Here's a zinger of an article that everyone (and his or her mother) will have an opinion about.A couple thoughts
For years, mental health professionals were trained to see children as mere products of their environment who were intrinsically good until influenced otherwise; where there is chronic bad behavior, there must be a bad parent behind it.While not true all of the time, I still believe that that this is true 75% of the time.
We marvel at the resilient child who survives the most toxic parents and home environment and goes on to a life of success. Yet the converse — the notion that some children might be the bad seeds of more or less decent parents — is hard to take.I would argue that this is becoming a trend: many children with advantaged backgrounds, because they've been afforded the option to choose, choose lifestyles that contradict the expectations of their parents (whether at the moral, emotional, physical, or financial level).
Not everyone is going to turn out to be brilliant — any more than everyone will turn out nice and loving. And that is not necessarily because of parental failure or an impoverished environment. It is because everyday character traits, like all human behavior, have hard-wired and genetic components that cannot be molded entirely by the best environment, let alone the best psychotherapists.True. But, true to form, reductionist postmodern psychology does not view the human person in an integral fashion and completely disregards free will. Sure: some elements are hard-wired and/or genetic and/or environmental. But by and large, the choices that we make define who we are. We are responsible for our choices, not for the way we were raised or our natural proclivities.
