Opinion: Finding the Right Parenting Style Is More an Art Than a Science

Call it the Rosie O'Donnell Effect.

Remember when she started her family? She suddenly became an expert on parenting. She dispensed her maternal wisdom everywhere, including an online advice column. As with all things Rosie O'Donnell, it got to be a bit much.

Judge her gently. She was a new mother and reeling from a flood of insights and epiphanies that, surely, must apply to everyone. She just wanted to share.

She eventually eased up. Perhaps she simply lost her audience. However, I prefer to think (or hope) that one of her epiphanies was that she is not the cosmos. One size does not fit all. What is true for one person is not true for everyone else.

I wish more people learned that lesson, especially as it relates to parenting.

That wish resurfaced as I read yet another pointless debate about nature versus nurture. Two writers for the Wall Street Journal battled it out like Randolph and Mortimer Duke from the movie "Trading Places." (I wonder which one of them won the dollar bill.)

Bryan Caplan points to research that indicates twins' personalities and intellects evolve regardless of the influence of their parents. Parents, therefore, fuss too much about how their children will turn out. Their fates are really written in the stars -- or at least their genes.

He suggests -- reducing children to a commodity like pickled pigs feet -- that parents have more children rather than investing too much mental energy and anguish on just one or two.

His colleague, Will Wilkinson, cries poppycock. However, he similarly reduces children to consumer goods.

"Suppose I've got my eye on a certain high-definition television set," Wilkinson writes.

Charming. I prefer to think of my son as a lawnmower, but please continue.

"I think it costs $1,000, which is exactly what I've got to spend," he obligingly continues. "Then I discover it's on sale for $900. Should I buy two? Three? Should I take the hundred bucks I saved and put it toward more TVs?"

You want to know what I think? If so, then I think you care too much about what I think. Have as many kids as you want. It's no skin off my nose.

Nature Boy has a point. Kids are remarkably determined to be who they are going to be regardless of what their parents say or do. However, you can't tell me Superman would still be fighting for truth, justice and the American way if he was raised by Lex Luthor instead of Ma and Pa Kent.

Reality, as always, lies somewhere in the middle. If having kids has given me anything vaguely resembling a universal insight, it's that children are not high-definition television sets or emotional investment opportunities.

Whether or you have two children or 12, you are going to fret over them constantly. All the scientific research isn't going to calm you down. How many kids you have and how you raise them (provided they're not emotionally or physically abused) are your decisions.

Nature or nurture? Does it really matter? Raise your kids -- no matter how many -- as best as you can. Maybe my kids' destinies are all rolled up in neat little genetic packages, but if you don't mind, I'm still going to invest way too many emotions in what becomes of them. I will also play Pa Kent and try to teach them right from wrong.

It may not be very scientific, but I know parenting is more an art than a science. My father told me so.