Kids Turn Out to Be Who They Are

A Reply to Edwin Nunez

Substack is a realm of the fringes. One does find a few well-known American bloggers hovering around the mainstream, like Bryan Caplan, Sam Harris, or Jon Haidt. But in place of names like Jordan Peterson and Ezra Klein are a series of bloggers from the outer reaches of political and geographic space. This is one of the best things about Substack—like trade routes of the ancient world that brought distant, exotic cultures into contact, Substack carries thoughts and ideas from the fringes of the world into the bubble of American life, giving voice to individuals on the outside of things, in far off places most of us can only imagine visiting.

One such place is Tasmania:

Wineglass Bay, from Wikimedia

You’d be forgiven for thinking by its name that Tasmania lies somewhere on the African coast (actually that’s Tanzania) but in fact you’re looking at an Australian landscape—Tasmania is an island to the south of mainland Australia, so exotic and remote that it cannot even be found in the classic Risk game board where uncultured Americans learned their Geography.¹

And in this secret land of midget kangaroos and ants that can kill you, there is a blogger named Edwin Nunez; and from this blogger has come a thing to read about raising children—should we be stricter on our kids?

So, Should We Be Stricter on Our Kids?

As a man who’s had six children, I regard this topic with no small interest. My wife and I have always been rather poor, and rather libertarian, and our child-rearing attitudes reflect this.

Though they all do chores for a modest allowance, our children can buy, eat, watch, or play just about whatever they like—but sweets, chips, and other things of which we really don’t approve must be bought and paid for. Important decisions in our family are sometimes unilateral, but often made jointly. I entered my present profession after a long talk involving the kids, when they unanimously insisted that I enter the line of work that I am now in.

Explanations for rare restrictions come in the form of “I am your parent, I Don’t Need To Justify Anything To You,” followed by an attempt to explain once they’ve agreed that we’re the ones who make the rules. They wear their hair long or shaved as the mood strikes, and every other day when they aren’t allowed on their electronics, they’ve invented a wide array of games involving cards, bells, or creeping around in the dark and gurgling. Punishments are rare, usually involving a simple “time out” while spilled milk is cleaned up, or somebody can be calmed down enough to stop screaming. No one has ever been grounded, and when I checked with my oldest son just now to see if that was really the case, he asked, “What is grounding?”

But Edwin Nunez seems to be very suspicious of all this. Though he would probably approve of the whole “we are in authority, do not question us” schtick, he writes:

I think the behaviour of the lower class kids is a response to the lackadaisical parenting style of lower class families which is in itself is a reaction to the cultural ideal of permissive parenting and egalitarian structures.

Rob Henderson coined the idea ‘luxury beliefs’, which are risque, trendy beliefs that do not cost the individual who has them but often costs others who adopt them and have less resources. For me, one current luxury belief is that discipline and hierarchy in the family is wrong and that children just need to learn to express themselves. Parents are now afraid to overtly exert punishment on their children. The act of discipline is either enforced in subtle ways or is just handed over to the school and the internet. The result is that children are not punished but they are also more closely supervised.

Whilst wealthy families may be able to get away with these beliefs, those at the bottom end of the social ladder are not so lucky. They follow these ideas and become like an older brother/sister to their child and the consequence is a poorly behaved kid and a detached parent. The irony with trying to treat your kids like an equal is that it leads to more frustration as you cannot understand why the newfound autonomy does not immediately lead to maturity. For wealthier parents this frustration can be easily concealed and softened by the opportunities and comforts of middle class life, but in poorer areas where the physical and emotional safety nets are thinner a dysregulated house can easily lead to mayhem.

This is half right, and half wrong. I take no issue with the claim that dysregulated homes can lead to mayhem, particularly for poorer children. I’m pretty familiar with children from the lower classes; and lack of discipline can definitely be a problem. But the idea that hands-off parenting, and the bad behavior it causes, is something wealthy families are simply rich enough to absorb, is wrong. Rather, many children, particularly in the upper class, are well behaved to begin with. I can say this not only scientifically, but from straightforward experience.

First, the Science

SES, or socioeconomic status, is the term social scientists use when most people just mean “class.” Properly speaking, SES has connotations beyond mere earnings, including occupation and education; sports stars may be rich, but they are not generally seen as upper class. Teachers’ salaries may be low, but they’re not usually considered low class. What I want to talk about are differences between people of different classes, and where they come from.

And as it turns out, generally speaking, the members of the higher classes have nicer personalities than the lower classes. Specifically, people of higher social class are more outgoing, less anxious and anger-prone, more imaginative, and more organized than the lower class.² Unsurprisingly, they’re also smarter.³

This isn’t merely adults we’re talking about. One study carried out in Germany looked specifically at children, finding higher class children to be more patient, more altruistic, and less prone to taking risks than in the lower classes. (And again, they were also found to be smarter.) The authors of this study even point out that these differences in personality just might explain how people end up as members of a higher or lower class to begin with.⁴

Now it’s common to presume that the environment, including our social class, has a substantial effect on what we’re like. Savvy individuals might have a sense that different people start out differently due to their genes, but even there we might think that the life experiences from our environment would have a cumulative effect on us as we age. That’s what King Solomon said: “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”⁵ And it makes intuitive sense; after all, if I get punished for stealing once, then possibly I’ve learned my lesson, whereas if I get punished for stealing five times, maybe it’s more likely I learned?

But it turns out that the environmental component of any trait we’ve measured always drops with age, and the variation attributable to genes always rises.

In other words, when thinking about what we’re like, how we’re raised matters less and less as time passes, and our unique genetic code matters more. This is true whether we’re talking about antisocial behaviors, alcohol or nicotine use, anxiety, depression, IQ, even social attitudes like conservatism or religiosity become less influenced by the way we were raised, and more influenced by genes, from age ten to twenty to thirty. There is one exception I’ve encountered: The heritability of ADHD is just high across that entire time-span, and never seems to relate much to the way a person is raised at all.⁶

So when we talk about people from different classes, it isn’t safe to assume that we’re not making an apples to apples comparison. In a world where talent, thrift, sociability, or anything else we might think of that helps a person climb the status ladder relates to genes at all, it’s inevitable for those genes to cluster and concentrate towards the top.

Obviously, not everyone in the higher classes is a paragon of virtue. You can probably think of numerous things that could raise or lower a person’s social status, and so long as any of those things involve luck, there just isn’t going to be anything like perfect concordance between genes and the rungs on the class ladder. Still, we’d be living in a really strange world if everyone, of all social classes, were all the same. There would have to be no pathway by which talent, self control, social ability, grit, studiousness, or anything else could ever lead to success in school or at work. Maybe this holds in some kind of science-fiction world?⁷ Whatever, I don’t live there, and I never did.

The World I Live In

I grew up well below the poverty line. I wasn’t straightforwardly a member of the lower class, because my parents were both university educated, but political and religious differences soon saw them divorced, and I grew up in the fallout. Home-sweet-home was a place where (hey) most of the walls didn’t have holes in them, and (another selling point) most of the toilets flushed, but you did have to kick the frame a few times to get the front door to lock.

All of my clothes were hand-me-downs. I had to be careful about keeping change or keys in my pockets, because they’d fall out. I remember sitting in Sunday School with my hand on my knee to cover the rip. Sunglasses and toenail clippers were luxuries, right? These are the kinds of things I remember as a kid.

But that didn’t really bother me. And in retrospect, the cockroach infestation was actually fun to hunt!

No this isn’t my childhood home, I didn’t take pictures of the roaches there, sheesh. This photo is just from Pexels, courtesy of Najman Husaini

Pro Tip: If little scraping noises awaken you at 2 AM, you will need

• a pair of shoes,

• a knife, and

• one can of foaming carpet cleaner

You see it turns out cockroaches think they’re safe if you squirt the carpet cleaner on their backs. It foams up, so they stop running. Then you can cut them to pieces with the knife, and once you scrape it into the garbage, the carpet is already on the way to being clean. If you’re diligent about this, the infestation will subside, and if you’re nice about it, you’ll vacuum up the remains—though your mom may complain about all the noise in the middle of the night.

So I didn’t mind the house, or my clothes, or the roaches (well, not much, anyway). I was warm, I had a TV and a Nintendo, and that was pretty good. But I will say that the neighbor kids were often hard to tolerate; they seemed obsessed with sex before they’d even hit puberty, and one kid I knew broke into his neighbor’s garage to steal soda and spit it on the ground. (He also spat in his own house, that’s what these guys were like where I lived.) But it made little difference in terms of the way I acted; I simply wasn’t like them at all. They needed close supervision, but I never did, not past the age of around six.

Similarly, my own children grew up mostly poor, although our family has (finally) entered the middle class. Though once again, all bets may be off before the age of about six, after that our kids have all been pretty good. There isn’t a month that goes by without my being approached by someone—usually a relative from my wife’s side of the family or one of our children’s teachers, but sometimes nurses, psychologists, and complete strangers—who exclaim how good one of our children is, or how smart another one is, or how hard-working their brother is. Occasionally these friendly people congratulate me on rearing my children well, which I’m wise enough not to argue with, even though it’s not really true.

I say it’s not really true because by most objective metrics, my children have not had a strong start in terms of their environment. Yes, their parents are married but financial hardship forced our family to move over and over again, to live in cramped conditions, in lower class neighborhoods with substandard schools where our kids have sometimes been bullied and mistreated by other children.

Recently things are much better. We no longer religiously buy the very cheapest of everything, or wonder where we will live next month, or whether we’ll be able to make rent. Now we own our own house without even a mortgage on it, and that’s a very, very good thing! But our earnings are still not, and likely will never be, commensurate with middle class norms.

So it Isn’t Entirely a Question of Class

Unlike many children of the lower class, my wife and I behaved well as children because we were good kids. That’s who we were. Our children might behave well partly because of us, but more because they are good kids. This is who they are. They would have turned out to be themselves, the way that they are, pretty much no matter who raised them.

And my goodness, where does everyone keep getting the idea that kids are somehow all just kids?

Children are not all the same. Yes, most need clear, firm boundaries, good supervision, careful training, and predictable discipline. But many do not. And those children who do not, grow to be adults who also do not. They’re the ones who look to the future, manage time well, handle others deftly, meet setbacks with patience and ingenuity, and ultimately have the skills needed to build and maintain wealth.

For us, it’s been a long, slow climb out of poverty, hindered significantly by our shared determination to have a large family, despite its costs. But now here we are, and I have no regrets. My only complaint is that people keep thinking “kids turn out the way you raise them.”

They don’t. Kids turn out to be who they are.

Rad kid courtesy of Jonas Mohamadi

1. Also not pictured in that board: the entire country of Middle Earth no wait I think it’s called New Zealand

2. Luo, J., Zhang, B., Antonoplis, S., & Mroczek, D. K. (2022). The effects of socioeconomic status on personality development in adulthood and aging. Journal of Personality.

3. Flensborg-Madsen, T., & Mortensen, E. L. (2014). Infant SES as a predictor of personality—is the association mediated by intelligence?. PLoS One, 9(7), e103846.

4. Deckers, T., Falk, A., Kosse, F., & Schildberg-Hörisch, H. (2015). How does socio-economic status shape a child's personality?. Available at SSRN 2598917.

5. Proverbs 22:6

6. Bergen, S. E., Gardner, C. O., & Kendler, K. S. (2007). Age-related changes in heritability of behavioral phenotypes over adolescence and young adulthood: a meta-analysis. Twin Research and Human Genetics, 10(3), 423-433.

7. Hey wow! TIL there’s a rad 1967 novel series called The Tripods where humanity has been enslaved, and their individuality is suppressed by brain implants. Now here is a world where I could genuinely believe that virtue has no relationship with class.