Jordan peterson on Parenting

Since I've been interested in Jordan Peterson, I've wanted to ask him about Judith Rich Harris and The Nurture Assumption. The basic idea of the book is that while it's intuitive to think parents are molding their children into who they will be for the rest of their lives, the scientific data says parents are overestimating their own importance.

So it's a good thing Russ Roberts of EconTalk asked Jordan Peterson just that. Peterson's response:

Yeah, it's not true.

Well, it's really--it's an interesting thing to think about. Because what happens is that if you set up the preconditions in your household properly, then the shared environmental variance disappears. And so it looks like you are not doing anything. But that's misleading. Like, so, imagine your child has a nature and a fair bit of that is determined temperamentally, biologically. And then what you want to do is establish an individual relationship with that child, so that what they are can maximize. And the statistical processes that are used to analyze those effects aren't sufficiently sophisticated to pick up the individuality of what you are doing. And so they risk throwing the baby away with the bathwater. Like, if you treat all your children as if they are the same, then that's going to be trouble.

I don't think Bryan Caplan would agree.