Using These Concepts
We have varied, traditional methods for rearing children, each method with its disciples (who argue with each other!), its aphorisms, and theories. None of the methods has significant empirical validation; that is, none of them has been proven to work better than competing ideas; yet, the kids grow up. They acquire all the strategies for feeding themselves, for talking, walking and running, managing tools, courtship, and rearing a family. Thus, current thinking has lately some cautious acceptance of roles for genetic and familial patterns for at least emotional distress.(17)
Our dominant philosophy is still to assume that Learning, Free Will, and Environment are the effective variables, whether in the context of being a middle child, child of an alcoholic, abuse survivor, or any number of special handicapping social conditions, unless data show that genetics has an influence. Even if genetics is considered, we still must select our therapy tools from Learning, Free Will, and Environment.
In general: a) Early experience was/is more important than later .
b) Pavlovian and operant conditioning were the only accepted paradigms for habit development for a while; imitative learning gained respectability in the '60s.
c) Certain temperamental characteristics (and more lately, ADHD) were speculated to have significant genetic contributions. Some mental retardation was correlated with chromosomal formations.
d) On the other hand, oppositional, defiant behavior was and still is attributed to parental inconsistency; conduct disorder (lying and stealing, primarily) to the lack of parental monitoring. Recent, but passing tradition, therefore, has been to "blame mom." If Learning is the lever, and mom is the one in contact with the kids, then getting in trouble at school means mom taught them wrong. While ADHD and a list of other developmental disabilities are now seen as biologic in origin, blaming mom sometimes remains the tactic for explaining the actions of some of our most difficult children.
Behavioral Family Histories
Other outlooks, however, are gaining acceptance.(18, 19) An awareness of genetic possibilities and a detailed interview of families, not only for kidney disease or diabetes, but also for assorted behavioral traits offers choices not seen in the former models or in those of newer disciplines such as evolutionary psychology. A detailed inventory of family behavioral traits may eventually be the most powerful diagnostic and planning tool available.
a) A behavioral family history allows less blaming, more acceptance, less anger, and fewer erroneous assumptions about behavior antecedents.
b) There is a preexisting support group within each family consisting of people with similar talents and weaknesses. Along with this support group should come a sense of continuity, belonging, contentment, and pride.
c) If you have strong behavioral similarities to an older family member, then you have information about conditions associated with their failure and with their successes. Duplication of conditions that were present for a relative's success could generate comparable success for you. There is less expectation that various "practice" strategies will provide a satisfactory outcome for all kinds of problems. More rational tactics for doing things and for being in the right environments should emerge once the successes and failures of other family members are known.(20)
d) Customary "talk" treatment has a different role than in the past. Talk can provide information but information does not carry the burden of providing an automatic cure. Information helps with acceptance, planning, and making environmental changes. Information may also help you choose between competing educational or career paths. There is less pointless "dumping" of feelings that can be repeated in therapy until the client is either too bored or too poor to continue.
e) Treatment of depressed or impulsive behavior may be powerfully helped by environmental manipulations. Knowing the incentives and punishments that worked for other family members should more quickly lead to finding effective motivators for yourself. Grieving becomes a different matter. While you will miss the particular combination of traits carried by a deceased relative, you can also enjoy the similarities that you share and look for them again in your children.(21)
Discussion:
Traditional Beliefs about Ourselves.
We once believed in an equal potential for everyone that was largely dependent on learning, environment or our Free Will. Using the first as a tool, the latter two factors were thought to shape each of us into greatness, notoriety, or mediocrity. We usually ignored the contradictions that are involved in using environment as a cause for behavior but at other moments, ignoring it in favor of personal determination. If we made choices between the factors, we may have preferred Free Will (22) as the reason for success in spite of environmental disadvantage; environmental variables remained the chief carrier of blame for individual failure.
Changing ideas.
It now appears that both the environmentalist and the Free Will positions reflected a partial understanding of our past and a distorted, embellished vision of our future. Hints of biological limits were ignored or were restricted to considerations of physical attributes. Even within the past decade it is still in poor taste to refer to generalized intelligence as being either important or having a strongly biological, genetic foundation.(23) Unfortunately, our earlier concepts, like the lives of many people, were founded more on short term events and less by an understanding of long term plans (such as genetic templates) and delayed outcomes, outcomes so delayed that they are seen across not years but sometimes generations and millenia.
The Oncoming Evolutionary/Genetic Model.
Some biologists, anthropologists, and psychologists have become ever more preoccupied with speculations about our remote ancestors, the conditions under which they survived and the traits that they shared with each other and with other living creatures. We now believe that traits that once bound us into groups and helped ouly behavioral traits may eventually be the most powerful diagnostic and planning tool available.
a) A behavioral family history allows less blaming, more acceptance, less anger, and fewer erroneous assumptions about behavior antecedents.
b) There is a preexisting support group within each family consisting of people with similar talents and weaknesses. Along with this support group should come a sense of continuity, belonging, contentment, and pride.
c) If you have strong behavioral similarities to an older family member, then you have information about conditions associated with their failure and with their successes. Duplication of conditions that were present for a relative's success could generate comparable success for you. There is less expectation that various "practice" strategies will provide a satisfactory outcome for all kinds of problems. More rational tactics for doing things and for being in the right environments should emerge once the successes and failures of other family members are known.(20)
d) Customary "talk" treatment has a different role than in the past. Talk can provide information but information does not carry the burden of providor have been with us since Darwin and crested most recently in the early 1900's.(Sarason & Doris, 1969) Unfortunately for the concepts, various zealots outran the data which were further tainted by association with the German leadership and their horrid actions during WWII. We next spent approximately 60 years immersed in social idealism. Psychology's own piece of that movement was expressed by radical behaviorism in which organismic variables were ignored and even thought to be irrelevant. We were comfortable separating physical from psychological causes.
The genetics research was also hampered by group data about intervening variables such as "temperament" which obscured the finely detailed analysis necessary to see the phenomenon. Until recently, the separation of people either through migration or by mortality, limited their contact except between the immediately adjacent generations.
Why Now?
a) There is a greater overlap of the generations than formerly. Many of us know our grandparents and hear them comment, "He/she acts just like ____." Photographs and faded VCR records will enhance this awareness.
b) The fresh analysis of data about identical twins has shown earlier findings to be durable. That is, highly similar behavior characteristics occur in identical twins who have been reared far apart. If it can happen twins, why not in the rest of us?
c) Substantial changes have occurred in our understanding of earlier human cultures; there is a fresh emphasis on adaptivity and on continuity of behavior.
d) Medical research has made us more aware of the need for family histories for behavioral traits as well as for diseases such as diabetes or cardiac impairments.
f) Traditional methods of talk, analyze, feel, and rehearse have failed in a wide arena; we need fresh concepts if we are to continue our efforts to understand, predict, and modify human behavior.
g) The technology to record and to analyze many details of human action is only available recently. One contribution of this technology will be to make identification of meaningful pieces of behavior possible. We presently need to identify heritable behavioral units so that we have something to count and to measure.
The Hope of It All.
Small wonder other peoples believed in reincarnation and resurrection. DNA makes it seem possible. How else to describe the reappearing of highly memorable but departed relatives if you don't know about genes? Some of us really do rear our own parents and grandparents. And Uncle Ray and GrandDad Craig are still alive and still tease waitresses after a long day but this time they've got a doctorate. It's good to have Sassy home and good to have Sue and Norman accompanied by pieces of their fathers.
There surely is comfort in these ideas ... comfort for those of us who feel too easily alone, for those of us who did not know our parents or who have little idea where best to spend our lives. It is infinitely simpler to skip the "what shall I be" angst and to search the family for the heroes, the villains, and the average. My father did personnel work for 30 years in the Army and with a high school diploma as his entry card. I did highly similar things for a state government rather than a federal one but needed a Ph. D. Acceptance of genetic influences on our conduct lessens guilt for our mothers who didn't make us perfect and it lights our own paths to a more defined but more realistic, inherently satisfying choice of futures. Goodman (1995) commented that evolution consists of finding an environment wherein we can be ourselves. Our satisfaction and greatest personal good rest in exactly such an outcome.