Sigmund Freud was one of the fathers of modern psychology and the inventor of sit-on-the-couch-and-tell-me-about-your-feelings therapy. He also spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about penises.
Freud got a lot right. But Freud also got a lot wrong. Both of these statements are indisputable.
One of Freud’s big ideas was that parents play a defining role in shaping the personalities and emotional health of their children. It’s an idea that persists to this day.
Up until Freud, it was understood that parents taught their children certain behaviors — say “please” and “thank you,” make your bed in the morning, don’t eat mud it’s bad for you — but Freud introduced the idea that parents, through influencing a child’s unconscious, could actually shape how a child sees themselves and sees the world. Through their actions, parents could actually shape and mold a child’s permanent personality, for better or worse.
The idea intuitively made sense. Although Freud’s explanations for how this actually happened were a little bizarre. Little boys wanted to murder their fathers and fuck their mothers.1 And little girls were doomed to spend their entire lives secretly wishing they had penises.2
The explanations were rightly criticized and soon disregarded as being batshit loony. But the parent thing stuck. And over the course of the intervening century, the idea took its place as an accepted part of our culture today.
I mean, what do you immediately think about when you hear the word “therapy?” That’s right, you think about someone lying on a couch talking about their childhood and all the messed up stuff their parents did to them.
Freud introduced the concept with psychoanalysis at the beginning of the 20th century. But after psychoanalysis was discounted, behaviorists argued that parents molded their children through external conditioning of punishment/reward. Then when behaviorism came up empty in the 1950s, humanists argued that parents determined their children’s personalities by their ability to provide for the children’s needs.
By the 1970s, an entire school of psychology emerged called developmental psychology that studied nothing but childhood development and how everything a parent ever does is probably screwing up Junior in some way or another.3
This assumption has traced its way through various self-help movements as well. In the 70s and 80s, self-help seminars were designed for the first time around getting people to express “repressed” emotions, and in the midst of their fury many also discovered “repressed” memories of horrible childhood traumas that may or may not have actually happened.4
By the time the 21st century rolled around, it was entirely normal and acceptable to discuss your parents’ shortcomings as some sort of explanation for your own. It had become a universal topic amongst any support group, seminar, or therapy session. Self-development forums (including my own) filled up with “woe is me” stories about how parents weren’t expressive enough or never showed sufficient appreciation or were somehow indirectly responsible for the person’s current crisis.
Even my own father, when I confronted him recently with a problem in our own relationship, immediately rattled off an explanation of how his father had created the same problem with him when he was a young adult — as if this were somehow an acceptable excuse for our situation.
Today, this idea of parent responsibility is so common and so ubiquitous that it has become a cliché, a parody of itself. “Oh, mommy didn’t hug you enough? Let’s go drink Smirnoff and race BMWs, you know, like the rebels do.”
I’ve written before that there’s a fine line between self-improvement and self-indulgence, and I’ve come to believe this is one area where many people cross egregiously into self-indulgence.
How Much Influence Do Our Parents Actually Have?
Imagine there are identical twins — same features, same intellect, same genetics — and you separated them at birth. One twin goes to one family in the middle of wherever, Idaho. And the other twin goes to another family in the heart of Los Angeles.
Now imagine that you’re able to track these two twins down and give them a battery of personality tests, questionnaires, and study their behavior and life choices.
How similar or different would the twins turn out to be? Same genetics. But different environments, different families, different life experiences.
Well, in case you were wondering, researchers did this with hundreds of pairs of twins separated at birth and it comes out to around 45% of our personalities and behavioral patterns are based on genetics, the other 55% is based on our environment, life circumstances, and life histories.5, 6
Good to know, the next time you need to bitchslap some lame sexist or racist argument.
But what this means specifically is that identical twins separated at birth and raised by different families in different environments usually end up being 45% the same and 55% different based on the previously-mentioned battery of psychological examinations.
But here’s the kicker: Identical twins who grow up in the same home with the same parents also turn out about 45% the same and 55% different.
The data suggest that our parents’ parenting methods have no noticeable effect on our permanent personality traits.
Whoa.
Put another way, our parents determine the superficial stuff — what sports team we like, how we like to dress, where we hang out — and they don’t determine the important stuff — self-esteem, sexuality, introversion/extraversion, neuroticism, political views and so on.
“But I’m so similar to my father. Why?”
Of course you are, you share 50% of the same genes with him.
And when studied, it turns out that most personality similarities between parents and children can be explained through genetics, not through conditioning or parenting.
Dad was introverted and non-expressive and so you blame him for being introverted and non-expressive yourself. After all, you grew up in a home where this was the norm. But it turns out, you were both predisposed to being introverted and non-expressive through the same genetics. It wasn’t a conscious choice by either of you.
Mom loved math and loved to help you with your math homework, so you assume that you learned to love math from her. But actually, you each inherited an aptitude for math and pleasure in solving problems, and simply enjoyed doing it together.
Dad had anger problems. You assume that you unconsciously learned that anger was an acceptable way to deal with conflicts and so now you have anger problems. But once again, was it dad teaching you to be angry? Or did you both inherit the same predisposition for a “short fuse”?
But wait, does this mean that our parents have no influence on how we turn out?
Well, no. The influence is just small, much smaller than Freud thought. And much smaller than most of us tend to think.
About 45% of our permanent personality is determined by our genetics. About 55% is determined by our environment and life history. Our relationship with our parents falls somewhere under that 55% umbrella of environment and life history.
Yes, your parents are just another part of your overall “environment” and not emotionally special in some way.
It used to be thought that a child’s ability to form intimate relationships was determined by its relationship to its parents as an infant. But it has since been found that it is determined by a child’s relationship to any caregiver as an infant, whether that caregiver is a parent, an aunt, a family friend, the milk man, or Charlie Sheen.
Childhood traumas are childhood traumas whether they are caused by a parent, a teacher, a bully at school, or an attack by angry velociraptors.
In fact, a lot of research suggests that outside of major traumas, our peer group and social life as a child has far more influence on our self-perception, our self-worth, and who we eventually become than our parents do.7, 8
What I mean is, on average, statistics show: shitty parents in a good environment are better than good parents in a shitty environment. Environment simply matters more.9
A lot of this isn’t easy to read. Especially if you’re a parent and you’ve spent years planning how little Junior is going to get EVERYTHING HE NEEDS NO MATTER WHAT EVEN IF I HAVE TO PUT HIM ON A LEASH AND VIDEOTAPE HIM 24 HOURS A DAY.10
Parents need to get the idea through their heads: it’s not their fault. This is both frightening and liberating. It’s impossible to ever completely screw your kid up. But it’s impossible to make them perfect too.
Let the child be who the child is going to be.
Whose Fault Is It Anyway?
For children, everything is a struggle. Children are in constant need of assistance, support and direction. And for the most part, a child’s parent provides the majority of these things.
Therefore, as children, we naturally come to see our parents as infallible. And there’s a deep sense of security that comes with knowing that our parents always have the answer, always know what’s right, and always know what to do next.
But at some point, as we grow up, something terrifying happens. We realize that our parents are flawed. And we realize they have problems. Sometimes serious problems.
And what’s worse, once we hit our twenties and thirties, we start to realize that we also have problems, many of which are similar to the problems that mom and dad have too!
Therefore, it’s almost impossible to not draw some sort of correlation between mom and dad’s behavior growing up and our own behavior as an adult. They’re too similar to ignore.
And if we have vivid memories of mom and dad having our problem when we were children, then it’s hard not to blame them for somehow screwing us up and unintentionally passing their problem onto us, just as they passed on so many other behaviors and preferences too.
So we blame them. We hold them accountable and resent them.
But here’s the thing we don’t realize: Our problem is likely to have been our problem regardless of what our parents did.
Am I making sense?
Allow me to be more blunt:
You were going to be a little screwed up regardless of what your parents did. So stop blaming them.
Every parent screws something up with their kids. They all do it. And we’re all going to do it. Partly because many of our problems have genetic roots. But also because it’s simply impossible to permanently control the environment a child grows up in.11
To continue to hold our parents responsible for their negative influence on our lives is to return to the mindset of a child — a mindset where we feel entitled for mom and dad to take care of everything, and hold ourselves responsible for nothing.
Every child has shitty experiences. Some are far worse than others, but they’re all there. And it’s always in our power to reinterpret those experiences, to change them and build upon them today, now, as adults.
I believe you could define true adulthood as relinquishing the narcissistic and childish expectations of what our parents should have provided for us, and what they should have accomplished in raising us.
Because we don’t get to decide what our childhoods should have been like. We only get to decide who we will be today.
True adulthood is letting go of the notion that mom and dad somehow gave us our problems and admitting that, regardless of where they came from, our problems are our own, that we are responsible for ourselves, and while we can’t control our genetics or our life history, we can always control what we do based on them.
True adulthood occurs when we realize that our parents didn’t dig the hole that we find ourselves in today, but rather that they’ve been trying to climb out themselves their whole lives. That the abuser was once the abused. That the neglecter was once the neglected.
It’s not all their fault. To be honest, it doesn’t even matter whose fault it is. Because it’s always your responsibility. So if it’s a big hole, start climbing.
Footnotes
See: Oedipus Complex↵
See: Penis Envy↵
Interestingly, most major developmental psychology models still lack credible empirical data.↵
There are a numerous reports of people coming out of these personal development movements around this time with false memories of childhood abuse. For examples and discussion, see: Maran, M. (2010). My Lie: A True Story of False Memory. Jossey-Bass.↵
Bouchard, T. J., Lykken, D. T., McGue, M., Segal, N. L., & Tellegen, A. (1990). Sources of human psychological differences: The Minnesota study of twins reared apart. Science, 250(4978), 223–228.↵
Tellegen, A., Lykken, D. T., Bouchard, T. J., Wilcox, K. J., Segal, N. L., & Rich, S. (1988). Personality similarity in twins reared apart and together. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(6), 1031–1039.↵
Harris, J. R. (1995). Where is the child’s environment? A group socialization theory of development. Psychological Review, 102(3), 458.↵
Note that an absent parent can permanently affect a child’s development. Children from single parent homes or divorced parents are more likely to have all sorts of negative traits later in life. But this is due not to a parenting style or parenting actions, but simply from there not being enough emotional support present.↵
Harris, J. R. (2010). No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality (p. 195-200). W. W. Norton & Company.↵
See: the concept of “helicopter parents.” Ironically, one of the ways that research is showing that parents can screw their kids up is by not giving them enough opportunities to fail and hurt themselves. This is how children learn, and if parents are protecting them constantly, then the child doesn’t learn from his environment, and is stunted as a result. Also see: Segrin, C., Woszidlo, A., Givertz, M., & Montgomery, N. (2013). Parent and Child Traits Associated with Overparenting. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 32(6), 569–595.↵
Nor would you want to, as research suggests that a certain degree of conflict and struggle are good for psychological development. See: Kegan, R. (1983). The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.↵
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