Like father, like son? The complex factors that shape a parent’s influence on their child

he eternal mystery of how much we are shaped by our parents – or how much we shape our children – was stirred again last week with the publication of a study that suggests that we are less like our parents than we had previously thought.

The novelty of this study is that instead of relying solely on self-reporting of personality traits, it also includes the second opinion of a friend or partner. But the paper has yet to be peer-reviewed and has already been criticised by one leading expert in the field. Plomin has his own critics, not least in regard to his suggestion that a person’s socioeconomic status might be a genetic rather than environmental legacy. While science continues to grapple with the data and different interpretations are contested, the rest of us struggle to make sense of ourselves in terms of the families we came from and the families we create.

She sees this especially with men who have had abusive fathers. Of course, it’s difficult to know whether a tendency towards anger is a learned or genetically inherited trait. Even someone like Plomin, who has been called a genetic determinist, emphasises that we don’t inherit personality traits so much as a predisposition towards them. Whether, how and when those predispositions materialise is down to a whole range of complex and perhaps unknowable factors.

Miller explains that he himself was married with two children, but is now single and a roving foreign reporter.

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