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They sat next to me and watched the way most parents do when a child goes badly off the rails — exhausted, shocked and quietly horrified by the question. why It’s going to have their name.
Their twenty-year-old son had just been arrested for breaking and entering. The reason: He needed the money for opioids. Meanwhile, their eldest son had just graduated from a major university and was well on his way to a career in medicine. same parents same house Radically different results.
Mother, in particular, was looking for places to blame. So I decided to help her look.
I told them, “The reason your son is addicted is because you and your husband have been doing drugs in front of him all his life.”
They both stared at me. Dad said, we have never taken drugs. “Not once.”
“Okay,” I said. “Then let me try again. Your son’s drug addiction is because, since he was very young, you told him that the best thing to do with his life was probably to do drugs as soon as possible and as much as possible.”
“Of course we never said that,” Mom said, leaning forward now.
“Okay,” I said. “You didn’t model it. You didn’t teach it. You didn’t encourage it. Which means we have to look elsewhere for answers.”
That’s when the real conversation—the useful one—can finally begin.
The question everyone is actually asking
On Mother’s Day, we celebrate the enormous influence of the women who raised us. And they deserve that celebration — the research on maternal attachment is, frankly, phenomenal. Decades of work on John Bowlby’s landmark attachment theory demonstrated that a mother’s responsiveness in those early years creates what researchers call a Secure base – A psychological foundation from which a child gains the confidence to explore the world, regulate their emotions, build relationships and recover from adversity. Children who develop secure attachments early on show measurably better mental health outcomes throughout their lives. The bond between a mother and her child is not emotional. It’s science.
But here’s the question that brings the couples in my office to a therapist’s couch, and it quietly haunts almost every parent I’ve ever worked with:
If something goes wrong, how much is the mother’s fault?
And by extension: when something goes right, how much credit does it get?
What the research actually says
The honest answer is more complicated than our culture allows. Over the years, the dominant view of psychology has placed great weight on parenting—especially maternal behavior—as the primary architect of a child’s personality and life outcomes. Mothers were entrusted with great power, and with it great responsibility.
Then came a wave of behavioral genetics research that complicated the picture considerably. Twin studies — comparing identical twins raised in the same household and adopted siblings raised in the same household — are beginning to reveal something that has quietly proven to many parents: Children of the same family, raised by the same parents in the same home, often turn out to be significantly, even dramatically, different from each other.
Psychologist Judith Rich Harris has synthesized much of this literature in her provocative book Presumption of nurturingArguing that parenting explains far less of children’s long-term outcomes than we assumed. His key finding was striking: about fifty percent of the variance in personality traits appears to be genetic. Most of the rest is attributed to what researchers call Non-shared environment — unique experiences for each child, including peer relationships, chance events and individual temperaments — rather than the shared home environment that parents work so hard to create.
In other words: two children can live under the same roof, with the same parents, eat the same food, sleep down the hall from each other—and become a doctor and become a cautionary tale. This is not necessarily a parenting failure. This is the complexity of human beings.
What mothers do and do not control
None of this is to say that mothers are not hiding, and I would be professionally irresponsible to suggest otherwise. The research is equally clear that some parenting behaviors matter, and matter significantly. Chronic neglect, abuse, home addiction, emotional unavailability, persistent restlessness – these are not neutral variables. They load the dice. They make certain outcomes more likely, even if they don’t make them inevitable.
Psychiatrist Gordon Livingston makes a related observation in his book Too early old, too late smart That stayed with me: parents have far more power to harm their children than to guarantee their success. It’s an uncomfortable disparity, but an honest one. Research supports this. Damage – especially the chronic, unrelenting variety – is something that parents can reliably produce. In contrast, success is influenced by so many forces beyond the reach of parents that it can never truly be guaranteed, no matter how devoted the effort.
What mothers provide at their best — security, warmth, extravagance, a willingness to repair ruptures — create real protective factors that follow children well into adulthood. Absence of these things creates real risk. We should not underestimate this.
But there is a meaningful difference Loading dice And Determination of results. Every child comes into the world with a temperament, a neurological profile, a genetic inheritance and — if you’ll allow me a clinical opinion built on forty years of practice — something that works of its own accord. The same family may feel security to one child and confinement to another. Peers, culture, a single teacher or mentor, a formative experience, a child born with special neurochemistry—these all shape what a person becomes in ways that no mother can fully predict or control.
And children—even young adults who make terrible decisions—have free will. That’s not a cop out. This is a medically and philosophically defensible truth. My office boy had a brother who made a completely different choice with the same upbringing.
However, there is one environmental lever that research suggests mothers can meaningfully control, and it’s more specific than any parenting style or attachment strategy: where you live and raise your child. Pediatrician Dr. Eric Milowski cites research pointing to zip code — neighborhood, school district, peer community, neighborhood culture — as an important factor a parent can actually influence in shaping a child’s outcomes. This is a humble and clarifying inquiry. You may not be able to engineer your child’s personality or guarantee their preferences. But you can, where conditions permit, choose the soil in which they grow.
A term for mothers that carries guilt
In forty years of practice, I have sat with hundreds of mothers — devoted, loving, trying-to-be-their-best moms — who are quietly convinced that they have broken their children. Guilt was remarkable in its tenacity. It survives proof to the contrary. It survived the child’s own insistence that it was not his fault. It seemed almost immune to logic.
To those mothers, let me be clear: You were not the sole author of your child’s story. You had the most important first chapter. But the chapter does not determine the ending.
What research asks of mothers is not perfection. Bowlby himself observed that healthy development is predicted not by the absence of difficulty, but by desire repair — bounce back after a tough moment, reconnect after a breakup, keep showing up. Children are more resilient than our guilt. They are not passive recipients of whatever we eat. They are active participants, interpreters and — ultimately — choosers.
which is to the mother
Back in my office, once the couple realized they hadn’t modeled or encouraged their son’s addiction, we could finally do something effective. We can stop autopsiing their parents and start talking about how to help a drowning twenty-year-old.
The older brother had navigated the same childhood and was thriving. The parents didn’t succeed him and they didn’t get their little son addicted to drugs. What they gave both boys was a foundation — imperfect, as all foundations are, but real. What each young man built on that foundation was his own.
This is the hard and hopeful truth about mothers. They are hugely important – especially in the early years, their love and quality reverberates throughout life. But they don’t tell the whole story. They write the opening pages, in situations they didn’t fully choose, with a child they couldn’t fully predict, doing the best they could with what they had.
This Mother’s Day, I’d like to suggest that we honor mothers by not blaming their children for everything, but rather by recognizing what they actually do: show up day after day in a role that comes with no training manual, no performance review and no guaranteed results — offering love to an uncertain future and hoping for the best.
That is no small matter. That is, arguably, the bravest thing a man can do.
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Dr. Christopher Kortman has facilitated more than 80,000 hours of psychotherapy during his distinguished career. i amA Florida licensed psychologist for forty years, she has maintained a Personal practice development while specializing in trauma and anxiety disorder i amhe‘s appeared nationwide on talk radio and television. Its acclaimed author i amfi amive Previous books, his new books, Guided Image Healing: The best proven method for rapid trauma resolution and healingDescribes a profoundly influential tool for dealing with trauma, grief, and more. Learn more at srqshrink.com.
