Plomin makes a pretty solid case in Blueprint that it's pretty much down to genetics and yes, there are environmental differences, but no you cannot manufacture them. They are random and unpredictable.
After having read that book as I was reading through this article I was thinking back to a lot of the points laid out by Plomin. Namely the "Nature of Nurture" finding that we our genetic predisposition drive our choices over the long term which basically washes out the vast majority of things our parents and school try to do for us. We basically stabilize our own IQs over time.
My oldest is turning 12, she has been doing calculus since second grade. Not "calculus" like taught in school to work through formulae, but rather she understands the concept of "infinite addition of infinitesimally small things". This is because she asks questions, and I give her full answers. The calculus thing started when on a train with me she asked if we can know the position of the train, given only its rate of acceleration. Yes, she did ask that in second grade. And we had an entire 1-hour train ride to determine that yes, it is possible and this is how.
Younger daughter has absolutely no interest in maths or science. She'll listen to daddy babble on about Arduino or Falcon rockets landing, and she'll even write some Python with me to solve a problem, but she has no real internal interest. Her grades show it.
From my experience with my girls, I would say "genetics and nature" are most important in bringing up curious people with good problem-solving skills (or however else you define "smart").
And now we get to the boy who proves otherwise. The woman I live with has a son in first grade, who when I met him a year ago knew not to put on his socks or soap himself in the shower. Why would he, when he could cry and his grandmothers and mother would do everything he sobs for? When he is with them, he cannot do simple addition or figure out how to open a door with an unusual handle. But with me, and only when he is alone with me, he multiplies, makes puns, eats more varied food, and solves puzzles.
The conclusion? I have none. Every child is different. Nurture them, answer their questions, but accept that some just won't be interested or able.
IQ is a significant measurement that should not be ignored but I think it's important to see intelligence as a social process. There are a lot of people that I know I would score much higher on an IQ test but they are way better in expressing their thoughts. That matters a lot. And often what makes people "smart" is being able to juggle different perspectives which takes time to expose yourself to those perspectives.
You can get smarter by reading and people should be told that.
You're referring to verbal acuity and divergent thinking coupled with a propensity to collect information.
Intelligence as an aggregate term refers to a number of things which include but aren't limited to verbal acuity, spatial reasoning, abstract reasoning etc and the individual components differ from person to person. So you might be amazing at abstract reasoning and your friend might have above average verbal acuity.
I agree with the notion of intelligence being a social process. I think IQ isn't able to capture that all. Though that is not individual intelligence, it is collective intelligence but individual intelligence is a function of genetics+non-shared environment+collective intelligence is what I want to say.
You can see collective intelligence at work if you examine language. Certain concepts have a high power:weight ratio and can help you make better decisions than you otherwise would and those concepts first have to be discovered and then they have to diffuse throughout the general population and that happens via language.
I think the '80/20' or Pareto Principle is a fantastic example of this. It's very widely known and it helps you reason better about the world in a useful way. Before that was ever discovered, nobody could leverage it. As time ticks by our models of the world are slowly getting higher and higher resolution (if that makes sense as a metaphor) and that is filtering down into the general population.
Reading is fantastic. You can acquire in 4 days what it took someone 40 years to come to. I think regardless of your IQ the more data and the higher quality you can assimilate you can increase the resolution of your models of the world and that helps you reason about things more clearly.
I'm always really fascinated by people with learning disabilities who really buck the trend and go on to do amazing things academically. Sometimes the strategies they come up with for learning are unbelievable either in terms of creativity or sheer determination. There are some pretty extreme examples of this in Dr Norman Doige's The Brain That Changes Itself and a favorite recent example I encountered was David Goggins' talking about how it would take him 18 months to get through the textbook for his diving training, so he started memorizing it 18 months ahead of time by writing out every sentence in the book by hand 10 times each. I swear there is a tonne of unutilized headroom in the general intelligence of all populations.
I'm pretty optimistic about the general trend overall and I don't think having a low IQ in a general population or even as an individual necessarily consigns you to a life of mediocrity or that you will be unproductive as a society.
it's pretty much down to genetics and yes, there are environmental differences, but no you cannot manufacture them
I'm not so sure. If you look at genius level people (Mozart, Einstein, Perelman, etc) pretty much all of them had supportive, smart, educated, and usually wealthy parents. Of course genetics plays a major role, but it's not clear that genetics would overcome indifferent development environment.
Unless you're one of the leading behavioral genetics researchers who has personally conducted multiple famous longitudinal studies (adoption studies, monozygotic and dizygotic twin studies) since the mid 70s trying to nail down exactly what the environment is responsible for and you have done a thorough analysis of the literature and summarized it in a book. Then it's clear.
How much more rigorous of an analysis could you get?
The conclusion isn't that environment doesn't play a role. It does. The conclusion is that shared environment (family, school etc) doesn't contribute in any predictable way to the heritability of psychological traits (I think he says it's less than 1% ~ 2%). All psychological traits are on average 50% heritable (he says it ranges from 30% ~ 60% but it's on avg. 50%). The rest of the variance is from so called "non-shared" environmental differences. If you live in the same home with the siblings and go to the same school and are even in the same class, you still don't have exactly the same experience. A lot of your experiences are unique to and it's those things that shape you in combination with your genetics. He concludes that after all the research that has been done that non-shared environmental differences are unsystematic and unstable which means they are essentially random and you can make no predictions based on them and that implies you cannot systematically engineer outcomes for people.
I believe you’re making a good point that others are misinterpreting or outright dismissing:
Many gifted children come from upper middle class to upper class families. I’d wager majority of the people on this site are from those sorts of families and look around them and say “hey, none of us are geniuses! So, environment alone is not sufficient!” This is dismissive and misses the point (while ignoring most of these people went to good colleges and have good jobs, which typically is associated to “smart people” accomplishments).
What I think you’re getting at, is that you can be gifted and raised in an environment where your parents are uneducated and you lack a support systems to nurture your intellectual growth. You can be gifted and raised in an environment where you aren’t taking college level courses in high school and don’t have what it takes (on paper) to enter a good college and then potentially get held back from what your potential would otherwise allow you to achieve.
Even a kid that has a 160 IQ but went to a school where the highest math course they took is Calculus, will be behind a kid that took Calculus I-III, Differential Equarions, Linear Algebra, Abstract Algebra, Real Analysis and Number theory at a STEM magnet school. Even if they are equally smart as them. The latter kid would likely get into top colleges, while the former kid may get into a State school. The latter kid will be seen as traditionally intelligent, while the former kid may be viewed as average given their high school accomplishments.
I think the demographics of people on this site assume everyone is from the same upper middle to upper class backgrounds and equally have the same educational opportunities like the latter kid.
What they don’t all realize is you can be really smart in a very bad environment and not achieve anywhere near what you’d otherwise be capable of.
Environment plays a big factor along with genetics.
That historical level of accomplishments requires the accumulation of skills as well as the opportunities to develop it for extended periods of time since childhood when neuroplasticity is at its highest. At the extreme end of the accomplishment distribution, both nature and nurture must be very high. If one of them is lacking, there would be many others whose work is as impressive and their names would not stand out.
It is likely that a kind of luck, defined as being at the right place at the right time in history that matches their particular mix of skills plays a role in such cases. There are currently many times more people in the world than at any time in the past, why don't we have significantly more geniuses, as defined by accomplishments? Situations external to the individuals contribute to their geniuses.
A lesson I took from this is to think strategically and work in an area you have the potentials to achieve world-class level, given your existing foundations and the possible circumstances you can choose to be in.
This also applies to skill development in kids as their options, though quite broad, are not unlimited.
You've named three extraordinarily accomplished people. That is not sufficient to make any kind of judgement using the words, "pretty much all of them."
How many supportive, smart, educated and wealthy parents in history have had children who never achieved anything resembling Einstein's work?
Not necessarily about intelligence, but trace lithium could improve mental health which is certainly going to be related to school performance and success over one's lifetime.
Whilst there is very little evidence on how to increase intelligence, we know a lot of things drastically reduce intelligence. Generally, once that happens, it cannot be undone:
1) malnutrition at a young age. Meaning under 3 years old or so. Malnutricion during breast feeding or pregnancy is the most damaging. After a few years it mostly stops mattering.
2) some chemical contaminants, most notably (and commonly) lead. There are others (and worse ones), like Cadmium, but they're not very common at all.
3) genetic predisposition. Most pronounced, but far from the only effect, is Down syndrome. Of course there are genetic problems, like epilepsy, that are bad enough to make you an idiot.
4) any contact whatsoever with child services has a strong negative effect. If the child is removed from their parents, the effect magnifies dramatically. But children treated do far worse than untreated children in the same situation (and if you look at what happens in practice in such treatment, such as removing the children from school for years, this cannot come as a great surprise)
One almost-exception: voluntary treatment involving the mother (mostly by the mother) has only a slight negative effect. Father does not seem to matter if they're part of treatment. Still does not have a positive effect though. (Absense of a father has a strong negative effect though. I would love to see studies on if you see the same with mothers where the father is the primary caregiver)
I would say that attempting to fix children, in whatever way, other than advising the mother without any other option, is the negative. Children do best when following through on whatever way they develop. Attempting to change things is really bad.
5) drugs, and psychoactive medication are a strong negative, if taken over longer periods (obviously for strong drugs, longer period can be months. For most psychiatric drugs the period is something like a year)
6) lack of attention is a strong negative. Less so than attention by youth services, but it is decisively not good.
That can mean by parents, by peers, by teachers, by ...
At this point though we're talking about things that will definitely leave your IQ at over 90. It won't be catastrophic, whereas child services sometimes produce from normal children that people that have problems like not being able to count at age 17.
And then there are things that don't matter, but are widely perceived to matter.
(All of these have the same caveat. Make them bad enough and of course it will matter. If abuse means you don't survive, of course it will affect you. It essentially never does)
1) getting abused does not influence intelligence (Concrete example: getting scolded daily from age 3 by your mother for not cleaning your room because she's drunk will not make you an idiot)
2) quality of life does not matter. If anything it has a slight negative correlation: worse living conditions will actually make you (a little bit) smarter. (again, there is a level where is most definitely does matter, but that level is very low)
> One almost-exception: voluntary treatment involving the mother (mostly by the mother) has only a slight negative effect. Father does not seem to matter if they're part of treatment. Still does not have a positive effect though. (Absense of a father has a strong negative effect though. I would love to see studies on if you see the same with mothers where the father is the primary caregiver)
Can you clarify #4? What "treatment" are you referring to? Chemical dependency? Treatment in child services?
Any psychiatric treatment. The exact name and even mechanism varies a lot depending on location. For children, there's almost always legal threats behind them though, especially where child services is involved.
The dirty secret of psychiatry is that it almost never works. By the standard of placebo, "will this treatment work better than giving people a tictac 'that should help'" 90% of psychiatric treatments are ineffective. Better in the study means "reducing the chance of a future treatment being necessary" (doesn't include one other option that probably should be tracked: suicide)
On children, the stats are worse, and there you generally see a worsening of symptoms given treatment. Right now psychologists are trying to build a case that child psychiatric treatments at least do not make things worse (because there is a famous study showing that it does). When it comes to forced treatment, there is no real doubt: it makes things much worse. The outcome everyone wants to see is that treatment helps, but it just isn't what the data shows.
And of course, there are plenty of examples of forced treatment causing complete disasters, for example the famous French case of Solenn Poivre d'Arvor. TLDR: Girl gets anorexia, gets admitted to youth services. Girl jumps under metro after escaping what is effectively a prison, part of youth services. She committed suicide so "she could be saved in a little bottle, to be kept by her father, not thrown in the sea" (roughly translated, it was in French of course).
The reason it's so famous is what happened next. Her dad was a news anchor, who convinced then-president Chirac (and a lot of other rich French people, Chirac's wife organizing a lot with the mother of this kid) to build a new youth care facility with the following rules:
1) everybody, under any circumstances, is free to leave. They will not inform the police or youth services unless asked.
2) under no circumstances will ever anyone's name or dossier be discussed or passed to any other part of youth services
(one wonders just what French youth services pulled to make the mother of that kid demand such rules and convince a LOT of people, including the wife of the president, to make them official rules of the institution)
It is a pretty building called "Maison de Solenn" that tries to improve treatment of anorexia disorders in France. It is also an incredible and very, very public total failure of youth services, but the truth is this (youth services forced treatment) happens in something like 70% of the cases of suicide in France.
No, but short of severe head trauma, nobody claims that it does. This almost reads like an argument invented for the purpose of gaslighting abuse.
Abuse could severely impact a person's emotional development, though, and therefore how they treat people later in life, or allow themselves to be treated, with potentially dire consequences.
> 4) any contact whatsoever with child services has a strong negative effect
What direction is the cause and which the effect here? Is it possible or even likely that environment and other influences not conducive to highly intelligent outcomes are also positively correlated with contact with child protective services? That seems more likely than contact with child services, as if randomly assigned, was in and of itself the source of most of the harm.
There are plenty of cases where one child was placed and other children in the same household, despite suffering the same problem (things like drunk/drugged parent, bad living arrangements, that would not differ from one child to another), did not. This happens quite often because almost everywhere, a child is placed pretty much in 2 cases
1) extreme distress (ie. child directly dumped on street, or parents involved in car crash, ... some extreme cases like that)
2) when there is free space. Free space almost universally means "1 place". Families often aren't just 1 child. It may be months or even longer before a second place opens up, and things may happen that mean the other children are never placed.
Which also means that for instance, children from the same family only rarely end up in the same place. But "luckily" it allows us to verify exactly what the cause is.
So no, it really is treatment that is the source of the harm.
The weird part is that when talking to children you will find out it doesn't just not matter for intelligence. Most abuse, that falls short of permanent physical damage obviously, does not even make children unhappy. Seriously. I mean it's simple once you think it through, but it's so incredibly weird.
This is incredible the first time you see an interview with such a kid. "I thought it was normal that parents force you to stand outside with your dinner plate and keep you there until bed time". It seriously did not bother that kid. "What's wrong with that ?". Even with much worse things.
You even see this about youth services itself. A kid that has been locked up for a decade, never once allowed to go to school. "Treated" to solitary confinement for often trivial infractions sometimes once a week, never allowed so much privacy as a single drawer. Forced to take medication, sometimes tied up and fed medication with tubes. They will say "they were just trying to take care of me". And ask in amazement if you think she deserves better, then asks what better would be.
I mean it makes sense if you think about how a mind, that does not have a point of comparison, must think. It's only lasting source of information is the abusers (or the youth services staff). And of course, hearing an anecdote of a different situation does not change things. But ... it's incredible when you see it. Hell, you get shown it, it is in the literature, you see it on videos, and you still won't believe it. But I assure you this is very true.
The only thing that happens is the role switch. Kids brought up in youth care almost all eventually attack their carers. Kids abused at home attack their parents. Not because they want protection (they may do it to give protection to others though). They do it "because it's normal". If your dad beats you, you "learn" for the day you're strong enough to beat him. And of course, that day will come. If you get thrown to the ground and locked up by youth care employees, sooner or later you get the better of the employee and it won't be their best day. Kids will do to you (and to others) whatever you do to them, eventually.
> music training may hone self-control, including focused attention and memorization.
And then later in the article:
> Raising IQ may require the kind of sustained involvement that comes with attending school, with all the practice and challenges it entails. “It’s not like you just go in for an hour of treatment a week. It’s a real lifestyle change,” he says.
Well... are the qualities you develop via learning an instrument not the same qualities that are going to help in other areas of life?!
The other thing, is if you do a study on IQ and learning music, you shouldn’t look only at taking lessons... you should look into the type of practice people do, for how long they practice etc. Basically garbage in, garbage out.
For all the fancy math equations and language people use to put into these studies, sometimes I think they sure are pretty dumb and short sighted.
TLDR; Learning to play musical instruments or playing chess does NOT improve IQ. Lively conversation with complex vocabulary, interactive reading with child, memory games and not ending school prematurely helps.
Learning an instrument teaches perseverance, which is a large part of success. I make sure my daughter practices her cello scales every night, which is the part she does not like.
Aren't you just teaching her that she needs to do what you say? Her motivation isn't coming from herself so it doesn't seem like a good lesson in persevering - at some point you will not be there or not be able to tell her what to do - what then? And for an anecdote I know 3 people who learned cello as a kid, and none of them play any music any more and pretty much stopped immediately after they left their parents home. Maybe a piano or guitar player could keep it up, but cello isn't something you tote to a house party to jam on with friends.
Your job is to help her understand why practicing scales is a good idea (which I'm not sure it is, but that's not the point). Probably the best way is to find a great cello player who would explain to her why it's a good idea. That's of course if she actually wants to become a cello player.
That sounds like a great way to make her resent playing an instrument when she's grown up.
I learned (soprano and alto) recorder when I was young, in evening classes at a music school (East Germany), and started learning to play violin a few years ago (which turned out to be _the_ instrument for me, I can't stop and after a few years I know it's not short term). I had always practiced a bit on the recorder on and off. Fortunately nobody had forced me to continue music school. When I was young I had sooo many other interests. Being told what to do can hardly be a recipe to create a person that acts on their own? Sounds more like a recipe of trying to educate somebody who follows orders well.
As far as I know almost all of the top musicians were forced to practice for long hours starting from a very young age. If you want your child to become a good musician it seems almost necessary to do so. Most children of course eventually stop playing because they don't like it, but those who don't tend to be thankful for the forced practice.
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I recently read Blueprint by Robert Plomin. Here is a pretty good summary:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/24/blueprint-by-r...
Plomin makes a pretty solid case in Blueprint that it's pretty much down to genetics and yes, there are environmental differences, but no you cannot manufacture them. They are random and unpredictable.
After having read that book as I was reading through this article I was thinking back to a lot of the points laid out by Plomin. Namely the "Nature of Nurture" finding that we our genetic predisposition drive our choices over the long term which basically washes out the vast majority of things our parents and school try to do for us. We basically stabilize our own IQs over time.
My oldest is turning 12, she has been doing calculus since second grade. Not "calculus" like taught in school to work through formulae, but rather she understands the concept of "infinite addition of infinitesimally small things". This is because she asks questions, and I give her full answers. The calculus thing started when on a train with me she asked if we can know the position of the train, given only its rate of acceleration. Yes, she did ask that in second grade. And we had an entire 1-hour train ride to determine that yes, it is possible and this is how.
Younger daughter has absolutely no interest in maths or science. She'll listen to daddy babble on about Arduino or Falcon rockets landing, and she'll even write some Python with me to solve a problem, but she has no real internal interest. Her grades show it.
From my experience with my girls, I would say "genetics and nature" are most important in bringing up curious people with good problem-solving skills (or however else you define "smart").
And now we get to the boy who proves otherwise. The woman I live with has a son in first grade, who when I met him a year ago knew not to put on his socks or soap himself in the shower. Why would he, when he could cry and his grandmothers and mother would do everything he sobs for? When he is with them, he cannot do simple addition or figure out how to open a door with an unusual handle. But with me, and only when he is alone with me, he multiplies, makes puns, eats more varied food, and solves puzzles.
The conclusion? I have none. Every child is different. Nurture them, answer their questions, but accept that some just won't be interested or able.
You can get smarter by reading and people should be told that.
I'm really interested in this because I have someone who keeps telling me this isn't possible. Do you have a source by any chance?
Intelligence as an aggregate term refers to a number of things which include but aren't limited to verbal acuity, spatial reasoning, abstract reasoning etc and the individual components differ from person to person. So you might be amazing at abstract reasoning and your friend might have above average verbal acuity.
I agree with the notion of intelligence being a social process. I think IQ isn't able to capture that all. Though that is not individual intelligence, it is collective intelligence but individual intelligence is a function of genetics+non-shared environment+collective intelligence is what I want to say.
You can see collective intelligence at work if you examine language. Certain concepts have a high power:weight ratio and can help you make better decisions than you otherwise would and those concepts first have to be discovered and then they have to diffuse throughout the general population and that happens via language.
I think the '80/20' or Pareto Principle is a fantastic example of this. It's very widely known and it helps you reason better about the world in a useful way. Before that was ever discovered, nobody could leverage it. As time ticks by our models of the world are slowly getting higher and higher resolution (if that makes sense as a metaphor) and that is filtering down into the general population.
Reading is fantastic. You can acquire in 4 days what it took someone 40 years to come to. I think regardless of your IQ the more data and the higher quality you can assimilate you can increase the resolution of your models of the world and that helps you reason about things more clearly.
I'm always really fascinated by people with learning disabilities who really buck the trend and go on to do amazing things academically. Sometimes the strategies they come up with for learning are unbelievable either in terms of creativity or sheer determination. There are some pretty extreme examples of this in Dr Norman Doige's The Brain That Changes Itself and a favorite recent example I encountered was David Goggins' talking about how it would take him 18 months to get through the textbook for his diving training, so he started memorizing it 18 months ahead of time by writing out every sentence in the book by hand 10 times each. I swear there is a tonne of unutilized headroom in the general intelligence of all populations.
I'm pretty optimistic about the general trend overall and I don't think having a low IQ in a general population or even as an individual necessarily consigns you to a life of mediocrity or that you will be unproductive as a society.
I'm not so sure. If you look at genius level people (Mozart, Einstein, Perelman, etc) pretty much all of them had supportive, smart, educated, and usually wealthy parents. Of course genetics plays a major role, but it's not clear that genetics would overcome indifferent development environment.
How much more rigorous of an analysis could you get?
The conclusion isn't that environment doesn't play a role. It does. The conclusion is that shared environment (family, school etc) doesn't contribute in any predictable way to the heritability of psychological traits (I think he says it's less than 1% ~ 2%). All psychological traits are on average 50% heritable (he says it ranges from 30% ~ 60% but it's on avg. 50%). The rest of the variance is from so called "non-shared" environmental differences. If you live in the same home with the siblings and go to the same school and are even in the same class, you still don't have exactly the same experience. A lot of your experiences are unique to and it's those things that shape you in combination with your genetics. He concludes that after all the research that has been done that non-shared environmental differences are unsystematic and unstable which means they are essentially random and you can make no predictions based on them and that implies you cannot systematically engineer outcomes for people.
Many gifted children come from upper middle class to upper class families. I’d wager majority of the people on this site are from those sorts of families and look around them and say “hey, none of us are geniuses! So, environment alone is not sufficient!” This is dismissive and misses the point (while ignoring most of these people went to good colleges and have good jobs, which typically is associated to “smart people” accomplishments).
What I think you’re getting at, is that you can be gifted and raised in an environment where your parents are uneducated and you lack a support systems to nurture your intellectual growth. You can be gifted and raised in an environment where you aren’t taking college level courses in high school and don’t have what it takes (on paper) to enter a good college and then potentially get held back from what your potential would otherwise allow you to achieve.
Even a kid that has a 160 IQ but went to a school where the highest math course they took is Calculus, will be behind a kid that took Calculus I-III, Differential Equarions, Linear Algebra, Abstract Algebra, Real Analysis and Number theory at a STEM magnet school. Even if they are equally smart as them. The latter kid would likely get into top colleges, while the former kid may get into a State school. The latter kid will be seen as traditionally intelligent, while the former kid may be viewed as average given their high school accomplishments.
I think the demographics of people on this site assume everyone is from the same upper middle to upper class backgrounds and equally have the same educational opportunities like the latter kid.
What they don’t all realize is you can be really smart in a very bad environment and not achieve anywhere near what you’d otherwise be capable of.
Environment plays a big factor along with genetics.
That historical level of accomplishments requires the accumulation of skills as well as the opportunities to develop it for extended periods of time since childhood when neuroplasticity is at its highest. At the extreme end of the accomplishment distribution, both nature and nurture must be very high. If one of them is lacking, there would be many others whose work is as impressive and their names would not stand out.
It is likely that a kind of luck, defined as being at the right place at the right time in history that matches their particular mix of skills plays a role in such cases. There are currently many times more people in the world than at any time in the past, why don't we have significantly more geniuses, as defined by accomplishments? Situations external to the individuals contribute to their geniuses.
A lesson I took from this is to think strategically and work in an area you have the potentials to achieve world-class level, given your existing foundations and the possible circumstances you can choose to be in.
This also applies to skill development in kids as their options, though quite broad, are not unlimited.
How many supportive, smart, educated and wealthy parents in history have had children who never achieved anything resembling Einstein's work?
https://archive.fo/7RULL
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/opinion/sunday/should-we-...
https://www.topcognitiveenhancers.com/nootropics-for-childre...
1) malnutrition at a young age. Meaning under 3 years old or so. Malnutricion during breast feeding or pregnancy is the most damaging. After a few years it mostly stops mattering.
2) some chemical contaminants, most notably (and commonly) lead. There are others (and worse ones), like Cadmium, but they're not very common at all.
3) genetic predisposition. Most pronounced, but far from the only effect, is Down syndrome. Of course there are genetic problems, like epilepsy, that are bad enough to make you an idiot.
4) any contact whatsoever with child services has a strong negative effect. If the child is removed from their parents, the effect magnifies dramatically. But children treated do far worse than untreated children in the same situation (and if you look at what happens in practice in such treatment, such as removing the children from school for years, this cannot come as a great surprise)
One almost-exception: voluntary treatment involving the mother (mostly by the mother) has only a slight negative effect. Father does not seem to matter if they're part of treatment. Still does not have a positive effect though. (Absense of a father has a strong negative effect though. I would love to see studies on if you see the same with mothers where the father is the primary caregiver)
I would say that attempting to fix children, in whatever way, other than advising the mother without any other option, is the negative. Children do best when following through on whatever way they develop. Attempting to change things is really bad.
5) drugs, and psychoactive medication are a strong negative, if taken over longer periods (obviously for strong drugs, longer period can be months. For most psychiatric drugs the period is something like a year)
6) lack of attention is a strong negative. Less so than attention by youth services, but it is decisively not good.
That can mean by parents, by peers, by teachers, by ...
At this point though we're talking about things that will definitely leave your IQ at over 90. It won't be catastrophic, whereas child services sometimes produce from normal children that people that have problems like not being able to count at age 17.
And then there are things that don't matter, but are widely perceived to matter.
(All of these have the same caveat. Make them bad enough and of course it will matter. If abuse means you don't survive, of course it will affect you. It essentially never does)
1) getting abused does not influence intelligence (Concrete example: getting scolded daily from age 3 by your mother for not cleaning your room because she's drunk will not make you an idiot)
2) quality of life does not matter. If anything it has a slight negative correlation: worse living conditions will actually make you (a little bit) smarter. (again, there is a level where is most definitely does matter, but that level is very low)
Can you clarify #4? What "treatment" are you referring to? Chemical dependency? Treatment in child services?
The dirty secret of psychiatry is that it almost never works. By the standard of placebo, "will this treatment work better than giving people a tictac 'that should help'" 90% of psychiatric treatments are ineffective. Better in the study means "reducing the chance of a future treatment being necessary" (doesn't include one other option that probably should be tracked: suicide)
On children, the stats are worse, and there you generally see a worsening of symptoms given treatment. Right now psychologists are trying to build a case that child psychiatric treatments at least do not make things worse (because there is a famous study showing that it does). When it comes to forced treatment, there is no real doubt: it makes things much worse. The outcome everyone wants to see is that treatment helps, but it just isn't what the data shows.
And of course, there are plenty of examples of forced treatment causing complete disasters, for example the famous French case of Solenn Poivre d'Arvor. TLDR: Girl gets anorexia, gets admitted to youth services. Girl jumps under metro after escaping what is effectively a prison, part of youth services. She committed suicide so "she could be saved in a little bottle, to be kept by her father, not thrown in the sea" (roughly translated, it was in French of course).
The reason it's so famous is what happened next. Her dad was a news anchor, who convinced then-president Chirac (and a lot of other rich French people, Chirac's wife organizing a lot with the mother of this kid) to build a new youth care facility with the following rules:
1) everybody, under any circumstances, is free to leave. They will not inform the police or youth services unless asked.
2) under no circumstances will ever anyone's name or dossier be discussed or passed to any other part of youth services
(one wonders just what French youth services pulled to make the mother of that kid demand such rules and convince a LOT of people, including the wife of the president, to make them official rules of the institution)
It is a pretty building called "Maison de Solenn" that tries to improve treatment of anorexia disorders in France. It is also an incredible and very, very public total failure of youth services, but the truth is this (youth services forced treatment) happens in something like 70% of the cases of suicide in France.
https://histoire.inserm.fr/les-lieux/la-maison-de-solenn
No, but short of severe head trauma, nobody claims that it does. This almost reads like an argument invented for the purpose of gaslighting abuse.
Abuse could severely impact a person's emotional development, though, and therefore how they treat people later in life, or allow themselves to be treated, with potentially dire consequences.
What direction is the cause and which the effect here? Is it possible or even likely that environment and other influences not conducive to highly intelligent outcomes are also positively correlated with contact with child protective services? That seems more likely than contact with child services, as if randomly assigned, was in and of itself the source of most of the harm.
1) extreme distress (ie. child directly dumped on street, or parents involved in car crash, ... some extreme cases like that)
2) when there is free space. Free space almost universally means "1 place". Families often aren't just 1 child. It may be months or even longer before a second place opens up, and things may happen that mean the other children are never placed.
Which also means that for instance, children from the same family only rarely end up in the same place. But "luckily" it allows us to verify exactly what the cause is.
So no, it really is treatment that is the source of the harm.
The weird part is that when talking to children you will find out it doesn't just not matter for intelligence. Most abuse, that falls short of permanent physical damage obviously, does not even make children unhappy. Seriously. I mean it's simple once you think it through, but it's so incredibly weird.
This is incredible the first time you see an interview with such a kid. "I thought it was normal that parents force you to stand outside with your dinner plate and keep you there until bed time". It seriously did not bother that kid. "What's wrong with that ?". Even with much worse things.
You even see this about youth services itself. A kid that has been locked up for a decade, never once allowed to go to school. "Treated" to solitary confinement for often trivial infractions sometimes once a week, never allowed so much privacy as a single drawer. Forced to take medication, sometimes tied up and fed medication with tubes. They will say "they were just trying to take care of me". And ask in amazement if you think she deserves better, then asks what better would be.
I mean it makes sense if you think about how a mind, that does not have a point of comparison, must think. It's only lasting source of information is the abusers (or the youth services staff). And of course, hearing an anecdote of a different situation does not change things. But ... it's incredible when you see it. Hell, you get shown it, it is in the literature, you see it on videos, and you still won't believe it. But I assure you this is very true.
The only thing that happens is the role switch. Kids brought up in youth care almost all eventually attack their carers. Kids abused at home attack their parents. Not because they want protection (they may do it to give protection to others though). They do it "because it's normal". If your dad beats you, you "learn" for the day you're strong enough to beat him. And of course, that day will come. If you get thrown to the ground and locked up by youth care employees, sooner or later you get the better of the employee and it won't be their best day. Kids will do to you (and to others) whatever you do to them, eventually.
> music training may hone self-control, including focused attention and memorization.
And then later in the article:
> Raising IQ may require the kind of sustained involvement that comes with attending school, with all the practice and challenges it entails. “It’s not like you just go in for an hour of treatment a week. It’s a real lifestyle change,” he says.
Well... are the qualities you develop via learning an instrument not the same qualities that are going to help in other areas of life?!
The other thing, is if you do a study on IQ and learning music, you shouldn’t look only at taking lessons... you should look into the type of practice people do, for how long they practice etc. Basically garbage in, garbage out.
For all the fancy math equations and language people use to put into these studies, sometimes I think they sure are pretty dumb and short sighted.
Dead Comment
I learned (soprano and alto) recorder when I was young, in evening classes at a music school (East Germany), and started learning to play violin a few years ago (which turned out to be _the_ instrument for me, I can't stop and after a few years I know it's not short term). I had always practiced a bit on the recorder on and off. Fortunately nobody had forced me to continue music school. When I was young I had sooo many other interests. Being told what to do can hardly be a recipe to create a person that acts on their own? Sounds more like a recipe of trying to educate somebody who follows orders well.