Parenting and Parents’ Mental Healthmother is depressed after you are born, you are x percent
more likely to grow up depressed (cet. par.). And suppose
we could prevent your mother’s depression, before you were
born. As a result of this intervention, you would indeed
have a better childhood. But you would still share your moth-
er’s genes. So your chance of growing up depressed would
be reduced by less than the full x percent. We cannot say
how far x is an overestimate, and this is true of many of
the estimates of effects in this book. Whenever the “cause”
being studied is correlated with an omitted measure of the
relevant genes, the estimated effect of the cause is biased
to be larger than the true effect. On the other hand, since
most of these “causes” are measured with error, that biases
the estimated effect to be smaller. For both of these rea-
sons the numbers in this book must be treated as a broad
first attempt to depict the key environmental determi-
nants of well- being— a first rather than a last word on the
subject.^9
Parents and the Emotional
Health of Their ChildrenSo how much does parents’ behavior matter for their chil-
dren’s emotional health? A lot, but probably less than some
people think. If we take everything we know about parents,
it explains only 6 percent of the variance of their children’s
emotional health at 16.^10 This includes the effect of parents’
income and work (already discussed) and family conflict
(discussed in the next chapter). In the present chapter we
shall look at the main other factors we know in the child’s