12 Parenting and
Parents’ Mental Health
They fill you with the faults they had,
And add some extra, just for you.— Philip Larkin, “This Be the Verse”It is now time to move from the economics of the family
to the character of the parents, and how they relate to their
child.
Genes
But first a major word of caution is needed, which applies
to the book as a whole. All humans are the products of
genes and experience, and of how the two interact. So ide-
ally we should include genes among the determinants of
child outcomes and of adult well- being. Every parent knows
that genes matter— within most families the children dif-
fer widely from each other, which must mainly reflect dif-
ferent genes. Moreover, scientifically, there are two types of
compelling evidence of the importance of the genes— from
twin studies and from studies of adopted children.^1 Twin
studies show that identical twins are much more similar to
each other in their well- being than are nonidentical twins.^2
This is because identical twins have identical genes, while
other twins do not. Similarly when adopted children are