Enough With the Mom Guilt Already

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Numerous studies since then have backed up Harris’s core idea that parents don’t matter as much as many people think. Genes, for example, seem to play a bigger role than the environment that children are raised in. And some research on attachment theory suggests that a child’s bond with their early caregiver has only a weak correlation with their relationship patterns as adults; those patterns are informed by a whole range of experiences beyond just parenting, including friendships and major life stressors. “It is very difficult to find any reliable, empirical relation between the small variations in what parents do,” the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik wrote in The Gardener and the Carpenter, “and the resulting adult traits of their children.”

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