I have a friend that deliberately chose not to have children because she feared they would inheirit her mother's extreme mental illness. But I would guess that all families have a hideous medical history somewhere along the line and sometimes I think you have to take a little leap of faith. If anything, awareness of a potential problem can lead to seeking help earlier.

The genetic diseases ARE frightening, perhaps most so the ones which science does not currently have any plan of action. My mother watched her own mother die a slow, confused death from Alzheimer's. My grandmother ceased to recognize her gradndchildren, her own children, and eventually the language which she had spoken for the last seventy years, reverting in her final year back to her childhood languages of Canadian French and Yiddish.

The thought of watching my own mother go through this, as she almost inevitably will in fifteen to twenty years, gives me great pause. The hope for MY children is that science will have found a solution to save them this pain with me.

My own mother has (as the previous poster suggested) preemptively gotten nursing home insurance, assuming she could need ten years of care or more, and continues to push herself to learn new skills (she just graduated from business school at the age of 58) to delay the onset of the disease.

Pingback from  clip59 » Weekly Check-Up: Did Your Family History Give You Second Thoughts …

Yes, genetic history is one of the reasons we chose adoption.

My mother's side of the family is riddled with alcoholism and gambling addition.  My mom herself is a textbook adult child of an alcoholic.  My father's side is no picture of positive mental health.  Both my brothers have off the charts ADD (do I, who knows?  Girls don't get tested as frequently...)

My journey to motherhood was a deliberate act of healing.  I realize that there are risks for my kids given the family histories on both sides (my husband has diabetes, depression & deaths from heart disease in his background).  

However, my life has been an object lesson in the cycle of abuse & dysfunction - I spent my childhood miserable, my adolescence repeating the mistakes, my early adulthood scared by the fact that it was so easy & automatic for me to do that and my married life (the last 10 years) have been an act of deliberate growth, healing and flourishing.

My kids will be at risk for the same foibles my and my husband's families were prone to.  But if we can be open and forthright with them about the risks, model healthy relationships and coping strategies and keep ourselves plugged into their lives as they grow, hopefully we can mitigate any "nature" flaws with "nurture" strengths.

If we were at risk for serious genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis or those sort of defects that are almost always fatal at an early age, yes, we would take that into consideration.  But a family history of alcoholism or drug use isn't a strong enough reason, to me, to not have children.  As the poster above me said, it's possible to model healthy lifestyles and hopefully block those sort of addictions from ever happening.

Pingback from  Weekly Check-Up: Did Your Family History Give You Second Thoughts … | hgdomain-names