An Example of Yourself

According to the parenting experts I consulted, in modeling as in much else in life, timing and flexibility are key.

William Coleman, a professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, confirms modeling's importance, noting that from the very beginning, children pick up cues from the way we treat our spouses, how we resolve differences, and how we express our anger and other feelings.

"People think that kids are balls of putty sitting in their high chair," Coleman says. "But a child is observing a parent. They read us, our facial expressions, and learn 'this is how you do it.' "

The problem? "Much of our modeling has been accomplished by [the time the child is] age 3 to 6." After that, he suggests, "sometimes modeling only goes so far."

To encourage a kid to follow your lead in getting regular exercise, for instance, Coleman says you might have to take authoritative action: "Remove some distractions, modify the homework schedule -- make the parents be the heavies. Maybe you say there will be no more TV time, and bedtime's at 9 o'clock" if the child refuses to exercise, but tell them they can get TV back if they get off their duffs and get moving.

Sounds reasonable. Then I talked to Judith Rich Harris, the controversial author of "The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do" (Free Press, 1999) and "No Two Alike" (W.W. Norton, 2006) who has made a career of insisting that parents have far less power than peers and genetics over kids' behaviors.

In an e-mail, Harris notes that "if a child went around actually behaving like an adult, he or she would be seen as quite peculiar. . . . The child's job is to figure out what kind of person he or she is -- the social category [for example, 'preteen' or 'teenager'] he or she belongs in -- and then figure out how that kind of person is expected to behave."

There are behaviors that parents can successfully model, Harris says, noting that these include methods of cooking and cleaning, practicing a particular religion, how to throw a baseball, or how to play the piano.

For the most part, though, Harris is convinced that genetics trumps parenting. She points to studies showing that "on average, adult adoptees resemble their biological parents in fatness or thinness. They do not resemble their adoptive parents or adoptive siblings at all. Even though (biologically unrelated) adoptive siblings are reared in the same home, and exposed to the same parental 'models,' they are no more alike in fatness or thinness than two people picked at random," she writes.

Harris adds that studies involving adoptees or twins that control for the effects of genes "have shown pretty conclusively that the home environment -- which includes the example set by the parents -- has no long-term effects on children's eating behavior. Even young children who don't go out much, and who eat all their meals with their parents, are unwilling to eat foods -- broccoli, for instance -- that they see their parents eating. Attempts to persuade them to try it fall on deaf ears."

So what's a parent to do? Maybe step aside and let someone else do the modeling.

Harris says that in 1987, researcher Leann Birch discovered that "if you want your child to try a disliked food, the best way to do it is to put the child at a table with a bunch of other kids who do like that food, and serve it to all of them!" (Either your broccoli-hating kid will follow the broccoli-lovers' lead -- or the other way around.)