Alecia Slater (Pinker Article)

I found Pinker's Blank Slate article to be a very interesting read. One part of the article that was very eye opening to me started on page 6 and continued on to most of page 7. It was the discussion of how ones parenting can/cannot effect their child. I have always appreciated my parents for the way they raised my siblings and I over the last 22 years and I have also always thought that we grew up to be the kids we are because of their parenting. It was these 7 paragraphs from Pinker that left me thinking more about that concept.

I started off saying to my self, how can he say that parents don't shape their children... thats such a different concept, but it wasn't until I read about the studies with the twins that it really opened my eyes to this idea. It is crazy to me that the studies show that siblings separated at birth end up as similar as siblings that stay together. Part of me has a hard time believing that concept because I feel that if two siblings grew up in two completely different styled households that it would greatly affect them in ways that would make them different when they grew up, such as how they would consider parenting. But on the other hand I think of examples in my life. My younger sister and I have had MANY situations over the years where we come home from school/college and have bought the same thing from the same store without even talking about it or will say the same thing or be thinking the same thing at the same time. It never really occurred to me but after reading this article it has made me wonder if those situations are because the two of us are so genetically similar.

Overall, after reading this part of Pinker's Article it has really opened my eyes to this idea. But I still don't fully agree with his statement on page 7, " What all this suggest is that children are shaped not by their parents, but in part - but only in part - by their genes; in part by their culture, both the culture of the surrounding society and the children's own culture... ". I still believe that the way parents raise their kids have something to do with how the kids are shaped. For example, if two kids were born to parents that were non smokers, one of them got adopted at birth by a family that had two smoking parents and the other was adopted by a family with two non-smoking parents, I believe that the child with two smoking parents would have a greater chance of growing up to smoke. Pinker might disagree with that by saying that is due to the environment in which they are surrounded but if those parents don't really care if the kid is smoking their cigarettes and is telling them that they are able to go out and take a smoke with them every once in a while I feel like it is a learned behavior due to poor parenting skills. This has really got me thinking but i'm not fully convinced that parenting doesn't have anything to do with how a kid shaped.