Children may not really be a chip off the old block

Children inherit fewer of their parents’ personality traits than was thought, according to a study.

The stark findings concluded that parents and their children are only slightly more likely to resemble each other in nature than a pair of strangers are.

The study, reported in The Times, claims to be more reliable than others done on the question in the past by asking an “informant” – usually a partner or friend – to give a second opinion rather than it being solely self-assessed.

More than 1,000 pairings of relatives, including siblings, half-siblings and grandparents, were recruited to take part to gain as accurate a picture as possible.

“More than 60 per cent of children are in a different [category] from their parents for any given personality trait,” said Dr René Mottus (inset) of Edinburgh University, who led the research.

“In other words, children and parents are a little more likely to be similar than random people but not sufficiently so to allow us to accurately predict children’s traits from their parents.”

Another area of focus supposed that parents and their offspring were in the top, middle or bottom third of the population for a particular personality trait. The results suggested that only about 39 per cent of the children would be in the same category as their parents, compared with 33 per cent for pairs of strangers.

As well as finding a surprisingly weak link to our parents’ personalities, the researchers also compared siblings who grew up in the same household with seconddegree relatives such as half-siblings, who grew up in different homes.

The analysis suggests that those who grow up together are no more likely to share similar personality traits or levels of life satisfaction.

“In almost every major language you seem to have some saying along the lines of ‘like father, like son’, because people have an intuition about it but it turns out this is not correct,” said Dr Mottus, whose study has yet to be peer-reviewed.