Chennai: Not more than 50 per cent of a child’s personality is determined by his or her genes, while the rest is determined by the environment in which he or she lives, said Dr R. H. Belmaker, President, Israel Psychiatric Association and International Neuropsychiatry Association.
Delivering the 14th MV Arunachalam Endowment Oration titled ‘Why do children turn out the way they do? - A Neuropsychiatric Viewpoint’, on Sunday, Dr Belmaker said, “Parents should realise that their children are influenced largely by their environment, which includes their peers, movies they watch and the neighborhood they live in. Therefore, instead of forbidding their children from watching movies or stepping out of their homes, parents should ensure that the children have access to the right company and that they watch the right kind of movies,” said Dr Belmaker.
“How the child grows is not entirely in the hands of parents. It is like planting a tulip. We can give good manure, water, and sun light but we cannot determine the colour of the flower,” he said. Dr Belmaker also observed that parental advice does not work much because children mostly choose to learn more from their peers than from their parents.
He cited the case of picking up a new language. When parents happen to move to a new country or a new language zone, they speak the new language with some accent. But their young children speak it without any accent. This is possible because children choose to learn a new language from their peers and not their parents, though they spend more time listening to how their parents speak and less time listening to how their peers speak. “Children are not designed to listen to their parents. They are programmed to listen to their peers, who represent the future success,” he pointed out.
