Home / Nature, Nurture, and Learning (March 2026)

I used to assume the nature vs nurture debate could be answered with a ratio, like we are 60% a product of genetics and 40% a product of environment. Since having a kid, I'm not sure it's quite that simple.

The ability to learn seems really important. Just as some kids are predisposed to be naturally more athletic, extroverted or whatever, it seems plausable that some of us are naturally better learners. Similarly, learning how to learn is clearly possible, too. For example, cultivating a growth mindset can help you become a better learner.

This raises an interesting question. If someone is born as a great learner and they adapt extremely fast, is their personality a result of nature or nurture? You could argue it's more nature because the predisposition to learn was inhereted, but you could also argue it's more nurture because they learned, in part, from their environment.

Since having a kid I've come to believe parenting is less about teaching kids the exact right things and more about teaching them how to larn, including how to learn what to care about in the first place. This isn't to say I don't think we should teach kids right vs wrong and basic skills, but on a spectrum of kids being a ball of clay to mold vs a seedling to nurture, I err a little more toward the latter.

This is a relief, because the world is changing so fast that I don't know how anyone feels confident in what to teach their kids, beyond the fundamental values found in most cultures, like trying to instill honesty, empathy, hard work and so on, along with the basic skills we all need to survive. However, steering your kid toward, say, computer science because you believe software will be a great career in 15 years, feels like a fool's errand.

Assuming learning how to learn is really important to a kid's development, especially in a rapidly changing world, how do we learn, exactly? I'm not sure and I'm excited to dive into the research on this, but I've noticed a few things just by observing our kid over two years.

It seems like mimesis, emotions, and short memory all contribute to learning. Kids learn more from how you and others behave than what you say, avoiding negative emotions and seeking positive ones provides fuel for learning new things, and being somewhat forgetful, especially of small negative emotions that result from something like falling down, seem to help kids persevere through failure.

If it's true that mimesis, emotions and short memory all contribute to learning, it helps explain some parenting cliches. For example, how important it is to set a good example yourself and learn how to respond to your kid's negative emotions in a healthy way, which requires a difficult balance of not giving in to negative emotions while not making your kid feel like it's bad to have them.

Thinking more about learning has also made me view certain traits more positively in kids. For example, when our kid throws a tantrum, I try to remind myself that having strong negative emotions can be incredible fuel for learning, instead of thinking, "why won't he stop crying!"

As an adult, even though I still feel 16 at heart (my wife thinks I'm 16 in reality), I'm attempting to undo some of traits that helped me learn as a kid. For example, I try to be an independent thinker and less reactive to emotions.

Memory, in particular, is interesting, because it seems like evolution designed it to adapt with learning. When we're born and know nothing and we remember very little, perhaps because we mostly make mistakes from an evolutionary perspective, but the more we learn the better our memory gets, enabling our learning to become more granular. Then our memory starts declining as we get old, possibly to help adapt as our skills degrade.

I'm not sure if any of this is proven to be true or not, but it's certainly poetic. One cool byproduct of the whole AI thing is that there are a lot more smart people focused on figuring out how to teach computers how to learn, which could help us better understand us humans. It'll be fun to see what we learn about learing.