Problematic Parenting or Problematic Genes?

 

In an article in the Atlantic magazine, author and data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz opines that in determining how parents affect their children in the long run, almost none of the decisions they make matter nearly as much as they think they do. He of course emphasizes their DNA and uses twin studies in discussing the nature-nurture debate, something I have covered extensively in my blogs.

He trots out the kind of story you often hear in these debates of two twin who were raised separately from the age of four weeks. They reunited at age 39 and found that they were each six feet tall and weighed 180 pounds; bit their nails and had tension headaches; owned a dog named Toy when they were kids; went on family vacations at the same beach in Florida; had worked part-time in law enforcement; and liked Miller Lite beer and Salem cigarettes. There was one notable difference: Jim Lewis named his firstborn James Alan, while Jim Springer named his James Allan. 

These are some very superficial similarities. Many involve things like their physical appearance, which is of course dictated by their genes. Tastes in food, assuming that they do not involve a false self, are also somewhat determined by genes.  The author also seems to assume this what these twins named their children was somehow coded in their DNA. I wonder how many hundreds of other twin pairs like this gave their children completely different names. Or where one bit their nails and the other did not.

A study suggests that such things as teaching kids cognitively-demanding games, such as chess, doesn’t make them smarter in the long term. A meta-analysis of bilingualism found that it has only small effects on a child’s cognitive performance.

The author does emphasize the importance of “the village” or neighborhood in which a child grows up in determining things like schooling and career opportunities, because they provide role models as well as money. Of course the village is divided into cliques with differing values, and to which people one chooses to associate may involve the influence of one's parents, but no matter. When it comes to parenting, he tells us the data shows that moms and dads should put more thought into the neighbors they surround their children with—and lighten up about everything else.

It’s hard to argue with these ideas, and a lot of parents do indeed need to lighten up and let their kids learn about themselves and the world. The problem here is that the author is completely ignoring a most important issue: interpersonal relationships and the rules by which people operate in their social context. In particular social roles, both functional and dysfunctional, and one’s freedom to self actualize versus having to behave in ways that stabilize family functioning. 

Children learn predictive models that determine who they drawn to and how to respond to them in various situations. Most of that becomes subconscious and automatic. Personality disorders and family dysfunction come from those. And the author doesn’t even mention adverse childhood experiences. My readers will know what I’m talking about here.

That’s a pretty big omission.

The Effects of Mothers with a History of Depression on Their Offspring

Judith Morgan, Ph.D.

University of Pittsburg 

As my readers surely know, the nature-nurture debate in science continues unabated. Especially in psychiatry. When it comes to certain repetitive emotional reactions shown by a given individual, many in the field prefer to believe that the individual was just born that way. The truth, as described in Robert Sopolsky excellent book Behave,  is that we have hundreds or even thousands of genes that make certain behaviors either a little more or a little less likely. No complex human behavior is determined entirely by a gene or group of genes. We are also strongly programmed to tend to react in certain ways to the behavior of our kin group, although we can still make the difficult choice not to once we reach a certain age.

There is without a doubt a strong genetic component to true brain diseases like Major Depressive Disorder or schizophrenia, but the situation for other emotional reaction patterns is that they, IMO, are far more affected by the family environment than by any specific genes.

Some studies sure do point in this direction. For example, in a recent study published in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, Judith Morgan, Ph.D., recruited 49 children aged six to eight without a history of psychiatric illness. Half the kids' mothers had a history of clinical depression, and half had no psychiatric history. To measure reward-related brain activity, children played a video game in which they guessed which of two doors contained a hidden token while they underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Depression may disrupt parents' capacity for emotional socialization, a process by which kids learn from their parents' reactions to their emotional responses. Positive socialization responses include acknowledgment, imitation, and elaboration, whereas negative or emotionally dampening parental responses may be dismissive, invalidating, or punitive.

Mothers participating in the study completed an extensive questionnaire designed to measure parental emotional socialization by presenting a dozen situational vignettes of children's displays of positive emotions and collecting parents' reactions to them. Children with a maternal history of depression were more likely to have reduced reward-related activity in a part of their brains that handles this, but only if their mothers reported less enthusiastic and more dampening responses to their children's positive emotions, the researchers found.

"In our study, mothers' own history of depression by itself was not related to altered brain responses to reward in early school-age children," said Dr. Morgan. "Instead, this history had an influence on children's brain responses only in combination with mothers' parenting behavior, such as the ability to acknowledge, imitate, or elaborate on their child's positive emotions."