Children's behaviour problems in their genes

Some children seem to be born to be bad. Genes, rather than parents' own argumentative behaviour seems to be the key in the children's odds of serious conduct problems - like bullying, skipping school and shoplifting. In the case of child behaviour, research has linked parents' marital conflicts to long-term, serious conduct problems in their children. However, it has been unclear whether that means that marital woes themselves cause the behavioural problems. The new findings suggest it's more a matter of genes. That is, parents who are naturally argumentative pass on these traits to their kids. Marital conflict did not appear, in this study, to cause stable patterns of conduct disorder. Rather, marital conflict is influenced by parents' own characteristics, including their genes, and these genes are passed on to children Researchers from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, USA, arrived at their conclusions by studying 1,045 adult twins and their children. Some of the twin pairs were identical, which means they shared all of their genes; the rest were fraternal twins, meaning they shared only some of their genes. Such studies allow researchers to analyse the effects of genes and environment on a given behaviour. In this case, it was found that the genetic influences were important in parents' marital conflicts, and genes, in turn, explained the link between marital discord and children's conduct problems. There may be no 'argument' gene, but genes do influence personality traits, including those that make people more or less prone to confrontation. It's possible that genes involved in risk-taking, sensation-seeking and other aspects of antisocial behaviour may make parents more likely to clash, and, when passed on to their kids, make conduct problems more likely. However, the researchers stress, none of this means that fights between parents do no harm to children. Even if genes are more important in long-term, serious behavioural problems, parents' conflicts do distress their kids. The above results do not mean that children are unaffected by parents' disputes. Parental conflicts definitely are not healthy for children.