Reply to Why do you think some kids have difficult personalities?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The part about scratching and bruising their parents makes me think that there is a mental health issue and not just a parenting issue. Even parents who are bad at discipline and boundaries Won’t have kids scratching their faces and bruising them.[/quote]

When I first met the mom, she had some scratches. I thought she had a cat. Later learned the kid scratched her. Kid was a toddler so I thought nothing of it. It is many years later and oldest is now 9. Dad had scratches and bruises recently from the girl. I have seen both girls have massive screaming throwing fits over very small things like food not being exactly how she wanted it or flavor ice cream ran out.[/quote]

What you describe goes beyond "difficult personality," OP.  Especially if the parents haven't figured out in all these years how to reduce the physical aggression, something's up (something you're not aware of).  Situations that extreme are almost always some combination of genes and environment.[/quote]

Probably a lot less environment and a lot more genes.

The more children you have, the more you realize how little influence you actually have.[/quote]

Alternatively, your individual influence over children diminishes the more you have. Parents of onlies have immense influence. Parents of two kids must split their influence with the influence of a sibling dynamic. And so on. There are of course genetics at play, but all people are heavily influenced by their environment and in particular by the people around them.

I think one reason a lot of people will discount parental influence is because they don't understand how influence works. Like one dynamic I see a lot is the perfectionist parent who is always correcting and pushing their kid and then gets frustrated when their child does not respond by becoming exacting and hard working like them. But that's because the parent's behavior is making the child terrified of making mistakes, so the child learns to not try at all as a defense mechanism. The unintentional consequences of crappy parenting are often right in front of them, but the parent will say "huh, I guess this child is just genetically predisposed for laziness." So little self awareness.[/quote]

People discount parental influence because they have multiple kids with varying personalities that are evident from infancy. There have been twin studies and adoptee studies supporting nature over nurture as well — those kids turned out the same when raised in different environments. Of course parental influence matters on the extreme ends of the spectrum, but not as much as people tend to think. [/quote]

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