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It may sound folksy, but it’s backed by a ton of child development research.
Warren Buffett is (rightfully) best known as one of the best investors to have ever lived. But he has not done too badly as a parent either.
His three kids are remarkably scandal- and excess-free philanthropists who have publicly mocked the idea of getting into a Succession-style inheritance battle.
“We grew up expecting nothing, to be honest,” Howard Buffett said in an interview. “It’s like watching the show Dallas or something, but we don’t have any of that drama.”
I don’t have any private knowledge here. But from what I can tell from the media, all three seem to be reasonably well adjusted and thriving. So what’s Warren Buffett’s secret to steering his kids away from common rich kid pathologies and into becoming standup citizens?
Using his trademark folksy style, the 95-year-old Berkshire Hathaway chairman recently credited his own parents with showing him the way, boiling the wisdom he learned from them to just one sentence. His prescription might sound simple, but it actually captures an essential, research-backed truth about how to parent kind, secure, emotionally intelligent kids.
Warren Buffett’s rebellious teen years
In a recent interview with CNBC Buffett spoke about his own youthful indiscretions and how his father handled them. Back then he often behaved like “a jerk,” he confessed. But his father, a stockbroker and Republican congressman, wasn’t too bothered.
“My dad was always very forgiving of my misbehavior,” Buffett explained. “He’d just say, ‘I know you can do better.'” This quiet approach was “very powerful stuff,” Buffett continued, because he knew his father was right, both about his shortcomings and his potential to improve.
The Buffett family patriarch sounds like a cool and collected parent. But young Warren Buffett drew a deeper lesson from his father’s quiet confidence that his son would eventually figure out how to do the right thing.
“If you want to have good children, be a good parent,” Buffett advised, summing up his own parenting approach. “You don’t give them lectures about doing bad things when you’re doing the bad things, and they’re actually just acting like teenagers.”
If kids don’t witness hypocrisy in their parents, this thinking goes, chances are excellent they’ll grow up to adopt their parents’ values without too much hectoring and yelling.
Family values
“If you want to have good children, be a good parent,” is incredibly simple advice. It would be easy enough to dismiss this sentence as a tautology along the lines of “If you want to win at tennis, become a good tennis player.” But science suggests Buffett’s advice isn’t just the bland interview filler it might first appear to be.
When researchers wanted to investigate the long-term effects of various parenting styles, they knew they’d have to be patient. After all, none of us find out how we’ve done at raising an adult for at least 18 years. So in 1998, a group of researchers recruited a group of 184 teens and followed them closely for 15 years, documenting not just how they interacted with their own parents but how they behaved when they became parents too.
The results were published recently in the journal Child Development. They would come as no surprise to either of the Buffett family patriarchs: empathy, decency, and emotional intelligence are contagious across generations. When parents exhibit these values and skills themselves, their kids tend to embody them. And when it comes time for their adult children to become parents, they continue to pass down this parenting style.
“Adults want teens to develop good social skills and moral character, but simply telling them to be kind doesn’t always work. Our findings suggest that if parents hope to raise empathic teens, it may be helpful to give them first-hand experiences of being understood and supported,” two of the study authors wrote on The Conversation.
To instill EQ, exhibit EQ
Parents in the Buffett family seem confident that if they visibly live by their values, their kids—however many knuckleheaded things they do as teens—will eventually understand what’s important in life. This science, along with the testimony of family therapists, suggests they’re on to something.
Adopting the Warren Buffett approach to parenting might save you a lot of stress and anxiety. It should help you raise a non-brat too. But other research also has good news for parents who are worried not just about emotional well-being but also worldly success.
You might fret that being too empathetic with your child might make them soft. Don’t you need to push your kids hard if you want them to get ahead in a tough world? You might think so, but Warren Buffett’s example suggests not. So does another, even longer-running, study on the importance of emotional skills for objective measures of success.
The Dunedin study in New Zealand tracked 1,000 people for more than 40 years. It found that lots of things matter for how kids do in life, from a strong work ethic to academic performance. But one factor mattered more than all the others.
Psychologist Daniel Goleman summed up the results this way: “What they found was that, in their 30s, the strongest predictor of financial success was cognitive control—stronger than IQ and stronger than the wealth of the family they grew up in. So how well you do in your life depends on your levels of cognitive control.”
Cognitive control is a fancy way of saying the ability to understand your emotions and choose wisely how to respond to them. Those are just the kind of skills that kids seem to learn best by seeing their parents model them.
How to teach your kids to be good, Warren Buffett style
So go to Warren Buffett for business advice. But don’t ignore what he has to say about raising successful, decent humans either. His folksy advice might not sound flashy, but it actually has a lot of credible science behind it.
If you look at the research, it’s clear one of the best ways you can teach your kids to be good is to quietly go about your life behaving well. Data and the world’s best investor both say they will notice and eventually follow your example.
This post originally appeared at inc.com.
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