The neglected power of siblings with Susan Dominus (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

Susan Dominus: I say that people overemphasize the effect of parents in children's lives and success, and they probably underestimate the influence of siblings in each other's lives. 

Adam Grant: Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to ReThinking, my podcast with TED on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

My guest today is Susan Dominus, a staff writer at the New York Times magazine. Her writing offers deep insight into the human psyche. I especially loved her feature on restorative justice as an alternative to punishment in schools, and her mind-boggling story about conjoined twins whose brains were connected by a neural bridge.

In her debut book, The Family Dynamic, Sue examines the lessons learned from families with multiple high achieving children. She conducted extensive interviews and a thorough review of social science, and she has a strong message for parents. 

Susan Dominus: When parents feel like it's their job to make their kid harder working, grittier, tougher, you know, I just feel like that so rarely ends well. 

Adam Grant: Sue is an unusually tenacious reporter. I know from experience. She wrote the profile that launched my first book, and a dozen years later, I'm excited to turn the tables on her and do the interrogating myself.

All right, Sue, I have to ask you, how did you get interested in successful siblings? 

Susan Dominus: I got interested in successful siblings because I went to summer camp with a bunch of cousins who had parents who were quite famous, at least in New York. One was a famous playwright. One was a famous financier whose name is on, you know, a building at Harvard Law School now. Another, I mean, even more impressive, one of them had a mom who, as we understood it, had something to do with the formation of MTV. Like there was absolutely nothing cooler in our day than that. This was the Wasserstein family. You know, perhaps the best known among the, that older generation of siblings was Wendy Wasserstein, the playwright. And I was always fascinated by their parents' generation, and I really wanted to know what was going on in their home that made each of those kids confident enough to feel like they could do something that wasn't necessarily, um, safe or conventional or had been done before. 

Adam Grant: And I imagine that you were already a budding journalist at the time and started doing interviews and observations to get to the bottom of that. What did you learn? 

Susan Dominus: What I did learn was that they had a mom who, um, was extremely interested in her children's success, was very hard driving, and was always asking what, you know, do better, do more. There was this implication that no matter what they did, it wasn't enough. There was a real sense of Wasserstein pride, and although this isn't in the book, I will say that also their father was a real overcomer. You know, he was an immigrant, um, who had come from nothing, very, very hard scrabble childhood and had really built a very successful fortune. So I think that that kind of sets a sense in kids maybe that, you know, anything is possible when they see that their own parent has done something so extraordinary.

Adam Grant: Whenever I hear stories like this, my nature nurture alarm bell starts ringing. You know, you have, you have this hard charging mom, but those kids probably inherited DNA that's hard charging from their mom. How do we think about separating, you know, what's, what's genetic and what's learned? This is a central question you tackle in the book, and I would love to hear how you've begun to make sense of that.

Susan Dominus: I can believe you started out with like genetics. Nobody else has asked me anything about genetics. Nobody's at all curious. They're like, tell me about family mottos. And I was like, how do we separate nature from nurture in these families? I love it. 

Adam Grant: Well, you, I mean, that's what I wanna know. 

Susan Dominus: I know, me too. Um, you know, it's, it is, as you know, very hard to separate all of these things out. I mean, we know from twin studies that there are certain personality traits that do seem to have, um, you know, a genetic influence. It's not to say that there's like a gene, one gene for hardworking, or one gene for really, really smart, but the totality of your genes might kind of point you in a certain direction.

Adam Grant: So let's, let's talk about twin studies and adoption studies. Um, everybody's favorite way to try to tease apart nature and nurture effects. One of my personal favorite findings is when you look at the big five personality traits. Uh, so we think about extroversion, emotional stability, conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness. If you take twins who are separated at birth, so they say they share a hundred percent of their DNA, but then they're raised in different families, which is sad for them, but amazing for science. What you see is that they share about 50% of their traits, whereas if you take two unrelated kids who are adopted into the same family, their personalities are no more similar than if they'd been raised in different families.

Susan Dominus: Yeah, in general siblings, I mean, that's what people say. They're no more similar than two people who are raised on the street and, and so then you get to this idea that, okay, well what is the parenting effect? You know, people think it's very small. Obviously there are many, many critics of twin studies, and there are many defenders of twin studies. I don't think it is a perfect science because it, it, it's... twin studies work by inference, right? Like you're not actually measuring something. So I think we're a long way from knowing, but what I always say is that I think parenting effects are much smaller than parents lead themselves to believe, especially when you're coming down to the kinds of, um, parenting choices that parenting books are really obsessing about, you know, do you use rewards or not? Do you co-sleep or not? Um, I think that it's, it's probably hard to find real effects of that, that, uh, are gonna make a huge difference in your child's life in terms of outcomes, right? Which is different from their moment to moment experience. Like, maybe your kid is gonna be outgoing whether they sleep in your bed or not, but maybe your kid's gonna feel delicious and happy sleeping in your bed with you, and you're gonna love it too. And that really matters in the moment. So I always think that outcomes is, you know, um, overinflated as an important result in a way, when what we're really doing with our kids is living and loving with them moment to moment and wanting them to enjoy it, and we're wanting to enjoy it.

Adam Grant: That's such an interesting point. I've, I've, I've never really thought about it this way, that we, we shouldn't just be measuring parenting effects on the basis of who you become and what you achieve. We should be thinking about parents as affecting their kids' day-to-day experiences.

Susan Dominus: And life is an accretion of those little moments, and it's hard to say like, I had a million moments of feeling safe with my mother, you know? Does that necessarily like translate into agreeability? Like not necessarily. I mean, it's also complicated because let's say you're genetically maybe a little bit less inclined to be agreeable. Maybe you have fewer of those bonding moments with your mom and you look back and you think, like, my mom was so unloving, you know? But like one of the things that I think people are starting to understand is, and actually Judith Harris who critiqued a lot of birth order studies, she was somebody who really wanted people to understand that children elicit a certain kind of parenting as well. And I think that, you know, if you're a child, let's say with ADHD and you are extremely, you know, maybe difficult to reign in, um, and very agitated because school is such a bummer for you. That might elicit a less easy kind of parenting from your parent. And unfortunately, I do think that that also then has negative effects on a kid's development possibly. 

Adam Grant: Those feedback loops are real. I did just read a brand new study that I wanted to get your reaction to led by Jasmine Wertz. Uh, it's a twin study of parenting and personality, and I think it's the most impressive of its kind that I've seen. You look at, um, how mothers are interacting with their kids at ages five to 10, and then what their kids' personalities are like over time, up to age 18. And it turns out that if you compare two twins in the same family, the twin who gets more affection from their mom between five and 10, is more open, more conscientious, and more agreeable at 18. 

Susan Dominus: And this is fraternal twins or identical twins? 

Adam Grant: Yeah. So it is identical twins. It's interesting that little extra affection, you know, to a small degree, is predictive of becoming a more agreeable, more conscientious, more open-minded adult. Uh, and yeah. Curious to, to hear what you think of that. 

Susan Dominus: Yeah, I mean it's actually, it's kind of a terrifying study, right? Because I find great reassurance in the idea that, you know, these small decisions that you make on a day-to-day basis might not have such a powerful effect. But, you know, interestingly, genetic research is finding that it's possible we have underappreciated the parenting effect. Because basically there are things that parents do, kind of because of their own genetic predisposition, that then we assumed that those parents children inherited those traits. But we're seeing now that sometimes even when those kids don't inherit that gene pattern or those gene variations, the kids exhibit the same behavior. Like this is at, you know, at the level of genetic analysis. So now researchers starting to think that, yeah, maybe we have underappreciated the nurturing effect, the environmental effect of parenting, um, because we were over assuming, um, an actual genetic inheritance of those qualities, when in fact maybe it really was environmental.

Adam Grant: Really interesting. So in this particular study, they do try to look at reverse causality and whether kids are eliciting different kinds of parenting patterns. They show, as you suspected, that kids who had more behavioral and emotional problems in ages five to 10 or in, in that range, um, basically when they were young, when they had more problems, they got less affectionate parenting. However, if you control for their early behavioral and emotional problems, you still see that for whatever reason, getting more affection early on predicted those personality tendencies later. Both stories probably have some support behind them. 

Susan Dominus: Mm-hmm. Yeah. 

Adam Grant: It's a small correlation though. Um, to, to your earlier point. And so I think it, it sort of reinforces in some ways the thesis of your book, which is parenting is not irrelevant, but it's also not the cinequanon of like, of a child's life. 

Susan Dominus: Mm-hmm. 

Adam Grant: And I, I found this really liberating when I read your book. I came away thinking, okay, as long as you're not abusive or neglectful, a lot of the choices you make in terms of, you know, how your kids turn out are not as consequential as you think.

Susan Dominus: I mean, I do find that liberating as well. I do think the responsibility of how your child feels in the moment is also huge, but I think this idea that parents are burdened with, which is that if their child does not succeed in some socially conventional way, that they have not done their job. You know, obviously I wrote a book about high achieving families. I was interested in that, but um. You know, is it a parent's job to measure their child's like utility and successfulness in life? Like even that is kind of problematic. And I mean, why did I choose the families I wrote about? Uh, there's all kinds of success. You know, I was interested in parents who wanted their children to feel that they could do anything that they wanted, that the sky was kind of the limit, that they could be bold, that they could make a difference, that they could, you know, escape their circumstances. But, um. I, I didn't find that those parents made the kids feel that they had to do those things either. To me, what was interesting is how do you create that kind of environment and how do you create a sense in a child that they think they can do whatever they wanna do?

Adam Grant: I really got a kick outta that, that on the one hand you're taking on like, what is it? This, this big question of what does it take for parents to raise not just one superstar, but multiple superstars? And on the other hand saying, Hey, wait a minute, children are not status symbols for parents. Like, don't define your own success by what your kids achieve. 

Susan Dominus: Yeah, no, the idea that so many parents feel like it's their job to instill grit and conscientiousness in their children, I just feel like that so rarely ends well. You know, we live in an age of anxiety, but at the same time, I talk in the book about how I, I really admire this one family, the Polis family and, um, the home environment was incredibly warm and nurturing, and they kind of outsourced all of the training and discipline. They lived in New York City, so they had tremendous resources. Their daughters went to very rigorous ballet schools that were, you know, not easy and could be quite challenging and were very critical. Um, and they learned skills there. Like better to learn those skills from a coach or a teacher or a mentor. I don't know that the home is the best place for that stuff.

Adam Grant: Oh, that's interesting. I, I think especially as kids get older, that becomes important because they start to discount advice from their parents and resist pressure from their parents. 

Susan Dominus: Right. 

Adam Grant: And it can become, in some ways a self negating prophecy. 

Susan Dominus: Lisa de Mour calls it the, um, the kiss of death advice from a parent. You know? It's like if it comes from the parent, it will, it will never happen. Because I actually do think, not always, but there are definitely instances in which young people are more receptive to advice from an older sibling. Or maybe even a twin or even a younger sibling than they are from a parent. And you know, siblings also see each other a little bit more clearly, I think, than their parents sometimes do. They also see how they operate in their peer group when adult eyes are not on them. They are of their generation, so they can have vision for them that their parents might not have because their parents' vision doesn't see that far into the future. So I, I was really surprised when I started this book. I started the book thinking I was really gonna find just these parents who had all sorts of sayings and rituals and, you know, I don't know, task charts. I don't know what I expected to find. And instead, I really found at, at a lot of turns in the lives of these siblings, they could not all have been as successful as they were, were it not for each other's advice, introductions, coaxing, encouragement, support, that kind of thing.

Adam Grant: Role modeling. 

Susan Dominus: Role modeling. Yeah. Or, or even just like path clearing. Um, you're not gonna have an older parent who gets to the University of Kansas, a huge state school before you do, and like shows you around for weeks and weeks and introduces you and gets you into the fraternity, like, no, but your brother can do that for you, or your sister can do that for you. And I think at these big schools, or even small schools, it really can be incredibly meaningful to have an older sibling there. 

Adam Grant: Well, let's, let's talk about the influence of siblings on each other in more depth. What was the study or body of research that most blew your mind on that? 

Susan Dominus: Okay, so Emma Zang, who's a sociologist at Yale, did this fascinating study. Um, you know, it's hard to study siblings wide because they have a lot of genetic overlaps. So, you know, we know that when an older sibling does better in school, often there's what's called a sibling spillover effect. The younger one does better too, but it's really hard to separate out whether that younger child is just genetically similar or what's going on. Um, so she took advantage of a natural experiment, which are school start dates. There's a lot of research that shows that kids who are old for their grade do better in school at, you know, at least while they're in school than, than kids who are young for their grade. Um, especially in disadvantaged backgrounds. That seems to be a real boost. And so she looked at a relatively disadvantaged community and found that when a child, because of when that child's birthday fell, arbitrarily was a little bit older than other kids in the grade. That kid did better in school. And then she looked at what happened with the younger siblings of those students. And what she found was that the younger siblings, regardless of whether they were old for their grade or young for their grade, they also started to do better in school. So what you see there is that there really is a strong sibling spillover effect that, you know, we don't know the mechanism necessarily, like how is it that one student's grades improving improves the other one's grades? But it's a really great way to know that like, okay, we can see that they're really clearly, one older sibling's success is indeed raising the bar for the younger sibling. And it's just a great study. It's so pure, it's so well designed, and we talk about how a sort of mating perpetuates economic discrepancies in class and in finances. And we talk about how parents, like intergenerational wealth, that also affects it, but she believes that siblings in a way are responsible for the perpetuation of inequalities. 

Adam Grant: That's fascinating. I, I think another domain where we see that often is in sports. I'm thinking of, uh, a study that Frank Soloway led of every group of brothers that ever played Major League baseball. And by some measures, like the younger siblings are better than the older siblings, they're more likely to steal bases, for example. And we think it's in part because they're more willing to take risks and in part because they're faster. Um, because they always had an older brother who was better than them. And to your point, that seems to raise the bar. 

Susan Dominus: But you know, there's also other research that shows that oldest siblings are the most academic and also have the highest IQs. And I know that you talk about the effect of teaching and how that solidifies knowledge, but there is also research that finds that even by age one, um, the oldest child has stronger cognitive skills than their younger siblings when those younger siblings reach the age of one. We don't think it's a prenatal effect or anything like that. I think most people think that parents really do just lavish more attention on the firstborn. 

Adam Grant: Yeah. 

Susan Dominus: By the way, also scary, right? Like in terms of parenting, like it really does make a difference how much attention you lavish on your child. Like I think we can pretty much, in that first crucial year we can definitely conclude that. Parents of twins, I feel for you as one of them. So, okay, so your oldest sibling is the strongest academically. Like, what are you gonna do? You're gonna throw yourself into sports, basically. That that's, you know, an individuation kind of phenomenon. 

Adam Grant: In, in evolutionary terms, it's niche picking, right? The, the academic high achiever niche is filled, and so I'm gonna find a different niche to stand out. 

Susan Dominus: Yeah. And it just illustrated beautifully in the first chapter of the book by the Groff family. Um, I mean, it was almost as if Sarah True, who now is studying psychology at the graduate level, um, and who is an Olympic triathlete and had been this Ironman champion. It was almost as if she was familiar with the research. I mean, she was telling me that her older siblings were extraordinary students, and she chose to throw herself into athletics and sport because she knew, as she put it, they wouldn't touch it, that it was safe for her. Lauren Groff, who's this award-winning novelist and incredible beautiful writer, also happens to be a tremendous, tremendous athlete. And it, you know, it's conceivable that if she had pursued a sport with the same intensity that her sister did, that she too could have really gone quite far. But that wasn't what she wanted to do, and Sarah knew it, so she went for it. 

Adam Grant: Okay, come back to this, uh, this IQ difference already being visible at age one. I don't think that negates the tutor effect. 

Susan Dominus: Really? 

Adam Grant: You know, that starts to emerge later. 

Susan Dominus: Oh, so it's maybe it's a one two punch is what you're talking about. 

Adam Grant: Maybe. 

Susan Dominus: Yeah. 

Adam Grant: Um, and it may be a cumulative advantage then, that as the, the oldest child, you get more attention from your parents early, and then if you have siblings, you get to teach them and learn more through kind of being their mentor and tutor.

Susan Dominus: So that makes actual perfect sense. I mean, what I was starting to say earlier, I was referencing this economist, Joseph Hotes, who talks about how parents, not only, okay, well maybe they lavish more attention on the firstborn, but they also have more rules and they have higher expectations, and they enforce things like no television and you must study for two hours a night. And his theory is that it comes from an economic kind of analysis, which is, if there is gonna be a triple effect, it's most efficient to make the oldest child as successful and high achieving as that child possibly can be because there's so, so many children after them whom it will influence. By the time you're the fourth child, there's nobody at, if they're, if they're not gonna have a fifth child, there's nobody for you to influence. So why bother? You know, so it's very interesting theory. 

Adam Grant: It's, it's really hard to imagine parents being this calculative and thinking, well, you know, if I've, if I'm gonna have three or four kids, like it makes the most economic sense to invest my energy in child one who can then spill over some of that learning to child two and three.

Susan Dominus: I would hazard to guess that he would say it's happening at some subconscious level that they're not even aware of. 

Adam Grant: Uh, possibly, but I don't know. 

Susan Dominus: It's interesting to me. 

Adam Grant: I, I just, you know, I think Occam's razor would, would point in the direction of like really interesting finding. Most parsimonious explanation is like, parents have more time and energy available when they have an only child.

Susan Dominus: Agreed. I think that's probably right, although it keeps going even after the kids are, you know, even after they have more than one child, they're still enforcing more homework rules and things like that with the oldest child. 

Adam Grant: Yeah. And I, again, like, why is that happening? Like, my hunch would be, and I, I'm very curious to hear your take, but like, having lived it, like the, the oldest is the first one to confront every new rule.

Susan Dominus: Mm-hmm. 

Adam Grant: And, you know, then like the, the second and third children, you know, they can sort of poke holes in the boundary a little bit and, you know, get a little bit more flexibility and you lower your standards a little bit as a parent. 

Susan Dominus: I think that that does seem like it makes the most sense. And the more children you have the busier you are, and as you say, it's, well, you, you have different expectations partly based on your, maybe your preconceptions of birth order. Anyway, there's a lot of very large dataset based research that, um, suggests that birth order effects are largely imaginary and something that families kind of impose. It's a way of telling a story, but it's rarely upheld in very big studies these days.

Adam Grant: So let's make this personal. How has writing this book changed your parenting? 

Susan Dominus: Well, I have fraternal twins, as you may know. 

Adam Grant: And they're teenagers now, right? 

Susan Dominus: They're in college, yeah. Certainly the, the twin studies research did, um, make me feel like, you know, a little bit more relaxed about, um, whatever I felt responsible for and also suspect of whatever I wanted to praise myself for in terms of what was going on with my children. I do think that, um, I talk about this a little bit in the book. There's a researcher at Yale named Julia Leonard, who does a lot of work on, um, how quickly parents jump in to help their kids when they're struggling. For example, if they're just working on a puzzle or something like that. And the research also finds that it's just incredibly demotivating for kids when their parents do jump in. Her research also finds that in things like, um, even just getting dressed in the morning, parents underestimate how capable their children are. And I think that I probably was too quick to jump in. I wish I had, you know, hung back a little bit, been a little bit less nervous, let my kids figure it out on their own. I had a lot of admiration for the Groff family and the way that they would, you know, even do small things like Janine Groff would put the plastic cups and plates for her kids on the lower level of the cabinet, you know, like at floor level basically, so that they could help themselves. And it was very empowering. So that's, I think that's, that's probably the main way that I was trying to keep an eye on my own parenting as I was going through it. 

Adam Grant: Okay. So the main way it changed you is you now regret not letting your kids learn to do things themselves. 

Susan Dominus: Well, I think I was learning things on the go. I think also, you know, it's hard to change yourself, first of all. Like, let's be honest about that. There's a great quote from, um, do you know Dan Belsky, the epidemiologist? Have you ever worked with him? 

Adam Grant: Mm-mm. 

Susan Dominus: Um, I, we were just making conversation and we were talking about this idea that parents, is it even, even, is it even appropriate to wanna change your child's personality, right? Do you wanna make your child grittier, let's say, is that the job of a parent to change your child's personality? Here's a big one. As you know from your work on introversion, a lot of parents want their kid to be more extroverted than their child naturally is. Like, that's a tough one, right? And he said to me, listen, if I gave you parenting advice about how to change your child, then you'd have to change yourself in order to adopt that parenting advice. And if you think changing your child is hard, try changing yourself. 

Adam Grant: I think we live in a time where people are constantly blaming their parents for the ways they didn't turn out. And I wonder if you think that the people are placing blame too much on their parents. 

Susan Dominus: It's hard to separate out the rise of Freud in a way from the moment of sixties and seventies when people started overturning authority in general. Right? Like they both sort of point to the same thing, which is, you know, mom, dad, bad. And authority also bad. It's, it's kind of part of a, a bigger cultural moment that we are, have inherited and are still dealing with. I do wonder if it's something specific to Gen X generation, because I do think that there's research that suggests that young people today are closer to their parents and it's a more warm relationship. So I think it's almost as if like Gen Xers, our expectations were raised by therapy enough just to know kind of what a healthy relationship should look like, but our parents didn't necessarily get the memo. And so I think there is reason probably for a lot of people to be disappointed. I mean, you know, a lot of my friends, when we talk about whatever was happening in our own home will say, you know, consistent with this parenting standards of the time, you know, which have have, which have really changed.

Adam Grant: I wanna just ask you for a second about the comparisons that were illuminating and less illuminating as you were researching the book. I think, you know, it's really tempting to just go and study the positive exemplars like these families where multiple siblings did great things, but we don't wanna select on the dependent variable. Um, we want to make sure, obviously, that like whatever these, these families have in common is actually different from the ones where kids didn't succeed. What did you learn from contrasting these, these families with all these successful kids with the ones where only one sibling made it or none did?

Susan Dominus: Okay. Well first of all, I talk a lot in my book about luck and um, I think you can't discount that. And you know, sometimes when parents have three kids who all hit it out of the park, it is because of a combination of luck of the genetic lottery, which is a real thing. It could also just be luck that none of, yeah, that none of those kids had, you know, a predisposition to substance abuse or a predisposition to ADHD. Of course, are plenty of wildly successful people with ADHD, but it can make school a little bit harder. So it's a combination of just, you know, what was the genetic roll of the dice like, and then also what were the circumstances that happened in those children's lives? Maybe each of them also was the beneficiary of luck. I think very successful people often can point to lucky moments in their lives that were really, really fateful. But I, I do think that there was a real spirit of optimism and positivity in a lot of the families that I wrote about. Not to be too corny, but it wasn't just that the parents themselves were optimistic, but they actually articulated these things, or the kids felt it so deeply, like Marilyn Hollifield, who was the first black female partner at a major law firm in Florida and was one of three kids who desegregated her high school in Tallahassee whose parents were quite extraordinary. She said the unspoken motto in her household was "all things possible." And in the Murguia family, four of their seven children were wildly successful. Their mother used to say, with God's help, all things are possible. You know, really similar kinds of things. And you know that, that really struck me. I always joke that the only saying I remember my father saying consistently was, if something seems too good to be true, it usually is. And lo and behold, you know, here I am a journalist, right? 

Adam Grant: There's a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

Susan Dominus: Did you take away anything that you would do more of after reading the book that you thought about as a parent? 

Adam Grant: I've never wanted to be one of those psychologists who screws up our kids, and so I'm, you know, I'm reluctant to like, to be overly systematic and analytical about saying like, here's what all the evidence says and what I should do with it. Your point that parents' behaviors sometimes don't matter as much as we think, and siblings actually affect each other a lot. That's, that's probably my biggest takeaway from the book. And it's, it has gotten me thinking differently about like, when, when I, when I'm tempted to like try to, you know, give our kids some advice or feedback instead to say like, okay, how can I sort of plant the seed for one of our kids to then deliver this message to another? And then I start to second guess that. But let me make this more concrete with an example. So, um, I was being really careful to talk about college just with our oldest and not let our other two be around. And your book caught me thinking about how actually the oldest child sets the standard, but also provides all this insight. So why, why not make this a family conversation and start talking about like, why is college important to us? What do we think matters in a college? Our kids have really enjoyed thinking about it and imagining their, like their future selves on a campus, so thank you for that. 

Susan Dominus: Oh, I'm really glad to hear that. I think what I came away feeling was, and it's the expectations research that really made me feel this way, you have to know your kid. You know, you have to know your kid and know what your child is capable of, because we know that if you set the expectations too high, it can actually be counterproductive, right? You wanna set them like just high enough that it actually is gonna have an effect. That they feel like you believe in them and that you know, they can do their best work, but not so high that it becomes pressure, as we've said, where this is like generation anxiety and how, how do we make sure that we're not creating unrealistic expectations? I think parents sometimes look at their kids. You know, when my kids were born, one of them had a heartbeat that went like boom chicka, boom chicka. And the other one's heartbeat seemed to me to go like, rocket chicka, rocket chicka. I can't explain it. They were like different. And the pediatrician, I said to her, I don't understand. Their heartbeats actually sound different. And she said, that's because they're different humans. And I think that parents sometimes think, I raised my kids just the same way. I read them, the same books. The first one's getting A's, and the second one should be getting nothing but A's also, they're my children. You know, they have the same exposure, they have the same expectations, and it's really not fair. Like the kids need to be evaluated as individuals. And you can't just by setting an expectation, elicit precisely the behavior that you want from your child. Expectations are nice. They're guidelines. They, they give a kid a framework to, to move in, but you can't expect that just by setting those expectations, you're gonna make it happen.

Adam Grant: I think that's, that's well taken.

Okay, it's time for a lightning round. Tell me what you think is the worst parenting advice that people give or get. 

Susan Dominus: If you don't punish your child, they'll never learn. Like I think punishment is equal to shame, and I think there's nothing worse for children than shame. 

Adam Grant: What about the best advice on parenting that you heard from any of the families you studied?

Susan Dominus: Just don't break them. Um, that was said by a woman who had four extraordinarily high achieving kids. And I remember asking her, you know, what did you do exactly? And she said, I just didn't break them. And what she meant by that was I had bright, interesting, talented kids and I didn't feel like that was my opportunity to then push them to the max and you know, run them ragged with tutoring and Mandarin lessons and fencing and expectations. She just let them be kids and they did what they had to do. 

Adam Grant: What's something you've changed your mind about? 

Susan Dominus: You know, at some point over the course of my research, I found that very academic kids, um, the ones who end up sort of thriving the most are the ones who've had like the most challenges put in front of them. And I felt like this huge responsibility to make sure that my bright kids had like all of the enrichment that would maximize their potential. And now that they're off at college, um, and you know, I, I think partly because the world is such a hot mess, I sort of reverted back to the way my own parents parented, which was like, you know what? Over the summer, go have fun. Go be outside, go swim in a lake, go see something beautiful. I just think life is too short, and I really do want my kids to just experience joy. I think I have become less achievement oriented and more desirous that they love their lives and experience the best of what the world has to offer.

Adam Grant: And what's the question you have for me? 

Susan Dominus: I talk about this a little bit in the book about how, you know, I'm suspect of this idea of trying to make your kid more extroverted, but there is some good research that people who are forced to be more extroverted are happier. There's also some research that finds that people who are forced to be extroverted sort of have their energy depleted and that you're like such an expert on this. Where do you ultimately stand on that? 

Adam Grant: I think forced is a bad idea, I think encouraged. 

Susan Dominus: Mm-hmm. 

Adam Grant: Like we, we all need to expand our range when it comes to like the capacity to play different roles, and just as I think an extrovert needs to learn how to be introverted sometimes, to, like, to study quietly, to read, an introvert needs to learn how to occasionally, you know, put on a show. And I think that with practice, what we know is that that becomes less uncomfortable, um, and starts to feel a little bit more, as Brian Little would put it, second nature. But I don't like the ideas too of saying like, I'm an introvert and I wanna become an extrovert. Now what I want to do is I want to try on a more extroverted version of myself and figure out if that's a mode that I can get a little bit more comfortable with.

Susan Dominus: And so much of what we do is about tinkering around the edges. That's the best we can hope for is you tinker around the edges in just the right proportions that you're, you're doing the best you can for your kids and you're not overdoing it, which could then have like a boomerang effect. 

Adam Grant: Well, this was such a fun and thought provoking conversation, and as always, I am so impressed with the depth and breadth of your knowledge.

Susan Dominus: Thank you so much, Adam.

Adam Grant: Sue made me rethink something that I've been telling parents for years. I've said, your success as a parent is not determined by whether your kids get into elite schools or prestigious professions. I still stand by that. But I've also said that the real test in parenting is not what kids achieve, but who they become and how they treat others. And I'm now questioning that. Because we don't know how much of a difference parents really make when it comes to children's character. What we do know is that parents shape the quality of experiences that kids have and how they remember their upbringing. And I think that's where we definitely make a difference as parents.

ReThinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by TED with Cosmic Standard. Our producer is Jessica Glazer. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our engineer is Asia Pilar Simpson. Our technical director is Jacob Winnick, and our fact-checker is Paul Durbin. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Roxanne Hai Lash, Banban Cheng, Julia Dickerson, Tansica Sunkamaneevongse, and Whitney Pennington Rogers. Original music by Hahnsdale Hsu and Alison Layton Brown.

So we know in hockey that if you're born in January, you're more likely to become an elite player. But the kids who are born in October and November, if they make it, are better because it seems they had to be that much better in order to make it as a relatively younger kid. 

Susan Dominus: Tell me more about that.

Adam Grant: I just told you everything I know about it. That's all I got.