Transmitting Family Culture

Parenting, Peer Groups, Keeping Kosher and Chess

I have been struck, in a variety of contexts, by the number of people who take for granted serious conflict between parents and children, both in their own past experience and in their concerns with what might happen if they had children. That does not fit my experience. I cannot remember any point in my childhood at which my parents did not seem more nearly my sort of people than my age peers. The closest I can remember coming to rebellion was, at some point in my teens, feeling put upon because I had the job of mowing the substantial lawn of our summer house. After thinking about it for a while I concluded that the situation was indeed unfair; I was getting off very lightly considering how much time my mother spent maintaining the household and my father working to support us.  I concluded that my feelings were due to adolescence not unfair treatment, warned my father of my unjustified feelings in case any of them showed up in my interactions with him.

The same holds for my relation with my children. As best I can tell, there was no point when they didn't regard their parents as "us" not "them."

Judith Harris, in her very interesting The Nurture Assumption, argues that children's personalities are formed primarily by their peer group not their parents, hence that parental child rearing has a surprisingly small effect on how children turn out.¹ It makes sense that if children end up socialized to a different culture than their parents, there would often be clashes between the two.

Harris mentions, however, an interesting special case — where the family is the peer group. My guess is that, both as a child and as a parent, I was in that special case.² Both being a child and being a parent might been less pleasant if I were not, which suggests that it is worth thinking about circumstances make family-as-peer-group more likely and whether, and how, to create them.

That gets me to another book, Leo Rosten's The Joys of Yiddish, a portrait of Ashkenazi-American culture in the first half of the Twentieth century in the form of a list of Yiddish words with detailed commentary. Features of that world included not only a different language but much more, dietary rules, patterns of behavior, things done at particular times for particular reasons.

My friend and ex-colleague Larry Iannacone, an economist specializing in the economics of religion, long ago raised the question of how a religion that imposes costly requirements on its adherents can survive in a society like the U.S. where there is open entry to the religion industry. Why isn't such a religion always outcompeted by a new version that keeps everything else but dumps the costly restrictions: Judaism without koshrut rules, LDS with beer and coffee? His answer was that such restrictions serve the function of making it more difficult for adherents to interact with people outside of the religious community and thus give them an incentive to spend time and effort producing community public goods, doing things that make being part of that community attractive. I don’t believe he discussed the Amish, whose rules, such as forbidding members to own an automobile or have a telephone inside their house, appear in part designed to make more difficult social interaction with people outside the congregation.³

What we see in Leo Rosten's affectionate description of the world he grew up in is, among other things, a way to produce children who identify with their parents. If you are brought up in an environment which is sufficiently special to make your age peers at school feel like "them" rather than "us" and your parents, siblings and relatives "us" rather than "them," that may result in your identifying with the latter group. If their norms are better than those of the surrounding society, at least by their standards, they will see that as a good thing. Keeping their children is a benefit that may more than balance the costs of keeping kosher.

It doesn't have to be done through religion and in both of my cases it wasn't. My parents once raised the question, long after I was an adult, of whether they should have tried to bring me up in the ethnic/religious world they grew up in, celebrated the Jewish religious holidays (we had Christmas and a Christmas tree although none of us were Christians), sent me to Hebrew School, had a Bar Mitzva, despite the fact that neither of them believed in Judaism. My response was that I preferred to have been brought up in the religion they did believe in — 18th century rationalism, the ideology of Hume and Smith.

That may have been just as effective a way of making most of the outside world, my age peers as I was growing up and my colleagues thereafter, feel like "them."

The Polgar Sisters

Hungarian educator and chess enthusiast László Polgár had a theory: Geniuses are made, not born. To prove it he and his wife chose skills for their daughters to learn, primarily chess, secondarily languages and mathematics, and home schooled them in those skills starting at age 3.⁴ All three daughters ended up knowing Esperanto, German, Russian and English in addition to their native Hungarian. Sophia, before she quit playing, was an international master and rated the sixth best woman chess player in the world. Susan Polgar, the oldest of the sisters, at fifteen was the highest rated female player in the world.

Judit Polgar, the youngest, became an international master at twelve, the youngest person ever to have achieved that distinction. At fifteen she was a grand master, beating Bobby Fischer’s record by a month, at nineteen ranked as one of the ten best chess players in the world, male or female. She is generally regarded as having been the best female chess player in the world. Ever.

In 2012, Judit told an interviewer about the "very special atmosphere" in which she had grown up. "In the beginning, it was a game. My father and mother are exceptional pedagogues who can motivate and tell it from all different angles. Later, chess for me became a sport, an art, a science, everything together. I was very focused on chess and happy with that world. I was not the rebelling and going out type. I was happy that at home we were in a closed circle and then we went out playing chess and saw the world. It's a very difficult life and you have to be very careful, especially the parents, who need to know the limits of what you can and can't do with your child. My parents spent most of their time with us; they traveled with us [when we played abroad], and were in control of what was going on. With other prodigies, it might be different. It is very fragile. But I'm happy that with me and my sisters it didn't turn out in a bad way."

…

The family, she noted, had been the target of "some vicious anti-Semitism" during the girls' childhood. At age 12, she "got a letter, with a picture of my father with his eyes [gouged] out; and very nasty words." Largely because of the anti-Semitism and criticism they endured, there was "no jealousy" among the sisters; Judit said in 2008 that these challenges "kept us bound together."

Think of it as an engineered version of Judith Harris’s special case.

Most parents are not planning to produce geniuses. Bringing up their children with a different language and religion than the other kids in their school may not be an option available to them. But there are other ways to engineer Judith Harris’s special case. One is by having a large family, lots of children to interact with each other. Another is home schooling.

That is one reason people home school their children and one reason some other people disapprove of their doing so. Whether bringing children up in their familial culture instead of the culture of their peers in the local public school is a good or bad thing depends on which you prefer. Deciding for your own children is pretty easy since almost everyone prefers his own culture to other people’s, would rather have his children brought up in it, so that feature of home schooling is a plus for most parents, certainly was for us. But a lot of the hostility to home schooling, mostly by people who view home schooling parents as uneducated fundamentalists trying to keep their kids from learning about evolution,⁵ is based on the belief that those children are better off being brought up in something other than their parents’ culture.

That, not surprisingly, gets tangled up with the culture war, blue against red. If the other side are deplorables, better for them not to pass on their views to their children.

1. The contrary opinion, by her account, comes in large part from confusing genetic influence with environmental influence.

2. As I concluded, from corresponding with her many years ago, was she.

3. I discuss this in the chapter on the Amish in Legal Systems Very Different from Ours.

4. Scott Alexander on the Polgar experiment.

An English translation of László Polgár’s book Raise a Genius.

Scott’s review of it.

5. I discussed the evidence on who home schools and why in an earlier post. While there are surely some home schooling parents who fit the negative image, most do not. According to the NCES survey data, the distribution of educational attainment for home schooling parents is about the same as for parents who do not homeschool, at least as of 2016, the last year they have data for. The most common self-reported reason (Figure 5.4) for home schooling is, by a large margin “A concern about school environment, such as safety, drugs, or negative peer pressure.” The second most common is “A dissatisfaction with the academic instruction at other schools.” “A desire to provide religious instruction” is third.