The Nature of Nurture with Professor Jay Belsky

Summary

Raising Good Humans – “The Nature of Nurture” with Professor Jay Belsky
Host: Dr. Aliza Pressman
Guest: Professor Jay Belsky
Date: February 20, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode features a rich, in-depth conversation between Dr. Aliza Pressman and renowned developmental psychologist Professor Jay Belsky, focusing on how children’s development is shaped by both nature (temperament, genetics) and nurture (environment, caregiving). The main theme delves into differential susceptibility—the idea that some children are more sensitive and malleable to environmental influences, for better or worse, while others are more “fixed” in their development. The discussion challenges assumptions about temperament, parenting, and the limits of parental influence, offering nuanced guidance and encouraging compassion and acceptance for both parents and children.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining Temperament

• Belsky’s Definition: Temperament refers to consistent, stylistic ways of feeling and behaving, often rooted in emotional and physiological reactivity. It’s observable early in life and acts as a precursor to personality.
  • [01:48] “It has to do with stylistic, how should I say, consistent stylistic ways of feeling and behaving in particular situations.” – Jay Belsky
• Temperament is not deterministic; while some traits are biologically ingrained, experience can “manufacture” temperament into personality, for better or worse.
• Plasticity has limits: There is a “range of reaction”—some kids can change a lot, others only a little.

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2. Differential Susceptibility & The Orchid-Dandelion Framework

• Some children (orchids) are much more “developmentally plastic” or sensitive to their environment, capable of blossoming in nurturing settings or struggling in adverse ones.
• Other children (dandelions) are more resilient or fixed—they tend to do okay regardless of environment, but their developmental trajectory is less influenced by intervention.
  • [07:42] “Orchids...have more room to maneuver with support or lack thereof. So imagine one who’s born right in the middle...but nobody waters him. He ends up over here dying young. Or...a nice Japanese gardener and ends up over here, beautiful and sturdy...” – Jay Belsky
• The idea is not about preferential treatment but recognizing that equal support can have unequal effects.

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3. Responsiveness to Parenting & Intervention

• Belsky discusses the tension parents feel about investing extra support in more “susceptible” children while worrying about neglecting the less demanding ones.
  • [06:08] “How do you not feel like I’m now getting these two potential challenges?...Am I not paying enough attention to [my dandelion]?” – Aliza Pressman
• Resilience is not inherently ‘better.’ A “resilient” child may not benefit as much from a positive environment, coming out the same no matter what.
• The field tends to overemphasize adverse outcomes and neglect the impact of enrichment—some kids flourish from good environments, others are unchanged.
  • [15:31] “When we look at adversity...we never think of how would that kid do under good conditions. The presumption is all kids would do well under good conditions. But as it turns out, that’s not the case.” – Jay Belsky

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4. Individual Experience, Memory, and Sibling Differences

• Children’s experiences and recollections of their upbringing differ, even within the same family, due to temperament and perception.
  • [21:25] “People who are more depression prone...are more likely to think about and remember...those exposures. So what registered powerfully on her could well have been water off a duck’s back on you.” – Jay Belsky
• Non-shared environment: Most of what matters developmentally feels unique to each child, even for siblings.

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5. Attachment Theory Revisited

• Belsky challenges the traditional notion that parent sensitivity always leads to secure attachment. Some children are born more or less secure (or insecure), relatively impervious to intervention.
  • [25:13] “Efforts to promote sensitivity in the parents...benefits some kids and not other kids. Even if their mothers increase in sensitivity, it doesn’t have a security-inducing effect on some.” – Jay Belsky
• What matters most is not the attachment measurement per se but the parenting the child is exposed to and the child’s susceptibility.

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6. The “Goodness of Fit” Fallacy

• The “lock-and-key” notion that every child can thrive if only the parent acts the right way doesn’t account for hard-wired limits in some children.
  • [27:25] “Some locks have very few keys, if any key at all...So I don’t buy into goodness of fit.” – Jay Belsky
• For some challenging kids (so-called “fixed strategists”), endless attempts to adapt parenting may not yield big changes.

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7. Parental Acceptance, Limits, and Compassion

• It can be both relieving and upsetting to recognize that not all children can be “molded.” Acceptance is often a saner strategy than endless optimization.
  • [31:33] “Some people are going to be who they’re going to be and there’s not much you can do. So acceptance may be a little bit more effective for your functioning than chasing some kind of...” – Aliza Pressman
• The story of raising especially difficult children highlights the real need for resources—not just for children but for parents, who need the capacity to reflect, regulate themselves, and provide consistency.

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8. Misinterpretations, Sensitivity vs. Susceptibility, and Social Implications

• Many resist the idea of “differential susceptibility,” fearing it means some kids are “unreachable” or will be neglected, which Belsky strongly refutes.
  • [41:29] “That doesn’t mean taking the kid who’s not highly susceptible and putting him in a closet and feeding him. One of the mistakes that developmental science has made is it’s all about tomorrow. What about today?” – Jay Belsky
• Sensitivity = Immediate reactivity, Susceptibility = Lasting influence. They aren’t the same.
  • [43:04] “Sensitivity is a good word for immediate reactivity, an initial response. But it needs to be separate from susceptibility.” – Jay Belsky

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9. What Parents Can (and Can’t) Control

• Parenting matters, but it’s not all-powerful. Most parents are “attentive, worried,” and do their best within their constraints.
  • [73:23] “Love your kids and take care of them...not because of what it’s going to do down the developmental road, but what it’s doing here and now.” – Jay Belsky
• Live your values and be present—don’t parent out of anxiety for the future.
• Who children become is shaped by an unpredictable mix of genetics, temperament, their lived experience, culture, luck, and more.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• [07:42] “Dandelions are not guaranteed to just be fine and dandy...And so it doesn’t mean that these kids will turn out either perfect or nightmarish. It just means what they experience will register on them more powerfully and shape them more than the other kids.” – Jay Belsky
• [15:31] “The kids who do the worst in life are often the kids who could have done the best in life. And that’s a huge human capital cost to a society.” – Jay Belsky
• [31:33] “Some people are going to be who they’re going to be and there’s not much you can do. So acceptance may be a little bit more effective for your functioning...” – Aliza Pressman
• [41:29] “That doesn’t mean taking the kid who’s not highly susceptible and putting him in a closet and feeding him.” – Jay Belsky
• [43:44] “Sensitivity is a good word for immediate reactivity...But it needs to be separate from susceptibility.” – Jay Belsky
• [69:42] “There aren’t simple answers to critical questions unless you’re an ideologue. It’s genes, it’s environment, it’s a whole mess of stuff.” – Jay Belsky
• [73:23] “Love your kids and take care of them as you think is right and appropriate, and not because of what it’s going to do down the developmental road, but what it’s doing here and now.” – Jay Belsky
• [74:46] “Live your values and worry less about tomorrow because you don’t know what world he or she’s going to live in.” – Jay Belsky

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Key Timestamps for Reference

• 01:48 – Belsky defines temperament and its role in development.
• 04:52 – The parenting challenge with more and less “susceptible” children.
• 07:02–12:07 – Orchid/dandelion framework and individual differences in plasticity.
• 15:31 – Why focusing only on resilience or adversity misses half the story.
• 21:25 – Retrospective memory and why siblings often disagree about childhood.
• 25:13 – Critique of classic attachment theory’s universality.
• 27:25 – Problems with the “goodness of fit” model.
• 31:33 – Acceptance versus endless striving.
• 41:29 – Sensitivity vs. susceptibility distinction.
• 43:44 – Reactions versus long-term impact.
• 69:42 – The complexity of development (“it’s a whole mess of stuff”).
• 73:23 – Practical parenting advice: focus on values and the present.

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Takeaways for Parents and Caregivers

• Parenting matters, but its influence is shaped by the child’s temperament and susceptibility.
• Differential susceptibility means not all children respond the same way to the same environment or parenting.
• Orchids and dandelions are not value judgments—there are trade-offs in each, and both deserve attention and care.
• Acceptance and presence are as valuable as effort and intervention; don’t blame yourself for what’s unchangeable, and don’t neglect what you can influence.
• Focus on the present needs and values of your child rather than trying to guarantee or engineer a particular future.

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This conversation is an enriching blend of science, wisdom, humor, and humility—reminding parents that raising good humans is as much about understanding diversity and accepting limits as it is about offering support and striving for success.

Transcript

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

The following podcast is a Dear Media production.

[Dr. Liza Pressman (Host)]

Welcome to Raising good humans. I'm Dr. Liza Pressman and today is just a thrill for me because I have a very brilliant developmental psychologist on Jay Belsky, who just published the Nature of Rethinking why and How Childhood Adversity Shapes Development. And we had such an interesting conversation and we're really talking about amazing concepts like differential susceptibility and how different kids have different plasticity levels. So some are going to be more sensitive to their environment. We've talked about that. And this differential susceptibility means that their plasticity in some of the kids means they're going to be malleable in positive growth ways and negative depending on their environment. And it's a really interesting conversation about evolutionary adaptation, differential susceptibility, which is particularly important if you have more susceptible kids. So we're talking about that. Have a listen and of course send me a DM with questions. Go to my substack or reach out to me there. Do Dr. Lisa pressman.substack.com and can you go write a nice rating and review if you have time so we can spread the word. But most importantly, listen to this conversation, particularly when we get to differential susceptibility. It kind of blows my mind.

[Jay Belsky]

Let me start by saying temperament's one of those concepts. Reminds me of the Supreme Court justice to couldn't define obscenity but recognized it when he saw it. And there are a lot of definitions out there, so I wouldn't presume to be the quote, singular authority, but I've been around the block long enough, been exposed to much of it that I'll offer. It has to do with stylistic, how should I say, consistent stylistic ways of feeling and behaving in particular situations. So we classically, when it comes to babies, really are focused upon how easy it is for them to become upset, how difficult it is for them to be soothed. You can throw in activity level as well as they get older. It relates to attention and self control. But one of the things that is very confusing about temperament is its relationship with personality. Personality becomes its own challenge to define, although these days the common assumption is, and I'm sure there are people who will question it, is that we can distinguish five different dimensions of personality. What's more important to me is I tend to think about temperament as the precursors of later personality. It's kind of the raw neurological, emotional, physiological reactivity and responsiveness that you come into the world with. Some kids are very subdued. Some kids are anything but now there are those who believe that that tells you who they will become. I'm not one of them. I think temperament can get, quote, manufactured into personality, meaning experience exposures can regulate temperament so that it is transformed for better and for worse. So you might imagine a child who is temperamentally cool, calm, et cetera, but has enough horrific experiences where that kind of stylistic character breaks down and is reformed. By the same token, a baby who's very easily upset, has troubled time soothing, has difficulty with self control, is highly active under the right regime, may be just as likely to radically develop as well. I mean, obviously they're going to be constraints, limits, what we professionals call the range of reaction. So you might be able to go between these two points if you're over here and you can come over here, but you're not going to go that far away. There's limits to the degree of plasticity in that temperament, in that physiological reactivity and response system.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

So the thing that I think is really interesting is you're to your point, like, it is true that you, you know, I think a lot of parents don't believe in temperament till they have their second kid. And, and then on the, the, the one thing that I wonder about, and I really want you to talk about differential susceptibility because it's so interesting and I like, I'm like lightly obsessed with it. When we talk about, you know, at the end of your talking about differential susceptibility, I want to address the feeling as a parent, when you think about, okay, I have my. And I'm just going to use like the category, the crass categories, because I think they're easy. I have my orchid and my dandelion and I can see that my orchid has higher needs and might respond better to getting the support, but they're still struggling. And the research keeps talking about these environmental, like the support system versus the vulnerability.

[Dr. Liza Pressman (Host)]

But at the end of it, how

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

do you not feel like I'm now getting these two potential challenges? I'm giving extra support to the orchid. The orchid is still having some struggles. Would they be having more if they didn't have a loving, supportive, caregiving environment? Maybe, but they're not like blossoming in the same way that, you know, the orchid hypothesis suggests. And my dandelion, am I not paying enough attention to them? But they seem to be doing great. I'm curious, when you first wrote your New York Times op ed about, you know, like, should some kids get more. Of course they should. But like, how do you say something like that without people going, wait a second. So we're not talking about neglecting other kids. We're just talking about some people being more responsive to interventions.

[Jay Belsky]

I'm a bit surprised that that in itself, in and of itself is a radical idea because, you know, just the other day, Just the other day there was a big story about. I think maybe it was in the New York Times about whether parents have favorites. So clearly, you know, they do. We know I never got a sense that I was a twin. I am a twin. And I never got a sense that my parents had favorites, quite frankly. But. But my father used to say, you know, he's my favorite, or he's my favorite. Just to develop psychologist in me. Thinks he's trying to throw us off. Now I think about it.

[Dr. Liza Pressman (Host)]

Or.

[Jay Belsky]

Or it's just. It was such a ridiculous question that that was the only way to argue no was to simply say, yes, he's my favorite. And then it was, he's my favorite. Okay, now, right. One of the things to think about when it comes to orchids and dandelions. Let's start with dandelions is that the kids who are much less susceptible to environmental influences, they have a more narrower range of reaction. That is, they're not as developmentally plastic as the. The orchid, who could be over here or could be over here. And it's going to depend upon what the experience is. So we have to keep in mind that orchids, I mean, dandelions are not guaranteed to just fine and dandy. Think about the full range of behavior, personality. And you have dandelions in all those styles. You know, there are some kids, sadly, who were born as psychopaths. They grew up in fine homes. There's the famous Leopold and Loeb, I think, murders back in Chicago, way back in the early 20th century. These were two rich kids, spoiled, had everything in the world for them, and they just decided that they were going to kill somebody and see what that was like. That was their entertainment. Now, of course, you can also have kids grow up in the worst possible worlds and they turn out just fine or seem to. And so, so. And then there are kids in the middle and at every variation. So I think it's a mistake to presume that a dandelion, you know, only comes out just fine and dandy. And I think if your dandelion comes out that way, knock on wood, because that might not have been guaranteed. Now we go to the orchids. There's no presumption here that these kids will go from being coal to diamond it simply means that they have more room to maneuver with support or lack thereof. So imagine one who's born right in the middle, okay, is a prototypic orchid, but nobody waters him. He ends up over here dying young. Or we have one who's got a nice Japanese gardener and he ends up over here, beautiful and sturdy relative to his capabilities. And so it's going to matter where you start and also what your exposures are. That's the notion that they're more developmentally plastic. They have a bigger range of reaction, the professionals would say, as opposed to a narrower one. And so it doesn't mean that these kids will turn out either perfect or nightmarish. It just means what they experience will register on them more powerfully and shape them more than the other kids. You know, the bottom line is that the canon, the developmental canon that I grew up with, that you grew up with, is that the early years are the most developmentally plastic years. This is where characters form, blah, blah, blah. Why have we never entertained the possibility that some kids that's more true of than less true of. I mean, everything in life almost is a bell curve. There is a few at the one extreme, there are a few at the, at the other extreme, and in the middle there are more of them. Well, when it came to developmental plasticity until I came along, which is, it took me a long time to come to this realization, quite frankly. So I was just slow. I was a little bit less slow than the rest of them, is that developmental plasticity is an individual difference factor too. And it makes all the sense in the world because again, if you're highly developmentally plastic and you grow up in a supportive family, in a supportive environment, you suck the marrow from the bone. You benefit. If you grow up in a horrific family, you don't really in trouble because of that. And in fact, I think, and I think there's evidence out there, even from randomized controlled trials of early interventions, that the kids who do the worst in life are often the kids who could have done the best in life. And that's a huge human capital cost to a society.

[Dr. Liza Pressman (Host)]

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[Jay Belsky]

So our Failure to appreciate that. You know, we have this notion of resilience, which is the opposite of vulnerability. But in both cases, we miss half the story that is the resilient kid, which is wonderful. If he's growing up under conditions of adversity, be it abuse or harshness or deprivation or whatever, you want to consider, you know, misbehaving siblings, a bad neighborhood. That's a great place to be resilient. But what if he's in a home that's really nurturing, stimulating, supporting, encouraging? It turns out he's going to be resilient there too. He's not going to suck the marrow from the bone. By the same token, or the opposite, is the kid who's not susceptible. If he grows up in a bad home, he's just going to be who he is. He's going to be otherwise for the most part. And if he grows up in a good home, so to speak, it's going to be the same thing. So neither of these is inherently better than the other. And we live in a world in which resilience is all of a sudden this thing that everybody can get. Well, if you're not really developmentally plastic, you're probably this degree of resilient or that degree of resilient or. Or that degree of resilience, more, less, even less, because that's who you are. That resilience may reflect the degree to which you're not susceptible. And the absence of resilience in the face of vulnerability and adversity is evidence that you are susceptible. And those kids in the interventions are the most likely to benefit. And this is the other thing we've missed when we look at adversity, negative effects of bad things, we never think of how would that kid do under good conditions? The presumption is all kids would do well under good conditions. But as it turns out, that's not the case. Some kids will just be who they are, and other kids will thrive because of their good conditions. And so what we've missed is what we've studied to death for humanitarian reasons, the effects of adversity. We haven't studied to death the effects of enrichment. Again, when we do randomized control trials, when we do experiments, when they do interventions, we just look at the average. To me, that's like eating the oyster and throwing away the pearl. The real question, I think, is who benefited and who didn't? And let's not confuse the average with everybody. And yet, almost everything we talk about, except in personalized medicine, when it comes to behavior, more or less presumes that about children's development.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

I couldn't agree more. And I actually think a good example. Well, maybe not, but I'm trying to think of like a real world example is right now we're talking about the absolute destruction of a generation because of social media. And I'm so curious because I haven't seen these studies and I don't think anybody's doing them. But like, I have to believe that for some kids it doesn't matter and

[Dr. Liza Pressman (Host)]

for other kids it is devastating.

[Jay Belsky]

That's absolutely the case. And in fact, I have a development psychologist, good friend who's been hired by Google and other companies to make this case because that's what the evidence shows. There's variability in susceptibility, but we like

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

to hear one story and then cling to it.

[Jay Belsky]

There's probably a small portion, and I don't mean 2%, it may be as low as 20% to 25%, who are really susceptible to all the ills that social media is heir to. Others are a little bit susceptible. And there are a lot of people who, you know, it's no big deal. I mean, you know, it's interesting. I recently recontacted a friend from high school. We played soccer together and he's reminding me that when we had a very good team my senior in high school, we won our local championship and then we went into a higher level of competition. And he reminds me that we lost. And he just cried and cried and cried. I didn't cry. You know, he was a kid who lived sports. I was a kid who I lived for the fun of sports, the social experience of sports. I had a future I was thinking about that was much more important than my athletic ability. But I know I had friends who, you know, that was the be all and end all. So here were two people who had the same exact experience. We both wanted to win, we were both disappointed, but he was crushed. And the next day I was fine.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

When you're doing your research and you're asking about adverse experiences, is there also. And I actually think there is. So I'm asking this question and probably you're going to be like, but is the perception of the experience part of the information that we need about a developed human? Like, if I'm looking back about my. I'm interviewing two people about their childhood or I'm being interviewed and I can't remember 10 bad things that happened in my childhood. And my sister is like, on this date this bad thing happened. On this date, this bad thing happened. And they happen to both of us in different ways. Like divorce or, you know, moving or whatever is part of that attributable to my temperament versus her temperament, and does that influence her lived experience?

[Jay Belsky]

One of the things I say in the first or second chapter of my book is that because retrospective reports of our childhood are not accurate, however convinced we are that they are. And I'm one of those who's certainly convinced that they are that they are, but they're not. The evidence is shown again and again and again. I don't even pay attention to research that relies on retrospective reports. And what we can report retrospectively with great accuracy, it turns out, are critical events. My father died, my parents got divorced, we moved house. But when it comes to the quality of relationships, experiences, no, it's affected by what our mental state is when we're being interviewed. So, you know, I can tell the same story you just said, my twin brother and I grew up in exactly the same room, in a very small room that only had room for two beds and a very small bookshelf between those two beds. And as teenagers, we couldn't even stand up really right out of bed at the same time. I wasn't poor, but it was, you know, this was what the house was and that was that. And I was never thought of myself as deprived really. And this is now 30, 40 years ago as middle aged adults, we're talking about our childhood. And when I described something that happened, he says, what are you talking about? We're in the same room. People have different recollections. And so, and those are based, I wouldn't get in the temple. I talk about their personality. The evidence we have suggests that people who are more depression prone, prone to negative emotionality, are more likely to think about and remember, like your sister in this theory, those experiences and those exposures. So what registered powerfully on her could well have been water off a duck's back on you. No wonder. You know, siblings come together and it's sort of like they grew up in different families. You know, this is one of the great mistakes about thinking, oh, we grew up in the same family. Well, if you had an older brother who was a bully, you didn't grow up in the same family. He didn't grow up in the same family as you did because nobody was bullying him when he was the firstborn. Your parents may be the same, but there's a lot. So the truth is most of our experiences are what we call in the field, not shared. They're unique to Us and therefore we shouldn't expect even the same exposure. Well, we've already talked about differential susceptibility that implies that we shouldn't expect the same exposure to have the same consequence for two siblings in the same family. And there's evidence to that effect. By the same token, we shouldn't presume that the two kids are having the same experience to begin with.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

Okay, so given that, can you talk a little bit about the early years and the attachment relationship and why for some kids in the same household, they may have a different experience of attachment relationship?

[Jay Belsky]

Let me start by pointing out that it may be the case and I'm pretty prepared to convince, pretty convinced that it is following up from differential susceptibility thinking or, or dandelion thinking that some kids are born secure and some kids are born insecure and not. There's not going to be much that's going to shape them differently or at least.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

And it's not. So you're not saying. Yeah, this is what I'm getting.

[Jay Belsky]

I want to hear the whole attachment canon makes perfect sense. That is sensitive, responsive care facilitates the development of security and the absence of it, or worse, fosters insecurity. And you know, we now have a couple of experimental studies showing that efforts to promote sensitivity in the parents who are growing up under difficult circumstances benefits some kids and not other kids. That even if their mothers increase in sensitivity, it doesn't have a security inducing effect on some that it has on others. And what drives me crazy is how the whole attachment field has failed to recognize this. And it's still kind of more or less that it doesn't matter what your temperament is, it doesn't matter this or that, that this causes security and this causes insecurity and it's just plain nuts. And the best evidence of that is effects of security on the large sample are rather modest. In fact, my attitude these days is that if I want to predict where a kid's going from developmentally, I don't want a strange situation or attachment appraisal. Tell me how sensitive and responsive and supportive or lack thereof, the parents were. Tell me about the parenting, not some infant measurement of attachment security. It's a combination of what you're exposed to and what your susceptibility is. So you and I can be siblings and we both get, if we could get, if we had a mother like that or a father like that who give us exactly the same quality of care and it lands heavily on you and it's water off a duck's back on Me, this is where we get person, environment, interaction, as we call it in the field. That is the very same exposures don't have the very same effects on everybody, and we've known that forever.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

So can you sort of talk about goodness of fit, then?

[Jay Belsky]

Okay, I object to goodness of fit because it doesn't. It kind of suggests that if the parent can be. That every kid has a lock, that if the parent is the appropriate key, voila, you have your fit, the key goes in, the door opens, and it's wonderful. It'd be nice if that was the case. But again, a lot of this theory comes from focusing way back in the 50s and 60s by Thomas and Birch, who were otherwise excellent. You know, there were groundbreakers, no two ways about it. If 60% of what I'm saying turns out not to be true, 30 years from now, I'm not going to be embarrassed by that. I'll probably be dead on the one hand. On the other hand, all scientific knowledge is provisional and open to change. So I know I'm not casting aspersions on them, but they were really talking about difficult infants.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

Did you mean Thomas and Chess? Did you mean Thomas and Chest?

[Jay Belsky]

Came after Thomas and Chest. They focused mostly on the difficult infants. And for them, the goodness of fit was a parent who was sensitive and responsive and supportive and calming. What they didn't talk about was the kids who were like the ones I just spoke about and whose parents did the exact same thing, but it didn't quite work because.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

And they still were like, difficult and

[Jay Belsky]

uneasy, less susceptible, but. So the goodness of fit notions is a lock and key. And I think it forgets the fact that some locks have very few keys, if any key at all. It's kind of not a perfect metaphor here kind of thing. So I don't buy into goodness of fit. And what's really interesting is that we have evidence out there that difficult kids who. And I'm sure we'll get there more, maybe go there right now. That would be difficult infants who have been always cast as risk factors. As your kid's vulnerable, your kid's sensitive, your kid is difficult, that under good rearing conditions flourish and under bad ones succumb severely. So it's not just a matter of what the caregiving environment is. It's also a matter of who the kid is. And it must be really frustrating for people to have an impossible kid who is what I call a fixed strategist who is really not particularly susceptible because whatever they keep trying isn't working, and they think the solution is to find the solution. And the solution may be this is who he is. In the same way a 30 year old government bond is going to give you 2%, or I have an old friend whose father left him a million dollars worth of 1978 bonds and the interest rate was 15%. Well, the interest rate went way down. But for 30 years he was getting 15% on that. That's a lot of money. But that's a fixed strategist. Somebody else whose father left him a 4% or parents left them a 4% bond that's going to pay 4% for 30 years.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

So that actually at the beginning of our conversation, you kind of just captured what I'm getting at, which is there is this sense that if you are, if you do find yourself with a child, you're probably not listening to Raising Good Humans podcast. If you're a neglectful parent is my guess. So let's say you're like, thoughtful, you're sensitive, you're connected, you're doing the things and it's still not going great that there is a part of this that's like relieving but maybe upsetting, which is people. Some people are going to be who they're going to be and there's not much you can do. So acceptance may be a little bit more effective for your functioning than chasing some kind of think about a, I

[Jay Belsky]

nourish my kid, I've always fed him good food, he's never overeaten, he's always been. And he's never going to get bigger than 5 foot 6. You know, there's a constraint on who he can become. Now if you do something radical to take him into medical care, break his legs and let him, you know, as they do to make legs longer, which is kind of crazy, I think. But be that as it may, you know, then maybe you can push the elephant I harbor. I don't know if this is a hope or an expectation or a nightmare, but I could imagine we have in 50, 100 years, if it takes that long, really understanding of the underlying physiological, genetic, hormonal, microbiome, dynamics of plasticity, that we may be able to go in in the same way CRISPR tweaks a gene, we may be able to go in and tweak the microbiome or tweak some other hormonal assessed system, or tweak some physiological system. And now in some ways you're kind of like opening the valve for more experience that we're really changing something or modifying something. Now that sounds like a great idea to people who believe in developmental plasticity across the board like I used to. But as an old colleague and friend of mine pointed out, do you realize, Jay, that if everybody was maximally developmentally plastic, the Nazis would have had no resistance? The Communists would have had no resistance? That is developmental plasticity in and of itself is not an inherent good. There are plenty of living things out there that don't change your response to the environment. And sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn't, because the future is uncertain and the world is forever changing.

[Dr. Liza Pressman (Host)]

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[Dr. Liza Pressman]

So bringing it to like just a relatable concrete example. There's the kid who's pretty easygoing and they're probably not going to have a differential response to their environment, but it doesn't matter because they're kind of very pleasant and things are going well, you know, and they're adaptable in the sense that like wherever you put them, they're kind of going to, they're going to do what they're going to do. And that's great. And we take credit for that probably because we're just like an amazing parent. But then there's the kid who's just not thriving, whatever we're doing. And we're going to think, you know, if they had had different parents, if I could do something different, if there was a different environment, that they would have done better. And then there's the kid who really does do better in a different environment or does worse in a different environment, but that we're trying, we're like doing everyone a disservice by not acknowledging that these are all.

[Jay Belsky]

One of my complaints these days is we're all into diversity, at least in the progressive end, except when it comes to who children are going to become. Then we have the standard, then every

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

has the same potential.

[Jay Belsky]

And the whole idea of realizing your potential is nuts. What if your potential is to be a psychopathic murderer? What if your potential is to be a great thief? I mean, this is where the field of developmental psychology and child development, and I'm as guilty of this at least early in my career as anybody else, has romanticized and idealized development. It's as if we're all supposed to become orchids. Some of us are weeds, some of us are mooses, some of us are orchids kind of thing. And here's the thing that maybe that parent who has that challenging, difficult, stubborn child who you can't seem to modify, here's the thing to remember that they are growing up as children in a world that they don't have freedom of movement in a major sense. That is, they're in this family with these values. They're in this neighborhood with these ways of behaving. They're in this even culture with this way of doing things. And they don't fit in. But you know what? When they grow up, maybe they'll move someplace where they will fit in. Maybe there'll be a job and a way of making money. I mean, you know, it used to be the case that if you were on the autism spectrum when we grew up, our parents worried about what happened when we died. Who's going to take care of this kid? What's he going to become? You know, he's completely ineffectual. He's frightened of the world. He doesn't want to go out of the house. But we move into the it generation, the it world, all of a sudden, all of a sudden he's making 3, 4, $500,000 a year just being himself. That is to say that it may be that he's a square peg today in a round hole, but when he gets out or when he grows up, there'll be places for that square peg to fit in, and he'll find his way there, God willing. It's not guaranteed. But the point is that don't think as a parent that you. You know, it's hard to say this, and I'm laughing at myself because I was a parent of children once too, is that don't think that you know for certain what is best for your child.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

There's another thing that I'm curious about, because when you're talking about sort of the. The kids who are going to be who they're going to be, we're talking about like the more difficult ones, but but there's also like, I have my daughter loathes. I have one daughter. If I'm going to stereotype, I have one orchid and one dandelion. And the dandelion is so irritated by this orchid research and this dandelion thinks it's like so ridiculous and dangerous to tell people that these differences exist. Because what if people take that information and they just like, are shitty parents for that kid? And I'm like, do you feel like I was a shitty parent because I

[Jay Belsky]

give this in my book. My response is, let's say we get to the day when we can really very easily, reliably, confidently say this kid's highly susceptible and this kid's not highly susceptible.

[Dr. Liza Pressman (Host)]

Right?

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

Like you could do a swab or.

[Jay Belsky]

Yeah, whatever. That doesn't mean taking the kid who's not highly susceptible and putting him in a closet and feeding him.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

No, you're right.

[Jay Belsky]

You know, one of the mistakes that developmental science has made is it's all about tomorrow. What about today? What about the quality of life? You don't give children quality daycare. I hope because of the payoff. Only. My philosophy is very simple. No child ever asked to be here. And in an affluent society, every child deserves safety and physical safety and security, nutrition and a caring, loving environment that may not pay off in spades like it does for another one. So what? And I think it's something that my PhD student and then postdoc Michael Lewis, who did great work, has confused and I'm a little bit annoyed by it. And that is, he uses the word environmental sensitivity. Sensitivity and susceptibility need to be distinguished. You and I think of a diet, we can both go on a diet. And when the diet's over, you keep the weight off and I don't. We're both sensitive to the diet. We both lost weight on the diet. But you were susceptible to the long term effects of the diet. That's what susceptibility is about.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

So the fact is that you're totally right. The word sensitivity has messed with our understanding of susceptibility.

[Jay Belsky]

And what we have to appreciate is that two kids will get really upset by being yelled at by their parents. They'll cry the same mouth, they'll be feel sad, whatever it is. But it's only going to register on one of them perhaps, and not the other. The upset, the immediate experience is sensitivity. The long term consequences, if there are any, is susceptibility. And those can't be confused.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

I really, I appreciate you saying that.

[Jay Belsky]

Sensitivity is a good word. For immediate reactivity, an initial response, you're sensitive to it, you're reactive to it,

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

but it needs to be separate from susceptibility. But also it's not as a word in this culture. It's not a great word either because then you get a lot of eye rolls from people who don't want to hear it because they think it's fragility. So I think that, I think it's problematic anyway. But I, but I would like to be able to say Jay Belsky is distinguishing sensitivity and susceptibility.

[Jay Belsky]

Let's imagine we've got two kids. They grow up in a nutrient rich, broadly conceived household, neighborhood, nation, whatever. One of them sucks the marrow from the bone, the other is unaffected by all those benefits. Insofar as we can tell. What do you call the first one? It's the opposite of vulnerable. What's the positive opposite of vulnerable? And you come up with a word. You know, I've asked this question to at this point, thousands of people. The closer you get is the word these days is flourishing. But you don't say flourishers. There's no equivalent of vulnerable kid to a flourisher kid. A flourishing kid. No, it's.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

I guess I'm also hearing something else that I need to ask you, which is I think there's two types of kids who might suck the marrow. One of them might be by virtue of sucking the marrow like self sucking. Like they are self directed at sucking the marrow out of every opportunity. That's not because they're, they're more susceptible to their environment. If they are actually like would. I don't know if this is going to make sense but like I'm going to go back to doing the opposite of what a researcher should do and tell you my own kids, my, my dandelion would suck the marrow out of every, you know, like there's a teacher that is available for office hours. She's like sucking that opportunity for dear life.

[Dr. Liza Pressman (Host)]

She.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

But she just like I've done nothing with her. She's just. I love her but like she just is. She takes life and she just takes all the opportunities and, but let me just say, cuz my, the, the one who's sort of more malleable to the environment, I have to. Her natural inclination isn't to take care of herself in such a way that she would suck the marrow out of it, but if I provide that she does flourish. The other one, it is embedded in who she is to have that. So I don't know how to distinguish.

[Jay Belsky]

Well, first of all, the characteristic of the orchid is very consistent with one early difficulty, but more importantly to Elaine Aaron's notion of the sensitive person. And in fact there's plenty of evidence now, and Michael Plewis and his Italian colleagues have generated it, that actually people who are the sensitive person have more anxiety and more depression. And that may be because they haven't had sufficient positive redirectional experiences. The whole idea is that if experiences register. One of the reasons experiences register powerfully on some points rather than others is that they have a very sensitive nervous system. So things that are potentially upsetting, loud noises, strange people doing things too fast, whatever it is that overwhelms them, unless there is a mediator who's helping to regulate that experience. You know, many years ago, my oldest friend, he had kids long before I did. He had these two girls and I met them when they were about three and they were as inhibited, shy, holding onto their parents as you could imagine. And my counsel, misguidedly, I don't think they took it. So I'm not feeling guilty about it. At that time, my understanding of development was, you know, they might grow out of it, but this is who they are. Just accept them and don't make life difficult for them. Be sensitive. Well, it turns out that's not what you need to do. You need to push them, encourage them, get them out of their comfort zone. It's kind of like what name called the zone of proximal development. Their zone of proximal development may be more. Their zone of proximal development where they can be pushed, may be smaller. So you have to do smaller steps, right?

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

You're not going to throw them in the deep end.

[Jay Belsky]

Throwing them in the deep end is going to overwhelm them. So the trick is to. And this is where parents who are healthy and secure and have decent living conditions have the wherewithal to do that, have the coping capacity to do that. But what you see is. So what you see actually is in some work and very little of it though, but. But some of it is that those parents with a difficult kid are nurturing, supportive and sensitive and increased likelihood that those kids will be, if not transformed dramatically, somebody who you wouldn't have expected them to turn out to be. Whereas other the same kid under parents, under adverse conditions, they're stressed, they're not coping. They're not worried about food, they're worried about their family violence. They're worried about all sorts of things. They don't have the coping capacity, they don't have the wherewithal usually put that

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

kind of a lot of, you know.

[Dr. Liza Pressman (Host)]

Right.

[Jay Belsky]

I had a very difficult first child. I've always wondered if you're better off having a difficult first and an easy second or the other way around. I'd never seen a study of it. I would love to see that. But I had a very difficult first child. And I came away from the experience and as a baby was entirely impossible. I came away from the experience wondering why there wasn't more child abuse. Because I felt numerous times like throwing him against the wall.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

You just had the resources not to

[Jay Belsky]

exactly is that I could be. Reflect. And I tell the story about walking in one day when my two boys were squabbling. And I walked in one day and I was pissed off at something that happened at the office. And I came in with that attitude. I took two steps in the house. I heard them arguing with each other and I went to make a left hand turn into their bedroom. It's a small house. And I said, jay, all of a sudden I had this awareness, do you want to be your father or not? But I didn't want to be like. So I walked in that room and I said, boys, you have two choices. You can go sit in your beds and stop playing, or you can simply stop fighting with each other. This is verbal. They never hit each other. Can you stop fighting with each other and keep playing? What do you want to do? They looked and so they said, what do you play? That was it. But I. I was capable of reflect and. And you know, people. Now Peter F. And others are talking about reflective awareness. They were compassionate to be reflective. And it's hard to be reflective when you don't know if you're going to drown in the next minute. You don't know what's. You know, that takes psychological resources. And so the same kid can go this way or that way, depending whether he's, you know, was born into the correct family, so to speak, or born into the unlucky family. We're back. Notion that being highly malleable, sensitive, deprocessing in this case is what. It can be a great benefit, but it can be a great cost. It's going to depend upon what the world throws at you.

[Dr. Liza Pressman (Host)]

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[Dr. Liza Pressman]

So when people think, I want to be careful in my phrasing of this, but there are some people right now who think parenting is so the sort of preciousness of parenting and the language that we use, the scripts that we have, the all of our micro choices is incredibly important. And there are some people who take it to the other extreme of just like parenting doesn't really matter.

[Jay Belsky]

Ultimately you're either a nativist, you're either for nature or you're for nurture. And there are probably kids at the

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

extremes who right for whom. That's true.

[Jay Belsky]

But. But you know, it's our dichotomous thinking, our simple thinking that leads us there. And the sad truth is that in my new book I just complicated boundaries because we used to have one nature. Next, now we have two natures. I thrown an evolution there. So we get a three variable problem with nurture and all the combinations.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

Can you talk a little bit about that?

[Jay Belsky]

We want simple answers to complex questions and that's what we've had. And it only takes you so far.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

It only takes you so far. But for the majority of people, if you had to choose, I think again

[Jay Belsky]

for the majority of people is the majority at what time in history and where are you at what resource level?

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

I actually want to talk about that and clarify it for people because I was actually giving a talk and I was explaining temperament and orchid dandelion. And that is exactly what happened to me is somebody came up to me and said that's so deterministic, it feels terrible. And I was like, I feel like it was the opposite of deterministic except

[Jay Belsky]

for for like it's somewhat deterministic. But what it determines is quite different depending upon a variety. You know, things like your temperament. What people are hearing is you're saying some kids you can't influence and therefore you mean we should just throw them away and disregard them. You said nothing about that. But again, that's their default.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

No, in fact, because of my lived experience, I'm like, I'm not so worried about. I guess I have a more positive spin even than what you're saying because I'm like, I'm not worried about my dandelion. I'm worried about my orchid. So I'm actually interested because from the beginning of this conversation you're like, so it feels like we all want an orchid. And I'm like, I, I have a much harder time with my orchid. My, like I feel much more hopeful about my, I mean I feel hopeful about both of them and I love them and we have a very lucky circumstance. But what you're saying is people are reading that and they're like, so you're saying throw out these dandelions, don't bother with interventions. And what I thought people would be saying is like, so these are these like vulnerable orchids and we have to be so careful otherwise they're not going to flourish. But that's not what people are hearing.

[Jay Belsky]

But the responses I've gotten that are knee jerk ideological are not like, oh, you're saying we can ruin kids. That doesn't seem to be what they're worried about. They're more worried about the fact that you're saying there are kids who you can't influence and by implication you shouldn't bother with them. In other words, it's like these are kids who are not going to be Nazi youth. These are kids who are not going to go into a fraternity when they say you have to, or a gang when they say you have to kill somebody to become a member, are going to do it. We have this notion, and again it's the canon that developmental plasticity is an inherent good, but it depends upon the world, right?

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

And so if you're in a negative environment, developmental plasticity is very much on that.

[Jay Belsky]

You're going to. Well, unless the world that they're going to grow up into is dangerous and shitty and it's a dog eat dog world. And so hit first, ask questions later, take advantage of others and it's all about me, me, me and mine. That's the world. And then you're going to, then adversity is and susceptibility go together to create a winner. Probably we live in civilization. Civilization is an attempt to, to avoid that world, create the greater good for the greatest many to well, at least modern civilization. And so here today, being born an asshole, a psychopath, becoming a sociopath is not a great strategy. I mean there are people who do win at it, but they're the exception, not the rule. If you're in the right side of the economic distribution and you're in the right side of the mental health of parents and in the right side of a good school district, you're much and being developmentally Plastic is an opportunity to suck the marrow from the bone. Most of us don't realize that the world we live in was not always the world. And so they don't stop and think, you know, what if I was developmentally plastic and it was a shitty world, who would I become?

[Dr. Liza Pressman (Host)]

I often wonder.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

My grandfather was 15 when the Holocaust started and my grandmother was 18. They both survived and then got married. So obviously everything worked out in terms of procreating, but not, you know, I don't think my Grandfather's still. He's 101, but he's still going. And it's all he thinks about pretty much.

[Dr. Liza Pressman (Host)]

Obviously.

[Jay Belsky]

I'm sorry, what's all he thinks about? The Holocaust.

[Dr. Liza Pressman (Host)]

The Holocaust.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

But I think about like, my grandmother went to Auschwitz. My grandfather tried to convince her to go into the forest with him and not go, you know, from the work camp to the death camp because he was like, everybody's gonna die.

[Dr. Liza Pressman (Host)]

Let's.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

I'm going with a group of people into the forest. And they both survived in very different ways. But the stories that my grandfather has of his survival, I often think, like, what temperament do you have to have to notice the strange things that he noticed about the. Like. He tells a story of being in one of those giant. Outside of one of those giant pits where they were shooting mass graves. They were shooting people to go into mass graves. And he noticed that the soil was soft and wet. So he knew that if he had. If he grabbed the particular Nazi that was within reach to him, that the soil would bring. Drag them both into. Because it would collapse. It would drag them both into the pit, and therefore they wouldn't shoot because they wouldn't want to shoot him. So then I'm like, well, that is a very sensitive person, if you're noticing.

[Jay Belsky]

But again, he could have been a cool, calm, collected operator for fixed strategy reasons. It doesn't have to be. He had.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

Right.

[Jay Belsky]

You know, I always think of myself, I said, I would have just rolled over and died.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

Me too, 100%. Like, every story he tells, I'm like, I would have been like, I'm out.

[Jay Belsky]

He was a very sturdy, strong, ridiculously confident person at some level, that he was going to take this risk to run away. And then he kept his cool about him. And, you know, when everybody else was losing theirs, as the saying goes, that could have been just who he was by nature.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

Well, so that's what I wanted to ask you is like. And I don't want to use that as an example because I certainly don't want to attribute like survival versus not in those kinds of dire circumstances, to be like anything about that individual. And so I'll be cutting that section out of this podcast.

[Jay Belsky]

I don't know why. I mean, I think these are interesting examples. I mean, what we don't know is whether I like putting it this way, whether your grandpa was born that way or made that way.

[Dr. Liza Pressman (Host)]

Right.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

Well, so this is what I wanted to ask you. Ultimately, after this conversation and your decades of thinking about this is it. We need to accept that temperament exists. And in the absence of accepting we're not like understanding humans, we're trying to like create something out of like, like, as if we're all the same things.

[Jay Belsky]

Like, right, there's. This is where we kind of don't appreciate diversity and really the evolutionary utility of diversity. You know, the first rule of evolution is there has to be variation, because only if there's variation. That's why, and that's the risk for clonal species is they're all exactly the same. So the minute temperature changes, they all crash.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

We need to appreciate the diversity instead of trying to sort of make everybody be like, we're all the same.

[Jay Belsky]

If you've gotten to our age and you think we're all the same, then, you know, I don't know what planet you're on. We're not all same. There's another hidden question here is a fact, and that is that susceptibility. When I first wrote about it, I presumed it was born, that is it was genetic. And there's good evidence or certainly strong suggestive evidence that that's true to some extent. It never occurred to me why I don't know that it could be that plasticity could be experientially induced. But that's exactly what in the way. So I thought of genetics, but not nurture for shaping plasticity. Tom Boyce was just the opposite. He wrote about experience, especially with when he got to the U shaped curve with Bruce Ellis as experience inducing plasticity, for better and for worse genetics. And we both, and the three of us, myself, Bruce and Tom wrote Hebrew, integrate these two and make it clear that these aren't mutually exclusive at all. They can both be going on and it can even be more complicated so that only on the right genetics will a certain kind of environment influence this kind of plasticity versus that kind of plasticity. So the point is that we have to appreciate it may be that experiences, at least for some kids, can influence developmental plasticity. Remember before I talked about if we could Go in and change some biological substrate, be it microbiome or physiology. Well, if you stop thinking about it, orchids and dandelions. The mechanism that Tom identified was physiological reactivity, which is basically how reactive your cortisol system is. You know, that kids who had very high reactivity under good conditions flourished and took advantage under bad conditions. They, quote, flourished too. But it was in the wrong direction, so to speak. But it was. It was experiences of high levels of support or high levels of adversity that induced greater plasticity. Now, could it do that with anybody or just people who were genetically predisposed to be susceptible to that? I'd probably err on the side of that, but I had no evidence to that effect. Work hasn't been done. So you can think, and this is why I say finish. And the second half of my book is all about this, is that plasticity can be born genetically induced, genetic, or may experientially induced. In fact, one of the real interesting things is prenatal stress, which fosters both high physiological reactivity and difficult temperament in infants also is related to greater developmental plasticity. So here we have experience prenatally doing something to the organism physiologically, temperamentally, that makes it open to incoming cues.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

So is it the environment is releasing

[Jay Belsky]

the possibilities, you know, releasing, inducing, crafting. You know, these are all fabricated verbs or gerunds to try to explicate what we're talking about, but we don't know what's going on. You know, there may be something about distress as a fetus that ramps up the reactivity system, the physiological reactivity system, which now makes you more of an open book to learn whatever is coming in. If it's good stuff, you go this way. If it's bad stuff, you go that way. And that's, you know, in fact, it's probably the case, although we don't have evidence, we have hints of it that your genes, your physiological reactivity and your temperament and even your sensitive personality. I think of them sometimes as the blindman and the elephant. Jay Belsky's holding the tail. So he's describing susceptibility some way. Tom Boyce is holding the trunk, and he's describing it a different way. Elaine Aaron is holding something else. Nobody's ever done the genetic and temperamental study which tries to measure all these things at once and seeing how high are they correlated. And I think certainly in some kids it's very highly related. So we're talking about the same beast. We're just looking at different indicators. My point is that sort of these may be all markers of the same

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

underlining dynamic which sort of is like at the beginning when I said define temperament and it was that you know it when you see it. We do know it when we see it, but there isn't a lot of,

[Jay Belsky]

well, you define temperament behaviorally like I tend to do. You can also define it physiologically. If you've got Whitman and making the measurements now, which one is it? Well, those two are probably not unrelated in many people. Who knows, in some people they may be strikingly unrelated, but at the same

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

time, ultimately, aren't we just saying that there's a certain that humans are complicated and, or complex and that some of it's going to be. We can't quite put our finger on it, but this is like you have

[Dr. Liza Pressman (Host)]

a way of being.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

And some of it is it's complicated

[Jay Belsky]

because people want simple answers to complex, to critical questions. And there aren't simple answers to critical questions unless you're an ideologue. It's genes, it's environment, it's a whole mess of stuff.

[Dr. Liza Pressman (Host)]

If you were like, I need parents

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

to know this is the most annoying question. But if you, if you were like, given the culture we're in today and the conversations that happen particularly directed at parents about kids, what do you feel like? I just want to do, do your kids have kids? Do you have grandchildren yet? Are they. Has there been anything where you just are like, this is what I really want to say to my, the parents, but I don't, but I won't. I'll bite my tongue because I certainly

[Jay Belsky]

both of my, my son's a professor of public health at Columbia and studies biological aging, which, which child adversity is part of that story, as I make clear in the book. My daughter in law is, you know, worked for the nurse family partnership and now she, and she was actually a child development commissioner in New York City and now she's doing something else. So they're both tuned in and I don't think I, I can only think of two things that I've explicitly said to one or both of them. I don't. And in fact maybe three things because something happened recently and I actually didn't say it to them. I sent to my granddaughter in an email and I've kind of stayed out of it. It's not my, I figure it's not my place and most importantly, it's not like there's something going on.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

You're super concerned in front of them.

[Jay Belsky]

What I tell my granddaughters is, you Kids are really smart. You really pick good parents.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

Well, you know, maybe that's part of it too, is given your research, maybe you feel more calm than other people about all of this.

[Jay Belsky]

When my first son, the Columbia professor, was a kid, I was beside myself with, what is he going to turn into? He was difficult, ornery, terrible baby. He was ornery. He didn't have friends. He was, you know, and the thing is, his first daughter, my granddaughter, is very much like him. And, you know, well, I'll chat with his wife and she'll say, you know, it's your fault. I said you married him, not me. Don't blame me. But, you know, and he gave me confidence, actually, that with the right degree or at least sufficient supervision and support and not demeaning and humiliating and threatening and whatever, that he'd get to a place and he'd mature into the person he's become now. He still can be somewhat overbearing like his father. He can talk too much like his father, but he's. But I. But the worries I had as a parent, in some ways, you know, I say this facetiously, but partly wasted, you know. You know, looking back, I sort of. If I, If I would have known then what I know now, I probably would have thought about things different, at least I hope so.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

Well, that, that's kind of what I wanted to. To know, because I think that's very valuable for people to hear, which is this doesn't take away the sort of rite of passage of being a very attentive, worried parent. But the question is more like in looking back, is it when you zoom out and you know what, you know, with the assumption that you were relatively

[Jay Belsky]

sensitive and thoughtful, love your kids and take care of them as you think is right and appropriate, and not because of what it's going to do down the developmental road, but what it's doing here and now. And that doesn't mean make their life easy and everything, you know, you're not going to. When your child comes home and complains about the teacher, you know, my attitude is you don't say, oh, that's this lousy teacher. You know, you say what the child doesn't want to hear, which is that teacher works hard. It's a job that doesn't get enough respect. And in this house, except in severe conditions, the teacher is always right. So if you want to complain about the teacher, I'm not the person to listen to it because I don't think that's appropriate for me to do anything other than to Stand behind the teacher, and if that upsets you and disappoints you, then let it. Okay. In other words, I'm not going to just coddle him. I'm not going to. But. But. But there. You know, you could say what I'm doing is, you know, preparing the child for tomorrow, but I'm not. I'm telling you about today. I'm telling you about who I think teachers are and what they deserve in terms of respect today.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

And your values, by the way. I mean, that's.

[Jay Belsky]

And. And so live your values. Hopefully they're not, you know, harsh. Live your values and worry less about tomorrow because you don't know what world he or she's going to live in. I think. I think I'm a believer that the aspiration should be to be sensitive, to take into consideration who your child is, what are his or her characteristics, how does that interact with your values and your proclivities and your preferences and know. So you won't treat two kids exactly the same way. And one of them might say, that's not fair. And then you can say, well, that's my favorite. When the other kid says, that's not fair. You know, my father did. But the point is that I think it's this obsession with tomorrow that we developmentalists have oversold and that the culture has overbought.

[Dr. Liza Pressman]

Yeah. Please note that this episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services. Individuals on the show may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to in this episode.