On Parenting

Since my birthday is so close to Father's Day, we tend to celebrate both at the same time each year with my children. Since they are all adults now and whatever successes and failures there are to be had as a parent are mostly in my past, it seems like the perfect time to take a brief look at the subject (not to mention that a whole lot about my blog is about dealing with my own upbringing).

So, how much does it even matter how you were raised? When I look at my own kids, they turned out quite different from each other. It's hard to think that I would have treated each of them so differently that I could be held accountable for that, at least entirely.

According to studies, personality traits such as extroversion, neuroticism and conscientiousness are somewhere between 40% and 60% heritable, and intelligence is around 50% heritable in childhood and up to 80% in adulthood. For many psychological traits you have as an adult, only about 5% to 10% can be accounted for by the shared family environment you were raised in.

However, whether on purpose or not, as parents we do treat our kids differently precisely because they are individuals. As each of our kids has their own personality and temperment, they experience (and respond to) our parental efforts in their own different ways. Birth order and peer influence are also major contributing factors in how we grow up. (These are known as non-shared environmental factors, for any of you who wish to Google for more information on the subject.)

Parents are also highly responsible for transmitting their culture, values and beliefs to their children - and perhaps most importantly, responsible for providing a secure and stable environment for their kids. Abusive or neglectful environments have clear, negative impacts on mental health and can lead to attachment issues that will continue to matter when our children become adults.

Our parenting style is also somewhat likely to be passed from our children to our grandchildren, and so on. Our own childhood gives us the general idea of what parenting looks like, and so we have a tendency to follow that blueprint. However, that tendency is anything but inevitable. Studies have shown that parents (and mothers in particular) often reflect on their own upbringing to deliberately modify the way they raise their kids, in order to avoid repeating the perceived mistakes of their own parents.

How do I feel about myself then, personally? Have I done well as a father?

Looking at each of my kids, and considering how smart and beautiful human beings they have become, I'd like to think that I could have done much worse. I feel that I have a great relationship with them and I absolutely love each one of them. 

But I also know that I could have done better in some areas. While I think I've managed to avoid some mistakes my own parents made (may they rest in peace), perhaps I have repeated some of them too. And probably invented some mistakes of my very own.

But hey, as with many things in life, parenting is something we learn as we go. It's been a great journey so far. Perhaps you'd like to embark on that journey some day too, my little baboons? Think you'd do a better job than your old man?

I bet you would. Just please finish your schools first☝️