How about yourself Breanne? Anyone else?

If you don’t know, you can go to http://www.mbticomplete.com to take the authentic online version of the MBTI.

First, something about nurture. Think of it like this :- Who creates our childhood environment? Our parents or our own genes or behaviour. Let’s say a child is irritable (a trait of the child) and doesn’t sleep, so the parent is overly tired and shouts at them constantly. They go on to be insecure and don’t take responsibility for their development. The parent’s fault for the environment, or the child’s genetics for creating the environment? Or even the child’s fault for not being more self-determined.

Phew… deep breath… To your question… Nature/nurture investigations seem to be showing that actually parents aren’t a big part of our environment. In the UK, parents and children are pretty much parted at 5, as children go into full-time education. Of course, the school they go to then becomes a big part of the environment, but are the parents responsible for which school the child goes to (and therefore that environment)?

There are no clear lines and so many different variables that it is hard to pick it all apart, but it sort of goes like this: If your parents do a good job, they don’t have much impact on our nature. However, if they do a bad job, they can ruin it. Not a cheery picture is it?

You can see why I stick to adults and technology? :) That’s quite hard enough. Even there, the same issues can apply: is a work environment bad because of the people there, or are the people bad because of the environment… I’ll touch on that a little in part II.

Distilling it down to something more practical. Take control of the things that you can and accept the things that you can not – to paraphrase an old prayer. At the end of the day, even once we know the answers, it may not change much of what we already know to be true. Parents and kids, be the best that you can be!