Do bad apples fall far from the tree?

Dr. Richard A. Friedman, a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, recently wrote a New York Times article about child behavior with relation to parenting. It is a commonly-held belief that ill-behaved children must have had bad parents, but can good parents produce ill-behaved children? Dr. Friedman thinks so. “The fact remains that perfectly decent parents can produce toxic children,” he states. With a multitude of factors, he feels that “parents have limited power to influence their children.” His colleague Dr. Theodore Shapiro says, “The era of ‘there are no bad children, only bad parents’ is gone.”

 

So maybe the apple does fall far from the tree.

 

Photo from WxMom of Flickr.