Did you turn out like your father and was that necessarily a good thing?

It would be a extra strange coincidence if your children grew up with 331/3 relatives. I felt bad that my kids didn't have relatives like their friends (my mom turned her back on me because of the woman I married) so I cut out photos of rock stars - framed them and hung them on the wall. There was a photo of Tom Petty wearing a pair of Groucho Marx glasses and I wrote Uncle Tom Being Silly at the bottom and their Aunt was Patti Smith. Their grandma and grandpa was a  photo of Burton Cummings skipping through a garden with a woman wearing a paper bag over her  head - at the bottom I wrote grandma and grandpa's first date - kind of mean but I was a bit bitter back then. Cheers! This post was edited by Nanoose at April 11, 2021 1:00 PM MDT

 

  Being in a mixed-nationalities marriage, and being a military family, my children grew up without being surrounded by any grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. Their entire lives, they’ve only met or interacted in person with fewer than a dozen members of the extended family, and even then it was sporadic and temporary. Their maternal grandfather died before they were born, they were about 8 and 9 before we traveled “back to the old country” where they met their maternal grandmother for the first time, she does not speak English and they do not speak the mother tongue. Their paternal grandfather is unknown, they met their paternal grandmother when they were about 12 and 13.

  I also have some thoughts and feelings about how my children grew up in such a small family unit: ma, pa, and two kids. It’s certainly had ramifications in how they are now as adults, and in their interactions with others. Not only that, it’s hit my wife and I.  We both grew up with large families, large extended families, each other us with varying levels of closeness with some of those family members, ranging from seemingly inseparable to no will or desire to have any contact. From that, we embarked on a glove-trotting adventure that changed addresses every few years and new culture shocks at each stop. We also brought two children into this world under those circumstances.
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  That’s an extremely inaccurate claim. While it’s true that many personality traits and others aspects of self are hereditary, it’s by no means an absolute. There are plenty of ways a person can be a carbon copy of both or either parent, just as there are plenty of ways a person can be the exact opposite of both or either parent. Environment, culture, life’s circumstances, situational issues, etc. are relevant factors in the way any person is, in addition to influences of genes or other parts of self derived directly from parents. 

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I disagree to the extent that we are unknowingly and unconsciously influenced by our parents' personalities and patterns of behavior virtually from birth.

 

  Disagree all you like, you’re wrong. It generalizes far too much to assume that what you state is wholly accurate.

  For instance, a newborn is taken halfway across the world and raised by people who have largely nothing in common with either of his or her biological parents. The environment is so vastly different than that child’s siblings’ environment, all of whom are raised by both of those biological parents. While it’s true that certain hereditary influences and innate characteristics remain, it’s illogical to say that ALL remain. In fact, I’ll go a step further and state that so few of them remain that within an extremely short period of time, few nuances from the bio parents would be recognizable in that child. By adolescence and adulthood, there might not be enough left to make a connection. 

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  A correction: I think that in my case, my biological father departed within minutes after fertilization, so I do not have the experience of “never having seen him again”.
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