As I have discussed, studies of behavioral and emotional conditioning have a lengthy history. Everybody has some extent of conditioning in childhood that endures with them in adult life. So, does conditioning follow gender/sex, race or cultural distinctions? Is it related to being wealthy or poor? Are boys and girls, men and women, differently conditioned? The answer to all these questions is, “no.” Parents do not emotionally condition their children differently based on the child’s sex, skin color or culture they belong to. Instead, conditioning takes place unconsciously based on the particular set of circumstances in the parent’s minds, even well before a child is born. Boys can be emotionally shaped to have their mother’s personality or their father’s and girls can be emotionally conditioned to be like their father’s personality as well as their mother’s. Conditioning does not follow sex or gender differences. Similarly, children with different cultural backgrounds are conditioned more alike than differently. Among poor and affluent children, similar conditioning styles are found. Even siblings are not emotionally conditioned the same even though the same parents raise them. Usually, siblings have very distinctive differences in their personalities. Some parents wonder why one sibling is so different from another and if that child is even a member of their family! Parents understand nothing about how they unconsciously raise their children to be different, at times dramatically so.
Parental conditioning in conjunction with one’s genetic proclivity, as well as with one’s temperament, helps to shape our adult psyche. It is encouraging to know that just as a behavior can be conditioned, it can also be un-conditioned, once we learn to understand our behaviors and our triggers. Also, creating healthy environments for ourselves, to the extent possible, may affect the expression or non-expression of genes which manifest in mental illness or maladies of coping. Children with easy temperaments and resilient children tend to fare better than others even with the most adverse parental conditioning. We can learn to foster the traits of resiliency in ourselves.