(soft music) - I'm often asked that if
things are environmental then why is it that in the same family two children receive the same parenting, the same food, the same
toys, and one of them will have ADHD, the other will not? One of them will be an
addict, the other will not. One of them will have
this or that condition, the other will not. First of all, this is also
true of identical twins and then you can also say, "Well, if the genes are the
same how come they don't?" The answer is that no two kids
have the same environment. No two children have the same parents. My two children didn't
have the same parents even though they had the
same mother and father. Because it's not the
physicality of the parent, but the emotional states
that define who the child experiences as the parent. So you can love the child as equally as you love another child, but if you're stressed during
one pregnancy or one infancy and you're not during the other, those children don't
have the same parents. If the economic situation changes, if the parental relationship alters, those children don't
have the same parents. Furthermore, of course,
there is such thing as the inborn temperament. D.W. Winnicott is a great
British child psychologist he said that even if a mother
could be the same mother to eight of her children,
which she couldn't be, he said, but even if she could be, they would still have
eight different mothers. Because temperamentally they
would experience her as different. So it's just not possible to speak of two children having the same
parents in the same situation. (soft music) Children trigger different
reactions in each parent. A male child will not evoke
the same response, necessarily, in a father as a female child will. Or the mother, for that matter. A child who is high
sensitive will not trigger the same response in the parent as a child who is more
sturdy by temperament. And so on so that we become-- We're shaped by our children, as well. It's called recursive
nature of human development where the, not only the
child developing response to the parents, but the
parent also develops responses to the child. So that children create
their parents in some ways. Not deliberately, not consciously, but simply by who they
are and how they respond. And what that may trigger in the parent. Obviously, the more
conscious and the more mature you are as parents, the
less likely we are to be differentially triggered by our kids. But it's almost inevitable that there'll be some differences. And so, again, I say no two
children have the same parents.