Parenting does matter. There is much parents can do to encourage their kids to become achievers, and there are some important mistakes to avoid.

Do we know how many geniuses are never recognized because their talents are blighted before they have a chance to be expressed? The fact is, nobody does.

—TALENT RESEARCHERS MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI,

KEVIN RATHUNDE, AND SAMUEL WHALEN

To say that there is much we don’t control in our lives is a dramatic understatement, roughly on the order of saying that the universe is a somewhat large place. To begin with, there are many influences we can’t even detect. In 1999, Oregon neuroscientist John C. Crabbe led a study on how mice reacted to alcohol and cocaine. Crabbe was already an expert on the subject and had run many similar studies, but this one had a special twist: he conducted the exact same study at the same time in three different locations (Portland, Oregon; Albany, New York; and Edmonton, Alberta) in order to gauge the reliability of the results. The researchers went to “extraordinary lengths” to standardize equipment, methods, and lab environment: identical genetic mouse strains, identical food, identical bedding, identical cages, identical light schedule, etc. They did virtually everything they could think of to make the environments of the mice the same in all three labs.

Somehow, though, invisible influences intervened. With the scientists controlling for nearly everything they could control, mice with the exact same genes behaved differently depending on where they lived. And even more surprising: the differences were not consistent, but zigged and zagged across different genetic strains and different locations. In Portland, one strain was especially sensitive to cocaine and one especially insensitive, compared to the same strains in other cities. In Albany, one particular strain—just the one—was especially lazy. In Edmonton, the genetically altered mice tended to be just as active as the wild mice, whereas they were more active than the wild mice in Portland and less active than the wild mice in Albany. It was a major hodgepodge.

There were also predictable results. Crabbe did see many expected similarities across each genetic strain and consistent differences between the strains. These were, after all, perfect genetic copies being raised in painstakingly identical environments. But it was the unpredicted differences that caught everyone’s attention. “Despite our efforts to equate laboratory environments, significant and, in some cases, large effects of site were found for nearly all variables,” Crabbe concluded. “Furthermore, the pattern of strain differences varied substantially among the sites for several tests.”

Wow. This was unforeseen, and it turned heads. Modern science is built on standardization; new experiments change one tiny variable from a previous study or a control group, and any changes in outcome point crisply to cause and effect. The notion of hidden, undetectable differences throws all of that into disarray. How many assumptions of environmental sameness have been built right into conclusions over the decades? What if there really is no such thing?

What if the environment turns out to be less like a snowball that one can examine all around and more like the tip of an iceberg with lurking unknowables? How does that alter the way we think about biological causes and effects?

Something else stood out in Crabbe’s three-city experiment: gene-environment interplay. It wasn’t just that hidden environmental differences had significantly affected the results. It was also clear that these hidden environments had affected different mouse strains in different ways—clear evidence of genes interacting dynamically with environmental forces.

But the biggest lesson of all was how much complexity emerged from such a simple model. These were genetically pure mice in standard lab cages. Only a handful of known variables existed between groups. Imagine the implications for vastly more complex animals—animals with highly developed reasoning capability, complex syntax, elaborate tools, living in vastly intricate and starkly distinct cultures and jumbled genetically into billions of unique identities. You’d have a degree of GxE volatility that would boggle any scientific mind—a world where, from the very first hours of life, young ones experienced so many hidden and unpredictable influences from genes, environment, and culture that there’d be simply no telling what they would turn out like.

Such is our world. Each human child is his/her own unique genetic entity conceived in his/her own distinctive environment, immediately spinning out his/her own unique interactions and behaviors. Who among these children born today will become great pianists, novelists, botanists, or marathoners? Who will live a life of utter mediocrity? Who will struggle to get by? We do not know.

What we do know is that our brains and bodies are primed for plasticity; they were built for challenge and adaptation. This is true from life’s earliest moments. According to neuroscientists Mark H. Johnson and Annette Karmiloff-Smith, “Recent reviews of pre- and postnatal brain development have come to the conclusion that brain development is not merely a process of the unfolding of a genetic plan, or a passive response to the environmental input, but is an activity-dependent process at the molecular, cellular, and organismal levels involving probabilistic epigenesis (bidirectional relations between genes, brain and behavior).”

Put more simply: “Human babies are special,” says Andrew Meltzoff, codirector of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington. “What makes them special is not that they are born so intelligent but that they are designed to change their minds when faced with the data.”

Intelligence is not fixed but waiting to be developed. Athletic prowess is not preordained but awaits training. Musical ability lies dormant in all of us, calling for early and sustained incantation. The potential for creativity is built into the architecture of our brains. All of these are a function of influence and process—far from fully controllable, but also quite the opposite of fixed and predetermined.

The parent’s job, then, is to respect and engage in that process—which has, of course, already started long before birth. Every parent experiences the odd sensation of getting to know his or her newborn child, recognizing in him or her a unique personality that seems to have been already formed. That’s because the process is already nine months old. The process has already begun.

On reflection, we parents are not so far off from John Crabbe and his mice. In his lab, Dr. Crabbe studies the interaction between environment and mouse genome. In our home nursery, we also watch how our child’s unique biology interacts with various facets of the outside world: we see what makes her laugh and cry, what grabs her attention and bores her silly, what tastes good and bad. We get to know not her preset design, but how she responds to different versions of the world we present to her.

Based on our reading of these interactions, we then tailor her environment accordingly. We mesh our own aspirations with what we learn about the child.

This is the ultimate lesson of GxE: rather than first waiting for our natural gifts to sprout, we must immediately dive into the process, embracing the inseparability of nature and nurture. We know that genes are playing a key role and that their expression is being determined every moment by the quality of the life our child leads. We know that we are helping to choose our child’s own jukebox tune. Our job is to find the process that produces the best possible individual.

Of course, one does not have to aim for a gold medal to incorporate the lessons of talent and ability that come from this book. There are many quietly heroic ways to be a modest or terrific success: a wonderful teacher, a sharp and creative and ethical entrepreneur, even a loyal and hardworking assistant or clerical worker.

Ultimately, of course, the life goal will be up to the individual. But parents can sow certain seeds and water them.

Or can they? In 1998, writer Judith Rich Harris shook the world of academic psychology with her book The Nurture Assumption. “Do parents have any important long-term effects on the development of their child’s personality?” she asked, then bluntly declaring, “The answer is no.” Relying heavily on the identical-twin heritability studies from the 1980s and ’90s (discussed in chapter 4), Harris concluded that parents are more genetic guardians of their children’s personalities than they are active shapers of them. The most important environmental influences on character, she proposed, are not parents but peers.

Challenging assumptions is always healthy, and in one sense Harris’s book was a welcome critique that forced university psychologists out of their comfort zone. But a decade later, her argument is a victim of its own stale assumptions, beginning with her stance on genetics. “Genes contain the instructions for producing a physical body and a physical brain,” Harris wrote. “They determine the shape of the facial features and the structure and chemistry of the brain. These physical consequences of heredity are the straightforward consequences of carrying out the instructions in the genes; I call them direct genetic effects.”

This was an understandable view in 1998, but now we know better. We know now that there are no real “direct genetic effects” and that the nature/nurture distinction is a false one.

Saddled by the old view of genetics, Harris believed that 50 percent of a person’s character comes straight from his or her genes, while most of the rest comes from what behavioral psychologists were calling “non-shared” environment—a term proposed by geneticist Robert Plomin to explain not-yet-understood environmental influences. The ambiguous word “non-shared” was designed to convey the opposite of shared family experiences that researchers had assumed affected siblings in similar ways. Non-shared experiences, they reasoned, would affect siblings differently. Much of Harris’s book is an effort to convince the world that peers are the crucial non-shared influence in kids’ lives.

Two years after her book came out, though, it turned out that there was a problem with the shared/non-shared paradigm. An analysis in 2000 by the University of Virginia psychologist and expert in behavioral genetics Eric Turkheimer revealed that it was another false distinction. Just like “nature/nurture” was supposed to separate genetic effects from environmental effects, “shared” and “non-shared” implied that it was either/or: either people would have similar reactions to shared experiences or they would have different reactions to non-shared experiences. Turkheimer’s powerful meta-analysis revealed the much more common third possibility: most of the time, kids have different reactions to shared experiences. (As Turkheimer put it more clinically: “Non-shared environmental variability predominates not because of the systematic effects of environmental events that are not shared among siblings, but rather because of the unsystematic effects of allenvironmental events.”)

Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner had an even more fundamental problem with Harris’s notion of uninfluential parents. “When we consider the empirical part of Harris’s argument,” he wrote in the New York Review of Books, “we find it is indeed true that the research on parent-child socialization is not what we would hope for. However, this says less about parents and children and more about the state of psychological research, particularly with reference to ‘softer variables’ such as affection and ambition. While psychologists have made genuine progress in the study of visual perception and measurable progress in the study of cognition, we do not really know what to look for or how to measure human personality traits, individual emotions, and motivations, let alone character.”

“My reading of the research,” Gardner continued, “suggests that, on the average, parents and peers will turn out to have complementary roles: parents are more important when it comes to education, discipline, responsibility, orderliness, charitableness, and ways of interacting with authority figures. Peers are more important for learning cooperation, for finding the road to popularity, for inventing styles of interaction among people of the same age. Youngsters may find their peers more interesting, but they will look to their parents when contemplating their own futures … I would give much weight to the hundreds of studies pointing toward parental influence and to the folk wisdom accumulated by hundreds of societies over thousands of years. And I would, accordingly, be skeptical of a perspective, such as Ms. Harris’s, that relies too heavily on heritability statistics and manages to reanalyze numerous studies and practices so that they all somehow point to the peer group.”

So yes, parents matter. Parenting isn’t everything or the only thing. Parents don’t have anything close to complete control and in most cases should not shoulder all the blame when things don’t turn out well. But parenting does matter. And to the extent that parents can have a serious impact on the goals, strategies, and personal philosophies of their children, here are four key guideposts to excellence:

1. BELIEVE

In 1931, a young Japanese violinist and instructor named Shinichi Suzuki was teaching a violin class composed mostly of young men. After class one day he was approached by the father of a four-year-old boy: would he consider teaching the gentleman’s son?

Suzuki was startled and dumbfounded. He had no idea if a four-year-old could learn to play violin and little idea how to instruct him. While rehearsing shortly afterward, though, a profound thought struck him: virtually all Japanese children learn to speak Japanese—early, and with precision. “The children of Osaka speak the difficult Osaka dialect,” Suzuki thought to himself. “[They] are unable to speak the Tohoku dialect, but the Tohoku children speak it. Isn’t that something of an accomplishment?”

The obvious lesson, Suzuki surmised, was this: through extraordinary repetition, parental persistence, and strong cultural reinforcement, every young child masters this steep technical challenge. Why couldn’t this lesson apply just as directly to music?

So Suzuki did accept four-year-old Toshiya Eto as a pupil and began to develop a method of instruction he called the “mother-tongue method.” He emphasized heavy parent involvement, steady practice, memorization, and lots of patience. (In retrospect, the parallels between Suzuki’s approach and young Mozart’s musical development are uncanny.) Little Toshiya Eto responded beautifully, prompting Suzuki to recruit more young pupils and refine his methods further. He came to quickly believe, in fact, that early musical training has an overwhelming advantage over later training and that it was a gateway to an enlightened life.

He also began to attract attention. A few years into his radical experiment, Suzuki featured seven-year-old Toshiya and several other young students in a public performance. A local newspaper became fixated on the marvels of three-year-old Koji Toyoda, who played one of Dvořák’s “Humoresques” on a one-sixteenth-size violin. “A Genius Appears!” ran the headline. Suzuki was horrified by this interpretation. “[Before the concert], I had told journalists: talent is not inherent or inborn, but trained and educated … I had put emphasis on this and had repeated it.” The message was just as important to Suzuki as his method: gifts and talents, he was convinced, were not exclusive to the privileged few; with the right training and persistence, anyone could achieve remarkable success.

As his first young pupil, Toshiya Eto, developed into a world-renowned musician, Suzuki continued to refine his methods and spread their application. By 1949, his Talent Education Research Institute had thirty-five branches in Japan and was teaching fifteen hundred children. The Suzuki method became a sensation around the world and helped transform our understanding of young children’s capabilities.

It begins with a simple faith that each child has enormous potential and that it is up to us to muster whatever resources we can to exploit that potential. Rather than wonder if their child is among the “gifted” chosen few, parents should believe deeply in the extraordinary potential of their children. Without that parental faith, it is highly unlikely that significant achievement will occur.

2. SUPPORT, DON’T SMOTHER

Imagine, for a moment, that the day your child is born, the doctor gives you a choice of two infant nutritional supplements. The first will transform your child into an astonishing prodigy who, in adulthood, will probably fall back into mediocrity and possibly develop severe emotional problems. The second will produce an emotionally balanced child who is highly unlikely to be a tiny star athlete or musician early on, but who will slowly gather the tools to become a confident, enlightened person with solid relationships and a deep belief in the value of hard work. In the long run, he will have the resources to achieve greatness as an adult.

This stark choice may seem a little absurd, but unconsciously, it is the choice that many parents make.

“You could call it the Britney Spears Syndrome,” says Columbia University psychiatrist Peter Freed. “I see it frequently in my practice—a clear model for how the narcissistic parent injures a child’s sense of self by attaching high-achievement to love.”

It all begins, explains Freed, with a parent who has grown up believing that, in order to be liked, he must be exceptional in some way. The parent subsequently showers his own children with affection after each accomplishment and shuns them after failure. “The parent beams when the child performs well, and then withdraws love when he’s underperforming,” says Freed. “The kid becomes addicted to pleasing the parent. When he doesn’t live up to the parent’s expectations, he feels his parent go cold, which of course is totally devastating. That on-again off-again feeling about how love works sets the stage for narcissism.” In early adulthood, Freed explains, the child will inevitably struggle with social and emotional challenges (as everyone does) and find that he doesn’t have a deep emotional reservoir to fall back on. The foundations of love and trust are corrupted by what he experienced as a child. The child victim of a narcissistic parent frequently has a difficult time forming stable life partnerships.

The flip side, says Freed, is a parent who offers unconditional and unshifting love that is decidedly not connected to achievement. “Non-narcissistic parents follow the child’s lead,” he explains. “They’re very good at limit-setting and setting high expectations, but they will wait to see what the kid wants to do and not become anxious if he isn’t high-achieving early on. Their attitude is that the most important thing you’re doing in childhood is making friends and being an active part of the community. If the team wins, they’ll be happy, but if the team has trouble, they’ll have them over and watch a movie.”

There is, in other words, a right way and a wrong way to direct your kids toward achievement. Early exposure to resources is wonderful, as is setting high expectations and demonstrating persistence and resilience when it comes to life challenges. But a parent must not use affection as a reward for success or a punishment for failure. The parent must show faith in the child’s ability to seek achievement for his or her own inner satisfaction.

3. PACE AND PERSIST

“It’s not that I’m so smart,” Albert Einstein once said. “It’s just that I stay with problems longer.”

Einstein’s simple statement is a clarion call for all who seek greatness, for themselves or their children. In the end, persistence is the difference between mediocrity and enormous success.

The big question is, can it be taught? Can persistence be nurtured by parents and mentors?

Boston College’s Ellen Winner insists not. Persistence, she argues, “must have an inborn, biological component.” But the evidence indicates otherwise. The brain circuits that modulate a person’s level of persistence are plastic—they can be altered. “The key is intermittent reinforcement,” says Robert Cloninger, a Washington University biologist. “A person who grows up getting too frequent rewards will not have persistence, because they’ll quit when the rewards disappear.”

This jibes well with Anders Ericsson’s finding about deliberate practice and with the ascetic philosophy of Kenyan runners: an emphasis on instant gratification makes for bad habits and no effective long-term plan. The ability to delay gratification opens up a whole new vista for anyone looking to better herself.

It also conjures up a classic study by Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel, who in the early 1970s offered a group of four-year-olds a choice: they could have one marshmallow immediately or wait a short while (until the researcher got back from an “errand”) for two marshmallows. The results:

· One-third of the kids immediately took the single marshmallow.

· One-third waited a few minutes but then gave in and settled for the single marshmallow.

· One-third patiently waited fifteen minutes for two marshmallows.

At the time, it impressed Mischel and his colleagues that so many very young children had the self-discipline to wait indefinitely for a larger reward. But the real lesson came after fourteen years of Mischel’s own waiting—until his original subjects had taken the SATs and were finishing high school. Comparing the SAT scores of the original nonwaiting (instant gratification) group to the waiting (delayed gratification) group, he found the latter scored an average of 210 points higher. Those with an early capacity for self-discipline and delayed gratification had gone on to much higher academic success. The delayed-gratification kids were also rated as much better able to cope with social and personal problems.

The marshmallow study also demonstrated the ability to develop such skills. In side experiments, researchers transformed kids’ wait times by suggesting how to think of the rewards. When kids staring at real marshmallows were encouraged to imagine them as pictures of marshmallows—making them more abstract in their minds—it lengthened their ability to wait from six to eighteen minutes. (The reverse was also true—kids imagining pictures as real marshmallows had their waiting ability shortened.)

Strategies like these prove that a kid’s mode of gratification can be altered by parents and teachers. Overall, what emerges about the study of delayed gratification is that it is a skill set—and the skills can be acquired. Kids can learn to distract themselves from objects of desire, learn to abstract those desires, learn to monitor their own progress, and so on. “Children will have a distinct advantage beginning early in life,” Mischel concluded, “if they use effective self-regulatory strategies to reduce frustration in situations in which self-imposed delay is required to attain desired goals.”

Any parent can adopt basic strategies to encourage self-discipline and delayed gratification. Here are two:

· Model self-control. Behave as you’d want your child to behave, now and in the future. Don’t buy, eat, or grab whatever you want whenever you want it. The more self-control you demonstrate, the more your child will absorb.

· Give kids practice. Don’t immediately respond to their every plea. Let them learn to deal with frustration and want. Let them learn how to soothe themselves and discover that things will be all right if they wait for what they want.

There’s no single pathway to achieve these desired results as a parent, of course. Each parent must chart his or her own course. Any philosophy, religion, or practical exercise that reinforces that principle is going to work well for parents and children.

4. EMBRACE FAILURE

In the sometimes counterintuitive world of success and achievement, weaknesses are opportunities; failures are wide-open doors. The only true failure is to give up or sell your children short.

Developmental biologists, in fact, stress that all of human development is set up to be a response to problems and failures. Parents are supposed to play an important role by drawing attention to those challenges. “Specific motor problems are in many cases called to the infant’s attention or even thrust upon the infant by one or more caretakers in what we call a field of promoted action,” writes the noted philosopher of science Edward S. Reed and his colleague Blandine Bril. “It is because human adults promote specific motor problems for infants—often before the child is capable of solving that problem—that human action development takes the course that it does.”

In other words, parents are not supposed to make things easier for kids. Instead, they are supposed to present, monitor, and modulate challenges. The great success stories in our world come about when parents and their children learn to turn straight into the wind and gain satisfaction from marching against its ever-increasing force.