Are we destined to become our parents? Or can we be different?

By David McElroy · December 18, 2011

I decided pretty early in life that I was going to be very different from my parents. It seemed easy at the time to just watch their mistakes and avoid them. So why have I spent so much time over the years hating things about myself that seem to have come straight from them?

Some psychologists would argue that it’s because I learned their habits as I was growing up, so it’s all about the environment. Others might argue that the ways in which I’m like them are simply in my genes (and thus hard to overcome), so it’s all about nature.

I think it’s some of both, as I suspect most people believe today. I think most of us would like to believe we were born as blank slates and that whatever we have is just an accumulation of the “programming” that we got from our parents and whoever else raised us, but I don’t think that’s the case. Economist Bryan Caplan looked at all the studies he could find on the subject and concluded the opposite.

In his recent book, “Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think,” he argues that most of what kids are going to become is encoded in their genes. He says that the studies he looked at prove that most of the things parents do to change their kids have little effect. (Here’s an EconTalk podcast in which Caplan discusses the research and his conclusions. I highly recommend it.)

But whatever it is, why have I so often in the past heard things coming out of my mouth — or seen myself acting in certain ways — that seemed to be the ghost of my (still living) father within me?

I’m not a psychologist, so I have no formal credentials to answer that question, but I do have some thoughts about why most of us do it. (I’d argue that we all “channel” bits and pieces of our families, but since some people don’t notice it in themselves, I don’t want to get hung up on that point.)

I believe most of us take the path of least resistance — and that path leads to us becoming our parents, in whole or in part. Everyone makes a few decisions along the way that are different from the ones our parents made, so we’re not carbon copies, but I believe the less introspection and insight people have into themselves and human nature, the more they’re going to automatically morph into their parents as they age. If you don’t understand yourself well enough, you’re going to be shocked as you realize that you’ve become one of your parents at some point. It can be a painful realization.

My own conclusion is that we’re not destined to become what our parents are. We’re not doomed to repeat their mistakes. We’re not doomed to be like the things we hated in our family of origin or in our ancestors. But if you take the path of least resistance, those things are going to happen for you. And if that happens to you — and then you ever wake up to realize what you’ve done in allowing yourself to live this way — you’re going to hate yourself. And you’re going to hate your life.

You have two ways out of that, as far as I can see. You can either remain oblivious to what’s happening — as is the case with the vast majority — or you can look inward, get to know yourself, think deeply about what you learn and then take actions to make yourself an emotionally healthy person. It’s easy to say, but hard to really do. Half-measures won’t be good enough. If you just become somewhat aware of what’s going on, you’re simply going to hate the process as you see it taking place — as you slowly become aware of your transformation into your mother or your father.

In the last few years, I’ve had to change a lot of things in my life — and it started with a realization of what issues of my father’s had influenced me. It was difficult work, both emotionally and intellectually, and I didn’t get truly motivated to reach the root issues until I’d lost what I wanted most in my life (despite the fact that I’d already spent years thinking and reading about psychological issues).

Every now and then, I still feel hints of the old ways. But something that might once have made me raging and angry can now cause me to reflect and stop before reacting. Something that might once have made me feel under attack can now trigger the conscious thought that the thing I’m hearing from someone else probably isn’t an attack and doesn’t matter if it is. I’m able to walk away from things that caused me to engage in the past. And more than anything else, I’m able to be honestly vulnerable with others I care about.

Those things I just described learning to do are things that emotionally healthy people learn early in life. It took me longer than most for some of them, because I absorbed my early programming in my dysfunctional family of origin. It’s tough to get yourself honest enough with yourself that you can change in those ways, but I can say that it’s worth it, based on my own experience.

If you were fortunate enough to be raised in the last emotionally healthy family around, count yourself lucky. If you’ve read this far, though, and have the uneasy feeling that it somehow feels familiar, be honest with yourself. Get professional help if you need it. (You probably do.) Get really honest with yourself. Work really hard to learn and to discover who you really are. And then keep working to make your life what you want it to be.

It’s a lot of work, but the alternative is to slide down the path of becoming one of your own parents — whichever of them was the dominant influence for you. For most of us, that’s a terrifying and unhealthy thing. Change is hard, but it’s worth it.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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