Nature, nurture and naughtiness
The baby was delivered by a self-taught midwife who immediately covered and rubbed her in salt to get rid of the sticky birthing liquid. She was wrapped in bandages five layers deep round her body and her head was fixed onto a stiff board. The baby was first purged of its ‘long-hoarded’ excrement by castor oil or enemas and then given a strengthening glass of wine or whisky. The baby would be put to the breast only on the second or third day, when the mother’s milk was ready, or if the family was rich a replacement mother (a wet nurse) would be paid. If none could be found or there were some health concerns (such as, commonly, syphilis in wet nurses), the babies would suckle direct from goats’ or asses’ teats. The content baby was swaddled up all day so she couldn’t move. She was hung on a hook, usually in the kitchen, and brought down to feed.
This is not a story of a modern organic New Age birth in north London, but how most infants were treated in England and France in the first few weeks of life in the seventeenth or eighteenth century.1 We have less detail about what happened before then, but what we do know is that childhood was not a protected or isolated event. Children were just treated as small adults.2 With no real concept of education for most families, children were exchanged after the age of six into apprenticeships to learn a trade or serve a noble. As for the pre-school age, the child was usually a nameless piece of livestock and roamed the townships in street gangs, wore rough clothes, rummaged tips for food and contributed to the family’s income with petty theft and begging. Parents couldn’t afford to involve themselves too emotionally. These rough childhoods did not necessarily end in disaster though. The future Emperor Frederick II (1194–1250), heir to the most powerful dynasty of his time, the Holy Roman Empire, and one of the best-educated and most enlightened rulers in history, who was fluent in six languages, had passed his early childhood and adolescence as a thieving thug in a Sicilian street gang.
History tells us that life for an infant or adolescent 300 years ago was certainly very different from today. There wouldn’t have been much talk of early bonding or the crucial importance of listening to Mozart. Perhaps because – even up to the nineteenth century – only 50 per cent of children survived past the age of six, and quite a few mothers died in childbirth, emotional bonding with children was seen as a lesser priority. So is parental concern for children’s upbringing a new phenomenon invented by us and psychologists in the 1960s and 1970s?
Indeed the word ‘parenting’ itself is a neologism that only appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in the 1970s. It may be new but it has been marketed extremely well and is today a global industry worth billions. The best-selling parenting book of all time, by Dr Benjamin Spock, has sold 50 million copies across four decades and is outsold only by the Bible.
Yet, if it is only in the last three generations that we have been taking parenting from the child’s perspective seriously, why have rates for nearly all behavioural and psychiatric disorders in children steadily risen since the 1960s? Why are major expensive programmes in the US and UK trying to redress this and teach good parenting techniques? What is going wrong, and what techniques could put it right?
I was asked recently by the BBC to discuss a new book by the American economist Bryan Caplan called Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids.3 In it he argues that the scientific evidence suggests that parents shouldn’t feel guilty. His message is that you can’t change your kids by trying too hard. If they don’t want to go to piano or sports practice, relax. If they don’t want to read books now, they will later. So take it easy and enjoy them without stressing. This is completely the opposite advice to that given by Amy Chua, the author of the best-selling book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.4 As well as being a Harvard law professor she dedicated her life to her kids to make them perfect Grade A students and musical prodigies. She wouldn’t allow them to get B grades, go to sleepovers, waste time in school plays or to not practise for up to six hours a day – even on birthdays, or holidays. She believed that Western attitudes are too soft and the global success of Asian kids is due to the firm maternal approach.
She did succeed in her goals. Both her daughters were straight-A students, and musical prodigies, and both played at Carnegie Hall. However, the younger feisty one, after many years of fighting and punishments, at age 13 eventually rebelled, gave up the violin and played mediocre tennis instead. The other daughter was quieter and meeker and continued piano practice, although her mum later found secret bite marks on the piano that had been there for years. Apart from the occasional moment at the end of a prestigious public concert, joy and happiness in mother or daughters don’t feature highly in the book or in their lives.
Time will tell whether these kids are grateful to their mother and raise their kids the same way. Yet you might wonder whether the attractive healthy daughters of two high-achieving Harvard law professors would not have pretty good genes and a reasonable start in life without their mother’s excessive and obsessional devotion. Nonetheless, books on parenting like these by a variety of psychologists, journalists, economists, mothers, midwives, doctors and nurses sell every year to an eager market of insecure parents trying desperately to do the right thing.
The parenting debate is far from new. Books started in the eighteenth century when the philosopher John Locke (who like quite a few experts when they wrote their books had no children) argued for firm regimens to harden minds and bodies for the future for the good of society. These would include irregular mealtimes, putting the children to sleep anywhere, often wearing cold or damp rough clothes in poor weather, and educating primarily by fear and awe. This boot-camp style of parenting was countered by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France, who argued the complete opposite – that nature should be allowed to take its course, children should be allowed to have as much attention and breast as they wanted, roam free and feed and sleep at will, and have no schooling, discipline or training until the age of 12. Interestingly, Rousseau had 5 children and was not the ideal Dad, raising them ‘naturally’ in an orphanage. ‘Rousseau fever’ took off in a big way; the English politician Charles James Fox was famous for being raised ‘naturally’ and as an 18-year-old used to climb on the table at dinner parties. Jacob Abbot famously remarked that ‘had Byron and Washington swapped cradles, the world would have been very different’.
Although the concept of the importance of a firm hand, fresh air and regular cold baths with no cuddles slowly prevailed, there was a continual swing of opinion every few decades and wide variations in practice. These included heated debates about breastfeeding, wet nurses, stimulation, discipline, potty training, the role of the father, and use of nannies and grandparents up to 1945.
After the Second World War, in 1946, Benjamin Spock’s book came out and opened the floodgates of international baby-rearing best-sellers. He was a New York paediatrician born in 1903, influenced by Freud and the attachment work of Bowlby and the major social changes. He reflected a popular view as a reaction away from the rigid authoritarian parenting styles of Nazi and communist states. His general approach was: listen carefully to the needs of your child, let them sleep when they want, don’t be rigid about mealtimes, and think why they may be crying.
Spock’s books were full of common sense and confidence, but the message was clear: fail to respond to your baby correctly and it has consequences. That message, coinciding with an increase in our leisure time, was when our current era of parental guilt probably began. Spock was on most families’ bookshelves in the US and UK for 40 years, with new editions every ten years reflecting considerable changes each time, such as views on breastfeeding and working mums, until the last edition just before he died aged 94 in 1998.5
For the last 30 years Gina Ford has been one of the most widely read parenting authors, selling nearly 2 million books. She is a former midwife who favours a strict routine-based system about meals, feeding and education, and discipline more akin to the hardy pre-war era, without mentioning bonding.6 Ford has been called the Delia Smith of parenting, with a recipe for all situations. Her nearest publishing rivals are Dr Bill Sears and his wife Martha, who believe in a different approach, namely the crucial importance of attachment and one-to-one maternal bonding above all else.7 Today some of the recent debates are on the role and responsibility of the mother, with many – such as the Searses in the USA and in the UK psychologists like Oliver James or Penelope Leach – increasing the guilt by telling working mothers that nurseries will damage their children, crying causes brain damage, the Gina Ford routines are bad, using the naughty step time-out disciplinary method is counterproductive and that toddler misbehaviour is all their fault.8
As historians of childhood reveal, none of these debates or conflicting theories are really new, and although the self-proclaimed experts can’t agree among themselves on which parental advice is best, they all have one thing in common: they are based on hypotheses or observations that fail to control for genetics and individuality. They also want to sell books, and guilt and controversy work best for this. In his book A Good Enough Parent, Bruno Bettelheim says that ‘parenthood is an art accessible to any human being, not a skill learnt by listening to child-rearing experts’. Many of these experts, he argues, come from broken homes and have their own issues.9 ‘Scientific observations about babies are more like mirrors that reflect back the preoccupations and visions of those that study them.’
Amid the lucrative bickering over the different styles of parenting since the war, a few lonely dissenting voices suggested that both groups had got it wrong: parental styles just didn’t matter. Bryan Caplan was echoing the work of the self-taught psychologist Judith Rich Harris, who had earlier written the first major book (The Nurture Assumption) debunking the behaviourist claim that family environment and parental style were crucial.10 Her ideas came from the failure of multiple twin and adoption studies to find any significant effect of the family environment on personality.
To further explore the real implications of the family environment, and how all this relates to genes, let’s look at a story of twins brought up in very different surroundings.
Nina was born just after the war and was eight when she was first told she had a twin sister who lived a few miles away. Before then she had been brought up as an only child by a loving couple who were in their late fifties and had no kids of their own. They treated her well and spoilt her with presents and holidays. Her dad used to read books to her on his lap every night and always had plenty of time for her, as he had retired early. She was often naughty, but was never smacked or badly scolded and ended up bossing her poor mum around. She had the run of a large house and garden.
Despite being quite lazy, Nina went to a good local school and passed the 11-plus entrance exams at the second sitting to go to a grammar school, and then university, where she studied to be a teacher. ‘I always had everything I needed, although sometimes wondered what it would have been like if I’d been born into a large family with younger parents or kids to play with.’ She ended up marrying another teacher and having three kids, all of whom also went to university. While Nina was young she was discouraged from seeing her sister Gill by her adopted parents, who feared she would return to her biological family. So apart from a few fleeting visits they never really got to know each other until they were in their forties, when they were flown to Minnesota for batteries of tests as part of the adopted-twin study.
Gill had a rather different life. She was never alone. She grew up as the youngest of six kids and the family of eight were squashed into a tiny terraced house with a toilet that was across the road. ‘I can never remember having a meal sitting at the table, as there were not enough chairs, although I don’t think we ever went hungry. I don’t have any fond memories of childhood apart from the highlight of once being washed on the kitchen table. When I was naughty – which was often – I was smacked and told off and sent to play in the street, where I remember spending much of my time’.
Her father was pleasant enough, but invisible, as he worked 16 hours a day as a train driver to pay off his gambling debts. Her mother was ‘a bitter woman, totally indifferent to us, other than providing us with food’. She had tried to give both twins away at birth, but one unofficial adoption arrangement (Gill) failed. When Gill came first in her class at school, nobody cared. ‘My report was left unopened on the mantelpiece.’ One of her older brothers was actually illiterate. She didn’t receive much attention at the local school either, which had a poor reputation, and she failed her 11-plus exam. She left school at 14 with her friends to work in a shop, but got pregnant soon after and married a trainee electrician. Life didn’t get any easier then, as he was a regular wife-beater, often drunk, and on one occasion he cut her with a knife. They stayed together on and off with further violence and poverty for 14 years and two more children. Gill did eventually return to school, aged 29, to get some O-level qualifications, and then got a good job in the local Civil Service, divorced her husband and remarried a gentle kind man. They are now retired and spend half the year sunning themselves in the south of Spain.
Talking to Nina and Gill now, they seem much the same, although Gill, who smoked for most of her life, admits that she had a tougher life and, unlike Nina, has lost her teeth, and has poorer health. I asked them both if they would swap their lives. Nina said that although she would have liked to have known a family, she wouldn’t have changed anything. Gill, although now happy, said after some reflection: ‘Life would have been a lot easier for me if I would have swapped.’ One surprising detail that Gill told me at the end of our conversation was that at age 16, just like her sister (but unknown to her), she also fell in love with a trainee carpenter, got pregnant, and married at 17. Like her sister she had fallen for another aggressive abusive male, but unlike Gill she left him after only a few weeks, with the support of her family. Gill, without support from her family and no independent income or home, had had to put up with her abusive husband for years. This clearly changed her life. Both twins believe they are very similar, with the usual identical mannerisms and similar personality. They agree that Nina is the more diplomatic, and Gill speaks her mind, but both try to be assertive in different ways. They believe they raised their kids pretty much the same way, and the next generation now see each other regularly.
So where does this example help us with the parental debate? Would social workers nowadays (backed up by Article 19 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child) have moved in to relocate Gill from her overcrowded poverty-stricken home and cold-hearted mother who had wanted to give her away? Figures show that when a child develops antisocial behaviour (conduct disorders) the state and taxpayers pay a heavy price. In the UK alone each child with problems costs around £70,000 directly and up to £500,000 indirectly, with a total cost of children in care of around £2 billion. Advocates of parental training estimate that it costs only around £600 per family. Surely this is good value if it works?
Clearly the two girls had very different family environments and parenting styles. Yet the differences – absent father, cold tough mother, etc. – didn’t stop their naughty tendencies or both falling to the temptations of lust and getting pregnant at 16. It did not seem to change their personalities markedly in the long term, although it clearly affected their education, confidence and finances, and ultimately their route to happiness – which for Gill took much longer to reach.
My colleague Robert Plomin, who works on young twins, asked way back in 1987 the key question: ‘Why are children in the same family so different from one another?’11 He was referring to the fact that normal siblings should, judging by their similar genes, in theory be more similar than they are, and adopted siblings never seem to grow more alike, even when raised in the same family all their life. This raised the question of the real importance of the environment. Now environment is traditionally divided into what is unique to an individual or random (such as being mugged, or having an accident) and what is common to the family or shared by both siblings (such as housing conditions). Behavioural geneticists were keen to work out how much the shared family environment (which includes parenting) really influences future personality. To do this they performed over 43 twin and adoption studies before 2000, just on this question alone. Many of these studies were small and poor-quality, but pool them together in a so-called meta-analysis and clear patterns emerge.
The researcher Eric Turkheimer12 found in summing all the data from the 43 studies that a meagre 2 per cent of differences in behaviour were due to parental influence, the same as estimated for sibling interactions. Even less important was the 1 per cent effect estimated for birth order and age effects. This is contrary to many psychologists’ firm belief in the power of birth order on personality. As usual genetic factors explained about 50 per cent and random and specific environmental effects the rest.
Because of the controversy and strong views on both sides of the debate, a large study (called NEAD – non-shared environment in adolescent development) was funded by the US government to answer the question decisively. It brought together sceptics from all camps to design and run it and didn’t exclusively use twins. Starting in 1988, they observed 720 pairs of different kinds of early adolescent siblings in stable two-parent families, which were not easy to find. The pairs included identical twins, fraternal twins, ordinary siblings, half-brothers and -sisters and step-siblings. They followed them intensively over three years and again after 11 years, by interviewing them, their parents and their friends and peers. It was a huge task – the most thorough examination of the family’s influence yet performed – and most expected it to confirm the importance of parenting.13
One of the researchers, David Reiss, was a psychiatrist and family therapist, and before the study a keen advocate of the parental influence. He was ‘shocked by the results’. It showed as expected a large effect of genes on outcomes and behaviour. But crucially, after accounting for genes no effect was seen of distinct child-specific environmental factors in parenting, or parental biases in the way the kids were treated. Nor did the study show evidence of identical twins being treated more similarly. In fact the researchers were unable to explain any of the presumably huge influence of unexplained non-genetic factors on behaviour at all. This was a clear blow for the nurture camp and led to the first public questioning of the real role and extent of nurture in parenting, which had hitherto been untouchable.14
The NEAD study confirmed that there was a correlation between parental handling of adolescents – i.e. harsh or lax, loving or indifferent – and later adolescent behaviour. However the underlying reason for this was genetic, both in the mother’s genes and the child’s. Furthermore the same genetic factors that influenced maternal harshness also influenced adolescent antisocial behaviour. Just over 70 per cent of the agreement between maternal treatment of children and their antisocial behaviour was accounted for by these common, but still unidentified, genes.15 In younger pairs of US twins and siblings followed through to adolescence, only a weak correlation was found between early maltreatment and subsequent behaviours. Moreover, the greatest effect seen was not the reaction of the kids to their parents, but the parents’ negative response to the genes of their poorly behaved kids.16
This idea that there are important individual responses of the parent to each child, reacting to their genes, is a crucial one. It is not so much the parent who influences the child, but more the child’s genes that influence the parental response.
But environment still has a small but important role to play. Re-analysis of the NEAD study showed for example that up to 5 per cent of the environmental effect on adolescent depression was due to maternal negativity.17 But in general, environmental effects were very specific to the child and not usually shared by the same siblings or twins in the family.18 This is odd, and suggests that even identical twins can react very differently to the same environment.
To support this idea, a study of identical twins in the same classrooms found they did just that. They reported quite different responses (both positive and negative) to exactly the same teachers and same lessons given at the same time. In this study Robert Plomin’s team followed 122 ten-year-old identical twins with daily diaries at school for two weeks.19 They found overall only a modest 65 per cent agreement on perception of classroom experience. The twin receiving the more positive vibes about school from teachers and peers had increased success, particularly in maths and science, by 8–15 per cent. Clearly small differences in perceived ‘positivity’ can make quite a large difference to learning.
The fact that even identical twins can experience the same environments differently reinforces the observation that generally siblings from the same family and upbringing turn out more different than we would expect, given that they share half their genes and most of their environment for the first 18 years. It is almost as if we all have a built-in individuality processor working all our lives to make us more different to our siblings than nature programmed us.
For the first 30 months of her life, Simona languished in a Romanian orphanage. She lay in a cot alone for up to 20 hours a day, sucking nourishment from cold bottles propped over her tiny body. Unable to sit up by herself, she would push her torso up on stick-like arms and rock back and forth for hours, trying to soothe the aching void that had replaced her mother. Like the other babies, her head was shaved to reduce infections. She shared a large room with 24 other cots, mostly in the dark. The difficult older kids were tied to the side of the cot. On the other side of the room was the oldest child, six-year-old Stefan, who looked half his age, his eyes wide and brown. He lay mostly on his back, occasionally managing to pull himself up to peer out of his little prison. Until a few months ago, when an American volunteer visited, no one had bothered during his six years of institutional life to encourage him to sit or stand or speak.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, 10 per cent of the kids had HIV, due to experiments by the incompetent health minister Dr Iulian Mincu, who authorised micro-blood infusions in a hopeless bid to boost the undernourished kids. Simona and Stefan were in just one of 35 state-run orphanages in Bucharest. After the fall of the Ceausescu communist regime in 1989, the West was able to see the wider legacy of his policy. In 1966, a year after Nicolae Ceausescu came to power, Romanian State Decree No. 770 declared abortion illegal for any woman under 45 who had not yet produced four children. In 1989, in pursuit of a larger workforce, this was increased to five. Birth control was virtually unavailable, except for those with access to the black market. The result, because of the poverty and lack of space: an orphan population of over 120,000.
When Western doctors entered the orphanages a few years later they were shocked not only at the filth and health of the kids but at the standards of care and apathy of the staff. They were casually chatting, laughing and smoking in the corridors while the babies literally rotted in their rows of cots behind closed doors. They estimated that each baby got only about six minutes of stimulation per day. Toys were not allowed, as the few they had caused fights between the older children and so were only brought out for visitors. Sadly the situation didn’t improve much under Ceausescu’s successor Iliescu, who unbelievably kept the same incompetent health minister and the same ideas about the strong role of the state in childcare. Some of this apathy may have been due to the majority of the children being Gypsies who in half of cases were retrieved by their families after the age of three, when they could start to be useful. So can we predict what would happen to these three-year-olds after this experience of extreme maternal deprivation?
The children still in Romanian orphanages ‘look frighteningly like Harlow’s monkeys’, said Dr Mary Carlson, at the time a neuroscientist at Harvard University, referring to a well-known experiment of the late 1950s in which baby monkeys were removed from their mothers a few hours after birth and reared without parental care.20 The infants developed abnormal habits and social behaviours. They were tiny for their ages and often sat and stared for long periods, or would rock back and forth for hours.
The ex-street urchin Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, performed an earlier environmental experiment in the thirteenth century. He raised dozens of children in silence in an attempt to discover the natural ‘language of God’. It was not a great success, unless God’s preferred language was silence. The children never spoke any language and apparently all died in childhood.21 Other anecdotes exist of nature showing that stimulation is necessary for normal function. If a young chick has its eye covered from birth and the bandage taken off after six months, the brain connections are never made and the chicken remains blind.
In a few short years, one single cell, the fertilised egg, becomes a walking, talking, learning, loving and thinking being. In each of the billions of cells in the body, a single set of genes has been expressed in millions of different combinations with precise timing. Development is a breathtaking orchestration of precision micro-engineering that results in a human. In order to create the brain, a small set of precursor cells must divide, specialise, connect and create specialised neural networks involving trillions of connections. It’s not surprising that this process requires nourishment. The first three years are now known to be the most crucial for normal development. All this complexity and Emperor Frederick’s experiments suggested that the orphans deprived of attachment, emotion and sensory input would never recover.
One of the largest studies following up Romanian orphans is the English and Romanian Adoption Study (ERA) by Michael Rutter and his team, down the road from me at the Institute of Psychiatry.22 It has been known for a long time that profound deprivation in early childhood increases the risk of subsequent psychopathology. However, the different types and range of problems were unclear. They followed up 165 adoptees who had spent more than two years in these terrible institutions, usually from birth to three years, and compared them with UK adopted infants.
When they assessed behaviours at follow-up for up to 15 years, although there were a few severely disturbed children, most had improved. However, on average they still showed persistent problems with attachment, inattention, overactivity and autistic-like behaviour. The study suggested that the first six months of deprivation were the most crucial, with longer durations of misery strangely not making them any worse. Most of the major physical problems and most of the cognitive deficits had actually resolved fully with good nutrition and stimulation. Oddly they found no significant increases in the risk of other problems such as emotional difficulties, peer relationships or conduct problems. Also 20 per cent were found at age four to 15 to be completely unaffected in any domain whatsoever – suggesting that some children were incredibly resistant to the most appalling of conditions,23 and that environmental determinism is no more absolute than genetic. The data pose many questions. Why should some children be affected so much more than others? Why could some stay normal? Other studies found that the brains of these deprived children showed abnormal metabolism based on PET (positron emission tomography) scans in many parts of the brain responsible for emotions and empathy. But why would only some parts of the brain and some emotions be damaged?24
Clearly one simple way of explaining differences in response between kids is differences in their underlying genetic backgrounds. The group found some evidence that dopamine genes were also involved in explaining who was worst affected by inattention disorders.25 But while this may explain some variation, it isn’t the whole story. In the longterm study of normal kids in the Dunedin Study in New Zealand that we discuss more later, those kids with different versions of the genes controlling the neurotransmitters (particularly dopamine and serotonin receptors) react differently to the same bad stimulus.
So clearly some level of interaction between our genes and environment is happening, but how? Could animal studies help us understand the mechanisms by which genes could be influenced or modified? The early classic Harlow monkey studies, taught to every psychology student, that I mentioned earlier showed that infant monkeys separated early from their mothers do badly. But they couldn’t properly separate the effects of genes from environment, as monkey mums are not always very keen on adopting other mums’ difficult offspring.26
However, clever rat experiments by Mike Meaney’s lab in Montreal have managed to partially and more realistically reproduce the human experience in a way that crucially can account for genetic differences. When identical strains of rats are separated into two adopted groups, one of them raised by adopted mothers who are naturally attentive ‘good mums’ and are called high lickers and groomers, the other by ‘cold mums’ who are naturally low lickers or groomers, major changes in their behaviour occur. The pups who received less licking and grooming in the first week develop significantly greater levels of stress and anxiety.27 The team found that a key brain hormone was involved, called the glucocorticoid receptor, a steroid hormone regulator that when blocked causes levels of the stress hormone cortisol to rise in the hippocampus and other brain areas of the pups. This meant that these underlicked pups would react more to some perceived threat and be in a state of greater alertness.
The same group has shown that modification of the key regions of genes like the glucocorticoid receptor can affect the function of literally hundreds of other genes downstream, causing a cascade of effects.28 This means that if the key brain genes are switched on or off epigenetically, it will have widespread effects. Some of the biggest gene effects are seen in gene families (called protocadherins) which are involved in making the trillions of brain synapses (connections in the brain). These changes could be reversed by cross-fostering with an attentive licking mother.
Other key hormones being influenced by licking and grooming were oxytocin and dopamine. Oxytocin, known as the cuddle hormone, is released during suckling and is key to how animals and probably humans form bonds with kin and lovers.29 It activates certain brain areas.30 Importantly, the changes in the oxytocin gene were also transferred to the daughters, although they were raised normally, and influenced their behaviour with their own pups.31 These changes could have some evolutionary benefit in other animals as well as rats. Making animals alert and anxious can actually be helpful in some situations and may increase the survival or mating success of the pup in stressful or dangerous conditions.32
So the combination of history lessons about parenting and the huge variations of styles over the planet and in time, plus twin and adoption studies, seems to be clearly telling us that for 95 per cent of families parental style and shared home environment has little to do with how your kids turn out personality-wise. But this leaves several questions unanswered. If genetics explains around half of the differences between kids and parental styles don’t explain much else, then what is explaining the rest? Why do siblings in particular end up being so different and respond differently?
Bullying in schools is a very common trauma, with around 1 in 6 kids admitting to being a bully and the same number to being a victim. Although the traits of both bully and victim are highly heritable, context and family support are also important. When both identical twins are bullied at school, the one that perceives or actually receives greater warmth from the mother will experience less trauma and may become more resilient.33 When for example only one identical twin experiences bullying, studies have shown that their response to future stress is permanently reset as compared with the un-bullied twin.34 So it is clear that being a sympathetic parent that the child can come to for support is still an important feature, even if its effects may be hard to quantify.
To go back to my original question – do parents matter? – clearly the answer is still yes – but the extent is unresolved. Kids without a source of emotional attachment on average do very badly in life. Those who are neglected by their parents and with no sense of security have a high chance of being disturbed or suffering social problems. But the level to which normal ranges of parenting in most families affects children has undoubtedly been exaggerated. Twin studies have probably gone to the other extreme and underestimated environmental effects on the individual.35 This is partly because these effects are not as predictable as believed and there are few shared family effects.36 There is however no good scientific evidence that for example being a part-time or full-time working mother, duration of breastfeeding, being an active father, levels of strictness, number of cuddles, bedtimes, mealtime routines, TV watching, supervised home reading or homework supervision make any long-term differences in your child’s development or ultimate personality or behaviour.
All parents like to think they have had a role in shaping their children – it’s part of being a parent. So by all means let us take the credit when it goes well. But if things don’t go quite as planned and your kids aren’t as perfect as your irritating friends with perfect A grades, impeccable manners, piano prodigies and tidy rooms, don’t blame yourself or your genes – blame your kids’ genes. We have seen how children’s genes will drive them to seek more or less of the environment that surrounds them, and they will be drawn to what they like. Their genes can also drive you crazy. Their genes will then interact with the environment they were brought up in (and partly chose themselves), which includes the influence of parents, siblings, peers and school. It’s clear that neither genes nor environment (nature or nurture) can operate on their own, and the boundaries of both are growing fuzzy. The key message for parents is beware of self-declared experts. There is no magic formula. Do what feels natural and try not to feel too guilty.
Different parenting styles and discipline, bonding and attachment are one thing, regular beatings or sexual abuse of your kids are another, which most of us find hard to imagine. You would suppose that these early life traumas would leave scars impossible to remove. We will next explore how people deal with these experiences, and the epigenetic changes that may explain them.