SCIENTISTS have found an answer to one of the most intractable squabbles in family life – argumentative and disruptive children are born, not made.

A study by American scientists has found that antisocial traits such as being argumentative, bullying and lying, are often inherited. The new research challenges the scientific consensus that difficult children are the product of disruptive homes and are copying parents’ behaviour.

The implication of the research, conducted by the University of Virginia, is that children with “antisocial” genes would behave badly even if they had been adopted and brought up in a happy family.

The effect appears to pass down the generations. It means that couples who fight a lot may be driven by their genes and pass them on to their children, who tend to behave in the same way.

The finding emerged from a study of 2,000 children born of 1,000 twins. Half of the twins were identical, meaning they shared all their genes, while the rest were fraternal and so shared only half their genes. The study of behaviour in twins and their children is a standard means of finding out which traits are inherited.

Research has also found links between genes and other aspects of bad behaviour. In 2002, Terrie Moffitt, a professor at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, discovered that men with a mutation in a single gene were predisposed to be violent criminals.

A separate study by Moffitt found that a tendency to antisocial behaviour is largely inherited. She argues that an early diagnosis of a child predisposed to bad behaviour may be key to offering them treatment to stop such tendencies developing.

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