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Parenting
Designing Destiny: Parenthood Behind the Genetic Screen
Trying to create the ideal child is far from ideal.
Posted May 1, 2025 Reviewed by Jessica Schrader
Key points
- Advances in reproductive technology can delude parents into thinking they can engineer the perfect child.
- Young adults develop their own identities, often diverging from what their parents envision for them.
- Embracing the unpredictability of child development is healthier than attempting to design the perfect child.
The quickly-growing field of reproductive technology has led to quantum leaps when it comes to genetic screening. Biotech companies confidently advertise that they can provide in-depth “background checks” on embryos, performing in-utero assessments of the likelihood of a host of worrisome conditions, such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and schizophrenia, as well as soon being able to predict and select for more complicated characteristics, like a child’s IQ.
These enterprises proudly tout their ability to help parents construct maximally optimized, premium-grade offspring, a far more sophisticated and ambitious endeavor than the now-routine first-trimester blood tests and amniocentesis procedures that have been able to identify a range of chromosomal anomalies, and possibly lethal congenital conditions.
In this regard, it is no longer the stuff of science fiction that a “snowplow parent,” the mother or father who does everything she or he can to smooth out the bumpy pathways of their child’s life, can now rev up the engine of a prenatal plow and set it into motion before those bumpy pathways are even encountered and traveled.
Behind all of this glittery technology lies the possibility that parents will soon be able to biologically sculpt the child of their dreams. And behind that possibility lies the belief that this is somehow a good thing, that parents should be able to build their offspring according to desirable and exacting specifications and, as a result, map out an ideal, cloudless destiny for family life.
The obvious problem here—beyond concerns about genetic technology verging into a high-tech version of eugenics—is that raising children is not at all like engineering, much as we, at times, might like it to be.
Because the ascendant belief that technology is the solution to all of our problems—including children who don’t develop and behave exactly how we want them to, who don’t loyally follow the detailed blueprint that we have laid out for them—doesn’t comport well with the complicated trajectories of human development.
All parents have to come to terms with this reality, but it confronts parents who are launching young adults with particular intensity. For it is when the nest is being emptied that we are forced to finally come to terms with the fact that despite our herculean efforts, our son or daughter did not become the person we envisioned years ago.
Young adult children are not obligated to establish romantic relationships with the partners whom we think are best suited for them. They are not required to attend the college that gives us smug bragging rights. They do not need to pursue the occupations that we believe most comprehensively harness their strengths and talents.
They did not commit to living their lives the way that we have lived ours, or to living the lives that we didn’t live but wished that we had. They are not our possessions, not our belongings, not our treasures—they are not here simply to reflect well upon us or to function as our narcissistic ambassadors to the world.
Childrearing has a destiny all its own, and trying to mandate and dictate that destiny can bleed family life of its unanticipated joys, its rich spontaneity, its sometimes painful but always life-affirming lessons, its sense of mystery and meaningful adventure.
If you want things to turn out exactly the way you prefer, plenty of wonderful pastimes await: There are jigsaw puzzles to assemble, sweaters to knit, model cars to build. But don’t imagine that raising a child will conform at all closely to the contours of these kinds of activities, no matter how advanced our bio-technology becomes.
Parenthood is embedded in the assumption that things are going to turn out very differently than you ever imagined—along with the assumption that the lives that turn out very differently from those we imagine can still be imperfectly okay, and can make us perfectly satisfied.
