What have I realized from 20 years of parenting? By no means to underestimate how improper I will be | Emma Beddington

How alike are parents and kids? Fairly, proper? Certainly all of us play that recreation. I, for instance, am aggressive like my dad (however with no shred of his vitality); my sister acquired my mom’s compassion and I acquired her lust for crispy potato merchandise and staying in mattress. My husband and his mum, in the meantime, share a vigorous debating type (I’m selecting my phrases rigorously); it’s why their conversations get so … animated.

It’s an assumption that transcends geography: there are “the apple doesn’t fall removed from the tree” equivalents worldwide – largely tree-related, though I just like the Portuguese “a fish’s little one is aware of the right way to swim”.

And it’s bolstered culturally. Trying to find “like father, like son” throws up Mick Lynch’s son on a picket line and Cristiano Ronaldo’s son focusing on a football match relatively than chatting as proof of their related personalities. (Predictably, trying up “like mom, like daughter” throws up much more matching bikinis.) You don’t even must weigh up nature versus nurture: some fuzzy mixture of the 2 should make us a bit alike, absolutely? It feels true, intuitively.

The factor is, it’s not. This isn’t information: psychologists have identified for ages that oldsters and kids don’t particularly share the “big five” personality traits (extroversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness and neuroticism). It’s getting consideration now due to a study that attempted to vary the way in which this query of household similarity is explored. Reasonably than individuals solely self-reporting their character traits, in addition they selected a 3rd get together who knew them effectively to evaluate them.

This novel method prompt extra similarity between mother and father and offspring – roughly 40% relatively than the 25% of earlier research. However that’s nonetheless very low. The research concluded that it was “not possible to precisely predict a baby’s character traits from these of their mom or father” and that the majority family are not “way more related than strangers”.

Huh. So it’s simply our pattern-seeking brains that make us suppose little Timmy is “cheeky like his dad”; you may as effectively say he’s “cheeky like that gull”. As a mother or father, this felt like a weight lifted: if my youngsters are like me (God assist them), it’s not my fault – simply dumb luck. The identical research’s findings on the impression of house setting felt good, too: “Rising up collectively doesn’t make folks extra related.”

Is that this a child step in direction of relinquishing years of parenting guilt? There’s extra encouragement in this surprisingly sweeping statement from the research’s lead writer: “Folks assume that upbringing shapes character, that it shapes what individuals are psychologically, however there’s actually no proof for this.”

However mother and father aren’t completely off the hook. Final yr, a study of 9,400 11- to 17-year-olds declared: “Mum or dad personalities have a major impression on a baby’s life.” The detailed outcomes concluded: “Children with neurotic mother and father scored comparatively low on a number of measures, together with grades, total well being, physique mass index … and time spent on leisure actions.” (Sorry, youngsters, but it surely’s not simply me and my fellow neurotics getting guilted: extroverts’ offspring additionally worsen grades.)

It might be weird if the individuals who raised us had no affect on how we turned out, however absolutely we’ll by no means perceive with any readability how our mother and father screw us up and the way we screw up our children in flip. There are too many variables; how may you ever work out what makes us who we’re, what’s innate and what isn’t? As one psychologist has put it, probably the most direct solution to weigh nature in opposition to nurture is “to randomly assign youngsters to oldsters”.

This will get to the true problem of this area: you’ll be able to’t double-blind-randomise parenting, so we’re left stumbling round in the dead of night. Maybe probably the most useful factor to take from this stunning nugget is how wildly off the assumptions and labels we placed on our family members usually are. If I’ve realized something worthwhile in 20-plus years of parenting, it’s by no means to underestimate how improper I will be.

Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist