As flawed as it is, it has made many aware of how important it is.

It’s like they assume that particularly disordered or problematic adjustment styles arise out of partial influences on partial characteristics. For example: the influence of a few parental personality dimensions on the child’s psychological development on a few dimensions; or another one — how parents’ inability to cope with stress is transmitted to close-by kids. It’s very interesting, but it may be missing a lot of stuff going on (in society too).

If you focus too much on a few variables, it’s likely you’re going to miss a lot, I think, because you’re looking for too strong a correlation to explain the studied phenomenon almost completely. Rarely things work this simple.

In real life we have constant interactions between different unrelated characteristics. Like body characteristics influencing how parents treat their own kids, based on their own social and psycho-development and so on and so forth. Peers can judge each other based on how they look and what appearance they seem to project emotionally. A lot can go into this, and it influences how they interact, who gets to be dominant, who gets to serve, who gets to be merely attending. Only looking at genes/biology and parents is reductionist. There is no pure situation, no way to disentangle one factor from another. There is also a lot of mental activity that escapes formalisation, either by questionaries or free language description.

I don’t think outcomes in individual people’s adjustment are strangers to how healthy society is. If I wanted to see how healthy/sick a society is I’d look at the taboos first and then at which are the categories that don’t fit in. Thus, one could understand how most people try to structure their social relations and what is thrown under the carpet. And by that I don’t mean only psychological characteristics, but also physical and all the possible combinations between them and how people mutually establish group structure.

…Success stories, failure stories, moralising stories, who is the hero, who is damned, etc. Who is sane, who is doing very well, who is sane in one group and unwell in another. Consensus always changes and so do these stories with which parents and kids develop.