It takes a stoic and selfless parent these days to receive the news that their offspring is about to enter therapy without some trepidation. However pleased and relieved they might feel that their child is demonstrating commitment to overcoming their difficulties, part of every parent dreads the inevitable dissection of their children’s upbringing. Parents know full well that they are more than likely to end up in the frame as the chief culprit and author of their child’s problems and failings, however old they may be. If there is one great myth to rule them all in popular psychology it is this: that the kind of adult you become is almost exclusively determined by what happened to you when you were younger, particularly at the hands of your hapless parents. It’s for this reason that the Canadian writer Dr Laurence J. Peter joked that, ‘Psychiatry enables us to correct our faults by confessing our parents’ shortcomings.’ In fact, I know of more than one case where the parents of perfectly affluent adult children have fallen on their swords and offered to pay upfront for their offspring’s therapy precisely, one suspects, because they felt obliged to take personal responsibility for whatever may have gone wrong in their children’s lives. Usually, alas, their sons and daughters were only too quick to agree with them.

However, such pre-emptive parental attempts to ‘settle out of court’ may be misguided. Whatever mistakes they may have made bringing you up, your parents can’t really be held accountable for your genetic make-up over which, after all, they had very little control once they had chosen their respective mates. Independent scholar Judith Rich Harris, for one, has little time for those who succumb to what she calls The Nurture Assumption:

‘The classic case is the poet Philip Larkin, who famously griped, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” Though he admitted that he shared most of his faults with his parents, he never entertained the thought that he might have inherited them.’

Harris is a formidable woman. Possessed with a fierce intelligence, a refreshingly open mind and buckets of dogged determination to spare, she has stormed the citadel of accepted wisdom and ruffled more than a few feathers in the academic community. Holed up in her home in Middletown, New Jersey, where she is largely confined by health problems, with no stipend or formal academic qualifications, she has pored through the minutiae of the existing developmental research and come up with some pretty incendiary conclusions.

Much of her scholarship draws from the research of evolutionary psychologists and the genetic studies that use twins, siblings and adopted children to work out how much variation between people can be attributed to the influence of the environment, and how much to inherited characteristics. Her brutal conclusion is that once the impact of genes have been accounted for, ‘the home environment and the parent’s style of child-rearing are found to be ineffective in shaping children’s personalities.’ Although her figures are slightly different, the direction of her findings very much agrees with those of other authors like David Cohen, who also compares the cases of identical twins (same genes, obviously) reared together and identical twins reared apart. Whereas various characteristics of the twins raised apart correlate approximately 75 per cent of the time, those reared in the same home correlate just 85 per cent, leaving only 10 per cent of variation that can be attributed to their so-called shared environment. Intriguingly, of course, this also leaves a substantial percentage of variability that cannot be explained by either, an enigma explored by Harris in her latest book, No Two Alike.

Twin studies are helping us understand the respective contributions of nature and nurture.

But what about all those studies demonstrating the impact of adverse life events on children? Surely it has been established beyond all reasonable doubt that if your father is a violent drunk, or your mother depressed and unresponsive, there are going to be negative knock-on effects for you further down the road? This may be so, and there is certainly a very large pile of thorough research suggesting this is the case. However, we have to be careful. Most of these studies assume that just because two or more factors occur together there is probably some kind of causal relationship between them.

For example, if we know, as psychologist Diana Baumrind reminds us, that children of dominating, authoritarian parents are prone to lower self-esteem, reactions of fear and aggression and tend to emulate their parents’ coercive behaviours, it is natural enough to assume that the children have turned out like this because of the way they were treated. But what if they turned out this way because they had simply inherited these tendencies from their parents? Might this not explain why aggressive, controlling parents often produce aggressive, controlling offspring just as plausibly as the notion that they became this way as a consequence of their upbringing? In fact, aggressive tendencies turn out to be quite highly heritable. You can see the problem.

If you still need convincing, consider the salutary case of one study of adopted children whose original biological mothers had criminal records. If their mother had a conviction, compared with a sample of adoptees whose biological mother had no record, these adopted children were more likely to have been arrested (15 per cent compared with 2 per cent), convicted themselves (13 per cent versus 1 per cent) and put in prison (10 per cent versus 0 per cent). The unpalatable reality is that in studies that control properly for genetic factors, Harris’s conclusions are consistently upheld: it would appear that, generally speaking, parenting has much less impact on how we turn out than we might all wish to believe.

If you are a parent, like myself, you may find the implications of all this a bit mind-blowing. If, like me, your work also involves child protection cases in which huge emphasis is quite rightly placed on trying to safeguard children from the adverse effects of early environments, then Harris’s work raises profound concerns. Nevertheless, she makes a compelling case that I would strongly urge you to read for yourself, however tempted you are to dismiss it out of hand (as many of her critics have).

The first-hand evidence of my own clinical experience means I am certainly not quite ready to dismiss the influence of environment just yet. Some fascinating findings are coming through suggesting that exposure to parental stress can actually modify your genes, turning off the stress hormone receptor sites. This would seem to be a pretty strong piece of evidence for the line that environment is far from toothless although, to give Harris her due, she has never claimed otherwise – merely that things don’t necessarily work in quite the way we assume they do. If you are committed to the value of nurture, you might also want to look at some of the persuasive neuropsychological evidence from brain scans of emotionally deprived children presented in Sue Gerhardt’s very well written book Why Love Matters before you chuck the baby out with the bathwater (presumably an environmental event that even Judith Rich Harris might expect to have some impact ...). I am also somewhat reassured by developmental psychologist Sandra Scarr’s recent suggestion that it is perhaps only extreme environmental conditions that may tend to affect us, depending on our predisposing vulnerabilities. This would certainly start to cover the cases of some of the damaged children I work with. But what Harris and others are telling us implies that if we are muddling along in a fairly average home, even if things feel far from ideal and we have a list of grievances as long as our arm, we can’t really lay the blame at our mum and dad’s door for the grown-ups we become. The bar for what constitutes ‘good enough parenting’ may just have got a whole lot lower.

Bracketing for a moment the cases where parents do truly terrible things to their children, let’s look in a bit more detail at the grounds for our prevailing sense that our mum and dad have messed us up. What do we mean when we say they are to blame, and what exactly are they to blame for?

One of the charges frequently made against parents is that the way they have treated us as children has left us feeling bad about ourselves. However, research into self-esteem suggests that while a critical, unsupportive environment can damage our self-image, self-esteem is far from fixed in childhood. Reviewing the findings of over 130 studies, psychologist Chiungjung Huang discovered that across the board self-esteem ratings continue to fluctuate up until the age of 30, after which group effects tend to plateau out. The first decade of young adulthood turned out to be a time of particular turbulence. Huang didn’t look at individual cases, so it is likely that there were hidden and local fluctuations the study didn’t pick up. However, let’s not forget that the way we feel about ourselves often owes a great deal to factors that have little to do with home. We know, for example, from Susan Harter’s work how powerfully peer relationships orchestrate the rise and fall of adolescent self-esteem. Satisfaction with physical appearance is another strong predictor of self-esteem levels within this age group. However, peer factors and media-propagated ideals of beauty turn out to be more significant in determining how satisfied young girls are with their bodies than any input from their parents.

There is another idea, essentially psychoanalytic in origin, that continues to exercise the popular imagination: namely that our various ‘hang-ups’ are due to the way our parents dealt with issues like sex, rules, and self-indulgence. Freud believed that repeated parental injunctions about such matters give rise to the ‘superego’, our childhood programming about how things should be done and the conditions under which we can experience pleasure or pain. The superego is the repository of all the times our actions met with our parents’ delight, disapproval or anger. It’s the basis of our conscience, and it’s not to be trifled with. To resist its demands is to risk flooding oneself with guilt. According to Freud, the battle between our pleasure-seeking drives and the disapproving superego can set up eddies of unconscious conflict that result in all manner of neurotic symptoms, leaving us feeling nervy and rotten. We all know people who are prissy, controlling and ‘anally retentive’ and the fact that they are like this is supposedly a lot to do with how they have been brought up. According to Oliver James, just the right blend of strictness and empathy from your folks produces a benign conscience that won’t trouble you overmuch but keeps you on the straight and narrow, while parenting styles that stray too far towards the punitive and authoritarian on the one hand, or that are too relaxed and liberal on the other, can create serious problems for us. However, once again Judith Rich Harris springs up to insist that parenting style makes little odds, pointing out that, ‘Of the large number of correlations the researchers calculated between maternal practices and child outcomes, only 6 per cent – about the percentage you would expect to occur by chance – were statistically significant.’

Freud and Klein both believed that issues of sexuality can be especially troubling for developing children, especially since sexual desire for the opposite-sex parent has to be repressed. This supposedly leads to the development of the Oedipus complex in boys and the matching Electra complex in girls. We might be tempted to dismiss this as a lot of psychoanalytic claptrap but, as the following anecdote amusingly illustrates, the unconscious mind can still make fools of us all:

Freda Cohen is having a very torrid time with her teenage son. They are always screaming at each other and sometimes even fighting. So Freda takes him to see a psychoanalyst. After several sessions, the doctor calls Freda into his office and tells her, ‘Your son has an Oedipus complex.’ ‘Oedipus Shmedipus,’ answers Freda, ‘As long as he loves his mother ...’

The truth is that these days few people take Freud’s theory of psychosexual development very seriously. Evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson found little evidence of the Oedipus complex when they went hunting for it in the data, and concluded that the lack of evidence made it virtually impossible to test predictions about it. Meanwhile, Walter Mischel argued that the flexibility of our moral standards within different contexts (for example children cheerfully cheating and lying at school who would never dream of doing so at home) weighs against the likelihood that ‘a unitary moral agency like the superego’ even exists. With no superego to tie us up in knots, this really lets our parents off the hook.

But what about our relationships? Your parents’ messy divorce is bound to have blighted your prospects of future happiness, surely? Maybe not. Alison Kirk found that while being a child of divorcees made people more anxious/realistic about the likelihood of relationship breakdown, this didn’t affect young adults’ self-esteem, anxieties about intimacy or their reported levels of satisfaction in their relationships.

However, perhaps your childhood experiences are influencing your personal life in more indirect and subtle ways? Many of us have now heard of ‘attachment theory’ and how the quality of your early relationship with your carer could potentially be affecting your relationships later in life. If not, let me offer the briefest of introductions. Attachments come in two main flavours – ‘secure’ and ‘insecure’. There are several subcategories of the latter. A ‘securely’ attached infant is confident that their parent will respond to their needs. They seek comfort when required, enjoy being close, but can also tolerate brief separations without undue distress. In fact, securely attached children use their parents as a dependable base from which to explore the world, apparently confident in the knowledge that their mothers will welcome them back when they return.

However, some children (in fact about a third to half of them) don’t behave like this. Some are hopelessly clingy. Others come across as withdrawn, passive and indifferent, as if they gave up on any hope of getting what they need from adults long ago. Yet other children respond to separations by blowing hot and cold and, when their mothers do return, alternately demand cuddles and then angrily reject them when they’re offered. Then there is a fourth group of infants whose behaviour seems completely random and incoherent. These poor children are all over the show, often making little distinction between people they know really well and total strangers.

On the basis of these kinds of responses, infants are classified under one of four main attachment styles. The received wisdom is that their behaviour reflects what they have unconsciously learnt about the world from the parenting they’ve received. If their mother is reliable, affectionate and responsive, then this is likely to promote a ‘secure’ attachment. If not, they will fall into one of the other four ‘insecure’ categories. With about 40 per cent of the population classified as ‘insecure’, a naive reading of this would be that that there must be a lot of ropy parenting going on out there. Worse still, statistical studies show that those of us who don’t enjoy the privileged gold-standard ‘secure’ status are more vulnerable to all manner of psychological problems and social disadvantages. So maybe your parents really are to blame for all your hang-ups and neuroses? To add insult to injury, Cindy Hazan and Philip Shaver found evidence of equivalent attachment styles at work in adults’ romantic relationships. Once again, if your adult attachment style is ‘secure’, then you’re laughing. But if you happen to fall into one of the other categories (as about half of us still do) – well, there may be fireworks, heartbreak or substantial solicitors’ fees ahead ...

Of course, I’m parodying the whole business: researchers know that it’s by no means as cut and dried as that. But what if one’s style of relating really was set in stone in infancy? Then surely your parents must shoulder responsibility for your volatile or disappointing love life? This is certainly the impression given by certain popular-psychology authors who haven’t done their homework properly. The idea that attachment is the ‘missing link’ that neatly ties up an individual’s past and present is so elegant and convenient that some very important loose ends are often ignored.

For a start, the similar distribution of the various attachment styles amongst children and adults doesn’t mean that individuals necessarily keep the same attachment style over the course of their lives. The best estimate is that about two-thirds of us stick with the same attachment style, but that still leaves a third of us who are chopping and changing. One study that followed the attachment behaviours of children from infancy through to maturity found only 17 per cent still demonstrated the same attachment style in their adult romantic relationships as they had when they were little. Another found correlations of security ratings between parents and current romantic partners of under a third. Other researchers have found (not surprisingly) that the attachment style of adults often wobbles quite dramatically in the wake of stressful life events. It also appears that people don’t necessarily demonstrate the same attachment style across the board in their various relationships, which poses a bit of a challenge for those who subscribe to the most basic version of the ‘internal working model’ – the theory that the mental template we inherited from our mum and dad is applied indiscriminately to everyone.¹ As Paula Pietromonaco and Lisa Barrett concede, ‘From this perspective, people do not hold a single set of working models of the self and others ...’, while Mark Baldwin acknowledges that ‘Within romantic relationships, expectations might then vary significantly depending on the specific partner, or the specific situation, or the specific needs being expressed’.

This makes a lot more sense and sits more comfortably with our everyday experience. Sure, we may know individuals who just seem to repeat the same disastrous pattern with each successive partner, but haven’t you also encountered people who miraculously blossomed into someone very different when they stopped dating disaster stories and found someone who was a Mr or Miss Right for them? Or, conversely, friends who slowly drifted away from the open, relaxed warmth of a secure attachment style once they fell under the sway of a controlling, jealous partner? Having seen how different people can become under the influence of new relationships, I really struggle with the concept that we have one predetermined style of relating, as some of the more simplistic attachment literature suggests. There is certainly little evidence to support popular-psychology authors Amir Levine and Rachel Heller’s bold assertion that ‘Understanding attachment styles is an easy and reliable way to understand and predict people’s behaviour in any romantic situation’. If only it were that simple!

It would hardly be very adaptive if we all responded to everyone in the same way. The fact is, even babies don’t. Babies whose mothers are depressed may very well exhibit a concerning pattern of behaviour in their mothers’ company, and then behave entirely normally in the company of other non-depressed caregivers. As Judith Rich Harris points out, ‘A baby whose mother is depressed doesn’t expect everyone to be depressed.’

The security of attachment in infancy is also a poor predictor of how well we get on with others later on in life. For example, infant attachment doesn’t necessarily anticipate how we will relate to our friends, and Dinero and colleagues discovered that even having a secure attachment style in your mid-twenties was no guarantee of the quality of your interactions with your romantic partner.

In any case, for most of us the attachment system may be less relevant than we assume. As Professor Pat Crittenden explains, attachment behaviours are primarily activated only under conditions of threat, since that’s what evolution designed them for. It’s quite possible that even if these powerful internal programs do exist, providing things are ticking along okay and we are on a relatively even keel, they may well leave us alone. Crittenden’s Dynamic-Maturational Model is thankfully sufficiently flexible to accommodate the possibility of different ways of relating in different contexts.

The truth is, we currently understand less about attachment than you might assume from the blasé way the term is thrown around these days. We are certainly not clear about the pathways by which our parents might bequeath us a specific style of relating. What we probably shouldn’t overlook is that our attachment status is closely linked to our belief system – specifically beliefs we hold about ourselves and other people. Bartholomew and Horowitz have managed to reformulate the whole taxonomy of adult attachment in precisely these terms (as you can see from the diagram opposite). For example, if you have a positive attitude towards yourself and other people you are likely to be ‘secure’, whereas if you have low self-esteem but think well of others you will end up in the ‘preoccupied–insecure’ quadrant.

The point is that as adults we should be taking personal responsibility for all our beliefs – even those that might underlie our so-called attachment style. Babies may not be able to articulate their beliefs clearly but adults can. If they are of a mind to, they can even work on changing them. Since it is clearly far more adaptive to hold the attitudes associated with ‘secure’ attachment styles, we might want to think about challenging and re-scripting any unhelpful attributions linked with an ‘insecure’ attachment status. Perhaps we could educate ourselves to see the outside world as less threatening, and ourselves as being a little more worthy? We probably owe it to ourselves to do so. To resign yourself to being stuck with beliefs you arrived at when you were knee-high and – even worse – to blame someone else for them, is both defeatist and unnecessary. There’s a whole load of other stuff you used to believe that you have revised perfectly successfully: I presume you no longer subscribe to Father Christmas, the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy? If your beliefs about yourself and other people aren’t helping you, then maybe you should put a bit of effort into changing them? There are many good resources out there to show you how.

Moreover, before you call your parents to account for what they did to you, take a moment to consider what you may have done to them. The type of child you were (by nature) may well have helped condition the sorts of responses you were met with. Temperamentally tricky infants do put pressures on parents who sometimes find themselves hard-pushed to cope and it doesn’t necessarily get easier with older children either. In 2006 David Huh and colleagues tracked the behaviour of 500 teenage girls. They found that the parents of girls who had initially scored highest on measures of antisocial behaviour such as fighting and cruelty at the start of the study were demonstrating less and less momentum in trying to keep their daughters’ behaviour in check by the end of the study. The ‘mean girls’ won out. The parents of the most difficult girls appeared to be being progressively worn down and had abandoned their efforts to control them.

Four categories of adult attachment and how they refl ect our views of self and others.

Perhaps you feel aggrieved because you weren’t Mummy or Daddy’s favourite, or that you got a raw deal because of where you ended up in the birth order? And it is true that parents do treat their children differently. Attractive children get doted on. Clever ones get kudos for it. However, Oliver James’s claim that ‘Each parent treats each child so differently that they might as well have been raised in completely different families’ is pushing it a bit, I feel. Often, such claims are made by supporters of environmental causes who are only too well aware of data suggesting differences between siblings comparable with those that actually might have been found if they had come from different families. The effect is there but it is much smaller than you might imagine. Harris claims that differential treatment by their parents accounts for only two per cent of the variance shown between siblings. Furthermore, what differential treatment existed was linked exclusively to the genetic differences between them rather than the non-genetic differences. What this indicates is that ‘the parents were reacting to the genetic differences between their children, rather than causing their children to be different’.

The bottom line logically is that if you have been instrumental in shaping your own environment, then maybe you have to carry some of the responsibility for its effects on you? Generally, recognising that any relationship is a dynamic system in which both parties exert a mutual influence over each other can sometimes be an important step towards laying down arms and calling a truce.

In trying to make sense of all of this data, and regardless of whether you wish to hold nature or nurture accountable for where you find yourself in life, it is probably crucial to hold on to the fact that you are not a helpless child any more. Biology alone might not constitute destiny as Freud once claimed, but neither does upbringing. After all, as you grow older you have more and more freedom to choose your own environment, even if your genes may still influence the environments you select. As Edward Miller, a professor of economics, comments in relation to psychologist David Cohen’s work:

‘All over the world, teenagers are choosing friends, and even mates, that their parents disapprove of. A person who is smart and who enjoys intellectual activities will engage in intellectual activities, read books etc. By adulthood individuals are picking their own environments and the influence of family is minor.’

There comes a cut-off point when it no longer makes much sense to keep blaming someone else. We have to face the fact that our current circumstances are likely to be largely of our own making. It is definitely true that we are the only ones who have any realistic chance of shaping our future.

The nature–nurture debate is certainly not resolved yet to anyone’s satisfaction, but what is now clear is that the whole picture is far more complex than it appears. It doesn’t allow for any knee-jerk apportioning of blame. Whatever sins of commission or omission committed against us, let’s try and keep in mind that the majority of our parents were doing their best. Sometimes it is not we who need to forgive our parents, but our parents who need to forgive themselves; it is heartening to think that perhaps they have not done as much long-term harm as they may have feared.

People are people – baffling, perverse, and laws unto themselves in many cases, which is why psychological researchers have such a hard time getting adequate purchase on them. Sometimes the things that should affect us don’t, and the things that shouldn’t matter send shockwaves rippling through the rest of our lives. The truth is we can’t always tell which is which. Judith Rich Harris makes a good point that the revolution in childcare practices and attitudes towards children that has taken place in the last 50 years doesn’t appear to have translated into measurable global differences between the personalities of those born in the first and second halves of the twentieth century. Even in cases where parents have palpably let their children down very badly, I have encountered several truly remarkable people in my work who have still defied the odds. Despite having had the cards of the environmental lottery completely stacked against them, and having done battle with horrors most of us, fortunately, can scarcely conceive of, they have still found within themselves the resources to go on to become loving, brilliant, and impressive human beings. This gives me hope. And generally speaking, hope and blame don’t make very companionable bedfellows. We should choose carefully which we are going to kick out.

¹ You can check out for yourself how differently you relate to the significant people in your own life by logging onto Chris Fraley’s quiz at www.your personality.net/relstructures