Parents who worry that calling a child brilliant will create a narcissist can take some nuance from a large family study published this year. Analyzing 6,715 people from German families, researchers found that narcissistic traits do cluster in families, but mostly because relatives share genes, not because they share a home.
The finding lands in a research area that has leaned heavily on parenting. Earlier work linked inflated parental views of children to later narcissism, and one of the psychologists behind a 2025 Ig Nobel-winning experiment on IQ feedback now studies how parents see their children's intelligence. The twin data do not erase those findings, but they change how they should be read.
