Can we really blame our parents?

My Dad and I have a very funny dialogue every time I visit him in California. He picks me up from the airport and as we cross the Bay Bridge, just as we pass the Yerba Buena exit, he would turn to me with his characteristic light, comical air and say “I really screwed up, anak (child).” And I would, as always, respond “Yes, Dad, gloriously.” And we will both laugh with the same intensity as if to foil the fate we both had to live with. He is my Dad and I love him very much.

My parents separated a very long time ago when I was just reaching my teens. I did wonder then how that could happen but after a while, I understood why they separated, more than how they managed to even think they could succeed as a couple. I love them both as individuals and I think I am more emotionally stable dealing with them separately. But before then, barely out of their teens as parents, they tried with all their might, to raise their three kids as best as they could without stressing us out too much. Well, they did stress us out but name me kids who were not stressed out by their parents (or vice versa)? And now that I am into middle-age, can I now, with scientific backing, blame them for whatever problems I have now? (Hi Mom and Dad!)

Hmm, I myself tell people who blame their childhood for their woes that their childhood may have sucked but as adults, it is now officially over. But out came a study last week, published in the journal Child Development. It is entitled Epigenetic Vestiges of Early Developmental Adversity: Childhood Stress Exposure and DNA Methylation in Adolescence by Marilyn J. Essex, W. Thomas Boyce, Clyde Hertzman, Lucia L. Lam, Jeffrey M. Armstrong, Sarah M. A. Neumann, and Michael S. Kobor. They tested DNA samples from 109 adolescents (15 years old) and looked at their “methylation.” Methylation is a chemical that clothes DNA and affects the way genes will be expressed or not in response to physical or social triggers. You can think of it as some sort of fashion statement your DNA can express or not express. The scientists also asked the parents to answer questions on “stressors” that the parents experienced when their kids were just infants or in their pre-school years. These stressors included “depression, family-expressed anger, parenting stress and financial stress.” The results came out and indeed parental stress affected the DNA methylation of their kids into their adolescence. This is the first evidence of an imprint of parental stress on the DNA of their kids outside the womb!

The evidence was staggering as the stress experienced by the mother when the kids were just infants affected 139 DNA sites of her kids, whether they were boys or girls. A father’s stress during his kids’ pre-school years affected 31 DNA sites of his adolescent kids. But the stress experienced by the father affected daughters more. It is not yet known what kind of behavior or diseases are associated with these DNA “fashion statements” or if they stay until adulthood but obviously, they are there now. More research would need to be done on what exactly all this stress did in terms of controlling the way genes are expressed. For now, we marvel at evidence showing that when one or both your parents were stressed beyond normal when you were an infant or in pre-school, it changed your DNA’s ability to dim or intensify what it can do when confronted by social and environmental conditions.

If it turns out that we can indeed blame our parents for how we turned out as adults, then that would mean they too can, in turn, blame their own parents and so on and so forth. I don’t know how this domino blame game really helps except to tell parents of infants to think twice before stressing too much. Your kids would probably have enough problems carrying your DNA that you may not want to aggravate the condition by affecting the dimmer switches of their DNA.

I think my Dad in his own way, is wise to just make light of what usually makes rich material for telenovelas that was our life. Important thing now is he reliably there when I just want to say hello and ask him a question and is ever present when we now take our journeys together. That is what matters to me and if my genes insist that I still have to blame Mom or Dad for my own mistakes, those genes can take a cab and go file their complaints on their own. I will not drive them myself.

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