Welcome back to another Question of the Week here at The Confusing Middle! Every week, I pull another question from Gregory Stock’s The Book of Questions and attempt to figure out what my answer actually is. Sometimes that means confronting some uncomfortable hypothetical. Sometimes it means discovering that my first instinct was completely wrong. And sometimes it means reading the question and thinking, Well, that’s kind of ridiculous.

Here’s this week’s question: If you had a child who was your clone—a delayed identical twin—do you think that your hard-won self-awareness and self-knowledge would enable you to be a better parent for him or her than your parents were for you?

My immediate answer? No.

Not because I think I would necessarily be a worse parent than my parents. I just don’t think “better” is something we could possibly measure in this situation. I’d be a different parent. And my clone would be a different kid.

The Problem With the Question

I understand what Stock is getting at here. This is essentially a nature-versus-nurture question wearing a science-fiction hat.

If I had a child who was genetically identical to me, presumably I’d have a tremendous advantage as his father. I know myself pretty well after 46 years of living inside this particular brain. I know what frightened me as a child. I know what motivated me. I know where I struggled. I know what I wish someone had said at certain moments.

Surely that would give me the cheat codes for raising Aaron 2.0. Except there’s a pretty enormous problem with that assumption. My clone wouldn’t be me. Scientifically, the closest real-world comparison would be identical twins, and research involving monozygotic twins has repeatedly demonstrated that sharing essentially the same genetic sequence does not produce two interchangeable human beings. Genetics influences personality, certainly, but environment and individual experience matter enormously too. Even identical twins can develop differences in personality, behavior, health, and patterns of gene expression as their lives unfold. In other words, DNA provides ingredients. It does not provide a completed recipe.

And my clone wouldn’t even have the advantage of growing up alongside me in the same household during the same historical moment. He’d be my delayed identical twin. I was born in 1980. I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s. This hypothetical kid would be growing up in the late 2020s, 2030s, and beyond. Who knows what fresh hell he’d be dealing with?

I could probably make some educated guesses about him. Maybe he’d be introverted. Maybe he’d be shy. Maybe he’d have a dry sense of humor and a sarcastic streak a mile long. He would, naturally, be devastatingly handsome. Okay, that one might be pushing the limits of what genetics can accomplish. But even if those traits carried over perfectly, he would have to figure out how to live with them in a world completely different from mine. A sarcastic kid growing up in 1992 navigated different social expectations than a sarcastic kid growing up in 2032. The same personality trait can create entirely different experiences depending on when and where you’re living. So if I went into parenting this kid convinced that I already understood him because I understood myself, I might actually be putting myself at a disadvantage.

Send in the Clones

Strangely enough, Star Wars provides a pretty good illustration of this. In Attack of the Clones and particularly throughout the animated series The Clone Wars, the Republic’s clone troopers are created from the genetic template of bounty hunter Jango Fett. At first glance, they appear interchangeable. Same face. Same voice. Same genetic source. But spend any time watching The Clone Wars and that illusion disappears quickly. Rex isn’t Cody. Cody isn’t Fives. Fives isn’t Echo. They develop their own personalities, loyalties, fears, friendships, and ambitions. Some decorate their armor differently. Some alter their appearance. They even develop individual ways of expressing themselves despite having been created and trained for essentially the same purpose.

Obviously, Star Wars is not a scientific documentary about human cloning. But on this particular point, the metaphor works surprisingly well. Same DNA does not mean same person. My clone would begin life with a genetic blueprint remarkably similar to mine. Everything that happened afterward would belong to him. And that means my job wouldn’t be to raise myself better. It would be to raise him.

Looking Back at My Own Parents

This is where the second half of Stock’s question becomes difficult, because it asks whether I could do a better job than my parents did. Let me make something very clear before I start picking apart anybody’s parenting decisions. I love my parents. I was incredibly blessed to grow up with two parents who loved me and were there for me. We didn’t have everything we wanted, but we were comfortable. My parents worked hard to give my sister and me everything they could. Were they perfect parents? Absolutely not. I doubt either of them would have claimed otherwise.

There are moments from my childhood and adolescence that I can look back on now and think I might have handled differently if I had been the parent. But that’s an incredibly unfair advantage for me to have. I have hindsight. My parents didn’t. I get to sit here decades later knowing how everything turned out. I can replay a decision they made in 1993 while knowing what happened in 1994, 1998, 2006, and 2026. They were making the decision in 1993. That’s a pretty significant difference.

And even if I could travel back in time and change one of those decisions, I have no way of knowing whether my decision would produce a better outcome. It would produce a different outcome. Maybe only slightly different. Maybe enormously different. But better? There’s no control group for childhood.

The Kid I Understand Now

There are things about myself that make much more sense to me today than they ever could have when I was growing up. I was a perfectionist. Yeah, yeah. In a lot of ways I still am. Just not quite as extreme. My parents didn’t create that perfectionism. They never demanded straight As. They never made me believe their love depended on my accomplishments. What they asked was that I do the best I could based on my abilities. The pressure came from me.

I had an enormous fear of disappointing people, particularly my parents and other authority figures. That fear pushed me toward good grades and toward doing well at the things I attempted. Eventually, that perfectionism contributed to an eating disorder during my middle school years. My parents weren’t equipped for that. What parent would be?

This was the early 1990s. They couldn’t pull out a phone and instantly find medical information, support communities, firsthand accounts, treatment resources, and twenty-seven contradictory TikToks explaining what they were doing wrong. They armed themselves with the information available to them. They did everything they could to keep me safe and get me onto a path toward healing. Today, I can look backward with decades of hindsight. I’ve also spent time studying psychology and sociology. I understand the kid I was in ways my parents couldn’t possibly have understood him while they were busy actually raising him.

Would that knowledge help if my clone developed the same perfectionist tendencies? Absolutely. Would it mean I knew exactly what he needed? Absolutely not. Maybe his perfectionism wouldn’t involve grades. Maybe it would emerge through athletics or friendships or whatever unholy combination of social media and artificial intelligence is tormenting teenagers fifteen years from now. Recognizing a trait isn’t the same thing as knowing where it will lead.

The Mistakes I’d Want to Stop

There is one advantage I’d desperately want to exploit. I’d know my mistakes. If I saw my clone approaching one of the same cliffs I walked toward, every parental instinct I had would probably scream at me to grab him by the shoulders, spin him around, and send him in the opposite direction. But I’m not convinced that would always be the right thing to do. Isn’t that one of the great frustrations of parenting?

You know your children are going to make mistakes. You know some of those mistakes will hurt. And sometimes you know exactly how badly they’re going to hurt because you’ve made them yourself. But experience is a remarkably effective teacher. There’s been plenty of criticism in recent decades of overly protective parenting, and developmental research generally supports giving children age-appropriate opportunities for autonomy rather than attempting to eliminate every risk or failure from their lives.

You can’t learn how to recover from failure if you’re never allowed to fail. That doesn’t mean I’m going to shove my clone into the deep end of the swimming pool because I never properly learned how to swim. But I’m not going to teach him to be afraid of the water, either. Maybe that’s where self-awareness actually would help. Not because I could prevent him from making my mistakes, but because I might recognize the difference between a mistake that’s dangerous and a mistake that’s necessary. I could offer him the benefit of what I’ve learned. Then I’d have to let him decide what to do with it.

Maybe I’d Understand My Parents Better

There’s another possibility buried in this question that I find much more interesting than whether I’d outperform my parents. Maybe raising this kid would finally make me understand them. Not because he’s my clone. Just because he’d be my child. I’m a single man with no children. I can imagine the responsibility of being a parent, but imagining it isn’t remotely the same thing as experiencing it. You’re responsible for another human life. You worry about whether they’re safe. Whether they’re healthy. Whether they’re happy. Whether they’re learning what they need to learn. Whether you’re being too strict. Whether you’re being too lenient. Whether the decision you made yesterday is something they’ll be talking about with a therapist thirty years from now.

And apparently that worry never stops. There’s a wonderful moment near the end of Parenthood when Jason Robards’ character, Frank Buckman, is talking to his adult son Gil about being a father. Gil is struggling with his own kids and wondering when the job finally gets easier. Frank’s basic message is that it doesn’t. There’s no finish line where your children turn eighteen and you stop being their parent. Suddenly I imagine myself raising this hypothetical little clone and having moments where I remember something my father did when I was twelve. And instead of thinking, I would have handled that differently, maybe I’d finally think: Oh. Now I get it.

So Would I Be Better?

No. At least, I wouldn’t assume so.

I’d know things my parents didn’t know. I’d have access to information they didn’t have. I’d understand certain parts of my own personality that might help me recognize similar traits in my clone. But I’d also make mistakes my parents never made. I’d overcorrect in places because I remembered something from my childhood too vividly. I’d probably mistake familiarity for understanding sometimes. I’d worry too much about preventing problems I’d experienced and completely miss problems that never occurred to me. And somewhere along the way, this kid would become his own person.

That’s the part of Stock’s question I think matters most. My parents didn’t raise me with the goal of creating the person sitting here writing this in 2026. They couldn’t have known who that person would be. They gave me morals. Values. Knowledge. Boundaries. Love. Then life did what life does. The man I am today is partly the product of how they raised me, partly the product of the choices I’ve made, partly the product of experiences none of us could have predicted, and partly the result of whatever genetic cards I was dealt at conception.

My clone would get some of those same cards. He wouldn’t get the same game. And maybe good parenting isn’t about knowing exactly who your child is going to become. Maybe it’s about giving them what you can, teaching them what you know, admitting when you don’t know something, and eventually trusting them to become somebody you never could have predicted. Even if they happen to have your face.

Your Turn

So what do you think? If you were raising your own delayed identical twin, would knowing yourself give you an advantage? Would you try to steer your child away from the mistakes you made? Or would knowing your own history tempt you into assuming you understood someone who was ultimately living a completely different life? And looking back at your own upbringing, do you think you would be a better parent than your parents were? Or simply a different one?

Let me know where you land on this week’s question in the comments. Until next week, this is Aaron, at The Confusing Middle, grateful that any hypothetical child of mine would at least inherit one thing guaranteed to make parenting easier: A perfectly reasonable, completely manageable sarcastic streak.

Feature Photo by Ketut Subiyanto