Decoding Your Child

How your kid's genes and temperament should shape your parenting.

Welcome to Is My Kid the Asshole?, a newsletter from science journalist and author Melinda Wenner Moyer, which you can read more about here. If you like it, please subscribe and/or share this post with someone else who would too.

If you’re a parent, you know that two children, even within the same family, can have very different ways of interacting with and responding to the world. My two kids are similar in many ways, but very different in others, and I’ve noticed that parenting approaches that work with my son sometimes fall flat when I try them on my daughter. Why is this, and what can we do about it?

Today I’m excited to be running a Q&A with Danielle Dick, a psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University and an expert on the genetic and environmental influences on human behavior, whose wonderful new book The Child Code: Understanding Your Child’s Unique Nature for Happier, More Effective Parenting answers these questions. Dick’s book explores aspects of parenting that I don’t see discussed nearly enough: How our own genes and temperaments shape our parenting, and how our kids’ genes and temperaments shape their responses to our parenting.

It sounds complicated, and it is, but Dick does a magnificent job of unpacking and explaining everything to make it accessible. And it’s helpful, too: There’s a quiz in the book that helps parents identify their children’s temperaments (as well as their own) based on three major dimensions and provides tailored parenting advice based on the results. Without further ado, here’s my fascinating interview with Dick.