Where Do Our Kids’ Personalities Come From?

My son is having social development problems. He gets frustrated easily and then lashes out physically or screams. He's bossy and has a temper. At school, his teachers find him anxious and so shy around other kids that he barely talks to them, though he chatters to grown-ups with ease. They recognize that he's a nice kid deep down, and obviously smart, but he's having trouble connecting with his classmates and has begun getting into altercations when not supervised.

I'm trying to change this situation, but everything I do seems to be wrong. If I don't talk with him about his behavior at school, then it feels like I'm doing nothing to help him and that I'm avoiding the problem. And yet when I raise the subject in a gentle, reassuring way, Felix becomes uncomfortable and resistant. He's only four years old and has yet to work out how to articulate his feelings or understand the connection between his emotions and his actions. If I insist on discussing his problems in school, Felix becomes upset, often confused, and sometimes even lies. He seems as confused and challenged about it all as my wife and me.

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Because of these complex issues, I've begun second guessing myself as a parent. What have I done to contribute to his problems? Despite what I wrote the other day about children not being an extension of their parents, I can't help but feel guilty, like I've messed up somehow. I mean, I know I've made mistakes and not always been as patient or calm as I would have liked to have been in the face of his tantrums. What parent doesn't feel this way?

As Lisa Belkin writes on The Huffington Post, a study in the journal Nature Neuroscience suggests that parents may not be directly responsible for all of their kids' anxieties and neuroses - those might be family traits, passed along through the generations. What's more, one person's destructive behavior may wreck havoc on future generations.

Scientists at the Emory University of Medicine exposed mice to a pleasant smell while administering painful shocks at the same time. Not surprisingly, after a while, the rodents began trembling with fear as soon as they picked up on the smell, even when they weren't shocked. Here's where things get more interesting. Those scared mice made babies, and guess what? Those babies were born with an aversion to the smell, too! And so were the grandkids. That one negative experience affected multiple generations of offspring.

This is a part of the rapidly growing field of epigenetics, which posits that while our DNA might in some ways (or perhaps in most ways) be our biological destiny, how our genes behave can be affected by the environment and then passed down the family line. Scientists had a sense that this was the case with physical traits, but this study points to this possibly being true with psychological and emotional traits as well. In other words, nature and nurture may be as intimately twisted together as the strands of a double helix, the one affecting the other.

My wife and I look at our son and see challenges that we have faced and that we know our immediate ancestors have faced as well: anxiety, fear of abandonment and separation, anger, a tendency toward obsession, a quick temper. While we've both had family members with extreme personalities - my grandfather, for instance, was a destructive, abusive alcoholic - my wife and I are pretty even-keeled. Our darkness drives us, and requires constant monitoring, but it's not overwhelmed us.

Sometimes, when hearing about Felix's challenges, people will say, "It's funny, because you seem so calm…" as if there's a linear line between my behavior and Felix. Similarly, I've been questioned about what I've done or not done that has influenced him. "You never abandoned him, so why is he so scared when you leave…?"

It seems likely that our children's personalities don't come from our own in a straight line. Our cells carry all sorts of mysteries within them, mysteries that humans are just beginning to unravel. It could be that some ancestor's fear, nervousness, and anger lives in Felix in a way that I will never quite be able to understand. Feeling guilty about that will do nothing to help the situation. What I need to do now is stay positive, think clearly, and do what I can to provide my son the assistance that he requires to function in a classroom environment.

-By Brian Gresko

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