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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Parents can't overpower nature in defining their children's personalities, says Dr. Lawrence Diller. But they have enormous influence when it comes to behavior.
Oct 3, 2002 | Dear Dr. Diller,
We have a 14-year-old whom we adopted at 5 months from Chile. When I picked her up, it was from a shack with a dirt floor -- the home of a foster mother who was paid 25 cents a day for her care. I steadfastly believed that our energy, love, solid marriage, resources, and extended family (loving grandparents, etc.) could compensate for the poor start. After all, what's a handful of months when viewed in the context of a whole life?
But lately, I'm becoming more and more discouraged about my daughter's prospects. As a baby, she was very easy and passive, but only briefly. She was kicked out of preschool at age 3, elementary school at 7, hospitalized for depression at 8. She spent three years at a therapeutic day school before being mainstreamed back to our district, where she managed to do OK in a self-contained classroom. Over the years, she has been diagnosed with ADD, ODD and PDD. The only two "Ds" I'm absolutely certain of are mine -- for "drained" and "depleted."
Currently, she is a freshman in high school, surviving with medication (Celexa and Dexedrine) and lots of support (tutoring, therapist, at-home dad); but there are few friends or outside activities. Even though we talk a lot, I'm terrified about navigating the treacherous terrain of adolescence. Already, she fantasizes about having a baby -- not an uncommon scenario for young girls without much of a future.
Why do you think so many kids adopted into loving homes seem to have problems? Can nurture overcome nature? In your column, you seem to minimize brain wiring, but how else to explain that, in many families, three kids are raised exactly the same way, but only one might suffer from an emotional disorder?
-- KS
This writer's poignant e-mail goes right to the core of the perennial debate about the influence of nature vs. the influence of nurturing in behavior and development. Are we hard-wired from conception (or at least from birth) to develop certain talents, traits and temperaments, or are we blank slates to be filled in by experiences, primarily with our parents -- or, as some insist, with our mothers?
This debate has gone on for ages, and more often than not, the winning side reflects the current social-political-economic climate rather than any "hard science." At the moment, we seem to be in nature mode, looking at chemical imbalance or genetic, biological and neurological facts for an explanation of behavior. After half a century of blaming a child's mother for his inappropriate behavior, psychiatry did a 180-degree turn and now seems to blame neither the child nor his mother, but the child's brain and biological destiny for his problems.
Perhaps because of this extreme swing toward nature, I come across as sounding pro-nurture. Actually, for the past 25 years, I've maintained that nature interacts with nurture to determine a child's behavior. Children are born with inherited personalities or temperaments that greatly influence the type of parenting they receive. For example, lively active babies induce their parents to roughhouse with them, while the parents of inhibited babies are more careful with their quiet infants.
But I also believe that parents' behavior can directly influence a child's developing brain. Sophisticated new brain scanning confirms that the brain is not pre-programmed, and for lack of a better metaphor, acts like a muscle -- the parts or pathways that are "exercised" or stimulated grow, while those that are not, atrophy or wither and can completely disappear in some cases. Thus, the brain of an infant or child who has parents who love and nurture the child will look different from one whose parents are frequently angry or neglect the child. However, some babies are more lovable than others ... and on it goes. The debate continues.
In recent years, my conviction about this balance between nature and nurture has been challenged by the field of behavioral genetics, which relies mostly on studies of twins for its conclusions. Back in the 1980s and '90s, the University of Minnesota Twins Study, led by researcher, Thomas Bouchard, looked at the personality characteristics and behaviors of identical twins raised apart. The research demonstrated that many adult traits -- overall intelligence, physical health or mental disorders, as well as one's choice of religion, hobby or spouse -- have a very strong genetic component. In fact, Bouchard went so far as to question whether basic Western child-rearing practices -- outside of extremes of neglect or abuse -- make any long-term differences in children's behavior and personalities once they reach their mid 20s.
Naturally, this conclusion can be very disheartening for the parents of adoptive children who have a troubled genetic pedigree. The fact that genes, heredity and inherent biochemistry clearly influence the likelihood that an individual will develop a particular disorder makes us feel helpless. In children with schizophrenia, for instance, nature is thought to be about 50 percent responsible for the disorder; for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) that number soars to nearly 80 percent.
