In Which My Son Wins (Or Maybe Loses) the Genetic Lottery

Squirrelboy has a lot going for him, statistically speaking. He is white. He is male. He is Christian. He is from an upper middle class family. He was breastfed not just for a year, but well into his preschool years. His parents read to him regularly in early childhood and still continue to do so. He has had the privilege of traveling abroad as well as to many parts to the U.S. In terms of being given a good start in life he is sitting in clover. That's not the way he sees it, however.

He does recognize that he has a lot of privilege and a lot of advantages, but he thinks that the hand our genetics dealt him was incredibly unjust. Neither of us knew this about the other at the time, but, when we married, Mr. Engineer and I were creating a potential family with a high genetic risk for dyslexia on one side and ADHD on the other. Heck, our poor kids got an extra helping of dyslexia risk since it seems to run in my family as well, though I'm not affected.

When one parent has dyslexia, every child born to that parent has a 50% risk of having dyslexia. In our case, it happened to work out that one of our two kids has dyslexia, thus 50% of our kids have dyslexia, but the math doesn't always work that way. The risk is 50% for each child.  Another couple I know that could have passed down dyslexia genetically has three biological children, none of whom have dyslexia. A third couple I know has four biological children, three of whom have dyslexia.

For ADHD, the story is more complicated. Having a parent with ADHD definitely increases the risk for a child to have ADHD, but I couldn't find any hard and fast numbers. ADHD is also affected by environment in ways that dyslexia is not, which complicates the picture. The one statistic I could find was that 1 in 3 fathers with ADHD have a child with ADHD. I couldn't find any statistics about mothers, so we'll just have to presume that having a mother with ADHD (officially diagnosed or not) also increases a child's risk.

So any child we had had an approximate 50% risk of having dyslexia and maybe as much as a 33% risk of having ADHD. I don't know of any studies that show that the risks compound each other, but I wouldn't surprised if they did, even if only anecdotally, since the two often coexist. Our genes combined to create one child with both challenges and one child with neither, and the child who got both is pretty annoyed about that.

It does no good to point out to him that his sister was apparently born with a susceptibility to develop an autoimmune disorder and she wound up with type 1 diabetes. He simply points out that a) Kittygirl wasn't born with T1D and b) there is no guarantee that he won't develop diabetes or some other autoimmune disease at some point in his life.

So what can we do as parents to assuage his anger at the genetic profile we unwittingly passed down to him? We can remind him that we also passed good things down to him and gave him the best start in life we could, which was pretty darn good because of all the privilege we enjoy. We can also remind him that he's made it this far in life with much more success than failure. We can remind him of all the people in the world who have similar challenges and have gone on to be successful.

Finally, we can remind him that he is a unique and beloved creation of God and that God can and will use him to impact the world. Sometimes this may happen in spite of his challenges, other times it will happen because of his challenges.