Meanwhile, evidence points to your family environment having no bearing on personality. Twins who are reared in a family are not more similar than twins reared in different families. “Adopted siblings are basically no more similar in personality than any two strangers in the street,” he adds.I suspect that most parents believe otherwise, which is why we go to such lengths to try to raise our kids right. Every parent makes mistakes, though; everyone misses opportunities that are evident only in hindsight. Some of our strategies, even adopted with the best intentions for the child's socialization or success, end up looking worse in retrospect.
Parents might bristle at this idea, but it doesn’t downplay the importance of upbringing. Family environment contributes to our behaviour, our character and the way we adapt to the world, Mitchell notes, “so parenting has a major contribution”.
“Though our personality stays the same, our behaviour does change with our experience,” he says. Neuroscientists now view the brain as far more plastic than once assumed. It shifts with experience, much like a muscle changes with exercise.
Still, it's a nice thought: your work might help them develop analogously to exercising helping their muscles develop, but the basic structure is going to stay the same no matter what you got wrong. It's not that what you do doesn't matter. It's just that you end up a lot less responsible for the end result than you may fear.
And to some degree, so do they. You can only exercise muscles you were born with, after all. If your son or daughter just isn't the person you'd hoped they'd become, well, to some degree it may not be your fault or theirs either. It may just be they were born to be someone else.
If the study is true, of course. I have to be suspicious of it just because I'd like for it to be.
6 comments:
"“Though our personality stays the same, our behaviour does change with our experience"
This sounds rather definitional. Where is the line between what is *personality* and what is *behavior*?
I came out of the 60s/70s fashionable insistence that environment was all. We raised our first two with fanatic devotion to making the environment work to the child's advantage 24/7/365. Even as I began to doubt this, we adopted two, and then took in a fifth one in 2009. I now think it's mostly genetic plus random. I have discussed it at length elsewhere, but that's the summary.
If by personality we mean style and instinctive first approaches, it's a good thing for parents to realize they have a duty to influence behavior, but personality isn't theirs to form or even to approve or disapprove.
What Tex said. What I got out of the study is that - to use the article's example - if a person is shy, she is going to stay shy. But it sounds like how that shyness plays out in real life can be influenced:
Parents might bristle at this idea, but it doesn’t downplay the importance of upbringing. Family environment contributes to our behaviour, our character and the way we adapt to the world, Mitchell notes, “so parenting has a major contribution”.
“Though our personality stays the same, our behaviour does change with our experience,”
It seems to me that parents can do quite a bit to help their children do as well as possible given the limitations and possibilities of the child's personality type: helping shy children have new experiences, for example, to try to work around the "circuits and brain chemicals that control risk avoidance and our sensitivity to reward".
It seems to me to make sense that if a parent has a shy child and reinforces that shyness, the outcome for the child will be very different than if the parent encourages the child to be a little more adventurous. Of course, sometimes science is about pointing out how what seems to make sense is actually nonsense. :+)
It was interesting to read about this study around the same time I read a review of the book Educated, which is about a reportedly difficult upbringing out of which the author nevertheless did quite well. Did her parents have no effect on her trajectory? Did they have an effect opposite to that which they intended? If she'd been raised by more mainstream parents would she have taken the same path?
Vedic astro science is 100% accurate in correlating personality and predicting certain events, so far as I have seen from the data.
A twin has a different personality because the nakshatra of the moon would be different by a single pada out of 4. Thus people born with Aries on the ascendant horizon line tend to be like rams, they go straight through problems and don't like crookedness in any forms. This correlation is 100% so far, if the birth time is accurate.
Ascendant ecliptic changes constellations every 2 hours or so. This is because from Earth's standpoint, the heavens are moving along this eliptic. In Western astronomy and cosmology, thke ecliptic is just that orbital flat horizon that planets are in a track. WHy that would happen in a 3d random big bang galaxy with gravity... remains unexplained.
So even if a twin was born at 5:50 am, if the other twin was born seconds or minutes later at 5:55 am and Aries was 5:50 but Taurus was 5:55 am, then the personality and entire life track of the twins would be dramatically different. They would still share certain predestined plot quests, compatibilities, and fates however. Since the moon constellation and the sun constelation and which planet is in what constellation doesn't change nearly that fast.
A solid look into this is the youtube video named something akin to near death your life was planned before you were born. I don't have it here ready to copy and paste.
This video is an excellent depiction of sources and methods for what is going on with this life/death incarnation system called Earth.
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