Tag: Adolescence

I blame the parents! How does our DNA shape our character?

Our book, Confessions of an Ageing Figure Skater explored the effect of parenting on young people earlier last year and the subject has attracted huge interest with the Netflix series, Adolescence recently. It’s led me to wonder, how often do we hear this:

I blame the parents!

We’ve known for many a year that genetics can explain a lot when it comes to predicting the frequency of brown hair and blue eyes in a population and whether or not you’re born with an appendix. Ever since Mendel carried out his famous experiments cross breeding peas in a monastery in upper Bavaria, our understanding on how huge complex sequences of generic material can affect everything from whether we’re green, have wrinkled or smooth skin and whether we can glow in the dark in the right atmospheric conditions has increased exponentially.

These days we like to determine whether or not our characters can be explained by our generic makeup (‘I blame the parents’ is a common explanation offered by the popular press these days) – and recent experiments and huge statistical studies across the world have demonstrated some startling new insights into how our characters are shaped by our DNA.

The popular press have recently identified the scientists who have themselves identified important genes in our genome: for instance the gene which determines whether or not you are a lying bastard or not. This gene (the ‘lying bastard‘ gene) is located on the Y chromosome in men and consequently explains a lot of many men’s behaviours. It is located we are told next to smaller gene complexes entitled ‘scurrilous’, ‘shifty’ and ‘tosser’. Clearly, depending on whether your genes demonstrate dominant or recessive behaviour, your chromosomes will determine whether or not you are a scurrilous, shifty, lying bastard of a tosser – or just a tosser.

The X chromosome – possessed by both men and women – also has several character traits now clearly attributed to it. These include ‘not good at games’; ‘gets distracted easily’; and ‘rather fancies themselves in front of the mirror‘.

The future potential that character mapping of human DNA provides us with is immense with many economic and cultural implications. Whenever we say for example that something runs in the family, we’ll be able to point to the relevant gene sequence and either feel comforted that we come from good genetic stock (genes such as ‘self satisfied’; ‘holier than thou’  and ‘smug‘ will all help this process); or we could decide to excise them from our genetic lineage in future by sponsoring stem cell technology which replaces undesirable genetic material with more suitable alternatives.

The media will no doubt help us in this desire to help us purge ourselves of undesirable genetic features, exhibiting as they do all the positive qualities of a future genetically engineered population: ‘honesty’, ‘transparency’ and ‘accountability’.

The Parent’s Lot: how Adolescence offers us hope to the challenge of a lifetime.

Parents will never be enough. And we will always have children whose parents have deluded their children, abused their children, forgotten their children or simply never been up to the standards we wished for ourselves when we were children. Thew new Netflix series, Adolescence, throws a stark light on to these realities and amongst much else, it reminds that the parents lot – to expect, to be expected of and yet to fall and find it impossible to meet those expectations -is not a happy one.

We want so much for our own parents and yet they fall short; we want so much of ourselves when we become parents but learn too quickly that hypocrisy, double dealing and shape shifting come too easily and too quickly for our liking. We are seduced by the flattery that a child is simply and solely the biological and cultural product of two parents: so that if your child takes a path which horrifies you (like Jamie did in the TV series), then somehow we parents are completely at fault. There was something wrong in our DNA, or in our upbringing which has caused that outcome. It is somehow all our fault.

But that flattery is delusional. No child is simply the product of two adults who have combined their DNA. They are a product of their peers, their environment, of the world they live in – and of their own free will. Perhaps the most uplifting moment in Adolescence is when Jamie tells his family that he is going to plead guilty for the crime he committed and in doing so, takes responsibility for his actions, acknowledging he has agency, and is not just the result of other people’s pressures or two other people’s DNA profiles.

No one, no thing can be a parent alone: it requires partnership, a veritable village of influencers who can fill gaps and step up when needed, be quiet when required and to speak out when it’s essential. No two parents can do everything that’s required, especially in these pre-war days when the nation is gearing itself up for existential questions about who we all actually are and what we stand for. But one thing is crystal clear: we all need love, attention and support, all of the time. All of us.