DNA blueprint idea for child’s future is easy, risky and wrong

GOING through a box of old photographs recently we came across a pile of pictures of the son, now aged 16, smiling in the sunshine on holiday in Greece and Spain as a toddler.

Needless to say he has no recall of either holiday, despite the expense and hassle of international travel with very small people.

In Greece he had contracted bronchitis, resulting in a £250 medical bill, despite my waving around whatever the precursor to EHIC cards were and muttering about how we were “all in the EU”.

“Glad I can’t remember that bit,” says the son, feeling the hot embarrassment of a parent causing a scene even down the years.

At the time we were not only taking advantage of flying with our three young children before having to pay for seats for all of them, but we also thought, and still do, that travel and holidays together are good for the soul, the family and general happiness.

But it seems we were wasting our time. We may as well have left the son and his older sisters to play with a cardboard box in the back garden for all the good all these holidays, day trips and educational adventures over the years have done them.

The old argument about nature versus nurture has raised its knobbly head again, this time in the form of an eminent professor who reckons it’s all down to our DNA how we turn out, so you may as well not bother with parenting well.

In a trice the zillions of pounds made from super nanny, tiger mum and sleeping guides will be lost – if we believe what the prof says.

Professor Robert Plomin says DNA is the most important factor in all of us. The psychologist and behavioural geneticist from King’s College London has just published a book, Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are, which calls into question everything parents have held dear of late.

If the “environment is all” theory has swung too far, Prof Plomin has now whacked it too far in reverse the other way.

He reckons people’s ability to learn and behave, their psychology and the way they deal and cope with life is mainly down to DNA. His message is there’s not much we parents can do about how our children will turn out, however many music lessons, personal tutors and happy days out we provide. Our DNA, not how we are brought up, will determine the outcome.

The professor drew his conclusions from two of his own long-term studies. He tracked 250 adopted children in Colorado along with the birth parents who gave them their genes, and the adoptive parents who raised them.

After moving to London in 1994, he launched a 20-year study of more than 12,000 pairs of twins.

After looking at all the data he concluded the children were more similar to their birth parents than their adoptive parents.

Forget tumultuous life events like parents divorcing, because your DNA will decide whether you are resilient about that or not, or so his theory goes.

“We now know that DNA differences are the major systematic source of psychological differences between us,” he is reported saying.

“Environmental effects are important but what we have learned in recent years is that they are mostly random – unsystematic and unstable – which means that we cannot do much about them.”

There are a lot of problems in what he says. It could cause people living and working with children to become judgemental and could cause some people to bother even less than they do already.

As a parent it would be all too easy to say “why bother to tell her not to take drugs, it’s all in her DNA so she’ll do it anyway. I’ll save my breath and watch a film.”

Equally a teacher could decide, as some do, that a child aged 11 is genetically not up to passing certain exams so they will consign them to the heap that will serve their betters, or vanish into a nether world of jobless misery.

The problem with the nature versus nurture debate, as every parent knows, is that it is too black and white. It is neither one nor the other, whatever the eminent professor says.

We are a mixture of both our genes and our experience. Former child soldiers from Africa may have the DNA to be Oxford dons, but may lack not only the opportunity, but the education and application to become one, following all the trauma they have experienced.

Anyone with a passing acquaintance with children will also know that the kids whose parents have always been nervous of letting them do things either turn into nervy, frightened people, or develop crazily risky behaviour, or become well rounded individuals. It is probably their DNA and their experience that pushes them down one path or the other – there’s no real knowing. And how does knowing really help us anyway?

Psychology and parenting are not exact sciences and should never be so. What a frightening world it would be if we assessed all people with clinical coldness according to what we perceive to be their genetic destiny? There’s no knowing where that might end, but history suggests it might not be desirable, accurate or pleasant.

People are messy, life is messier. It would be so easy to boil it all down to some inherited blueprint. Easy, risky and wrong.

We are all products of our DNA, the world in which we live and also the way in which we were brought up and the things we experience.

As a parent of three I can see all are different despite growing up in the same household with roughly the same experiences.

They are different not just because their DNA may be slightly different, but also because their place in the family, their peer group at school, the things they are good and bad at, all influence who they are.

So thanks Prof, it’s interesting to read your theories and there may be some truth in some of them, but, in my 21-year science experiment of child rearing I conclude that it’s nature and nurture. Nothing is black and white where kids are concerned, whatever you’d like to believe.