Teach Your Children Well

I'm not sure if this is a phrase that comes up in the Bible as much as it does in LDS texts, but it gets at the point that our decisions now have effects that reach farther than we usually anticipate.

Last week in a forum while discussing his research, one of the professors in the psychology department was talking about a couple of studies that show how one generation's experiences can leave an imprint that lasts for multiple generations.

One study looked at how putting mice into stressful situations raises their cortisol levels. Cortisol is a physiological indicator of heightened levels of arousal, and in this case they had mice swimming around in a small pool (I didn't even know that mice were swimmers) to induce stress. Not surprisingly, they found that it raised the cortisol levels in the mice, and after having pregnant mice swim, their offspring also displayed higher levels of cortisol. What was surprising, however, was that the elevated cortisol levels were persistent unto the third and fourth generations, even though those other mice never had any direct links to the experiences themselves.

In another example, researchers were looking at goats that were born with deformities such that they did not have any front legs/paws so they could not walk around like a four-legged animal. Because they could only really use their hind legs, they had to hop around and eventually their spines resembled those of bipeds rather than quadrupeds. Similar to the mice, these life experiences that parents had reached down to the third and fourth generations, resulting in offspring that also had vertebrae that resembled those of bipeds.

The implications are many. There are a number of different directions that you can go with this, but the point I'll make is that the decisions that we're making now will reach farther and be more extensive than we can ever imagine. In a spiritual sense, we end up transmitting to our progeny an imprint of the things that we experience now, good or bad. Some measures that we take are explicit, such as those things that we communicate to them or demonstrate for them, and others are implicit and unavoidable. It's not just you you're hurting when you lack faith or are irresponsible, and conversely, it's not just you you're benefiting when you show courage. Your children, grandchildren, and future generations that you haven't even met yet are beneficiaries of how you choose to live your life now.