I’ve been saying that parents don’t cause mental illness in their kids and explaining why I think this.

Do you know this beautiful poem? Here are the first two stanzas:

On Children
Kahlil Gibran

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

People respond differently to relatives and non-relatives. Children’s brains quickly learn who is related to them and who isn’t.

The brain automatically applies this simple formula:

• People who live with you are your relatives.
• You should expect them to feed you and protect you. (They have an interest in keeping your genes alive because they have many of the same genes.)
• You shouldn’t have sex with them. (Kids who are raised together, even if they are adopted, are automatically sexually turned off to one another. Even with all those raging adolescent hormones, brother/sister incest almost never occurs.)
• You should look to the world outside the home for “how to grow up,” since that’s where you’ll be living when you’re an adult.
• You should be skeptical and resistant to relatives’ efforts to shape you, since relatives are not objective. (You carry a lot of their genes, thereby confounding your best interests with theirs.) They often won’t tell you the truth and they’ll manipulate you in self-serving ways.

This a blog-post-size summary of the theories of reciprocal altruism and parent-offspring conflict, both described by evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers back in the mid 1970s. Trivers’s body of work is brilliant and has been highly influential; I strongly encourage you to learn more about him and add him to your list of the most important theorists of all time.

Terrible childhoods cause misery, pain, confusion … all sorts of damage. But it doesn’t make sense that even a horrific childhood would actually cause mental illness, because Nature designed kids to specifically resist influences from relatives, especially parents!

As for the environment outside of the home? That’s another story! Kids’ psychological development is tremendously impacted by their peers, neighborhoods, communities, schools, the media. These are where we need to look (besides genetics) for the causes of mental illness.

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From Psych Central's website:
PsychCentral (March 19, 2010)

From Psych Central's website:
PsychCentral (March 19, 2010)

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    Last reviewed: 19 Mar 2010