When Good Parents Have Bad Kids

“While I do not mean to let bad parents off the hook, the fact remains that perfectly decent parents can produce toxic children.” A psychiatry professor on why parents aren’t always to blame. “Not everyone is going to turn out to be brilliant — any more than everyone will turn out nice and loving. And that is not necessarily because of parental failure or an impoverished environment. It is because everyday character traits, like all human behavior, have hard-wired and genetic components that cannot be molded entirely by the best environment, let alone the best psychotherapists.”