Understanding Sibling Personalities: Why are my kids so different?
Understanding how biological siblings raised in the same household can have vastly different personalities is a fundamental challenge of parenthood. Why is one child an extrovert and the other an introvert? Why was one baby easy to sooth, while the other needed constant parental attention to fall asleep? Maybe one child longs for adventure and change, while the other balks at deviating from routine. Doesn’t the environment (nurture) have more influence on personality than biology (nature)?
Many parents assume that providing the same home environment for each of their children, will yield “similar” children, but decades of twin studies and recent findings from behavioral genetics suggest that differences in personality have substantial genetic underpinnings. The stage for who we become as adults is at least partially influenced by what genetics we inherit.
The Big Five Personality Characteristics?
Personality describes the relatively stable individual characteristics of thinking, feeling, and behaving that are generally consistent over time and situations. While it is entertaining to determine our Hogwarts house via an online quiz or to answer a survey in a grocery store magazine, most personality inventories available to us are not theoretically sound. They are neither reliable…
