The Latest Parenting Debate : Will taking the kids to museums, reading Shakespeare and drilling math give them something nature didn’t? One researcher says ‘ordinary parents’ may be good enough.

Disneyland was never a feature of Mary Ann Brittenham’s family vacations. She took her children to Europe from an early age. Instead of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, they visited Spanish churches and talked about the Christian and Moorish influences.

As young teen-agers, the Brittenham children went to summer camp in France. Back home in New York City, they grew up intimate with the insides of the city’s museums. On spring vacations, they milked cows and watched hog sales as paying guests on a rural Pennsylvania farm.

“We don’t regret anything we ever did in order to get them exposed to enriching things,” Brittenham said recently. “I’m convinced that the more you do to help them along, the better off they are.”

But that common conviction has now surfaced at the center of a bitter debate over how much impact parenting actually has on children--whether, say, museum attendance, vocabulary drills or even bedtime reading leave any mark on a child’s intelligence, personality and interests.

University of Virginia psychology professor Sandra Scarr, a top figure in child development, fired the first shot, saying in a major speech to colleagues that “good enough, ordinary parents probably have the same effect on their children’s development as culturally defined super-parents.”

On the other side are researchers, including several at UC Berkeley, who believe that so-called parenting styles profoundly influence how children come to think and behave. The researchers insist that what normal parents do or fail to do crucially affects their children’s development.

“I believe that Scarr has done all children, their parents and her fellow developmental professionals a major disservice,” said Jacquelyne Faye Jackson, an African American researcher who fears that Scarr’s theory represents a particular threat to lower-income blacks.

Jackson and others worry about the political implications of Scarr’s thinking: If people believe that genetics, rather than upbringing, dictate a child’s potential, they might see no reason to spend money on programs such as Head Start aimed at compensating for some of the damage done by poverty.

The battle has grown unusually bitter, pitting believers in the power of socialization against believers in the power of genes. Each side has impugned the other’s motives; some observers say it seems that civil discussion is barely possible anymore.

“You have a scientific debate and you have a social and political debate,” said Cynthia Garcia Coll, a psychologist at Wellesley College. “They’re both informing each other, back and forth. When do you stop science and start politics?”

This new version of the nature-nurture debate broke out two years ago at a hotel in Seattle at the biennial meeting of the 4,000-member Society for Research in Child Development. In a specialty thick with jargon, Scarr’s presidential address was striking for its quotability.

“Feeding a well-nourished but short child more and more will not give him the stature of a basketball player,” Scarr told the group. “Feeding a below-average intellect more and more information will not make her brilliant.”

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It was not the first time Scarr had aired her views on genes; she has done work in the field for years. But the University of Washington advertised the speech in a press release, and some members of the society thought the ideas acquired new respectability in the context of a presidential speech.

“This is not to say that parents may not have effects on children’s self-esteem, motivation, ambitiousness and other important characteristics,” Scarr added. “It is to say that parental differences in rearing styles, social class and income have small effects on the measurable differences in intelligence, interests and personality among their children.”

The uproar was immediate. People who had spent years tracing the similarities within families to parental influence took Scarr’s address as a frontal attack. Others found in her conclusions echoes of controversial notions tying genes to racial differences in IQ.

“The whole minority membership felt completely alienated,” said Garcia Coll, who headed the society’s ethnic and minority participation committee. They wondered, she said, “How can anyone make a statement without considering the possible political implications?”

Insult followed injury last year when the society published the speech in its journal, Child Development, without any critical commentary or peer review. Scarr’s critics mobilized and prepared half a dozen papers in response, two of which appeared in the bimonthly journal’s October issue.

One came from Diana Baumrind of UC Berkeley, who has spent nearly 30 years studying the effects of different parenting styles on children. From her own research and that of others, she concludes there is ample evidence that “better than ‘good enough’ parenting optimizes development.”

In one striking example, she cites research on children with Down syndrome. When the children were engaged in a series of learning activities, in the context of a supportive relationship, some mastered new tasks “so that their performance approaches normal,” Baumrind said.

Parents influence their children’s development in such areas as personality, learning and social behavior, Baumrind insists. And certain parenting styles produce more competent children. Talking about feelings within the family, for example, can affect a child’s later social behavior and ability to recognize emotions.

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Although Baumrind says she, like Scarr, does not want parents unfairly blamed for problems beyond their control, she contends that parents who believe in their own effectiveness do a better job of parenting.

The other published response comes from Jackson, who believes Scarr wrongly implies that interventions such as Head Start are futile for children who are not extremely disadvantaged. Jackson says recent research shows the opposite--that interventions can raise IQs in such cases.

Jackson also challenges the research methods that led Scarr to her conclusions--specifically, the studies of twins and adoptive siblings that are used to estimate the relative impact of genes and environment on behavior. Many critics of so-called behavioral genetics are skeptical about that approach.

“People throw out a lot of information about sophisticated research methods and would have you believe that these are unquestionable methods,” she said in an interview. “My point is they’re very definitely questionable, both on the statistical side and the research design side.”

As Scarr sees it, children “construct their own reality” prompted in large part by inborn genetic cues. Innately cheerful infants, for example, who evoke warm reactions from adults, are likely to come to view the social world as a source of positive reinforcement. Fussy or irritable infants, evoking cooler reactions, may grow up to be less sociable.

Beyond infancy, children decide “what to attend to and what to ignore,” Scarr believes. Given a varied environment, they gravitate toward academic subjects, hobbies or jobs that fit their innate talents and personality.

“Children’s outcomes do not depend on whether parents take children to the ballgame or to a museum,” says Scarr, but on genes, exposure to a range of opportunities to choose from (as opposed to forced programming), and the kind of environment that allows them to “become themselves.”

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Those principles do not apply, however, to the extremely disadvantaged.

“For (them), making their environments richer and varied and more full of opportunities is a better thing,” Scarr said in a telephone interview from Sweden, where she is currently teaching. “What I am saying applies to children from working-class to upper-middle-class homes.”

Asked for examples of parental activities that make little or no difference, Scarr cited that most sacrosanct of parental duties, reading. She insisted that children learn literacy whether their parents read to them or not, and that difficulties with reading often have a genetic cause.

“In our culture, parents believe they have to work very hard at training children in school readiness,” she said. “They teach them numbers, colors, letters. They feel they have to provide intense instruction. If you look internationally, it’s clearly not the case.”

Scarr was equally skeptical about what might be gained by, say, taking a small child to Europe--unless the trip centered on activities that children like. She said children who are appreciated learn simply by being around adults--on a walk in the woods, to the harbor, to a construction site.

Parents, asked about the controversy, had mixed reactions.

Ellen Zimmerman is a former high-school English teacher raising two children, ages 10 and 4, in New York City. She is convinced that parents and schools shape children’s behavior and interests, but she also believes that contemporary parents could learn a thing or two from Scarr.

“I think that it could be a beneficial message, if taken the right way, to parents who think they have to stand on their heads and be with their kids every second,” she said. “I worry about parents who neglect their own interests thinking they have to be with their children.

“But I also worry about those who shunt their kids off to baby-sitters all the time,” she added. “I would like parents to be more relaxed, but I would like them to still be very much parents.”

Faye Snyder, a parent and founder of the Institute for Professional Parenting in Sherman Oaks, said her view differs somewhat from those of both Scarr and her critics. She believes that contemporary children suffer from too little interaction with their parents as well as too much pressure to achieve.

“What difference does it make if they recognize a picture of Van Gogh or Abraham Lincoln?” she said of younger children. “What a 5-year-old needs to be learning is what dirt tastes like and the properties of a ball when it bounces and that you can’t put salt on a butterfly.”

A similar reaction came from Elizabeth Memel, who works with Los Angeles families teaching a “non-intrusive” approach to parenting called Resources for Infant Educarers. A parent herself, Memel is critical of many activities for young children, such as gym classes and early use of computers.

Memel said she was inclined to agree with Scarr: A hands-off approach, she said, allows children to develop their own identities. It is the relationship between parent and child, she said, that is crucial in giving the child a sense of security and trust in the world.

Scarr’s critics concede that genes play a role in development. But they believe that Scarr exaggerates their influence and that she fails to recognize how few children grow up in environments in which they can flourish.

“We don’t deny variations in genetic potential,” said Urie Bronfenbrenner, a psychologist at Cornell University and one of the founders of Head Start. “But I’m very concerned that the kinds of environments that allow it to function effectively are decreasing.”

“My own personal opinion is that Scarr’s position overstates the genetics,” said John W. Hagen, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan and executive officer of the Society for Research in Child Development. “It’s the interplay of the two working together that come up with the unique characteristics of the child. You have to look at many facets--psychological, socioeconomic, cultural.”