Bit of a dimwit? You can’t blame your genes
That’s the surprising conclusion of a new book that claims to settle the Nature v Nurture debate by Oliver James
WHEN I was ten, my parents were informed by my headmaster that I was born stupid, and would have to move to a school for the congenitally defective. To be fair, I was a badly behaved slacker who was always at or near the bottom of every class (the weekly beatings did not help). But the interesting thing is that it was not my genes that made me a thicko.
Although hardly anyone outside the world of science is aware of it, research in the past decade has proved for the first time that no one is made dim or bright by their genes, or for that matter, mad or sane.
It’s finally being established that your character and mentality is not in your genes. The age-old nature-nurture debate is over, and nurture has won.
Don’t take my word for it: Professor robert Plomin, a behavioural geneticist at King’s College, London, one of the world’s leading experts in this field, said last year: ‘I’ve been looking for these genes for 15 years and I don’t have any.’
Or look at the huge 2013 study of the genes of twins, whose title told you all you need to know: ‘no genetic influence for childhood behaviour problems from DNA analysis’. many other studies have had similar findings.
Yes, significant genes for differences in physical traits, like height or eye colour, have been identified by the international quest for genes known as the Human Genome Project.
But no genes that matter have been found for psychological traits. I realise many readers will find that hard to believe. If genes do not govern our psychological characteristics, how come things seem to run in families?
That tendency towards depression you can trace way back to your grandmother. That quick-wittedness found in most of your relatives. The tendency to promiscuity on your father’s side. Surely, genes must play some part, right? Wrong.
What does shape and govern these traits is nurture. One study showed 90 per cent of children maltreated as youngsters have a mental illness by the age of 18.
And hundreds of studies show the more maltreatment in childhood — the earlier you suffer it, and the worse it is — the greater damage it will cause later in life.
We also know 70 per cent of maltreated children become maltreating parents, and the converse is true if parents are wise and loving — offspring repeat benign patterns when they have children.
What passes down the generations is not genes in DNA that determine our character, but patterns of behaviour from a parent to a child: everything from bickering to humour, snide asides, delicious cooking, beatings, hugging, short-temperedness.
Going back to my childhood, my educational failings had their origins in how my parents cared for me. my mother’s father committed suicide when she was 14, and she was raised by an illiterate nanny who hit her.
BECAUSE of that, she struggled to cope when I was small — it didn’t help that there were four of us under five. She was often depressed and irritable, and would whack me round the head. That was one reason I was an anti- social, angry boy who took badly to school. A great deal of what is assumed to be stupidity is actually just inattention and lack of motivation caused by emotional distress, in turn caused by lack of parental care, not genes.
Also, my parents had mixed feelings about the rigours of education, valuing playfulness above conscientious conformity. They were both psycho-analysts, and this was north London in the Fifties. regurgitation of rote-learned facts did not go down well where I came from.
Yet I did eventually manage not to be a total academic washout. The reason was that I was treated remarkably differently from my siblings. I was the third of four children — the others were all girls.
Purely because I was a boy, my father poured love and encouragement into me. Having been one of six brothers, he was much more attuned to boys.
So my father kept telling me I was clever, despite forests of evidence to the contrary.
As a result, in the end I did do quite well. In marked contrast, my sisters’ education was of no interest to him (though luckily my mother dealt with that, so they worked out alright — they are therapists, too).
In families, we are like actors in a play scripted by the state of our parents’ marriage, the order we were born, our gender and what our parents each project onto us.
On top of all this, each parent dumps on to each child a furniture van full of historical baggage from their own childhood. If they were first-born themselves, perhaps the arrival of a second or third child will trigger memories of being displaced when they were small, making them especially sympathetic to their own first-born.
If the parent was a last-born, they may be concerned to ensure their own youngest child does not get the same raw deal they felt they had.
If it is a boy and the father had a bullying brother . . . if it is a girl and the mother had a sister who was always prettier than her . . . the variations of birth order and gender are numerous, and the impact on how the parent sees the newborn are profound.
This is well illustrated by the lives of many successful people.
The writer, TV executive and presenter Janet Street-Porter was the oldest in her family, with a sister called Pat, who was two years younger. Her father was a lonely bully who’d wanted a son, and Janet was treated as one by him.
He took her to see his beloved Fulham Football Club, and to watch motorcycle racing. He also deemed her the ‘brainy’ one, so she became hyper- competitive at school — and at home.
In her autobiography, Janet describes how she bullied and tormented her sister. Twice, she pushed her down the stairs.
Her sister’s crime was to have developed a pair of breasts, whereas Janet was flat-chested. In later life, sharp-elbowed Janet succeeded in becoming one of the first female sen- ior television executives in what was then very much a man’s profession.
Had the family order been reversed, it is very possible that it would have been Pat who found the same kind of national profile. In fact, as a mother, Pat took a job working on the checkout in Sainsbury’s.
The amount of love and responsiveness in infancy really does mould the brains we have as adults.
The way we behave is governed by different amounts of key chemicals, such as the hormone cortisol. When threatened, it is secreted to prepare us for fight or flight.
If babies and toddlers do not feel loved and responded to, they can start to feel permanently threatened and develop high levels of cortisol.
That subsequently creates a cranky child who may have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or be shy and withdrawn.
Studies prove that as adults, our brains are still being affected by how responsively we were cared for as babies and children.
The actual size of bits of the brain can be affected. On average, a woman who was sexually abused as a child has five per cent less of the amygdala and hippocampal regions — which are crucial for emotional regulation — than one who was not abused. The love, neglect or even abuse we experienced as children creates a baseline for who we are, like a kind of emotional thermostat. And the great thing about a thermostat is that the setting can be changed.
Once you stop thinking of your child as having been ‘ born that way’, there is so much you can do to alter the trajectory of its life, and consequently, the lives of your grandchildren. At the simplest level, studies show that just by believing his or her own abilities are not fixed, a child can improve their academic performance.
FROM a parent’s point of view, if patterns of maltreatment are broken, they will not be passed to the next generation. One of my clients was convinced there was something wrong with her seven-year- old daughter. The girl had appalling tantrums, disrupting the whole family by screaming, shouting, hitting and biting.
It emerged that my client had found it hard to ‘ tune into’ her daughter on an emotional level when the child was a baby, and had been losing her temper with her from a young age, which in turn had led to the girl’s tantrums when she was older.
Using my ‘love bombing’ method (described in my book of that name) she was able to cure her daughter.
This entails the mother removing the child from the rest of the family, and providing intense, condensed periods of giving the child total control of events and love. The child feels completely safe and empowered, which leads to a resetting of its emotional thermostat.
most interestingly, my client broke a pattern we traced back four generations. Her maternal ancestors had all kept diaries, and in every case they reported tantruming, ‘ impossible’ daughters. Yet it was clear the problems were created by the mothering.
If all parents could be helped to understand how their childhoods have affected the way they relate to their children, it is no exaggeration to say we could largely eradicate mental illness.
We’ve all been in the grip of hugely powerful intergenerational processes that dictate how we function. Only by awareness can we gain some control of ourselves and the future.
We all want to improve our material circumstances to provide a more affluent life for our children.
But what we should understand is that, once a basic level of material security is reached, it is far more important to pass love and playfulness down the generations than property, stocks and shares. That’s the true path to lasting happiness.