I have spent a lot of thought on this, and I am well aware of all the studies posted by Gwern over time that show the effect of parenting on cognitive ability, educational attainment, etc. to be small or zero. I buy that your influence on intelligence and character is neglible. Still, it wouldn’t be adaptive for the child’s brain to throw away useful knowledge (though it might question its valence). There are also a lot of things that can make the parent-child relationship easier. Scott Alexander wrote that there seem to be shared-environment effects influenced by parents that are beneficial in other ways (I can’t find the exact quote, but this is close). A more fruitful parent-child relationship—esp. with multiple children—seems to fall into this category. You can also see it as being about trust. And it is also possible that there are effects at the tails of the distribution that are hard to find with usual study designs.
I have spent a lot of thought on this, and I am well aware of all the studies posted by Gwern over time that show the effect of parenting on cognitive ability, educational attainment, etc. to be small or zero. I buy that your influence on intelligence and character is neglible. Still, it wouldn’t be adaptive for the child’s brain to throw away useful knowledge (though it might question its valence). There are also a lot of things that can make the parent-child relationship easier. Scott Alexander wrote that there seem to be shared-environment effects influenced by parents that are beneficial in other ways (I can’t find the exact quote, but this is close). A more fruitful parent-child relationship—esp. with multiple children—seems to fall into this category. You can also see it as being about trust. And it is also possible that there are effects at the tails of the distribution that are hard to find with usual study designs.