What The Hell America!

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In Oscar Wilde’s celebrated 1895 comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest, one of the protagonists famously asserts, “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy.” This is obviously hyperbolic, but one traditional piece of advice a young man commonly gets before getting married is never to say to his wife, “You’re turning into your mother.”

The idea of becoming like your parent is rarely offered as a compliment and even more rarely taken as one. People naturally resist the idea that some kind of genetic or environmental vortex is sucking them into being a version of someone else, especially when that someone is an immediate forebear about whom they probably harbor some ambivalent feelings. Even if your mom and dad really were in fact wonderful, and you felt nothing but love and admiration for them, we do still all want to be uniquely ourselves.

But are we? Social scientists and evolutionary biologists have been interested in this question for decades, not just in order to find genetic links to dread diseases, but also because we are curious to know the future of our relationships, worldly success, and happiness by seeing whether the personality characteristics that helped or hindered our parents are shaping us as well. Are you doomed to have an addiction because your father did? Will you bless others with a kind and gregarious spirit like your mother’s?

The abundant evidence on this topic shows that we do indeed have a substantial genetic tendency to resemble our parents (and other relatives). But the similarity only goes so far, and depends a lot on how you see your past and on how you decide to build your own life. With knowledge and commitment, you can take a great deal of the good from Mom and Dad, but mostly leave behind the parts you don’t like.

Read: Quaker parents were ahead of their time

Researchers studying the heritability of character have generally approached the subject by surveying parents and their adult children about their personality, focusing on the so-called Big 5 traits of extroversion, openness to experience, neuroticism, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Using information about genetic similarity and statistical techniques, they generally find that, on average, about half of the variance (48 percent, to be precise) in overall personality can be chalked up to genetic factors, and the other half (52 percent) to environmental ones. Within this framework, extroversion tends to be slightly more genetic, whereas agreeableness and conscientiousness are more environmental. Studies have also shown that father-son similarities are somewhat more environmental than mother-daughter similarities.

A twist on the survey approach involves comparing adult-child pairs in biological and adoptive families. In a famous, and still influential, 1985 study using this approach, researchers found that, in most ways, shared genes have a much greater influence than shared environment. For example, the correlation in sociability between mothers and their biological children was 15 times greater than that between mothers and their adopted children; for self-acceptance, the finding was six times greater.

The heritability of personality is always interesting, but many people have a more pressing concern to avoid problems that tend to run in families, such as mood disorders and addiction. Major depressive disorder, for example, has been found to be about 30 to 50 percent heritable. A 2006 Swedish study of twins found that the heritability rate is 29 percent for men, 42 percent for women. Researchers believe they have identified the biological source of this phenomenon: a “short” variant of the serotonin transporter gene. They also note, however, that people who were subjected to stress by their parents in early childhood, which led to overactivation of the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis, are more likely to experience depression later in life.

Addiction is even more heritable; studies estimate genetic influence to be 30 to 70 percent of an addiction’s cause. Although this makes the condition highly determined by inheritance compared with other traits, addiction is also more manageable than other inherited characteristics, through treatment and therapies that can modify behavior.

The popular wisdom that people become more like their parents as they age has a scientific basis. A 2020 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology revealed that genetically similar people act more alike as they age—but only if siblings and parents share similar environments, such as living in the same general cultural milieu. So people who see their parents often, live in the same city, or share a similar community will probably become more like their parents

Unless, that is, you don’t want to. Scholars in 2008 tested the personalities of parents and children, but also corrected their estimates for “regard,” by which they meant an admiration for their parents that led children to want to emulate them. The higher the child’s regard, they found, the greater the genetic influence the parents’ personality had on the child’s; the lower the regard, the lower the similarity. Researchers have correspondingly found that children who perceive rejection from their parents are less likely to resemble them, whereas those raised in a warm, loving home were more like their parents.

David French: The mistakes that parents make

Taken all together, the research suggests that if you admire your parents and want to be more like them, you can and will be, especially as the years pass. But if you would prefer to be less like them, you can do plenty to create your own path. To achieve that, focus on these two approaches.

1. Make the environment you want, and live in it.
Anyone who has several children will tell you that they all seem different—and that this usually becomes only more apparent as they grow up. This can actually be a source of sadness for aging parents, because the differences among siblings—in beliefs, values, lifestyle—may grow so large that they seem like strangers to one another. As scholars have noted, such divergence is explained by the fact that even within families, the environment that each sibling experiences can differ sharply, and these environmental factors become all the more distinct as siblings move into their independent adult lives.

You can lean into this differentiation to create an alternative environment for yourself, one that contrasts with your family’s. This enables you, in effect, to make this non-heritable half of your character more influential. For instance, if your parents spent their whole lives in one part of the country, try moving somewhere very different. If they rejected religion, you might try making it part of your life. If they drank a lot, don’t drink at all. You get the idea. Your genes are fairly fixed, but the environment you live in is under your control.

2. Use the lever of regard.
People tend to speak of their family background and upbringing in binary terms—either your childhood was wonderful, or it was awful. In truth, almost everyone’s experience is more ambiguous than that, with both positives and negatives. Portraying your parents as either all bad or all good is not especially helpful for your emotional and psychological health.

You can make better decisions about your own adult life by listing the personality traits, beliefs, values, habits, and behaviors typical of your family, and putting a plus, minus, or zero next to each one, corresponding to whether that particular characteristic is one that you’d want to keep. This exercise sets a level of regard for each aspect of your family that you name. As noted above, regard has a strong influence on the genetic expression of parental traits in you—which makes it a handy lever to crank up or ratchet down the expression of a given trait.

Say that your mother was irresponsible with money; obviously, that gets a minus. Yet she was also a generous person; that gets a plus. She was also an extrovert, which is not a trait you feel strongly about, so it gets a zero. The list you create, and the rankings you give, can be revelatory the first time you do it, but I’d also suggest refreshing it and keeping it up-to-date. Then you can review it regularly, see if you still agree with yourself, and ensure you’re making an effort to match how you live to the pluses and minuses of your regard.

Read: The parenting prophecy

One last thought: We are all someone’s child, but you may also be, or may become, a parent yourself. Then your concern could be less how you’re turning into your parents, and more whether your kids will resemble you. You’d like them to emulate your positive traits, of course, and avoid your negative ones. A good place to start is to be completely honest with yourself and not pretend that those negative traits don’t exist or are somehow positive. For example, some people like to pat themselves on the back for always “telling it like it is!” But from your child’s perspective—and maybe to your friends, too—you might just seem embarrassingly tactless or downright obnoxious.

Once you have honestly sorted out the positive from the negative, be open about these traits with your kids, listen to their feedback, and show that you’re trying to change what’s not winning their regard. Researchers have amply demonstrated how strongly kids are influenced by watching their parents make an effort to achieve something: When young children see their parents struggle for something and succeed, they persist more in efforts themselves.

You cannot make a better bequest to your child than an understanding that what matters most is not the human clay we inherit, but that we are each always a work in progress. And we ourselves can mold that clay.