When did you start ...? (A follow-up post)

Just about ten years ago, I posted a rumination about what age people lose their virginity, and what age they start regularly fucking. Among other things, I posed the question whether these things travel in families? If your parents lost their virginity early (or late), did you do the same? How about your kids?

It was an interesting line of thought, but not one that I bothered to pursue after writing a post about it. Then this afternoon I happened to stumble across an article online that sheds a little empirical light on the question. "Being Poor Doesn't Have the Same Effect as Living in Chaos" by Rob Henderson argues that "environmental unpredictability" during childhood is a critical relevant factor: "In short, how often the kid moved, how frequently the adults in the kid’s life appeared and disappeared, and how frequently his mom changed jobs. How chaotic was the kid’s life?" The article goes on like this:

"... the researchers wanted to know how these two factors (childhood poverty and environmental unpredictability) influenced 5 outcome variables:

• Age at first intercourse
• Number of lifetime sexual partners at age 23
• Criminal acts
• Aggression (e.g., “I deliberately try to hurt others,” “I destroy things belonging to others”)
• Delinquency (frequency of lying/cheating, breaking rules, setting fires, stealing, drug use)

Researchers found that childhood poverty (harshness) was not significantly associated with any of the 5 outcome variables.

In contrast, there was a significant correlation between childhood unpredictability 4 of the 5 outcome variables—number of sexual partners, aggressive behavior, delinquent behavior, and criminal behavior. For males, but not females, instability predicted having sex at an earlier age.

So what does this do to my original speculations? Well, I think these results suggest that I was not exactly wrong, but maybe just a little muddled. If people who grow up in chaos are likely to exhibit the dysfunctional behaviors listed, then that means also that they are pretty likely to reproduce a chaotic environment when they have their own children. After all, not only do criminality, aggression, and delinquency stir up chaos by themselves, but they make it more likely that the offending parent will be jailed (or killed) and that the child will be shuffled off to someone else's care. But even in the best of cases this means that the child grows up with less predictability and more chaos.

In other words, there is some significant likelihood that parents who lose their virginity early will (exhibit other chaotic behaviors as well, leading to a chaotic home environment when they) have (their own) children who in turn (having grown up in a chaotic environment) lose their virginity early; and likewise (but the other way around) with parents and children who lose it late. 

When I think about Wife's family (looking at them from the outside, like a tourist or an anthropologist), many of them led chaotic lives. And God knows Wife's mother had turbulent storms inside her that could break out at unpredictable times and in unpredictable directions. And while Wife's life has been more orderly than the lives of some of her siblings, it is also true that she has (or had) a profound capacity for mayhem and willful destruction.

So what about the boys? I don't see the same chaos in them. Neither one has been arrested; they are kind and considerate, and for the most part dedicated rule-followers. Son 2 was 23 when he took up with Beryl; I don't know about his personal life before that point, but at any rate that means that (whatever it was like) he was able to keep it quiet. I know nothing whatever about Son 1's personal life. So it seems like the inheritance of chaotic behavior has been broken.

I guess it was a good thing to send them to boarding schools. And maybe I was able—somehow, to some limited extent—to shield them from some of the craziness and extend an umbrella of normality over them. Whatever the cause, they seem to be doing well as non-chaotic adults, and I'm grateful.