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by Donald B. Ardell, Ph. D.
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Wellness in the Headlines
(Don's Report to the World)

In Debates About the Primacy of Nurture Versus Nature, Root for Nurture Even If You Suspect Otherwise. Here's Why.

Saturday March 25, 2006

We worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today.
~Stacia Tauscher

You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.
~Franklin P. Jones

A characteristic of the normal child is he doesn't act that way very often.
~Author Unknown

A wellness mindset is founded on a sense of personal responsibility. To the extent possible, excuses and fault-finding, shifting of blame and elaborate rationales for setbacks are bypassed in favor of just doing what needs to be done.

However, even the most ardent wellness enthusiast acknowledges the fact that genetics play a huge role in shaping the nature and quality of life. Also influential are other determinants, including chance or luck, parents, peers and cultures and, for the faith-based folks, whether God chooses to answer their prayers.

Modern science has tilted the age-old nurture versus nature debate much in favor of nature, in the form of 25,000 or so revealed genetic basics embedded in a four-letter DNA code. What role can parents and others exert when so much depends on neurotransmitters and brain circuits? It seems increasingly likely that such characteristics as the letter codes assigned after completing a Myers-Briggs profile and the labels given to our functioning, such as neurotic or serene, impulsive or deliberate, straight or gay and so on, are hard-wired. As such, they appear to be beyond the influence of parents, peers and cultures.

Recent psychiatric research, however, suggests that nurture (for example, the responses of parents) can affect nature (gene-based personality traits). This tends to jeopardize simplistic notions of the primacy for one or the other. Maybe nature and nurture interact in ways previously overlooked!

This is the sense I get from new findings reported by Sharon Begley in "Science Journal", a regular feature in the Wall Street Journal ("Parents Can Counteract 'Environments' Created By Children's Genes," February 24, 2006; Page B1.) Begley cites experts who suggest that the genome is "a product of social interactions, that genes are fully expressed in some social environments, while in others they never get expressed." Perhaps the pattern of responses evoked by a child's genetically influenced personality reinforces such traits. If that's true, if "genes create environments" (Begley), then a wise parent might influence a child to evolve in desired ways. This despite the fact that without such reinforcement, the child will be largely at the mercy of his or her unmanaged genetics, for better or worse. In the instance of interventions, nurture would be trumping nature or, if you want less of a win/lose way of expressing this notion, nurture would be employed to harmoniously redirect nature.

It's an intriguing thought. Such speculation is fueled by a study of hundreds of adopted children underway at George Washington University Medical Center. The researchers are providing solemn kids with the cheerful treatment, as a parent would a baby who is naturally (thanks to nature or genetics) outgoing and charming, cuddly and cute, as I (probably) was as a child. Will this kind of treatment morph a grumpy, conduct-disordered kid with the genetics of an Attila the Hun, Stalin or Dick Cheney into a sweet charmer, eventually?

Well, more studies are called for, naturally, but let's hope so.

Yet, even if such speculations go nowhere, why should parents respond to kids with less fortunate DNA gifts with "harshness and lack of warmth?" Let's encourage all parents and care-givers to be as kind and loving, cheerful and unconditionally pleasant to all our young, no matter what nature has done to or for them.

Be well. Always look on the bright side of life.

Domain: mental
Subdomain: emotional intelligence

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