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They sat across from me looking the way most parents look when a child has gone badly off the rails — exhausted, bewildered, and quietly terrified that the answer to the question why was going to have their names on it.
Their twenty-year-old son had just been arrested for breaking and entering. The reason: he needed money for opioids. Meanwhile, their older son had just graduated from a major university and was well on his way to a career in medicine. Same parents. Same home. Radically different outcomes.
The mother, in particular, was searching for a place to put the blame. So I decided to help her look.
“The reason your son is doing drugs,” I told them, “is because you and your husband have been doing drugs in front of him his entire life.”
They both stared at me. “We have never done drugs,” the father said. “Not once.”
“All right,” I said. “Then let me try again. The reason your son is doing drugs is because, from the time he was very young, you told him that the best thing he could possibly do with his life was to use drugs as early and as often as possible.”
“Of course we never said that,” the mother said, leaning forward now.
“Exactly,” I said. “You did not model it. You did not teach it. You did not encourage it. Which means we need to look somewhere else for the answer.”
That is when the real conversation — the useful one — could 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, extraordinary. Decades of work building on John Bowlby’s landmark attachment theory have 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 early attachments show measurably better mental health outcomes across their entire lives. The bond between a mother and her child is not sentimentality. It is science.
But here is the question that brings couples like the one in my office to a therapist’s couch, and that quietly haunts nearly every parent I have ever worked with:
When something goes wrong, how much of it is really the mother’s fault?
And by extension: when something goes right, how much of the credit belongs to her?
What the Research Actually Says
The honest answer is more complicated than our culture tends to allow for. For years, the dominant view in psychology placed enormous weight on parenting — especially maternal behavior — as the primary architect of a child’s personality and life outcomes. Mothers were handed enormous power, and along with it, enormous responsibility.
Then came a wave of behavioral genetics research that complicated the picture considerably. Twin studies — comparing identical twins raised together versus apart, and adoptive siblings raised in the same household — began revealing something that made a lot of parents feel quietly vindicated: children from the same family, raised by the same parents in the same home, often turn out remarkably, even dramatically, different from one another.
Psychologist Judith Rich Harris synthesized much of this literature in her provocative book The Nurture Assumption, arguing that parenting explains far less of children’s long-term outcomes than we have assumed. Her core finding was striking: roughly fifty percent of the variation in personality traits appears to be genetic. Much of the rest is accounted for by what researchers call non-shared environment — the experiences unique to each child, including peer relationships, chance events, and individual temperament — rather than the shared home environment that parents work so hard to create.
In other words: two children can grow up under the same roof, with the same parents, eating the same meals, sleeping down the hall from each other — and one becomes a physician and one becomes a cautionary tale. That is not necessarily a parenting failure. That is human complexity.
What Mothers Do and Do Not Control
None of this means that mothers are off the hook, and I would be professionally irresponsible to suggest otherwise. The research is equally clear that certain parental behaviors matter, and matter significantly. Chronic neglect, abuse, addiction in the home, emotional unavailability, persistent instability — these are not neutral variables. They load the dice. They make certain outcomes more probable, even if they do not make them inevitable.
Psychiatrist Gordon Livingston made a related observation in his book Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart that has stayed with me: parents have far more power to damage a child than they do to guarantee the child’s success. It is an uncomfortable asymmetry, but an honest one. The research supports it. Harm — particularly of the chronic, relentless variety — is something parents can reliably produce. Success, by contrast, is influenced by so many forces outside a parent’s reach that it can never truly be guaranteed, no matter how devoted the effort.
What mothers provide at their best — safety, warmth, attunement, the willingness to repair after a rupture — creates genuine protective factors that follow children well into adulthood. The absence of those things creates genuine risk. We should not minimize that.
But there is a meaningful difference between loading the dice and determining the outcome. Every child arrives in the world with a temperament, a neurological profile, a genetic inheritance, and — if you will allow me a clinical opinion shaped by forty years of practice — something that functions very much like a will of their own. The same household can feel like security to one child and confinement to another. Peers, culture, a single teacher or mentor, a formative experience, the particular neurochemistry a child was born with — all of these shape who a person becomes in ways no mother can fully anticipate or control.
And children — even young adults making terrible decisions — have free will. That is not a cop-out. It is a clinically and philosophically defensible truth. The son in my office had a brother who made entirely different choices with the same upbringing.
There is, however, one environmental lever that research suggests mothers can meaningfully control, and it is more concrete than any parenting style or attachment strategy: where you live and raise your child. Pediatrician Dr. Eric Milobsky has cited research pointing to zip code — the neighborhood, the school district, the peer community, the surrounding culture — as one of the most significant factors a parent can actually influence in shaping a child’s outcomes. It is a humbling and clarifying finding. You may not be able to engineer your child’s personality or guarantee their choices. But you can, where circumstances allow, choose the soil in which they grow.
A Word for the Mothers Carrying Guilt
In forty years of practice, I have sat with hundreds of mothers — devoted, loving, trying-their-best mothers — who were quietly convinced they had broken their children. The guilt was remarkable in its tenacity. It survived evidence to the contrary. It survived the child’s own insistence that she was not to blame. It seemed almost immune to reason.
To those mothers I want to say this plainly: you were not the only author of your child’s story. You were the most important early chapter. But chapters do not determine endings.
What the research asks of mothers is not perfection. Bowlby himself found that what predicts healthy development is not the absence of difficulty, but the willingness to repair — to come back after the hard moment, to re-engage after the rupture, to keep showing up. Children are more resilient than our guilt gives them credit for. They are not passive recipients of whatever we dish out. They are active participants, interpreters, and — ultimately — choosers.
What Belongs to Mom
Back in my office, once that couple understood that they had neither modeled nor encouraged their son’s addiction, we could finally do something useful. We could stop the autopsy of their parenting and start talking about how to help a twenty-year-old who was drowning.
The older brother had navigated the same childhood and was thriving. The parents had not made him a success and they had not made their younger son an addict. What they had given both boys was a foundation — imperfect, as all foundations are, but real. What each young man built on that foundation was, in large measure, his own.
That is the hard and hopeful truth about mothers. They matter enormously — in the early years especially, their love and its quality echo across a lifetime. But they do not write the whole story. They write the opening pages, under conditions they did not fully choose, with a child they could not fully anticipate, doing the best they could with what they had.
This Mother’s Day, I would like to suggest we honor mothers not by holding them responsible for everything their children become, but by recognizing what they actually do: show up, day after day, in a role that comes with no training manual, no performance reviews, and no guaranteed outcomes — offering love into an uncertain future and hoping for the best.
That is not a small thing. That is, arguably, the bravest thing a human being can do.
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Dr. Christopher Cortman has facilitated over 80,000 hours of psychotherapy during his distinguished career spanning forty years. A Florida Licensed Psychologist, he maintains a thriving private practice while specializing in emotional trauma and anxiety disorders. He’s appeared nationwide on talk radio and television. The acclaimed author of five previous books, his new book, The Guided Imagery Cure: The Best Proven Methods for Quickly Resolving and Healing Trauma, describes a profoundly impactful tool for addressing trauma, grief, and more. Learn more at srqshrink.com.
