Do Parents Matter?

In some parts of northwestern Nigeria, mothers studiously avoid making eye contact with their babies. Some Chinese parents go out of their way to seek confrontation with their toddlers. Japanese parents almost universally co-sleep with their infants, sometimes continuing to share a bed with them until age ten. Yet all these parents are as likely as Americans to have loving relationships with happy children.
If these practices seem bizarre, or their results seem counterintuitive, it's not necessarily because other cultures have discovered the keys to understanding children. It might be more appropriate to say there are no keys—but Americans are driving themselves crazy trying to find them. When we're immersed in news articles and scientific findings proclaiming the importance of some factor or other, we often miss the bigger picture: that parents can only affect their children so much.
Robert and Sarah LeVine, married anthropologists at Harvard University, have spent...