Designer IVF Babies Are Teenagers Now—and Some of Them Need Therapy Because of It
https://www.wired.com/story/your-next-job-designer-baby-therapist/
Designer IVF Babies Are Teenagers Now—and Some of Them Need Therapy Because of It
https://www.wired.com/story/your-next-job-designer-baby-therapist/
33 Comments
For years now, aspiring parents have been designing their children. Screening embryos for disease-causing genes during IVF, selecting their future baby’s sex, picking egg and sperm donors to influence their child’s traits. Today, a lot of those “designer babies” are full-on kids or teenagers. And some families are discovering that, as hard as you try, things don’t always work out as planned: The kids feel like walking science experiments; the parents are disappointed in how their progeny turned out. Fertility businesses are selling a better chance of domestic bliss, and these families feel cheated.
Now controversial new technologies promise parents even more control over their embryos. One US startup, called [Orchid](https://www.wired.com/story/this-woman-will-decide-which-babies-are-born-noor-siddiqui-orchid/), claims its genetic screening can calculate a baby’s risk of autism, bipolar disorder, and hundreds of other health conditions. [Another startup](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/oct/18/us-startup-charging-couples-to-screen-embryos-for-iq) wants to help parents pick embryos with the highest predicted IQ. So WIRED spoke to a psychologist based in California who is already dealing with the fallout.
Read more: [https://www.wired.com/story/your-next-job-designer-baby-therapist/](https://www.wired.com/story/your-next-job-designer-baby-therapist/)
“In Silicon Valley, there are many distant parents—usually fathers—who hardly know their children. Sometimes the mom and child don’t bond, either. There are a lot of men who are extremely successful and want things a certain way. They tend to get what they want and don’t hear “no” a lot. So when their kid shows up and isn’t the way that they want, what happens?”
This isn’t IVF exclusive. Sounds like any out of touch or uninvolved parent upset their toddler is misbehaving because they are human.
Gattaca is a good movie. Instead of therapy, they should just go to space and challenge their genetically superior siblings to challenges.
Genetics may be an important edge in life but being perfect doesn’t mean you’ll be perfect.
Looks like *Gattaca’s* about to become a non-fiction documentary.
Why is this article written in the first person? Who is supposed to be speaking here? It’s clearly not the woman in the byline.
How common is it for people to use donor gametes without any fertility issues? Because that doesn’t sound common at all.
Are there any stats on this or even anecdotes from people with real names and actual verifiable experiences?
I feel like their parents with unrealistic expectations are why they need therapy, not because they were IVF babies.
Why not just… not tell your kids? The world is a hard enough place without giving them one more thing to feel weird about. Unless it becomes necessary for medical reasons, no reason for them to know.
I feel like having a high IQ is a detriment. I wouldn’t wish it on my kids. My average friends are all happier than my smart friends. Without exception.
I’m not sure how this is all that different than any set of parents with high expectations for their kid?
Just because they scanned for genetic disease, or picked a donor based on that donor being good at the violin or whatever, doesn’t mean those parents are all that different than some other set that insists on a dozen extra curriculars all the time and straight A’s.
Parents have one job. To love and nurture their child. If they do a good job, they learn from the child as much as they teach the child. It isn’t easy but it’s worth it.
What an unsual article. You still have to raise your kids past the usual challenges that come in society and growing up human. Them being designed to not get certain diseases aren’t going to make them less liable to act like a teenager would during that time of age.
Teaching somebody how to be a parent is always a subject I like introducing to conversations like this.
That’s a problem of nurture, not nature. Parents can have perfectly healthy kids with the best traits and still botch it out of sheer incompetence.
Discipline yoir kids.OR have someone do it for you.YOu want stubborn, passonate, üdRiven. You’ll get an infinite infant if they’re not forged into shape.
It’s insane how you need to pass tests to be able to, say…see if you are fit to drive a vehicle. Are you knowledgeable? Capable? Do you know the rules and so on…
But having a child? Go ahead. Yeah, no worries. Who cares if you can’t even afford to feed yourself at the moment? Go right ahead! Have 10!
Could this just be a correlation with being raised by the type of people that would go out of their way to have a designer IVF baby?
No amount of genetic screening can make up for shitty parenting.
Did no one else watch GATTACA? This is basically the plot
Another example on how capitalism actually creates a market by stoking fears to the gullible. Basic lack of education and effort, plus a conviction that money can buy everything are the scourge of our time and might so much contribute to our demise as a species.
In most countries, you aren’t allowed to select embryos based on sex unless there’s a risk of a serious sex-linked disease.
Genetic screening is also for identifying serious diseases to inform the parents decision about the life that child might have and their potential medical needs.
I think insinuating that either of these things are vanity projects about making better children is really disingenuous and I don’t trust this author at all as a result. Surprised Wired is writing something this shoddy and manipulative
These startups and prospective parents need to watch Gattaca.
Literally Gattaca.
But the article’s title, likely chosen by editors, is misleading. The kids don’t need therapy because of IVF, they need therapy due to bad parenting, which happens to kids regardless of whether or not they are created via IVF or the natural way. The bad parenting is likely made worse by the IVF due to the parents’ unrealistic expectations for the kids. Does IVF give these kids a leg up in life? Certainly, biological privilege is nice to have.
But it’s not nature OR nurture, it’s both, and the parents assumed the kids would succeed with poor nurture because of better nature.
When expectations are too high, there is no room for mistake, and that inhibition prevents necessary learning/growing. You gotta give people the option to fail.
This is one of the few advantages that being poor has, people don’t expect much of you, and that can allow human creativity to flourish.
My grandparents didn’t go to college, so when my dad did, it was like a neighborhood wide party (poor country) and people went ballistic when he got into med school. When I went to Ivy, it was met with much less fanfare, and when I went to med school, it was basically expected because of what my dad had done. Even now, i readily acknowledge that my dad’s accomplishment _is_ more significant given that he had to believe he could do things that weren’t expected of him, but in terms of objective academic performance, I blow him out of the water.
So, as I said, expectations are a double-edged sword that propel you to greater heights but you’re walking a tightrope that the parents don’t know the first thing about
So they would rather have been born with various genetic defects ?
How about a “thanks mom and dad for looking out for my health”
To a small extent we are all random genetic creations even by natural conception.
“Parents set unrealistic expectations for their children, better blame technology” – Wired.com, a bigger waste of electricity than AI.
I wonder how much of this is true and how much of this is the opinion of one psychiatrist. Children of any kind can end up with problems. Do these kids have more problems? At one point, she lists hypotheticals, but even normal children have hypotheticals and how often do these hypotheticals happen? People who can afford IVF can also afford therapy. These children may have more therapy, but that doesn’t mean that they need more therapy than other kids. As far as I know, Bronny James is not and IVF kid, but people have high expectations for him.
When I was a teenager, we had to disappoint our parents the old fashioned way.
I have no problem screening a child for genetic diseases or abnormalities, but if you’re trying to breed a Newton or a Picasso, you’re insane.
I doubt it’s because of IVF, mix of neglectful parents and gen z teenagers 😅
This is really just people being terrible parents.
1. They design their baby like it’s a car you can just mix and match it to suit THEIR desires.
2. Regardless of the first point being dissapointed in your offspring is so messed up. You chose to have the child! And you were the one who were (supposed) to raise them properly! If there is anything they should be dissapointed in, it’s their oen failings as a parent.
I totally understand people who want to avoid their kids having terrible chronic illnesses for their kids well being. It’s putting the well-being of your (future)kids over your own idealic ideas that’s the important part here.
I don’t doubt there are some sales people in the business who push people who are on thefence to “upgrade”(🤮) their child though.
I feel like its a bad idea to tell the child all of this.
Kids need to be told no, especially ones that grow up priveleged.
Oh no, the rich are hollow, unhappy people who thought they could buy love and found out they were wrong.
I, for one, am deeply surprised.
This article fucking sucks. Being a bad parent has nothing to do with IVF.