I rarely watch TV anymore, I mostly watch videos on YouTube on my phone in the evenings. VDH, Mark Dice, Jordan Peterson, etc... I stumbled across the video below and I've watched it many times over the past week. I have 2 boys ages 13 & 14. They are well adjusted and well behaved. I would like them to be a little more...motivated. They do whatever I ask, but I do wish they would take on more items on their own.

They are 14 months apart but could not be any more different. 1 is athletic and does just "OK" in school. A solid B student but always seems to have 1 missing assignment outstanding at any point in time. The other is non-athletic, but is very, very smart and excels in school. Honor roll, advanced math, etc...

I thought this was an excellent video and something I had never considered. I won't spoil it, but at the 3:35 mark he talks about a book written by someone else and what the author considers to be the most important determination of success.

While I'm a big believer in free range parenting (how many of us grew up, and raised our children), the rest of what this guy says is a steaming pile of new-age pop-psychology dung. Anyone who believes that parents do not influence the outcomes of their children needs to have their own head examined. This guy's a nut.

I thoroughly disagree with what this guy says in this video.

I couldn't disagree with the video more. Either that or the wife and I got very lucky.

I would not be surprised in the least if we found out this So-called expert, never even raised kids of his own.

Thanks for posting this.

As we know, he is simply talking about “Nature vs Nurture.” In general, he and Steven Pinker line up on the nature side and the evidence in most areas would seem to better support that position. Pinker’s study of identical twins separated at birth sure seems to strongly support the nature position. However, in the area of character: integrity, honesty, respect, religion, and etc, nurture seems much more important. From a macro perspective, we can see how nurturing plays itself out in the social norms of the different cultures. For example, a magazine decades ago used to conduct a wallet drop survey. A wallet containing money and a form of identification is “dropped” in a park or public square. In the Scandinavian countries every wallet dropped, along with the money inside, was returned; in other countries not one wallet was returned.

Towards the end of this snippet of the presentation he appears to state that parents have zero long-term impact, well, that is nonsense and it plays into the hands of the marxist who wants to destroy the importance of the family unit.

I recommend reading, The Sports Gene. The author makes a solid case for the importance of Nature over Nurture in the areas of athletics.

Silent

Don't know if he is right or wrong. I did see a TV show about identical twins who had been seperated at birth and raised thousands of miles apart. The personalities, interests, preferences of the twins were remarkably similar, much like one would expect of twins raised together.

Kind of surprised at the early comments. But, I think some context & perspective is necessary. What I'm currently dealing with/what's on my mind when I watched this is...

As I said above, I have 2 boys ages 13 & 14 that could not be any different. The older one is very athletic. He's not dumb by any means, but he is lazy. When he turns in his assignments he gets > 85% scores. The problem is, sometimes he has several assignments that are not turned in. They are allowed to turn them in late. It drives me crazy that he doesn't turn them in, not does he seem to care. I've tried to explain to him what a zero does to a grade point average. If you have four assignments worth 100 points, and you get 100 on three of them, but a zero on the fourth, your average is now a 75. He could be on the honor roll if he turned everything in.

In many respects he's a lot like me. We snowboard, dirt bike, wakeboard together and he plays football & rugby. However, he always looks for the easiest route to do things.

My younger one is very very smart, but not very athletic. He has zero interest in ball sports. He also can't snowboard. I've put him in lessons and tried to teach him myself many, many times. He just can't "get it". That's fine, except I take his brother snowboarding about 20 times per season. We have season passes. It breaks my heart to leave him at home. He has never had a missing assignment and gets A's in everything school related.

My takeaway from that video is I need to stop trying to force each of them into doing what they're not good at. I can't turn my non-athletic son into a athlete, and I can't make the older one care about school. I need to stop focusing on their weaknesses and focus more on their strengths. I can't "engineer" them. Or, in his words, "You don't get to design them."

In my opinion, that was the point of the video. YMMV.

quote:

Originally posted by Gustofer:
<snip> Anyone who believes that parents do not influence the outcomes of their children needs to have their own head examined. This guy's a nut.

I almost think we didn't watch the same video. Starting at 4:30 he says, "The peak years for parental influence is below 7. From 7 - 12 it drops dramatically. After 15 it's 6%. After age 21 it's zero."

I don't have any psychology background so I can't really speak to the numbers. However, I will say this seems about right based on my experiences growing up. I don't think my parents had a whole lot of influence on my decisions in my late teenage years, and nothing really at all once I went to college (2,000 miles away from them) & after.

I was surprised as well to the point I wonder if the early posters watched the video.

As a father of an 18yo boy, 16yo girl, and 14yo boy, I didn't hear him say anything revolutionary and agreed with most of it.

I can't make them taller, more intelligent, more creative, etc. I can provide them with opportunities to use what they have to the best they can.

I agree with the year ranges as well. What I do now with the 18yo will not have the same effect as it would have when he was 6. That shouldn't be a shock to anyone or ruffle anyone's feathers. If I tried to read to him now, he'd think I was nuts.

If you don't agree with the video, great! I'm all ears on what you guys think I should do to make the 18yo get straight As in college. He got a four As and a B his first semester on his own.