficult-to-control interactions, can cause diametrically opposite effects on two different people. Even if they are brothers. And, precisely for this reason, you have to be aware. At lunch, at dinner or where and how we can. Although yes, not too pending: parental anxiety is not usually a good advisor. As they said in Freakonomics, “most everything you can do to be a good parent, you do before you are a parent.”
In Magnet | The science of only children, or why they are more intelligent and creative than their brothers
Image | the anthill