Before my children were born, I assumed that
they would look somewhat like my husband and I. Naturally I wondered which
combination of features they would inherit, and hoped that the best in each of
us would prevail. However it did come as some surprise that three
of our four daughters have blue eyes, whereas my husband and I have hazel!
Two of my daughters have bodies much like
their father, and two are built more like me. The daughter that looks most like
me, even has three small brown freckles on the left side of her face - in
almost the exact same places as mine. This daughter prefers to lie on the
floor, rather than the couch – just like me; and my third daughter walks with
her feet turned out to the sides, on account of her extremely tight calf
muscles – just like her father. Two daughters have fine, limp hair (me) and two
have luscious, thick hair (him). Two have narrow noses (me) and two have button
noses (him).
Whilst I expected physical similarities, I
did not appreciate that children also inherit personality traits so strikingly
similar to their parents. These little quirks shape the children’s view of the
world, and affect their experience of it.
My oldest daughter is 12¾ years old. (Yes,
I count in quarter years – my child is frighteningly close to being a teenager
and I am not letting it creep up on me unnoticed!) She is all of the things
that oldest children so often are; responsible, serious, conscientious, bossy,
and somewhat anxious. She has experienced difficulty finding where she fits
into the social dynamics of her year group, which is complicated by her being
one of the youngest and least physically developed girls in the class.
I noticed recently that my beautiful quiet
achiever was becoming very withdrawn. Upon talking to her, I learned that she
is mourning the loss of her closest friend - to a group of which she has found
herself on the periphery, not knowing how to integrate. The topics of
conversation among the girls are not of particular interest to my daughter at
this stage, and she feels overwhelmed by the dominant, outgoing personalities
of the other girls. Her reaction at
first was to spend lunch times alone, wandering forlornly around the school,
hoping her friend would feel guilty and rescue her.
I reflected upon my own experiences at her
age, and realized that my daughter was going through exactly the same thing
that I did. I know that the only person to suffer by her morose guilt-tripping
behavior would be her. She wants to be a part of the group, and remain close to
her friend, but just doesn’t know how to whilst still remaining true to her own
interests and personality. We talked through it together, she had a cry, and we
came up with a strategy.
It amazed me how similar this experience
was for her, on account of her personality, and her reaction to the situation.
I was so grateful for my experience, which although awful at the time, has
helped me to guide my daughter. I genuinely know her pain, understand her
responses, and what she can and can’t do to help herself.
When I was a child I loved to sneak around
my home, eavesdropping on the conversations of my family members. I loved to
read things that I wasn’t supposed to read, and be in places I wasn’t supposed
to be - without anyone ever knowing. Fascinatingly, to me at least, my 10½ year
old delights in doing exactly the same thing. I frequently find her hiding
around corners, listening to my conversations. She wants to be James Bond when
she grows up, and turn this ‘interest’ into a career.
My husband tells me that when he was
bullied as a child, he used to laugh until the other kids stopped hitting him.
It wasn’t a strategy as such – he says he genuinely found it funny that these
kids felt the need to physically hurt him in order to feel important. The
would-be bullies soon lost interest and left my husband alone. His personality
and his reaction to those situations saved him from what could have been a
truly awful experience.
My third daughter is uncannily like her
father. When her sisters snatch things from her, or tease and taunt her, she
generally reacts by laughing or quietly moving away. This benefits her as much
as it thrills me; because she is totally unflappable 90% of the time. She
laughs easily and with her whole heart, loves the finer things in life, and has
no enemies – just like her father.
Each of these traits that I see in my
children cannot have been learned, or ‘nurtured’, because they have not
witnessed us as parents, behaving this way. They must have been inherited in
their genes, in just the same way they got their recessive blue eyes, fine/thick
hair, tight calves, and brown-left-side-of-face-freckles genes. Knowing some of
the past tendencies and traits of my husband and I, particularly when we were teenagers; I
sincerely hope that not ALL of the personality genes passed through to our
children! I guess we will have to wait and see.
