Parents or Parenting: What Makes Us Who We Are?

A friend, now nearing sixty like me, has had a guilt-laden conscience for decades. Her daughter who is a successful professional, married, and in a well-paid job, blames her mother for what she perceives as failings in her nature: fastidious personal habits, intolerance for views of others, inability to trust friends, capricious mood swings, and even her obsession with eating healthy food. Her main grouse – reinforced by similar opinion of a psychotherapist she often visits – is that my friend did not devote enough time to her when she was young, as she valued her job more. The friend cannot rid herself of the remorse - Were it not for her demanding job, would her daughter have grown into a happier, more contended, and a self-assured person?

Children spawn a new life for their parents. Birth of a child is an epochal moment in their lives. Young child is dependent on the parent for all her needs for a long time, stretching for years, perhaps the longest in the biological world. It is then reasonable to presume that this prodigal love and care, painstakingly spent on your child would, enormously and decisively, affect their natures.

Nature-nurture controversy is an old but an ever-green dispute in developmental psychology – what makes us who we are? Is it Nature, i.e., the genes we inherit from our parents or nurture, i.e., influence of the environment that shelters us in our growing-years? This controversy plays most fiercely on the battlefield of childhood. Effects of genes that children inherit from their parents are conspicuous in their physical appearance. It appears inarguable that the family environment, where a child spends most of her time, will significantly influence her future personality. 

Sigmund Freud gave birth to the nurture assumption of human nature. Parents of opposite sex caused unavoidable and unmitigable havoc in the lives of their children, scarring their future natures. Role of nurture was strengthened by the behaviourists like John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner. All human behaviour, they professed, was merely the conditioned or reinforced response to childhood influences. Watson’s oft-quoted statement aptly illustrates this extreme view:

"Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors." 

My mother was an avid reader. I attribute my love of books to her. I am sure that my father’s frugal habits have given me a steady dislike for wasteful living. I often think of my simple uncluttered house and thank my mother silently because of whom I have a penchant for clean, ordered surroundings. When my children suffer long anguished moments due to seemingly incurable circumstances and their less than adequate response to these, I grieve inconsolably, as baleful doubts about my shortcomings in their upbringing shroud my mind.

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Behavioural geneticists, in the last few decades, have made some astonishing discoveries on the development of our nature. I recently read three books concerning this realm. Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist, devotes a chapter on children in his book on human nature, Blank Slate. Judith Rich Harris’s The Nurture Assumption and Robert Plomin’s Blueprint are on the development of children’s personality. Harris is an unaffiliated scholar and Plomin is a leading behavioural geneticist.

Discovery of the structure of DNA, ‘Secret of life’, by James D. Watson and Francis Crick in 1953 started the genomic revolution in biological sciences. Genes found their way into psychology, till now dominated by the study of the environment. These discoveries shattered the ground beneath behaviourism.

Behavioural genetics informs that of all the known factors that influence our nature, heredity has the most consistent effect. Genes make us who we are: introverted or extraverted; open to new experience or conservative; careful and diligent or impetuous; agreeable in company or unpleasant; prone to negative emotions of anxiety and fear or stoic. Genes influence our cognitive abilities like verbal, mathematical, and general intelligence.

Heritability describes how much of the difference between individuals in a population is because of the differences in their genes. Seventy percent heritability of weight does not mean that in an individual seventy percent of weight is due to genes and thirty percent due to environment. It only implies that in a population seventy percent of the variability in individual weights is attributable to heredity and thirty percent to the environment.

Children invariably turn out like their parents in many respects. This is because they inherit fifty percent of their genes from each parent. Research reveals that genes are responsible for about fifty percent variability in human nature. Environment accounts for the rest. Is this the family environment which is largely dependent on parenting? 

Role of parenting in our natures, it was found in study after study, is zilch, zero, nil. This is backed by huge and impeccable research. Numerous studies in psychology, many running for decades, were unanimous in their conclusion; Family environment plays no role in shaping our natures. 

If effects of genes are to be segregated from those of family environment, one must compare groups of individuals who differ in only one of these influences while sharing the other. Twin and adoption studies were godsend for behavioural geneticists. Most of this research has been done in the Scandinavian countries where the government maintains diligent and colossal data-bases on its citizens employing validated measuring instruments known to psychology.

Identical twins share one hundred percent of their genes. Fraternal twins, like siblings born apart, share only fifty percent. 

Identical twins separated at birth and reared in different families are as alike as identical twins who grew up together in the same home. They are not only similar in weight and height, but also in their like or dislike of conservative or liberal form of government, fervour for religion, penchant for adventure sports. They even share many idiosyncrasies; dip buttered toast in tea, giggle incessantly, flush toilets before and after use, enjoy sneezing in elevators to startle people. Clearly genes they share have left wider and deeper marks on their personalities than the family environment which was different for them.

Identical twins reared in one home are more alike than fraternal twins also brought up under one roof. If nurture had a larger role in moulding nature, both should be as similar, because each pair shared the same family while differing only in the proportion of shared genes.

Adopted and the biological children growing together in one family are no more similar than strangers. Adopted children do not resemble their environmental parents, i.e., adopted parents, but their biological parents from whom they were separated at birth.

It was believed that parents who cuddle and coo their children often encourage them to grow into warm-hearted loving adults. Parents who read to their kids were thought to inculcate reading habits in them. These assertions disregarded the effects of heredity. Affectionate parents produce friendly children, adults fond of reading produce kids who love books. 

Twin and adoption studies, controlled for the effects of family and of genes, revealed an astonishing fact. Genes can manufacture the environment that a person seems to prefer: a child who is lovable will be mollycoddled more; a reclusive child would discourage attempts at indulgence; a child who likes reading would find such an atmosphere even in a house where none else reads. Instead of parenting affecting a child's behaviour, it seems the genes of the child mould the parenting it begets.

People vary in their response to stressful life events like breakdown of relationships, death of a close relative, major trauma, or financial difficulties. Middle-aged twins, both identical and fraternal, reared together or separated at birth, were studied in Sweden, for response to such accidents in life. Identical twins were twice as similar as fraternal twins on their scores on the measure of stressful events. Personality of an individual decides how stressful he finds an event in life and her response to it. It was surprising to find that even for stressful life events, which were assumed to be purely environmental in origin, a third of variance was due to heredity.

Intelligence is a personality trait that is different from others in being influenced by the shared environment of the family. Adoptive siblings – who do not share parents and consequently, genes – correlated twenty five percent for intelligence when tested at the age of eight. This shows the influence of family environment. But same kids tested after ten years had zero percent correlation for intelligence. Heritability of intelligence is strange. It increases with age. Late in life it is eighty percent; with passing time we resemble our parents more.

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These results do not imply that there is a divorce gene, an anxiety gene, or a gene for intelligence. Each personality trait is coded by hundreds, perhaps thousands of genes. Each gene codes for many functions. Effect of a gene on a trait may be less than a percent. It is impossible to look for these individual genes in a person. Genome analysis has become much more accessible now. In metanalysis (statistical analysis of the results of several separate but similar experiments) genomes of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of individuals with a particular behavioural trait can be analysed and a polygenic score for the trait arrived at. From these a correlation between the trait and the polygenic score of an individual with the trait can be discovered.

Results of genetic studies in behaviour are severely criticised for being deterministic. Critics say that they make humans slaves of their DNA. Genes were known to affect our bodies. Dualists, who believe that mind is separate from body, are loath to see genes trespass into the realm of a transcendental mind. If genes affect nature, would not it mean that man has no control over the condition of his life? Wouldn’t it make free-will superfluous?

These are unsound fears. Genes do not guarantee a behavioural trait in an individual. They are not a martinet forcing the bodies to behave in a particular fashion. Their effects are only a probability, a likelihood. Heritability is a statistical concept. In a particular individual the trait, say obesity, may entirely be due to environmental factors. And even if genes’ role in it was a certain probability, an individual can still reduce her weight by sticking to a healthy diet and active lifestyle. 

Genes are not the prophetic words of fate written in an indelible ink. Their role in the variation of personality traits is only about fifty percent. Environment accounts for the remaining fifty. We never dread the determinism of the environment. Is this because of the belief that unlike genes, the environment can be altered to produce a desirable personality? Perhaps, this gives us solace; In an inequitable world we gain a momentary supremacy over an inscrutable fate.

Twin studies point towards the cause of similar personality between identical twins. But personalities of twins also differ much. What explains this difference? Environment was the natural cause of this variance. But the family environment is shared by the twins and hence it cannot be the cause of differences in their personality. 

Robert Plomin coined the term non-shared environment for this mysterious environment which makes the identical twins growing in the same family different. It is responsible for fifty percent of the variance in personality traits among people. But what it is, is not known. It acts non-systematically and hence cannot be studied. 

Non-shared environment almost certainly does not comprise the peer group of a child. It may be the chance encounters that make each life an enigma: a quirk of headmistress’ mood on the day of admission assigns you the section where the class-bully makes your school experience a hell for years; in the qualifying exam one finds a clutch of questions on topics she has read recently; you come down with fever and cannot attend the interview for the job you have coveted and you now take the second available position in a field that proves the calling of your life. Even in the womb, two identical foetuses do not get the same non-genetic environment: one corners a slightly larger share of blood flow to the uterus and has a different growth of brain; a chance cosmic radiation mutates a minute stretch of DNA; A neuron deviates a millionth of a millimetre and synapses differently. This is speculative reasoning, but for now, psychologists can only speculate about the non-shared environment that is not known and hence does not lend itself for research. 

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Interestingly, a non-shared environment seems to offer fate an opening in our lives. Judith Rich Harris quotes a woman in a remote village in India, who seems to have got it right. When asked what kind of man she hoped her child would grow into she replied, ‘it is in his fate, no matter what I want’.

It is not easy to look upon fate with such forbearance when it strips you of any power in moulding your child’s future. Steven Pinker quotes a mother who said to the Chicago Tribune, ‘I hope to God this is not true. The thought that all this love that I am pouring into him counts for nothing is too terrible to contemplate’. 

Do behavioural geneticists mean parents have no hand in the way their child turns out as an adult? Genetic research done across continents speaks unanimously. Parents, through the genes they pass on to their progeny have the largest share of influence, around fifty percent, on the personalities of their children. Parenting, the shared environment of the family, has none. 

Caring for your progeny, although often tiring, is also the most satisfying experience in life. One watches with amazement the changing personality of the child as it blossoms. Does the pleasure wane because one has no control over this process? On the contrary, by freeing parents of the guilt they may harbour for being responsible for the flaws in their child's personality, it will permit them to wholeheartedly enjoy the biological imperative of parenting. 

Is it then immaterial how we treat our children? No, it is not. We treat our children well because we love them so completely – not because they are a clod of putty to be shaped by the tinkering of our care. There is no sorrow more distressful than to be deprived of the love and care of parents in our childhoods. As Harris says, ‘We may not hold their tomorrows in our hands but we surely hold their todays, and we have the power to make their todays very miserable.’ It is grossly immoral to be cruel and indifferent to a child who is so abysmally weaker and completely dependent on us for its every want.

It is odious to suggest that we love our child because our love will make her a better human. Parental love is unconditional. We do not care deeply for our spouse or our friends, because the love we pour into the relationship will make them a better person. We love them because of the person they are.  The relation that grows from this mutual fondness nourishes our soul. Parental love fosters a most profound relationship humans can access in life. 

If not for anything else, the desire to nurse ineffaceable memories of this relationship in the child, must be a sufficient reason to be kind to your children. Long after parents have forgotten the hardships and deprivations they willingly bore for their children, children fondly remember, often with moist eyes, the selfless love, and willing sacrifices of their parents. Equally, it is impossible, even in one's adult life, not to feel indignant when reminded of the neglect and cruelty of a parent.

I read Kahlil Gibran many decades ago and immensely liked his musings on children. Harris quotes Gibran in the epigraph to her book. After reading the genesis of human nature, I better appreciate the poem. The bard, it seems, understood the essence of parenting.

     Your children are not your children.

     They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

     They come through you but not from you,

     And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

     You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

     For they have their own thoughts.

     You may house their bodies but not their souls,

     For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in      your dreams.

     You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

     For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.