Do Parents Matter?

American parents drive themselves crazy trying to raise perfect children. There is always another news article or scientific finding proclaiming the importance of some factor or other, but it’s easy to miss the bigger picture: that parents can only affect their children so much.

In their decades-long study of global parenting styles, Harvard anthropologists (and grandparents themselves) Robert A. LeVine and Sarah LeVine reveal how culture may affect children more than parents do. Japanese children co-sleep with their parents well into grade school, while women of the Hausa tribe avoid verbal and eye contact with their infants, and yet, they are as likely as any of us to raise happy, well-adjusted children. The LeVines fascinating global survey suggests we embrace our limitations as parents, instead of exhausting ourselves by constantly trying to fix them.

Do Parents Matter? is likely the deepest and broadest survey of its kind, with profound lessons for the way we think about our families.

Robert LeVine is the Roy E. Larsen Professor of Education and Human Development, Emeritus, at Harvard University. His previous books include Literacy and Mothering, Anthropology and Child Development, and Child Care and Culture. In 2001 he received the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Educational Research from the American Educational Research Association.

Sarah LeVine is an anthropologist who has conducted research on four continents and coordinated the fieldwork of the Project on Maternal Schooling. Her books include Dolor y Alegria: Women and Social Change in Urban Mexico and The Saint of Kathmandu.