The Science Behind Your Child’s Personality (It's Not What You Think)

What we can do to give our kids the highest odds of being good people and happy people. And I know exactly how this feels in those 2 categories. You know, I mean, I have 3 kids. Those of you who follow my work might know that I have 3, they're all adults, 28, 26, and 23 at this point. And, you know, 10 years ago they were all teenagers, which was a super fun walk in the park, as you can imagine, having 3 teenagers at home. And they were all challenging in their own way. They were all difficult in their own way. And they, oh, they worried Esther and me in their own way. Uh, one of my kids, when he was in middle school, um, he was particularly difficult at one period. They all go through their periods of particular difficulty. And I remember haranguing him constantly about his homework and his grades, which had become a real problem, not because he didn't understand, but because he sort of lacked motivation, wasn't living up to his potential. You know, classic, you know, we'd get calls from the school that, you know, he was getting bad grades or, or he might fail a class or, You know, he didn't show up for his exams or finally Esther's like, at least we know he's not cheating. You know, she's an optimist. But one night after an especially bad day, I was taking stock of the situation and I came to this realization. I didn't actually care about his grades. I was haranguing him about something I didn't care about. I was using his performance in school as a proxy for what I really cared about was him becoming a responsible, ethical, faithful, well-adjusted man. In other words, I wanted him to be Good and happy. Exactly the qualities that the Pew Research team found in their survey-based data. And that led me as a behavioral scientist to start studying how to do that. So not just hoping and not just using intuition and not using sort of pop psychology and not just Googling it. I started to do some real no-foolin' research. This is one of the great things about being a behavioral scientist is because it's not research, it's me-search. And it's my family search, as it were. And so I started doing real work on this. And I want to tell you a little bit about what I've found over the years that subsequently I've been able to verify with respect to what I see in the data, what I see in the studies, and also what I've experienced as I've worked with families in my everyday work. What are the kinds of things that you think that you need to do so you can have good and happy kids? Should you be lax? Should you be strict or easy? Should you yell at them a lot? You should have a lot of rules or not so many. Should they be free range? What are the different styles of parenting? How should you behave? How should you treat them? That's what I looked into, but here's where my research really started. How much does it matter? You know, cause this is kind of the baseline of what you would do as a behavioral scientist. You want to know, it's like, does it matter at all what I do? And that's really the nature versus nurture debate. How much of a child's development and an adolescent's development is due to their genes rather than their upbringing. Okay. Now, now, when I was a kid, the psychology literature suggested that nurture was a lot more important than nature. And this has kind of gone back and forth over the years, but there was this blank slate kind of theory that we were tabula rasa or nearly so. And that parenting is what really mattered to mold who they will become as adults. Lots and lots and lots of books came out about that. There's a lot of parenting and child-rearing books. I mean, the famous Benjamin Spock book about, about how to raise children, babies, and children was really a lot about how to treat them in a particular way so that they will grow up depending entirely on how you treat them and what you say to them and how you act to become happy and good, good and happy, like we talked about before. And I was sort of interested in this to begin with, because I didn't know, I didn't know what the current state of the literature was. And by the way, the nature-nurture thing is really interesting because our kids vary with respect to how much nature and nurture are going to work. Let me explain. As I explained in a past episode, 2 of my kids are biological and one is adopted. And so this is like a social scientist dream, right? I mean, we didn't do it so that I could get data. I promise you, I'm not that weird. But, but I wanted to know how the similarities and differences and how they responded to different kinds of parenting stimuli would differ with respect to nature versus nurture. Now it's interesting because my 3 kids, My 2 older sons are biological. My daughter's adopted, my youngest, she's now 23, but they all are like me and my wife, but in different ways. So my oldest son is 28. He thinks just like me. We have complete cognitive similarity. He and I make the same jokes. We have the same sense of humor and many of the same ways of solving problems. So we're cognitively really similar to each other. My middle son, we have the same appetites. good and bad. We're attracted to the same kind of stuff, right? You mean the, you know, the exploding fireworks and, you know, that, that whatever it is. I mean, we have the same tendency to be attracted and averse to the same kind of stimuli with the same appetites, what it comes down to. And my youngest daughter who was adopted, here's where it gets really weird. We have exactly the same interests. We're interested in the same stuff. She specialized in college. She majored, you don't call it specialization. It's majoring for Pete's sake. I'm a 30-year academic. I should know this. She majored in psychology with an emphasis on neuroscience. I mean, yeah. And why? Because ever since she was a little girl, we'd have these intense conversations about the stuff that I talk about on this show and the stuff that I write about. She's really, really interested in that. And she's not technically biologically related to me. So I want to know how much of all of these things are nature and how much of all these things are nurture. Now, again, the old thinking is it's all nurture and no nature, but that turns out to be quite wrong. And how do we know this? Because modern research. has been able to use quasi-experimental methods on twins, identical twins, those who are, especially those who are separated at birth into, into separate families and then given personality tests later on in life. That's not a diabolical experiment. It just kind of happened naturally in the way that, that adoptions were undertaken, especially between the 1930s and the 1960s in the United States. And, and they're, they're voluntarily reunited. There's nothing, there's no ethical problems with the surveys, with these, uh, with these experiments, as a matter of fact. And you can see some of these meetings for the first time on YouTube. They're beautiful and funny and really lovely. Imagine you're 40 and you find out for the first time you have an identical twin, how weird that would be. And, you know, seeing people understanding this for the first time and the thrill they took in it, it's just really, it's actually really, really, really inspirational. The early studies on this, on these twins were coming in the late 1990s. And so this is when the thinking started to change. Which was really my time coming out as a behavioral scientist. I finished my PhD in 1998. So the first big study that asked nature versus nurture with respect to personality came out in 1996 in the Journal of Personality. So really an apex journal in psychology. And they were looking at these 123 pairs of identical twins, which have identical DNA, and 127 pairs of fraternal twins, which share 50% of their genetic material. So they're, they have 50% in common in their genetic profile. And then they looked across the personality profile. Now, those of you who have been following this work for a while, you know that we study personality with respect to 5 dimensions and the 5 dimensions are remembered in terms of the acronym OCEAN. O-C-E-A-N. This is how you remember it when you're first learning it for the first time in school. O is openness to experience or openness to personality. It's neophilia is another way to say it. You like new stuff. C is conscientiousness. You live true to your word. E is extroversion versus introversion. That was the first of the personality characteristics. Believe it or not, that was sort of popularized by Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist in the early part of the 20th century. So that was the first of these. A is agreeableness. That's agreeableness, going out of your way not to be disagreeable and to be agreeable with other people. And N is neuroticism, which largely is correlated with sort of melancholy and anxiety, depression and anxiety today. Those particular mood disorders are, and that's a Freudian term, is neuroticism, but we keep that in there for the N. So how much of these 5 personality dimensions are inherited? O, openness, 61% inherited. If you have parents who are open to experience, that's going to explain 61% of the variance across the population in And openness to experience among children, right? C, conscientiousness, 44% of your conscientiousness is basically inherited, or the variance is explained by parenting. E, extroversion, 53%. A, agreeableness, 41%. N, neuroticism, 41% as well. That's a lot. And so it's somewhere between 40, between low 40s and low 60s. So let's just say 50% of your personality is explained by genetics by, and the rest is the other 50% is not genetics is what it comes down to. That's a lot. Right. And that's, and what that means is that old nurture is, is not right. At least that we're not blank slates. Okay. You say, all right, great. So it's 50% genetic. That, that turns out not to be bad news, by the way. Because if you turn out to have a personality you don't like very much, don't just say, it's true. My mother did make me unhappy biologically. It just means you need to do more work to work on your personality than somebody who has a personality that they like or personality that's more pleasant, right? There's nothing wrong, but you have to know, if you know your genetic tendency, you can tailor your habits. That's everything that we often do about happiness. If you have a genetic tendency to be gloomy, you need better happiness hygiene. People who are just bubbly and ebullient all the time don't need to do that. But the same thing is true with the genetics of your personality. You need to know it. And it's not bad news. I've talked about this in numerous shows about how you can change that. And I'll talk about that a little bit later here today. Okay. Now the other half, however, you're going to say, okay, fine. I only have half with parenting. It turns out that's not right either, because it's probably more experience, the individual experience that people have Over the course of their lives, which has a lot to do with a lot of things besides parenting and parenting per se, in the way that children are parented doesn't make up very much of the other half at all. Big finding in the literature. Children are more conscientious when their parents were more involved in their lives and work to provide cultural stimulation, such as them taking them to museums. Okay. That's one piece of evidence there. Right. Okay. So that's not just genetics that has to do with Particular parenting actions, that's something that the parents were doing. This has nothing to do with what the parents were saying and only to do with what the parents were doing with their kids that affected their conscientiousness. Second, children are more agreeable, significantly more agreeable when their parents raise them with structure and goals. Once again, that's not just saying be nice. That's raising them with particular structure and goals. They tend to be more agreeable. And that's a pretty big conclusion, by the way. That means that we're going to do these things together. We're going to have particular goals. There's going to be rewards for the goals. We're going to have a structure in the way that you eat, the way that you sleep, when you get up, when you exercise, when you go to school, showing up on time, that, that actually leads to people becoming more agreeable. And once again, those are the actions modeled by parents, not just what they're telling their kids. This is also true with happiness. For example, one really interesting study of both fraternal and identical twins found that the genetic component from ratings of happiness largely, I mean, a lot of it is somewhere between 44% and 52% genetic. You know, your happiness is 44% to 52% genetic, a lot like your personality, but there are certain things that parents do that parents model that have a lot to do with the parenting per se on the later happiness of kids. Most notably parental warmth and affection. When parents are really warm and affectionate with each other and really warm and affectionate with their kids, that tends to highly, highly associate later in life with happiness. And it seems to be really causal. By the way, that's most important from the father. It turns out that the father being warm and affectionate is even more important than the mother being warm and affectionate. And this is one of the reasons that you'll often hear And I've often said this myself. I've given this advice to dads. The number one thing that you can do on your worst day is for your kids is love their mom overtly and clearly, and then go love them, but start with their mom. I mean, you got, you kind of got one job, guys. It's what it comes down to. But part of the reason is because that has this big association with the subsequent happiness of children.