Friday, 14 November 2008

Inherited children's behaviour from their parents

I think how children behave, what they good at or what they like to do are influenced by their parents both by their genes and also by what they do.
For example, the influence of their parents' genes: I have taken after my father in many ways regarding what kind of subjects and sports I'm good at and my way of thinking. And my brother has taken after my mother. Everyone has different strong points and it depends on their genes through successive generations. I don't know why I'm likely to be better at arts such as languages and history than sciences such as math and engineering. But even if you have strong points, it would be useless if you don't take advantages of that. It's just that we are biased and if you are aware of your strong and weak points, you will deal with these and might overcome them. I've read an article about a father and son in the U.S. The father divorced and left his son in an asylum because he couldn't afford to take care of him any more. He hadn't seen his son for a long time but one day he saw him on TV having won an archery contest It was his son who won the archery competition. It didn't take him long until he recognised his son because his father(grandfather of his son) was also a competitor of archery. There's no way his son could have known that his grandfather was the competitor but his son chose to play archery because of his genes. We can't avoid being influenced by genes without noticing but it depends on you to take advantage of your strong and weak points.
On the other hand the way you behave could be influenced by your parents' upbringing. I have taken after from my mother, because we spent more time together than with my father. I have been affected by the way I speak, think, deal with problems and how I try to solve them from my mother. It's parental imprinting by their behaviour. We will see their behaviour in the closest way and also they teach us how to be nice and communicate with others and how to handle the problems and difficult situations because they are the best person to help you first.
In Japan we say 'a child of frog is frog.' In English it's the same meaning as 'Like father, like son.' We say this saying for both inherited genes and parental behaviour. Therefore children behave like parents because they have been taught this way and because they share genes.

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