When you find out you are expecting people, Docters and random people, will express their ideas on how you should raise your child. Docters often speak of a safe environment that fosters love and growth. They also speak of family history and behaviors to look out for. Other people will say that strict rules will be the best options to raise a child. But scientist have agreed that both the genetic and environmental factors we are raised in play huge roles in our development.

What are Environmental and Genetic Factors

Environmental factors are outside factors that influence your behavior and beliefs. These factors can be super small and insignificant or huge and the most meaningful thing to you, but they will still impact your earlier childhood in some way.

Some examples are:

• Physical Environment- where you were raised
• Economic Static- what tax bracket you are raised in/how financially stable was your family
• Family Dynamics- was your family a healthy environment, are your parents devoiced, unique circumstances in your family
• Health- did you have access you had to health care and nutrition
• Education- the level of education that was provided

These are just some of the environmental factors that play a role in your development. Now let’s move onto genetic factors.

Genetic factors is when genes from your biological family are passed down. These genes are hereditary and lead to behaviors that you continue to do into adulthood.

Some examples are:

• Physical Characteristics- your hair, eye, and skin color and other traits faced down from parents
• Disease- what is the likely hood getting an illness based on family history- Cancer, Schizophrenia, Alsheimer’s, etc.
• Intelligence- how smart you will naturally be
• Personality Traits- what behaviorally traits you will pick up from your parents
• Addiction- the likely hood of you becoming addicted to things such as drugs and alcohol

When you take both of these influences into account you end up with the leading factors on our development as young children. This is not to say that nothing else effects our outcome or that both genetic and environmental are life or death, and that you have to be extremely cautious how your child. This is just showing that you need to be mindful of what’s around your child and your family history.

What Happens to Twins When Environmental Factors Outweighed Genetic Factors

In the early 2000s if you asked someone to think about a set of twins most people’s first thought would be of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. They were the “its girls” of this time. Them being twins is what made everyone so fascinated with them, but this interest in them caused hostility and a toxic environment

At 9 months old the twins were cast as Michelle Tanner in Full house. They skyrocketed to fame because of Michelles fun loving and sweet personality. They acted on this show until they were 8 years old. Now when you think about this you really see how insane that is. They spent the most crucial development stage in their life acting as another person. They were too young most of the time to understand they were playing a character. They were also playing the same person. They had no individuality or freedom from this role. This is also not even touching on the fact that it is widely believed and known that there were pedophiles cast in the show.

MK and Ashley never rested after their start up. They went on to make dozens of movies and shows, fashion lines, albums, and hundreds of different merchandises. This was all in the first 20 years of their life.

The older they got the more they realized that they had no control or freedom in their life. The tabloids were always reporting on them. Everything they had to say was negative and degrading. This led to both twins trying to retreat back from the spotlight, but the public wouldn’t let them. There was a countdown someone made that compared the legal age of consent in all 50 states compared to the sister’s age. It was so normalized to not see actors and celebrities as actual people that no one really spoke out against this treatment of the 2.

Many rumors were spread about them ranging from them being coke addicts because of how skinny they were-really an eating disorder caused by the stress and spotlight- to their love life’s being put on blast. People tried to use both of them to reach their own stardom so they would sell photos to the tabloids painting them in a less than idea way. The stress of all of this put a strain on the two sisters because what one did it always reflected on the other.

Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen are the perfect example of what happens when you have twins raised in a hostile and unsafe environment. It often overshadows genetic factors because of trauma that messes up the original thought process. The 2 are still out of the limelight too this day besides their fashion empire they have built. Even then they aren’t seen much.