When we talk about parenting, we are essentially talking about nurture: how experience influences development. Of course, parents aren’t the only environmental or experiential influence. Friends, teachers, and society and culture are also big influences in your child’s life.

On the flip side of nurture is nature: our DNA, our genetics, our blue-print that makes us who we are on the outside and inside.

So who’s the bigger player?

In the debate of nature vs nurture, scientists agree on one thing: it’s not simply one or the other, but both… and it’s complex and messy.

Say a child who becomes a lawyer when they grow up, a parent might contribute this to all those time they spent reading books to them, signing them to debate classes, and helping them with college application.

OR the other perspective can be true: the child who loves to read has the appetite and drive to read more. The child who has the temperament and interest to debate will have sought out opportunities to argue their point even if it isn’t in a formal setting. And the child who wants or need to learn will get themselves into classes that support their interest.

As it turns out, there comes a point where nature bumps the person back onto its more-or-less intended, genetic path.

We know this through research on twin and adoption studies. The evidence shows that children turn out more like their biological parents than the adopted parents that raised them, and separated twins are more alike with each other than to the non-biological siblings they grew up with.

Depending on your own genetic makeup, you might be relieved to learn your child has a path determined by who they are, or you might be an anxious wreck thinking that there is no control or certainty on an outcome based on what you can do!

But the story doesn’t stop here.

That’s because while parenting doesn’t make a difference in shaping who the child is, parenting does matter.

Take the example above of the child who becomes a lawyer. While we can argue that they might have become a lawyer regardless of what the parents did, we cannot ignore the path they will take.

Yes, people have a way of finding their way back to their genetically intended path – but there is a huge variety of what that path looks like. It can be bumpy and full of dead-ends or hazards. Or it could be direct and smooth. And as parents, this is where our influence can matter.

How parenting matters

Instead of pretending we can mold or push children to be something, parents can:

• help children find out what they like to do and what they do well
• make experiences possible to support children’s quest to be who they are
• provide psychological support of warmth assurance
• model grit and determination for when set-backs and bumps come up in their path to self-actualization. 

And about those mistakes, it’s important that parents don’t fall into helicopter or lawnmower parenting: where you hover and mow down all obsticles in the child’s way.

Not only are mistakes, bumps, and set-backs towards achieving one’s goal unavoidable and unpreventable, mistakes are vital to learning and forming resilience.

Instead, parents can offer empathy and emotional co-regulation so children can move pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and move forward again. This then brings us to how parenting actually matters.