Would I make a neurotic frankenkid?
The kid’s genetics might pull them one way or the other, but nurture overrules nature a lot of the time in how they will cope with things. They might be more shy by nature, but learn from watching their parents how to make friends, behave in groups, and know that it is okay to need alone time because you and your wife have been supportive of that. It isn’t the issues that may or may not compliment the other, it is how you cope with them; if one does while the other refuses to address, for instance, OCD, that just looks like trouble to me. You both might understand the issue, actually building a life together could be torture.
Any chance we’ll end up with a varsity football player, or are we definitely going to end up with a shy kid who is scared to come out from under the couch? Yes, of course you could end up with a varsity football player. You could also end up with a shy varsity football player. For that matter, you could end up with a confident, outgoing, kid who absolutely hates sports and competition. Or a fearless introvert, who can face anything life throws at him but doesn’t go in for small talk and doesn’t mind going it alone. Or an extroverted athlete who still hates risks — a varsity quarterback who succeeds because he’s already thought of every single thing that could go wrong, and come up with backup plans for all of them. Or a varsity QB who quits sports because he gets too nervous on game day — and then goes on to a wonderful, fulfilling career as a gym teacher. Or a shy, nervous kid who still accomplishes great things and has a very happy life because his parents taught him how to be persis
I’m pretty neurotic and Mr. Llama is kind of a melancholy sort (although just occasionally a peering into the heart of darkness), and I can tell baby llama is going to be on the thinky, bookish side. She’s always seemed like a pretty together person to me. I think that temperament is inherited, but the forces that act on it are such that it can create vastly different people — I’m really going to be okay with it if little llama just wants to sit under a tree and read. My parents weren’t, they treated me like there was something very wrong with me. Hence the (thanks folks!) years of therapy. So, I think yes, your kid has a chance of inheriting whatever your personal weirdness is, but if you’re accepting and supportive and you have a sense of humor about, whatever way that you have been tormented by said thing is not as likely to be passed on.
Also, for the record, neurotic frankenkids are fun in their own right, too. We had this vision of baby llama, before she was born, of her reading in restaurants and just like glowering at us and rolling her eyes as we made totally out of date references to The Simpsons. It may yet turn out like that, but I suspect there are some pretty serious lulz in that scenario as well.
