Are You Becoming Your Mother or Your Father?

When something hard happens, what is the actual sentence that runs in your head?

By Neil Solomon · 3 min read

I was raised by three men. One was my father. The other two were married to his sisters, and they were my uncles in every way that counts. Most of what I have done with my adult life has been some mix of their voices arguing in my head about what to do next.

My father is gone now. He lived into his nineties. The voices stayed.

Here is the question I would like to put to you. When something hard happens, what is the actual sentence that runs in your head? The exact words, whoever said them first.

For me, one is "When there is no man, you be the man." An uncle said it once, when I was eleven, and went back to his coffee. Another is "Stop watching pennies, or you'll never make dollars." That was said about my father, and it landed in me anyway. My father had his own: "Nobody will mess with you if they think you're crazy." I have used that face a hundred times in forty years.

Some of these have served me well. Some made me tense in rooms where I did not need to be. For a long time I could not tell which was which, because they sounded like me.

What research says about "becoming" a parent

Twin and family studies find that personality is shaped partly by genes. One review of 134 studies put the average at about 40 percent. That figure describes differences across large groups of people. It does not mean 40 percent of your own traits came from your mother or father. Research on handed-down habits is thinner. Paternal depression raises a child's risk of depression, with an odds ratio of about 1.4 in one large review. Beyond that, no one has a good measure of how much of a person's everyday thinking is a parent's voice. What we do have is a way to find out for yourself.

A short exercise

Take a page and make three columns. Write down five sentences you hear when you are scared, tired, angry or tempted. Next to each, write whose voice it is. Then mark each one: keep, outgrown, or never really mine.

The table is an example. Yours will look different, and a first pass may take twenty minutes.