Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Real Reasons Children are Like their Parents
Chapter 2: Why was Peaches Geldof so Like her Mother?
Chapter 3: Not in Your Genes
Chapter 4: Maltreatment and Love (Why Siblings are so Different, Pt 1)
Chapter 5: Your Role in the Family Drama (Why Siblings are so Different, Pt 2)
Chapter 6: Why Traits Run in Families
Chapter 7: The Real Causes of Ability
Conclusion: It’s the Environment, Stupid!
Appendix 1: Not in Your Genes: Time to Accept the Null Hypothesis of the Human Genome Project?
Appendix 2: Twin Studies: A Discredited Method
Appendix 3: The Fatal Flaws of the Minnesota Twins Reared Apart Study
Appendix 4: The Perils of Geneticism: The Advantages of Believing in a Flexible Psychology
Endnotes
References
Index
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Professor Robert Plomin, the world’s leading geneticist, said in 2014 of his search for genes that explain differences in our psychology: ‘I have been looking for these genes for fifteen years. I don’t have any’.
Using a mixture of famous and ordinary people, Oliver James drills deep down into the childhood causes of our individuality, revealing why our upbringing, not our genes, plays such an important role in our wellbeing and success. The implications are huge: as adults we can change, we can clutch our fates from predetermined destiny, as parents we can radically alter the trajectory of our childrens’ lives, and as a society we could largely eradicate criminality and poverty
Not in Your Genes will not only change the way you think about yourself and the people around you, but give you the fuel to change your personality and your life for the better.
Oliver James trained and practised as a child clinical psychologist and, since 1987, has worked as a writer, journalist and television documentary producer and presenter. His books include Juvenile Violence in a Winner-Loser Culture, the bestselling They F*** You Up and Britain on the Couch, which was also a successful documentary series for Channel 4. He is a trustee of two children's charities: the National Family and Parenting Institute and Homestart.
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Copyright © Oliver James 2016
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First published by Vermilion in 2016
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Hardback ISBN 9780091947668
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They fuck you up, your little ones
They know just what to say and do
To drain your world of joy and fun
Then blame the misery on you.
But they’ll be fucked up in their turn
By children they can’t understand,
Who’ll teach them what we had to learn
That nothing ever goes as planned.
Child hands back misery to man
It spreads out like a lifeless plain.
Eject them early as you can
And never speak to them again.
To my sisters, Jessica, Mary and Lucy
The latest evidence from the Human Genome Project is proving that it is not genes which make psychological traits run in families. There are physical traits that pass down genetically, like height, looks and eye colour, but it now seems very much as if variations in things like mental illness, smartness or shyness, have little or nothing to do with the sequences of DNA which pass from parent to child.
Rather, it is proven that patterns of nurture make us like our parents and grandparents: what travels down the generations is precise kinds of bickering, humour, snide asides, delicious food preparation, beatings, hugging, short-temperedness.
You are like you are because you were related to by both your parents in very particular ways, good and bad. When you have children, you are liable to do exactly the same, or something similar, in many respects, or else react against it.
How you were cared for, especially in early life, was critical. This, in turn, was caused by the way your parents were cared for, all the way back to your grandparents and beyond. The best evidence suggests that nine out of ten maltreated children develop a mental illness as adults. Seventy per cent of maltreated children become maltreating parents themselves.
Much nurture is positive, the love and sensitivity, the teaching of skills, the intimacy. But in almost all families, there are toxic patterns. The implication is that we do not have to go on repeating the past.
Politicians play on our desire to improve our material circumstances in order to provide a more affluent life for our children. If only we could see that, once a basic level of material security has been achieved, it is far more important to pass love down the generations than property, or stocks and shares.
I only ever excelled at one skill: dribbling footballs. Alas, I was never an excellent footballer for the simple reason that it’s a team sport. It is true that I once scored a goal after dribbling around ten players but, when practising with my friends, they used to chant ‘Selfish James never scores’.
When my son was aged two he could dribble a football remarkably well and from around aged five, he was doing it in a way that was startlingly similar to how I used to. Aged seven, I sometimes witnessed him dribble past the whole of opposing teams and score.
The interesting thing is that it is impossible that my son could have learnt this from me.
At nine, he was at pains to point this out. Something of a barrack room lawyer, he recorded the following interview with me on my iPhone:
Son: Oliver James, is it true that when you were young you used to dribble exactly like me?
Me: Pretty much true, yup.
Son: Okay. And is it true that you are disabled and I have never seen you play?
Me: It is true.
Son: And is it true I have never seen a photo or a video of you playing football?
Me: That is correct.
Son: So you have to admit that I dribble exactly like you, yet I’ve never, ever, ever, ever seen you do it? So is it true that that came from genes?
Me: No.
Son: Why so?
Me: Errrrrrr …
Son: That’s all we need.
(The reader can listen to this interview at www.selfishcapitalist.com/ and see a clip of him dribbling. The interview was recorded whilst driving in my car and includes poignant interruptions from the GPS instructing me how to get our destination. My son labelled the file ‘Oliver James Wrong’.)
For 27 years I have suffered from multiple sclerosis and for the last 15 that has somewhat impaired my walking. I was not able to dribble from well before my son’s birth ten years ago, and there are no recordings or pictures of me performing when young. Neither my wife nor I hothoused his dribbling when small, he was a born dribbler.
Like him, you might have thought that it must be some genetic dribbling code that he has inherited. But the odd thing is that it seems extremely unlikely that his skill was passed through genes, even though we share half of them in common. The latest research cannot find genetic codes that significantly influence the transmission of psychological characteristics from parent to child (dribbling is in large part a matter of psychology). Whether it be specific genes, groups of genes, or large numbers of variants, they have not been shown to play any important role in explaining our intelligence, personality or mental health.
I appreciate that this last sentence will be met with incredulity by some readers but they are a fact, not my interpretation. The consensus in the scientific community is that studies of genetic variants can only explain, at best, a tiny amount (1–5 per cent) of our psychological individuality.1 The scientists have invented something called the ‘Missing Heritability’2 as a way of describing this finding. Because they were so sure that genes would explain us, based on the results of studies of identical twins, they devised the idea that the genes are still there, it’s just a matter of finding them.
Now, this is where my interpretation does come in. Normally, when hundreds of studies have contradicted a theory, the theory gets dropped. I maintain that the impact of genes is not missing, the Human Genome Project – HGP – has proven beyond little doubt that it is largely non-existent. Enough studies have occurred for us to have reached that point. I believe it is safe to say that genes hardly influence why we are like parents or different from our siblings.
In the case of mental illness, for example, by 2011 there had been 115 HGP studies of it3 and several dozen have been published since. They have looked everywhere that the genes could plausibly be found and the believers in genes are beginning to admit defeat.4 Hardly any scientists now believe that DNA codes which directly determine us will be found, the only question is whether they have indirect effects.
I assume the general reader does not care for more detail about this than what I have presented in Chapter 3. Those with a scientific bent should immediately turn to Appendix 1, which reproduces my peer-reviewed, published scientific paper setting out the evidence. If you think that studies of identical twins have proven the importance of genes, think again: Appendix 2 explains why such studies are now all but disproven. Those who have been tricked by the much-publicised American study of identical twins who were supposedly reared apart5 should read Appendix 3: it’s a study which is bogus, hyped by ill-informed journalists and TV producers. Those who want even more detail should read my forthcoming scientific monograph, called It’s The Environment, Stupid!, where still further substantiation is provided.
Of course, if genes do not seem to explain us, parents can still physically pass traits down to their children. For example, it seems extremely likely that at birth many autistic children’s brains have not developed properly, that some children are born with autism6 (loosely defined as an incapacity to know that others have minds). But that does not need to have anything to do with genes. It could be largely or wholly because of what happens in the womb and there is some evidence it may be so, in some cases.7 This is in accord with the fact that one third of babies are born ‘difficult’.8 It has long been accepted that this is mostly not caused by genes, the difficultness of neonates results from the pregnancy and birth.
Going back to my son’s dribbling, I have little doubt that he has acquired this trait from me through a physical, biological mechanism. One theory is that in becoming an exceptional dribbler myself, my body released chemicals that switched certain genes on or off.9 This pattern of chemicals, rather than any particular genes, could have been passed on to my son through a process known as epigenetics, although this is very much a speculation.
Just as it now seems highly probable that genes do not cause our individuality, and whilst there are almost certainly other, as yet undiscovered, physical causes of it, there is a mass of solid evidence that how we are nurtured makes an enormous difference to how we turn out, for good and ill.
My son is a far better footballer than I ever was. When he was seven he was spotted by Southampton FC and trained with them for two years, aged eight and nine. He was twice invited for trials to become a member of their academy, not far from joining one of the best under-nine-year-old teams in the country.
This is because he is better adjusted than I was. Although he was selfish and did not pass the ball when small, unlike me, as he grew up he was able to see the need to cooperate with his teammates. I have good reason to suppose his superior personality and mental health resulted from the highly responsive care he received from my wife, and because he felt loved by both of us. He was able to tolerate others getting the glory of scoring a goal he had created, able to realize if he passed to teammates, sometimes they might pass to him, giving him his moments in the sun.
By contrast, I was sometimes a snarling, angry child because the early care I received was often rejecting and unresponsive. In later childhood, despite repeated attempts to persuade me to be more of a team player and despite my best efforts to be so, my personality got in the way. Looking back, I would speculate that my dribbling was a form of aggression and a way of feeling in control (literally of the ball), one that my mother very much encouraged and enjoyed, and which she had originally nurtured by making me such an angry and powerless boy through her irritable and sometimes violent nurture (don’t get me wrong, at other times she was loving and very much on my side). If I did pass this skill to my son through epigenetics, the fundamental cause was not genes, it was the nurture my mother provided.
It is also worth mentioning that when very small my daughter was just as good at dribbling as my son. I have little doubt that if she had lived in a society where that skill was valued in girls and if we, as parents, had valued it in her as much as we (particularly me) valued it in our son, she would be an outstanding female footballer. Thus, it is possible that both our children were born with the physically (but not genetically) inherited potential to be exceptional dribblers, but whether that was realised depended wholly on how we reacted to them as parents (especially me, with my desire for my son to be the footballer I was not) and what was valued in our society. As you will see in story after story in what follows, this is absolutely typical of how parents cause the way children turn out. Insofar as anything is inborn, albeit not inherited through genes, the critical factor is how parents respond.
Richard Dawkins portrays us as mere carcasses that enable DNA to be transmitted onwards, if we reproduce. As far as psychological traits go, the Human Genome Project is proving him emphatically wrong. The truth is that the good and the bad in you results to a large extent from the unique care you received. This is incredibly good news. As parents, if we get it right, the outcome will be positive.
There is now overwhelming evidence that childhood maltreatment is a major cause of mental illness. Even the World Health Organization acknowledges that 29 per cent of mental illness worldwide is attributable to it,10 almost certainly a considerable underestimate.
For example, the single best study found that 90 per cent of children who had been maltreated had a mental illness at age 18.11 Think about that: nine out of ten children who were maltreated developed a mental illness. It implies that nearly all maltreated children become distressed adults. There is plenty more evidence of this. The more childhood maltreatments you suffer, and the worse the kind of maltreatment, the greater your risk of subsequent mental illness.
Equally, there is strong evidence that children who suffer no maltreatment very rarely develop mental illness.12 The presence of early love and responsiveness creates emotional health and inoculates against later adversity.13 Whether loved or maltreated, the impact of parental care cascades down the generations.
The implications of genes being so insignificant and nurture being so vital are mind-blowing, hard to get your head around. If you are a parent, once you stop thinking of your child as having been ‘born that way’, there is so much you can do to alter the trajectory of its life and consequently; the lives of your grandchildren. At the simplest level, just by believing its abilities are not fixed, a child can improve its academic performance, the same goes for the beliefs a parent or teacher has about the child (see Appendix 4). Forget about having your genes tested to identify psychological traits, it is science fiction. There will never be gene therapy for mental illness or any other psychological traits. Mental illnesses run in families because of nurture, not genes. If unhappy patterns are broken, they will not be passed to the next generation.
If you are a troubled adult who thinks that this is your genetic destiny, or if you just have some irritating quirks that you had always assumed to be genetically inherited, it will be empowering to you to find out that they are not set in genetic stone. The brain is much more plastic than used to be believed, change is possible in adulthood, albeit often hard won. The studies show that if people diagnosed with a mental illness believe it is inherited, they fare worse. If their relatives, or the professionals caring for them believe the same, the prognosis is more pessimistic (see Appendix 4).
The late Paula Yates, the television presenter and ex-wife of Bob Geldof with whom I worked in the 1980s, is an example of the baleful effect of believing mental illness is genetically inherited. When I knew her, she told me that she did not drink because her father had been mentally ill and she was convinced she was at high risk of that too, because it was in her genes. Indeed, mental illness and substance abuse did befall her in the last few years of her life. But it was nothing to do with her paternal DNA, for it turned out that Jess Yates, the man who raised her, was not her biological father (that was the TV presenter Hughie Green). The true cause of her vulnerability was the care she received as a child. That she believed it was in her genes made it harder for her to overcome her problems.
All of us have been in the grip of hugely powerful intergenerational processes that dictate how we function. Only by awareness of them can we gain some control and change. This is illustrated in Chapter 6 with the tale of four generations of mothers who blamed their daughters for their difficult behaviour, with no awareness that they were causing the problem through their mothering. With the help of therapy, the last mother was able to break the cycle and her daughter is freed from it.
If you are the parent of an inexplicably impossible child or have a crazy or obnoxious partner, it is understandable that you want a clear medical label for the problem and even better, a pill that will change it. The psychiatric profession and drug companies know this, and ruthlessly exploit that longing for a simple solution. Fully 40 per cent of the websites on the Internet that offer explanations of mental illness have drug company backing of some kind;14 there is a deliberate and costly campaign to sell the genetic explanation and the drug solution.
I am not suggesting that genes play no part in what we are like as a species. Genes explain why we are not born with the necks of giraffes or the flippers of penguins. As well as physical traits, they confer fundamental human psychological traits, like language, humour and putting ourselves in the minds of others. What the Human Genome Project seems to have proven is that the extent to which we have these and other psychological traits is not governed by variants in specific genes. This makes evolutionary sense.
As explained in Chapter 5, all of us are born at a unique point in our parents’ relationship, affecting how they respond to us. We have a place in the family, our birth order. Our gender means particular things to both parents. They are very likely to have different expectations for each of us. In order to thrive, it makes sense that we would be born with great plasticity, able to adapt to what is required by our specific place in the family and expectations from parents. To be born stupid with parents who wanted a clever child, to be born extrovert if parents wanted a quiet child, that would decrease our likelihood of winning their affections. Being highly adaptable would work far better.
Genes enable almost all of us to acquire language. But which one we speak is wholly dependent on the one we are taught by our parents and society. The same way, nearly all of us have the potential for psychological characteristics like liveliness, intelligence or depression, but the extent to which we develop them and in precisely what way depends largely, or completely, on nurture.
Enough of these generalisations. There is no point in dilly-dallying. We can get straight into the real reasons that children take after their parents as soon as I have briefly explained a few details of the sources I have used and some other book househusbandry.
Footnotes and other househusbandry
A good deal of this book is concerned with the causes of mental illness, more than personality or ability – even the last chapter’s analysis of the causes of exceptional ability shows that maltreatment often plays a considerable role. Yet my main message is optimistic. To this end, at the conclusion of each chapter there is a section entitled WHAT WORKS? 3 TAKEAWAYS. These are not chirpy exercises in positive psychology: ‘Hey, you can sort yourself out by a bit of mindfulness training and eating a large portion of beetroot for breakfast every day’. Rather, I provide you with mostly scientifically supported, practical implications.
Where I mention evidence for an assertion I make, I provide a footnote with details of the study or studies, with an asterix in the text. The footnotes section at the end of the book is divided into chapters, with the page number and the words for which I provide evidence.
The book is littered with case histories. Some are based on clients I have worked with and in these cases I have received permission to tell the story. Some are based on emails and subsequent phone or Skype conversations I have had with members of the public who contacted me and who have also given permission for their use. Unless otherwise specified, in all the case histories I change important details to retain the anonymity of the persons in the story.
There are also famous people used to exemplify points I am making. Chapter 2 is devoted to Paula Yates and her daughter Peaches Geldof, the sources for which are explained near the beginning of the chapter. Chapters 5 and 7 use some famous examples, mostly based on biographies and autobiographies. As in my previous books, these psychobiographical examples are based on reliable sources, like the famous people’s own accounts of their lives, and in some cases, my own personal experience from working with them, or interviews I did with them for newspapers or on television. In using psychobiography, I am following the tradition developed by Sigmund Freud and Lytton Strachey, hoping to engage the reader through famous people with whom they may feel they already have some kind of relationship, through the media, or their artistic or scientific creations.
Human beings have the longest period of dependence on their parents for survival of any species.1 Whereas most mammals are independent after a few weeks or months, humans require five years. For that reason, we start off highly attuned to our main carers, hoping to attract their loving and material resources. We may die, emotionally as well as literally, if we do not.
Although it sounds rather negative and is only one aspect of the parent–child relationship, I characterise the normal tendency of a child to attract its parent’s resources and be highly protective of what they were like as Offspring Stockholm Syndrome.
Stockholm Syndrome was first identified when it was discovered that hostages in a Stockholm bank raid developed empathy for their captors and adopted many of their opinions. This is a rational survival strategy in the circumstances. Captors are less likely to kill you if they become attached and sympathise with you as a human being, just like themselves. One of the most famous instances was Patti Hearst, the American media heiress who joined the terrorist group that kidnapped her.2 By endorsing their campaign, she survived. Hers was not just a cunning wheeze, she truly identified with them, just as children do with their parents.
Since small children are completely in the power of parents, it makes sense for them to do their best to ingratiate themselves. Like hostages, they adopt their ‘captors’ opinions because, although we may prefer not to think about it, children genuinely are at risk of death from parents.
Most parents are desperate to do the best they can for their children, and that makes them prepared to put themselves second, or at least, to feel torn between doing so and meeting their own needs.3 But small children are a tremendous burden. Their total dependence when they are infants, unable to move, feed or soothe themselves, is so extreme that it creates a potent guilt and urgent demand. At times, for most mothers (it is nearly always the mother who is the primary carer for the infant in the early months) this can be intolerable and insufferable.4 Given the pressure, small wonder that fully half of mothers of babies under the age of one year report having seriously pictured killing their baby at some point5 (in actual fact, the true proportion is probably nearly all of us parents, however fleeting the thought). For most mothers, the 24-hour demands are so intense that, on occasions, it becomes a case of ‘one of us has got to die, this can’t go on’.
Anyone who has cared for a small child knows how physically and emotionally exhausting it can be, due to loss of sleep, loss of autonomy and the feeling that you are out of time and beyond civilised society. In our atomised world, with so many mothers isolated for most of the day rather than feeling part of a community, no wonder it is so common to become depressed and furiously angry,6 a mixture of despair and low-grade irritability which periodically explodes into severe anguish or an incontinent loss of temper, or at the extreme, into psychotic incoherence. Indeed, is it any wonder that about two babies a week are killed by their carers in England and Wales, or that the age group most at risk of being murdered is under-one year olds?7
It may seem an extraordinary and lugubrious suggestion, but the primary explanation for why children become like parents are the combined realities of the total dependence of small children and the threat this poses to the emotional survival of the carer, occasionally making them murderous. Children must find a way to attract parental resources and ingratiate themselves, otherwise they can die.8 The easiest way for the child to attract parental approval is to copy them.
Teaching, modelling and identification as mechanisms by which children become like parents
Teaching
Parents implicitly and explicitly coach their children in the ‘right’ ways.9 At the outset, everything that happens for infants, happens at the behest of the carer. As soon as they are old enough to understand, children are told how and when to eat, shit, pee, play and react to adults. As they get older, parents strongly encourage some activities and discourage others. Taught what pleases and displeases their parents, children adjust what they do accordingly. For example, when I am not shouting at them to leave me alone to get on with writing this book, I encourage my children to be playful and creative. Consequently, seeking their parents’ approbation, they place a high premium on these attributes (and hopefully, too, because they find these states enjoyable). Equally, both my wife and I can be competitive and while we do not deliberately do so, we implicitly teach competitiveness to our children. I encourage and supervise my son to do sprint training because he likes to be better than other boys at football (yes, and because I want him to be). The explicit lesson is ‘beat the other boys!’ A proportion of the positive and negative features that children develop is the simple consequence of such teaching, things like regular habits, organised thought and a glass-half-full attitude to life – or their opposites.
Modelling
Distinct from being actively taught, children carefully study how parents behave and scrupulously copy it from a young age. When our daughter was about six months old, she witnessed me doing yoga every morning, part of which consisted of rapidly breathing in and out through my nose, rather noisily. To our amazement and amusement, she imitated this sniffling noise. As children get older they pick up on other tiny details like this, behavioural or verbal tics. In the exchange between my son and me with which this book began, my son asks ‘Why so?’ – it’s an interrogative I sometimes use. They also duplicate less trivial patterns of behaviour, which range from punctuality to aggression to passivity.
While I may teach my children to be playful and creative, I also model patterns that are less wholesome. For example, I have always been a driver who is somewhat negligent of the regulations, whether that is not putting on my seat belt, speeding, or even using my mobile phone. I modelled this from the example of my father: I can still visualise the scene when I was seven years old in which our car broke down in a private London road that he used illegally as a shortcut to get us to school. Such modelled habits pass down the generations. Alas, I fear that when my children become drivers, they may imitate my attitude to traffic regulations. Interestingly, though, having witnessed my transgressions, as part of their identity they may do the exact opposite and be at pains to avoid such illegality, perhaps in an internal alliance with my wife’s diametrically opposed attitude – she is a fastidiously law-abiding driver. As we shall see, family dynamics – the patterns of relationships between all family members – hugely affect what we model.
As parents, there are nearly always some gaps between what we teach and what we model: ‘do as I say, not as I do’. For example, most parents teach their children that lying is wrong and yet, when our child picks up the phone, if it’s someone we do not want to speak to, we frantically wave at our child to tell the caller that we are not there. Our children learn from observing us that there can be exceptions to rules and we do not necessarily mean what we say, there are mixed messages.
Where there are two parents, differences inevitably occur in their views about some issues, such as what constitutes healthy eating, how much screen time should be permitted and, in our family’s case, traffic regulations. Parents differently model these issues to the children and the children sift through and select, according to what will attract parental resources.
When children do precisely duplicate parental behaviour, it is often assumed it must be genetic but it is nothing of the sort. My son did not inherit a gene that makes him say ‘Why so?’ They closely monitor parents’ personal styles, characters and behaviour patterns. As assiduous students, they are scarily astute. More than anyone, my children can sometimes leave me with nowhere to hide when specifying my faults.
Identification
Whereas modelling is imitation, identification is the child experiencing some aspect of the parent as being them.10 The child takes what the parent is like into them, making it one and the same thing as their very self.
At root, identification occurs out of love or out of fear.11 If it is love, the child is being like the parent in order to make the parent feel good or not wanting to distress them by being different. For example, when my son was aged eight, he asked me about a book I had written on office politics. Having explained it to him, he started playing around with the ideas in his school life. Intrigued by the tactic of ingratiation, for instance, he employed it on a teacher by complimenting him on his tie, with gratifying consequences (though when he reported this to me I warned him not to lay it on too thick, as ingratiation backfires loudly when spotted). He was identifying with his beloved father’s interest, applying it in his own life, and making it his own. Because I have shown him love, he loves me and wants to be like he whom he loves.
At the risk of disappearing down a tunnel of love, I can say much the same of my relationship with my father. His feelings about women were always mixed, and he was more at ease with males. I was his only son, the third of four children, with three sisters. Purely because of what was between my legs when I was born, he poured a great deal of affection into me, as well as his unfulfilled hopes, which caused me some difficulties as well as having many benefits. He treated me very differently from my sisters.
I was a delinquent, angry boy because my mother was overstretched, caring for four children under the age of five at the point when my younger sister was born. My mother smacked me (sometimes round the head) when she lost her temper and could be very irritable and depressed, although in later life she was also sensitive and I always knew she loved me. As a toddler, my father did his best to bond with me and once the hell – as far as I was concerned – of formal education began, he showed great sympathy for my reluctance to cooperate with it, as did my mother. They were united in their loathing of the destruction of creativity that formal education can entail. Indeed, given how lamentably organised British education is, I am inclined to agree with them that one of its main purposes is merely to warehouse children so that parents can work.
However, my father had mixed feelings about schooling. He was a scholarly man who loved knowledge. Most importantly in relation to me, one of his unfulfilled ambitions was to have attended a major public school, and he wanted that for me. He had been made into a snob, in some respects, by the slights of class inflicted by his background and education (as it happens, St Cyprian’s, the school where he endured his early education was described by George Orwell in his memoir, Such, Such Were The Joys, my father attending five years later; it depicts a humiliating, snobbish and dispiriting institution).
One of six sons, his father had been an exceptionally successful doctor and dentist,12 but a tyrannical man who had been the son of the proprietor of two grocery stores in Northampton, aware of his humble origins. Two of my father’s brothers also trained as doctors, along with him. All three attended the posh Magdalene College, Cambridge University, having been sent to a respectable but by no means posh public school. My father’s experience at university was that the ones who went to the majors had the most fun, enjoying a Bertie Woosterish life of drink-fuelled gaiety and playfulness, at least in my father’s imagination. That contrasted with the hard slog of my father’s pursuit of his medical degree. His conclusion was that if he had a son, he should go to a major and to his Cambridge College because that would make him (his son, but also my father, by proxy – parents identify with children too) a member of an elite that also had the most fun.
Unfortunately, the mixed messages I received from my parents led to a bumpy academic ride for me. Throughout the long line of disastrous academic failures, my father closely supported and encouraged me in the face of strong evidence that I was as thick as the proverbial two short planks.
I did not get off to a good start. I can still picture the corner of the playground during the break time on my first day at school, aged four, when I randomly attacked two older boys, who, not unreasonably, grabbed me by the hair and pulled. My parents allowed me to withdraw from school for a year.
Until the age of eight I attended schools that put little pressure on me but then I was sent to an extremely strict one. This being 1961, I was regularly beaten by the headmaster with a rounders bat for my misbehaviour and lack of application. I did no work and consistently bumped along the bottom of all my classes (the order of performance was read out each week and the bottom three was always some permutation of Arendt, Carpenter, James). At ten and a half, the headmaster called my parents in and startled them by saying I was ‘mentally subnormal’ and must leave because I required special education (many years later, however, ha ha, my mother had the great satisfaction of sitting next to the headmaster at dinner and being able to answer with some relish the question ‘Whatever happened to Oliver?’). Sent to a boarding school in Kent, I continued my bad behaviour and lack of academic commitment, proceeding to fail the entrance exam to the major.
I failed so badly that I was fortunate to be given a second chance. My father drove me down to a crammer, a boot camp for thickos, having pleaded with the major to let me have another go. He was sympathetic but also warned me that this was my last hope. Since he cared so much about me getting into a major, so did I. For ten weeks, I started every day (Sundays included) at 7 a.m. with a French and Latin word test before breakfast. Each Saturday morning we took the complete entrance exam and our progress, or lack thereof, was mercilessly exposed. I was still badly behaved and the punishment for this was to be sent for a run. During those ten weeks I must have jogged hundreds of miles but I was only beaten once (for throwing stones at the ducks on a pond). By the end I had doubled my marks and passed the exam with a respectable score. But, alas, on arrival at the major I returned to my old ways and at the end of the first term failed the school internal exam, dropping down a year.
I have the letters my father wrote me while I was there, at least two or three a week, as he gently tried to coax and advise me to apply and behave myself. Shortly after taking my O levels (now GCSEs) and before the results had been published he took me for a glass of Pimms at a pub. He did not read me the riot act, he was warm and kind, but he calmly posed three choices, ones that in retrospect seem curious. I could leave the school, there and then, and go and work on the railways in Swindon (why he imagined that city employed so many railway workers I never did discover), I could go and work as a stockbroker in the City, or I could stay at the school and go to Cambridge.
Having absolute faith in my father, I accepted this as a multiple-choice test in which there were no alternatives. Although I quite fancied the idea of the railways, I was not mad keen on the idea of relentless manual labour. In our family culture, working in financial services was akin to joining the SS, and a stockbroker was like being a guard at the Belsen concentration camp, so I did not consider that option. Which only left going to Cambridge. Being so much identified with my father, it did not occur to me to ask about the possibility of attending less academic universities. My dad warned me that I would have to work extremely hard to achieve this goal, since, at best, I was going to scrape a handful of O levels (indeed, my total was seven, all poor grades). Nonetheless, I signed up for the plan and worked like a super-nerd for two years, with brief periods of marijuana-induced anaesthetisation as light relief, serenaded by Pink Floyd.
The reader may have guessed by now that when my A level results came they were not good (a B, D and E – but as I always tell my children, A levels were real A levels in those days, just as Firsts were real Firsts, not the namby-pamby grade-inflated metrics of today). Luckily for me, I was allowed to sit the exam for Cambridge. Finally, I managed to work out how to answer essay questions well enough to pass that exam quite well and was accepted by my father’s old college.
Interestingly, however, once at university, I did not live out my father’s dream of becoming Bertie Wooster. For one thing, this was 1973 and such behaviour was out of fashion (although only ten years later it was back in vogue, Mrs Thatcher’s era dovetailing with a beautifully executed television dramatisation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited). But more profoundly, and much to my father’s distress, I reacted strongly against the idea of being a major public schoolboy and a different identification emerged, that with my mother.
Although from a wealthy family, she had been primarily raised by an illiterate Tasmanian nanny, and she had great faith in what she called ‘the integrity of the working classes’. In accord with this, I spent my gap year between school and university setting up a holiday play scheme on a housing estate on the edge of Manchester (called Hattersley, it was where the notorious Moors Murders had occurred five years before). My Cambridge college being very posh, I rejected the port-swilling and letting off of shotguns into the night, of some of my hunting, shooting and fishing contemporaries (the college actually had its own beagle-pack). Instead, I grew my hair long, and spent a lot of time reading and pontificating. My relationship with my father never quite recovered from this betrayal of his unfulfilled ambitions, although we continued to share the love of scholarship that he had modelled for me.
The main point of this lengthy digression is that my father never gave up on me and that it was because we loved each other that I kept on responding to his pleas to buckle down. Love can be the foundation of identification. It might be said that the very fact that I am expounding the ideas in this book is evidence thereof: my father was a psychoanalyst, and along with my mother, who also was one (and also had a big influence on my thinking), he was a compelling advocate of the role of nurture in determining what we are like. I did not genetically inherit my longstanding fascination with the nature-nurture debate, I identified with my parents’ interest. But identification does not only work through love.
Very often it is out of fear. If so, the child is identifying in order to avoid unpleasant experiences, like criticism, punishment or, at worst, physical attacks. This identification with the aggressor is a way of pacifying them. It is saying, ‘don’t hurt me any more, I am who you want me to be, I am you’. That way, the aggressor is less likely to attack them.
Maltreatment as a cause of similarities between children and parents
Beyond the three mechanisms of learning (teaching, modelling and identification), maltreatment is the most tenacious cause of why children become like parents because it sets in motion a desperate and compulsive tendency to repeat the past.13
Teaching and modelling can be consciously spotted once we grow up, and we can choose alternatives. Identification can certainly be hard to unpick, since it is part of who we are. But the effects of maltreatment are hardest of all to overcome.
At its simplest, maltreatment causes the child to feel the same distress as the parent. If I am a depressed parent, I may be depressing to my child. If your parent upsets you in particular ways that create similar distress in you, sometimes a duplicate of their distress. The content of the depressive ideas may be identical.14 If the parent is depressed about being fat and intellectually inadequate, those ideas may be planted in the child by a form of coercive teaching – ‘you’re fat, you’re stupid’. They may also be transferred into the child by behaviour, such as proving that it lacks intelligence by humiliating it in front of others. ‘I’m okay,’ the parent feels afterwards, ‘you’re not.’
Maltreatment includes emotional abuse (like being victimised, being treated cruelly or seeing other siblings favoured over them), emotional or physical neglect, and physical or sexual abuse. If we are maltreated, it causes severe distress which becomes the way we experience the world. It remains intractably part of us because the child copes with the distress through re-enacting it in other relationships, including with siblings and peers, and in later life, in love, work and friendships.
For example, a woman had been the object of considerable negative attributions from both parents. Her father routinely humiliated her by showing her how much cleverer he was at mealtimes. Her mother criticised her for being fat, having in fact made the girl overweight by encouraging her to overeat. As a result, the girl had very negative ideas about both herself and how other people viewed her, expecting them to think her fat and stupid. Both in childhood and in later life, she attracted friends who continued the maltreatment by also calling her fat and treating her as worthless. Even though it made her unhappy, being related to in these ways was familiar, comfortable in a way that benign alternatives were not. Behind this lay a faint hope that, somehow, this time, with this new friend, it would turn out differently.
In studies, such emotional abuse is emerging as the single most destructive maltreatment.15 If I persistently tell my children that they are stupid, ugly or foul, it’s invidious and damaging to their psyches. If I favour one child over another, bigging one up and putting the other down, the injury is deep, the wounds hard to heal. Painful though it may be for us to admit, to some degree all parents unintentionally maltreat their children, and mostly without being conscious of what they are doing. Indeed, maltreatment is found in all relationships, including in workplaces and between friends. But it is particularly damaging when done repeatedly and extremely by parents to children, because of Offspring Stockholm Syndrome and the power imbalance.16
I call the projection of unwanted negatives on to others the I’m Okay, You’re Not mechanism. If I am feeling angry or depressed, I may get rid of those emotions by provoking them in someone else. We use each other as dustbins for unwanted emotions in this way on a daily basis.17
If it is an infrequent or a mild, transient incident, it does no lasting damage. Hence, if you are feeling in a bad mood at work, you may send an email to a stressed colleague chasing up a document that they should have already supplied. Consciously, you think you are just doing your job; unconsciously, by choosing that particular moment to pressurise them, you are creating an irritant, which you know, deep down, will add to their stress levels, reducing your own by excreting it on to them. At a subliminal level, you know that when they open the email they will let out a little curse as they read it, stressed by the added burden. You feel a little bit better the moment you press ‘send’, knowing that after they open the document their heart rate will rise, their blood pressure increase and a frown will crease their face. Your body may relax a little, you may have a small and temporary relief from your bad mood.
All family members sometimes do this to each other. I may feel fed up and, instead of getting on with writing this book, send my wife a text asking if she has remembered to arrange the MOT for her car, causing her annoyance. It’s part of the warp and woof of family life, humorously explored in the television series Modern Family. Most of it is ultimately harmless, causing only short-term dips in moods, but it has bigger effects when done by parents to children because of the power ratio.
If I see that my child is tired, has had a bad day and has still not done their homework, there are distressing or benign ways and moments to communicate the need for them to get the homework done. I can do it in an I’m Okay, You’re Not way, or in one that does not dump my rubbish on them. If I choose the moment to suggest they do it when they are just settling into a much-anticipated new episode of The Simpsons