The Group Mind
Now and then I get an email out of the blue that reminds me that I wrote a book about tradition. Most recently it was someone doing a final project on the subject, asking for my feelings on the question “Will our family traditions affect the morals of teens as they become older or do these traditions get forgotten?”
It was hard to write much more than platitudes in under 300 words, and any more than that would have been writing his project for him, but I gave it a go:
I would say that it's inevitable that a particular family's beliefs and mores (its own family traditions) will affect the beliefs and mores of its children, as they are a major part of the cultural environment those children are raised in. If you mean "family traditions" more broadly - i.e., what politicians call "traditional family values" - those, too, will have some impact on any member of society, but probably not as strong as [those] of a child's family and peer group.
But it all depends on what you mean by "affect". A family tradition or belief might affect a child in the sense that he or she adopts it, or it might affect him or her in the sense that he or she rejects it. As the teenage years are a time when physical and psychological changes often encourage us to question the values we were brought up with, it's by no means predictable which way any of us will go. A child of strongly religious parents may end up as strong a believer as their parents, or as an atheist. You would need a lot more information about what else is going in a particular teenager's life, what other influences they're being exposed to, before you could predict *how* they will be affected by their family traditions.
But I doubt [we] forget those traditions, even if we reject them, and it's always possible that we might return to them later in life, when the changes of puberty and young adulthood have settled down. That, in turn, would depend on how strongly any competing value systems have taken hold on us in the interim.
Seems a bit obvious, now that I re-read it. And it’s obvious how my thinking has been influenced by the last book I read, Barbara Strauch’s Why Are They So Weird? What’s Really Going On in a Teenager’s Brain. What sounds like a manual for parents is more a journalist’s tour of the cutting edge of neuroscience, which in recent years has completely revised its views about brain development in the teens and early twenties. It’s the kind of book that forces you to think about your own development as a young adult and beyond. To think that there are solid neurological reasons for our teenage sense of impulsiveness, lack of foresight, depression, zest for life, even sleeping in until all hours, is strangely reassuring. And the section on dopamine and our quest for novelty definitely had me thinking about tradition, as well as my (and many people’s) addiction to travel. I read a lot of books about neuroscience and memory when I was thinking about tradition; one day I’ll have to revisit it in the light of this new research.