No.

I opened a big can of worms recently with my post Are Parents to Blame For Their Kids’ Problems?

Thanks to Freud and Dr. Benjamin Spock, our whole culture takes it as fact that bad parenting is the root of psychological issues.

But it’s turning out to not be true!

Joel Paris, MD, (a specialist on Borderline Personality Disorder) writes in his book The Myths of Childhood:

Myth 2: Mental disorders are caused by early childhood experiences.

The idea that the main source of mental illness is an unhappy childhood had has wide currency indeed. At one time, even the most severe mental disorders, such as schizophrenia, were explained in this way … Today, researchers have shown that almost all mental disorders are influenced by genetic predispositions … it is no longer acceptable to explain each and every kind of psychological symptom as the outcome of an unhappy childhood.

Here’s the blog-post-size version of how personalities develop:

1. Nature deals every person a unique genetic hand. Why? Because different combinations of genes will produce different temperaments, which will develop into different personalities. It’s better for people to have different personalities; that way they can occupy different niches (careers, roles, lifestyles, etc.) in society. Tons of good studies have shown that the heritability of personality is about 50% (about half the differences in our personalities comes from our genes), so this is a well-accepted tenet.
2. We then learn from our environment as we grow up. We learn what sort of person we are, what our surroundings are like, etc., and we develop personalities that will maximize our fitness to survive in our environment given our inborn temperament.
3. “Environment” is NOT the same as “home.” The environment that affects kids’ development is the one away from home: school, neighborhood, peer group. Nature is smart! She “knows” that kids aren’t going to spend their lives at home with mom and dad (well, hopefully not!), and so she designs children to be especially interested in and malleable by friends and events in the outside world. Kids are, in fact, naturally resistant to parental influence and highly inclined to follow what their peer group is doing. (If you are a parent, you’ve noticed this, right?)
4. Many, many good studies have been done with twins and with adopted children (so as to control for gene effects), which show that parents have virtually zero impact on kids’ personalities, beyond the effects of the genes they pass along. For example, adopted kids raised in the same family grow up to be no more similar in personality or incidence of mental illness than if they were selected randomly from different families.

Does bad parenting cause pain? Absolutely! Is a happy childhood better than a miserable one? Of course! Nobody is saying that parents don’t matter or that a good home life is unimportant or that happiness doesn’t matter. All we’re exploring here is the causes of mental illness. And it’s NOT parents.

The most horrific sorts of childhoods (the Romanian orphans, kids imprisoned and raised in basements, etc.) certainly may cause psychic damage, but even this is more likely due to an impoverished peer environment, not parental abuse or neglect. And even longitudinal studies on children who survived the Holocaust (can childhood get much worse?) show that the large majority did NOT develop mental illnesses (though they carried horrific memories with them throughout their lives).

Most kids are amazingly resilient; Nature made them that way. The majority don’t develop mental illnesses even after enduring shocking levels of abuse. (Which DOES NOT make abuse OK! Abuse is never OK!!)

But the “good enough” parenting the vast majority of parents provide is plenty.

My point is simply this: We need to look elsewhere for the causes of mental illness.

To be continued!

“Insanity is hereditary; you get it from your kids.”

Photo of Hannah and Matt taken at the Ben and Jerry’s factory in Stowe, VT.

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    Last reviewed: 12 Mar 2010