Raising children --parents do matter.

• Position: Your Life - Brief Article

In recent years, many people have debated the role of parents and what it takes to raise successful children. Some have maintained that parents have little power to determine the sort of adults their offspring become, adding it's what kids experience outside the home--in the company of their peers--that matters most. However, researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia have proposed a theory which argues that soccer moms and Little League dads do matter in determining how successful a child will become.

According to David Geary, professor of psychological sciences, and Mark Flinn, associate professor of anthropology, human parental behavior serves a complex evolutionary function that is linked to other unique human characteristics, including a large brain, sexuality, and a long childhood. Their social competition theory explains how these characteristics work together to define the purpose--and importance--of parenting better.

"Once humans gained ecological dominance over other species, they became their own greatest competitors," Flinn points out. "To gain advantage, humans formed kin-based social groups that competed against others, initiating a coalitionary arms race. Competition among and within groups required humans to be thinkers, involving deception and counterdeception. Thus, the brain became a tool to solve social problems, and greater intelligence was a selected evolutionary trait."

In order for children to gain the intelligence needed to compete, though, humans needed a longer developmental period to allow the brain time to become more sophisticated and the individual to gain experience. Geary and Flinn propose that...