What I'd like to talk about today is making kids.
Now it's not what you might be thinking about, this is a family show.
Rather what I would like to talk about are those amazing, adorable,
and sometimes incredible irritating traits
that we call 'temperament' or 'personality'.
Some kids are very quickly brought to feel anxious or angry,
while other kids seem almost unflappable.
Some kids love to be surrounded by noise, and people, and activity,
while others prefer some quiet, maybe even some solitude.
Some kids wear their emotions on their sleeves,
while for others you can't even figure out how they are feeling sometimes.
Where do these temperamental traits come from?
And what, if anything, should we do about them?
From twin studies, we know
that about 50-60% of child temperament comes from our genes.
That sounds like a lot. That is a lot.
However that still leaves a lot of room for other influences.
Such as the environment.
For a long time, there was a debate that went back and forth
about whether it was nature or nurture that determined behaviour.
Now, for the most part, that debate is over.
And I can tell you that the answer to the question
of whether it is nature or nurture is "Yes."
(Laughter)
The story doesn't end there.
When you talk to parents, many of them marvel
about how unbelievably different their kids are.
They'll say, "I don't get it. They had the same mom, they had the same dad,
they were raised in the same house, and I did the same thing,
and my kids are nothing alike."
Many times that is true.
The question about whether we really do parent our kids the same way
is an interesting one.
If you ask most parents, they say, "Yes, we did pretty much the same thing."
You ask the kids on the other hand, and they will generally tell you
they were parented completely differently.
If you actually do observational studies of parents and kids together,
you will often find something in between.
But things get even more complicated.
There's a term that geneticists call
"evocative gene environment correlations"
and that's a mouthful.
What it means when it comes to child development
is that the environment that a child is in is not some random event
that just descends upon them,
but is associated or correlated with, genetically influenced behaviour.
That still sounds a little technical, I know.
I would like to argue that this is
a very important and very practical concept.
For this Vermont crowd, I thought of a metaphor that I think could work.
That is that kids, just like big mountains,
have the ability to create their own weather.
Think about a child who was temperamentally happy,
and outgoing, and warm.
And think about how the universe tends to respond to those traits. Right?
Those are the kids that make parents look like stars.
What about the child who is a little bit more anxious?
Or a little bit more irritable?
How does the world often respond to that?
Very often it's with more anxiety, or more irritability.
Then those traits can become larger.
Then the snowball starts to grow, and it starts to move downhill
and what starts as small temperamental differences can then grow
into sometimes, full-fledged disorders.
What do we do about that?
We could blame the parents, right?
Psychiatry did that for a while, and it wasn't great idea, in my opinion.
We could blame the kids,
and we could focus all of our energies on fixing those 'bad' behaviors.
Or we could use this new knowledge to see if we could figure out strategies
that might turn that snowball and have it move in a different direction.
When I'm talking to parents, the word I often like to use,
especially when talking about
parenting more challenging temperaments is "override".
"Override".
When your little mountain is provoking you into having that thunderstorm,
that response might be entirely normal, entirely understandable,
but as well all know, often makes things worse.
In those moments, what often can really help,
is to recognise that you are in one of those 'override' moments.
And then take what's sometimes a small but a very deliberate step
in a different direction.
Now, easier said than done, right?
I know. I have been there. I am still there.
With practice, just like anything, we can get better at it.
I am also aware that when I'm saying this, this may sound counter to what parents
have been hearing for years and years.
The great Dr. Spock said one of his main principals was that we should parent
in a way that is instinctual, that feels natural to us.
I think actually, that's very good advice. I wouldn't want to contradict that.
I would say there are times, there are many moments,
when the best response may be the most unnatural response for us,
if we want to move things into a different direction.
Two very famous temperament researchers, Stella Chess and Alexander Thomas,
proposed almost 50 years ago
that temperament traits by themselves are neither good nor bad.
Rather, what makes them work, or in their words,
what makes them "adaptive",
is the degree to which that trait, and that environment, are a good fit.
That theory, the "Goodness of Fit" theory is still taught today.
If you think of all of our ways, all of our efforts
to try and improve that fit, you can boil them down
to two things, I think.
This is true whether we are talking about parent guidance,
whether we are talking about school interventions,
or whether we are talking about individual therapy sometimes.
You can try to change the child to fit the environment,
and/or you can try to change the environment to fit the child.
Although I have to say, lately I have been impressed
with a third strategy.
Which is that sometimes you can back off,
you can trust what you have done so far,
and you can let that child's temperament interact with the world on it's own terms.
I have to confess that that third one is a challenge for me.
As my wife might say, has caused there to be
some "override" moments for myself.
(Laughter)
I bring that up because I think when we talk about parenting,
especially as a mental health professional,
we have to approach the topic with a fair amount of humility.
I've gone to many conferences, I've heard many excellent parenting talks.
I've left some of them thinking that as a father,
the very best thing that I could do for for my kids
is to figure out how that speaker could adopt them.
(Laughter)
That's just not an option, is it?
We are stuck with our kids, and our kids are stuck with us.
Children don't come with instruction manuals.
I think that's OK because unlike a Christmas toy
which has to be put together in a very precise way,
when it comes to kids, there is no single final product that has to be assembled.
I like metaphors and when I try to explain what temperament is to my students,
one metaphor that I really like is music.
In particular, the key, F major, A minor, that that piece of music is in.
Because that key is with you, you can hear it,
still the possibilities of what that song will eventually sound like remain endless.
Thank you.
(Applause)