A mother and father have two biological daughters, both teenagers. One daughter

Question

A mother and father have two biological daughters, both teenagers. One daughter is outgoing and everyone describes her as friendly. She participates in several extracurricular activities in school, and she enjoys skiing with her friends. The other daughter is more reserved, and while most would say she is nice, they don't really feel like they know her. She talks to people when they address her, but she rarely initiates conversations. She is in one of the after school clubs at school, and she takes classes at the local dance school, mostly because her best friend takes classes there too. The parents of the girls wonder how they could have turned out so differently in terms of their personality. They have the same biological parents, have grown up in the same household (although the more outgoing sister is two years older). The parents are not aware of treating them differently, but they wonder if they did something to create these different outcomes in their girls. how can you explain this diverse outcome? Was it luck of the draw with genetics? Were the circumstances with the older sister that much different that this difference in personality types resulted? How would you explain this outcome to such parents? Is there anything that parents could do in order to raise a child to have certain personality traits? Why or why not?

Explanation / Answer

Individual differences in personality, like other psychological variables, are the result of an interaction between an individual’s genes and their environment. There is bound to be genetic differences between the siblings as they share about 50% of their genes. Furthermore, studies have confirmed that shared family environment accounts for a negligible amount of environmental variance relevant to personality development. In other words, personality differences are likely to occur in contexts outside the family environment such as the educational environment. In this case, the siblings are two years apart and may thus have grown up with entirely different classroom contexts.

Parents cannot impose certain personality traits on to their children. As discussed, they them from a complex interplay between the environment and the genes, over which the parents cannot expert absolute influence. Although it is possible for the parents to control the family environment to an extent, they cannot dictate what goes on in the school setting. Furthermore, I feel it would also be unethical to disallow the child to develop their own personality traits as it represents an important aspect of their selfs.

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