How alike are dad and mom and youngsters? Fairly, proper? Absolutely all of us play that sport. I, for instance, am aggressive like my dad (however with out a shred of his vitality); my sister bought my mom’s compassion and I bought her lust for crispy potato merchandise and staying in mattress. My husband and his mum, in the meantime, share a energetic debating type (I’m selecting my phrases fastidiously); it’s why their conversations get so … animated.
It’s an assumption that transcends geography: there are “the apple doesn’t fall removed from the tree” equivalents worldwide – largely tree-related, though I just like the Portuguese “a fish’s youngster is aware of how you can swim”.
And it’s strengthened culturally. Looking for “like father, like son” throws up Mick Lynch’s son on a picket line and Cristiano Ronaldo’s son specializing in a soccer match reasonably than chatting as proof of their related personalities. (Predictably, trying up “like mom, like daughter” throws up way more matching bikinis.) You don’t even must weigh up nature versus nurture: some fuzzy mixture of the 2 should make us a bit alike, certainly? It feels true, intuitively.
The factor is, it’s not. This isn’t information: psychologists have identified for ages that folks and kids don’t notably share the “massive 5” character traits (extroversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness and neuroticism). It’s getting consideration now due to a research that attempted to vary the best way this query of household similarity is explored. Somewhat than contributors solely self-reporting their character traits, additionally they selected a 3rd get together who knew them properly to evaluate them.
This novel method prompt extra similarity between dad and mom and offspring – roughly 40% reasonably than the 25% of earlier research. However that’s nonetheless very low. The research concluded that it was “unattainable to precisely predict a baby’s character traits from these of their mom or father” and that almost all kin are not “far more related than strangers”.
Huh. So it’s simply our pattern-seeking brains that make us assume little Timmy is “cheeky like his dad”; you would possibly as properly say he’s “cheeky like that gull”. As a father or mother, this felt like a weight lifted: if my youngsters are like me (God assist them), it’s not my fault – simply dumb luck. The identical research’s findings on the affect of dwelling setting felt good, too: “Rising up collectively doesn’t make individuals extra related.”
Is that this a child step in direction of relinquishing years of parenting guilt? There’s extra encouragement in this surprisingly sweeping assertion from the research’s lead writer: “Folks assume that upbringing shapes character, that it shapes what persons are psychologically, however there’s actually no proof for this.”
However dad and mom aren’t fully off the hook. Final yr, a research of 9,400 11- to 17-year-olds declared: “Mum or dad personalities have a major affect on a baby’s life.” The detailed outcomes concluded: “Children with neurotic dad and mom scored comparatively low on a number of measures, together with grades, general well being, physique mass index … and time spent on leisure actions.” (Sorry, youngsters, however it’s not simply me and my fellow neurotics getting guilted: extroverts’ offspring additionally worsen grades.)
It could be weird if the individuals who raised us had no affect on how we turned out, however certainly we are going to by no means perceive with any readability how our dad and mom screw us up and the way we screw up our youngsters in flip. There are too many variables; how might you ever work out what makes us who we’re, what’s innate and what isn’t? As one psychologist has put it, probably the most direct method to weigh nature in opposition to nurture is “to randomly assign kids to oldsters”.
This will get to the actual problem of this subject: you’ll be able to’t double-blind-randomise parenting, so we’re left stumbling round in the dead of night. Maybe probably the most useful factor to take from this shocking nugget is how wildly off the assumptions and labels we placed on our family members typically are. If I’ve discovered something worthwhile in 20-plus years of parenting, it’s by no means to underestimate how mistaken I might be.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist