The worst thing about being a parent is the guilt, especially if you're a mother. If your child is antisocial, hyperactive or underachieving, you are tacitly to blame. You're too cold, or overprotective, or inconsistent, or lacking in boundaries - to use the psychological lingo touted by the pop psychology movement. Mothers have been blamed for rearing schizophrenics and psychopaths, when the truth may be that some people are just born that way and there is very little parents can do to change them. "It's all baloney, this blaming little things for big problems, when most children exposed to much worse do much better," says David B. Cohen, a psychologist and author of Stranger in the Nest: Do Parents Really Shape their Child's Personality, Intelligence, or Character? To put it more elegantly, as Shakespeare wrote: "Good wombs have borne bad sons."
Cohen's liberating message, should Irish parents choose to take it on board, is that parents have surprisingly limited influence on their children's psychological development. Great leaders, artists and psychotics alike can come from similar, ordinary parents.
Parents with their own biological children often watch in wonder as a child blossoms - or degenerates - into someone the parents do not recognise as their own. The mother of a musical genius may never have played a note herself. This feeling of having a "stranger in the nest" may be explained by the power of biological influences, which can be so strong as to over-ride environmental factors such as parenting. "Parents need to lighten up," Cohen urges. "Some parents and their children are just victims of bad luck that, with limited current educational and biomedical technology, cannot be cured and may be not even well remedied. The chancy nature of genetic combinations, the vagaries of prenatal life and the flukes of foetal development and social life mean there simply may be no causal relation between parenting and dysfunctional behaviour." Studies of twins separated at birth have, again and again, produced the surprising evidence that genetically identical children reared in different environments usually turn out to be very similar in their behaviour, careers and personality. If environment and parenting are so important, then why can't we mould our children to our will?
We can't - and it is damaging even to try, Cohen argues. Nurturing in the form of good, respectful parenting may civilise children and help them to practise self-control, but at the end of the day the kind of adult your child grows up to be may be largely in the lap of the gods.
"Some things are just unpredictable. Life is a crap-shoot," he told The Irish Times from his home in Austin, Texas, where he teaches at the University of Texas. "There is no way to predict what you're going to get." Cohen's own 21-year-old son is a computer "genius", something Cohen takes no credit for. He attributes his son's talent to a rarely expressed gene hidden somewhere in the family tree. "Parent blaming reflects a common inclination to exaggerate parents' responsibility for a child's ways of being - likewise parents' inclination to accept responsibility - even where such inclinations are scientifically unjustified. Recognising the genetic factor in behaviour provides a much-needed antidote to this inclination," he says. No one yet knows exactly how much of an individual's psychological make-up is determined by nature and how much by nurture because the studies haven't been done. The medical experiments required to prove the point would involve ethical issues such as taking away the babies of sex offenders, rearing them in good families and then seeing how they turned out. Cohen has no doubt that such action would be ethically correct: "I have no problem with that. Who wants a child to grow up in the crappy home of a sex offender?" Some psychologists argue, however, that sex offending is a behavioural problem caused by emotional trauma in the offender's own life and that therapy can teach them remorse and transform their behaviour. Cohen disagrees - and vehemently. If sex offending is caused by bad parenting, how is it that horrendous, sex offending parents can rear decent, loving children?
The McColgan case would seem to be an example of this. Given existing scientific evidence on the strength of heredity in biological make-up, Cohen reckons prenatal influences in the womb and genetics account for at least half of what makes up an individual and at the very least predispose the individual to particular traits and conditions. In the case of schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder, the hereditary risk may be as much as 100 per cent. Up to 40 per cent of adopted children in the US, he asserts, are extremely troubled, despite being reared in the best possible homes. "Why is it that adoptive kids are more screwed up than other people?" he asks. One theory is that the child's detachment from the mother in infancy causes psychological problems, to which Cohen answers with his favourite retort: "Crap". He points out that "the people giving babies up for adoption tend to be troubled, irresponsible, psychopathic, hyperactive people. The kids are inheriting all this, and all the good parenting in the world is not going to change it."
If Cohen is right, then childhood traumas, which we believe have formed us into the unique people we are, may actually be less important than we think. There are many examples of children in Ireland reared in appalling circumstances in orphanages who turned out to be decent people. The qualities of resilience, moral strength and selflessness may actually be deeply ingrained in the individual's biological make-up.
If inheritance is as important as it is now appearing to be, we could live in entirely different circumstances and with different parents and still become essentially the same person. Likewise, the son of a man with a borderline personality disorder may have a wonderful mother but still develop his father's psychiatric profile.
Parenting looks completely different from this perspective. If you accept that your child is to an extent pre-programmed by biology, parenting becomes less a matter of moulding and more a case of guiding. "Children can be pushed around, their behaviour modified at least for a time. In the end, though, they are their own people, and as adults they are responsible for themselves for their biology makes it so," Cohen says.
"Good parents respect - they don't just love - their children. Parental love is best when it resonates to a child's talents and personality, when it celebrates and encourages what is best in a child. Parental love is worst when it strives in endless futility to induce what is really best for parents - for example, when parents try to impose their unique psychological agendas on their children, try to live vicariously through them, or try to keep their children in a state of emotional dependency - even though the parents resented it when their own parents tried to do the same thing." The notion that we can mould our children into becoming anything we want them to become is "a dangerous myth and delusion", Cohen warns.
The best thing a parent can do is simply to be present, providing security for their child - and the fact that in two-career couples many children are deprived of this anchoring influence worries Cohen. "Good parenting is essential to civilised society," he says. "Without good parenting, children can easily be spoiled and more selfish, immature, antisocial. However, even good children left to their own devices will get into mischief, or worse. That is why good parenting instills in children a sense of responsibility for their behaviour so, for example, lying and cheating are unacceptable. The absence of moral education can stunt a child's psychological development."
Yet this very morality on the parents' part may itself be hereditary. John Lonergan, governor of Mountjoy Prison, is among those who have argued that the root cause of crime is poverty and disadvantage, but Cohen couldn't disagree more. "Poverty may be an excuse, but it is not a root cause," he argues. "No, the root cause of crime is antisocial instinct and inadequate character nurtured by the moral deficiencies of family and society, all of which may, but need not, connect to poverty.
"The poverty-crime connection, like any correlation, is fundamentally ambiguous. It has been argued that poverty frequently causes bad parenting, when often both poverty and bad parenting are the common effects of relatively strong antisocial instincts, poor judgment and inadequate self-control.
"Poverty does not so much cause as facilitate and excuse antisocial ways. Arguing from a sociological perspective that poverty is the root cause of crime merely enables psychopaths and criminals to fulfil their antisocial potentials at others' expense."
The notion, however, that biological make-up and not poverty creates criminal behaviour does not fit into the liberal agenda. But could it be that the liberal agenda is about to be upstaged by biology? Rather than forming individuals, we may need to look at protecting society from them by controlling their behaviour. Cohen thinks that in the next century we will need to develop educational and medical models of altering behaviour, but this seems to conjure up fantasies of eugenics designed to prevent vulnerable people from reproducing, or to give gene therapy to foetuses regarded as at risk.
Cohen argues that these fears are irrelevant because the technology to achieve them does not exist. That may be, but science has a way of sneaking up on us before we have a chance to come to terms with its ethical implications.