Tag: Netflix

I blame the parents! Why not hitting your grades has nothing to do with you.

Last year our publication Confessions of an Ageing Figure Skater explored the effect of parenting on young people; and this month’s new Netflix series of Adolescence is throwing those questions right up in the again.. They’re particularly pertinent now that we’re about to go into another season of breast beating, finger pointing and collective ‘mea culpas’. Yes, it’s public exam time again and yet another opportunity to shout from the rooftops of the Daily Mail:

I blame the parents!

Along with childhood obesity, teenage ennui and the impending climate catastrophe, the failure of young people not to achieve 100% in all their exam results can all be levelled at the doors of their wayward parents who clearly have not suffered long enough or hard enough in order to get their offspring to meet the highest grades that our pristine education system prides itself on.

If you haven’t made the grade and have ended up in a university you never wanted to attend in a city you’ve never heard of – don’t worry, it’s clearly your parents fault, the fault of the parents of those poor misguided examiners who set the exams in the first place and ultimately the fault of the current education minister’s parents for producing a human being whose educational mission is driven by important 21st century values of tradition, servitude and deference to the great and the good of the past – and their parents too of course.

Your parents are also no doubt are also suffering from their parents’ wilful mistakes in bringing them up, so it’s no wonder we’re all going to hell in a handcart with no more than 2 grade U’s and a cycling proficiency test between us all.

It’s tough being a parent these days. Not only are you responsible for your offsprings choice of teenage rebellion, you have to bear the brunt of their inability to dress properly, listen to the right music, buy the right newspaper, vote for the right party and do as the media instructs.

This year though, instead of beating yourself about your parental breast about why your nearest and dearest have failed yet again to find the holy grail of true perfection, why not just set a torch to those newspapers, throw those parent manuals on the funeral pyre of parental disappointments and wave your offspring a cheery farewell as they sail into their freshers week, their gap year or their close encounters of the wierdest kind down at the job centre?

They won’t thank you for it – indeed, they’ll take great delight in blaming you for it when the going gets tough – but you can sleep peacefully knowing you never did your best because of your own parents inabilities to bring you up as an upstanding model citizen.

(Philip Larkin puts it even more succinctly in his poem, This Be The Verse.)

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’.