It’s certainly nice to be around kids who behave themselves. You know the kind of children who are friendly, smiling, and just nice people. I am often with a bunch of kids. My nieces and nephews have been blessing our fam with babies at the rate of a couple a year for the over a decade now. When we meet for Sunday lunch or a family birthday party, it’s not unusual to be surrounded by twenty or more little people who run the gamut from the life of the party to the quiet, introspective. If you care to pay attention, you’ll notice their potential adult personalities in each one. Personality is a huge influence on who we’ll turn out to be. My three kids definitely had three different personality styles. I predicted pretty accurately how two of mine would behave as adults, but totally got it wrong with one. See my shyest, most sensitive child merged into the friendliest, most outward-focused adult. Destiny isn’t always so. In other words, what may appear to be written in stone because of genetic dispositions is often altered by family,friends and personal experiences as we grow up. Shy isn’t destined to always be so. Bold and confident can be distracted. Social and fun may grow contained. Research recently has been focusing on the DNA -hardwired personality characteristics of wayward folks. And yes, there is science that says there is a pre-disposition in human genetic codes to behaviors that are not productive or useful in society. Okay – juvenile delinquency for one. A new research study found definite coorelation in certain genetic similarities for boys who badly misbehave. Factoring in the family and other social influences, these boys seem to be heavily influenced towards violence and other destructive actions when their environment wasn’t —-well, here’s the catch. WHEN their social environments negatively influenced their young lives. Duh! Sorry, I love science as much as the next guy.
God tells us that if we train a child in the way he should go, when he is old he will not depart from it. Kids need a lot of guidance – training to grow up to be healthy adults. They need lots of love, appreciation, attention, instruction and good ol’ discipline from the adults in their lives to turn out to be productive, caring, and moral people. Genetics is not a done-deal for behavior. Family matters. Always has. Always will.
Good kids raised in a good home raised by good parents will almost always result in good people from good families. And we’re all nicer to be around when we behave ourselves. Genetic predisposition just shows us the potential for any of us to be our best or our worst. There is just no subsititue for good training from responsible adult-acting parents for helping kids to be and become the BEST they can be.
