What would your parents say?

When you're young and you do something that others perceive as bad and they feel an obligation to scold you for it, yet they have no authority over you, the phrase they often fell back on was "What would your parents think?" - I often found this one strange for people to say, namely because in most cases when someone actually said it to me, my thoughts were "They'd agree with me not you" - I never actually said that in retort.  I didn't have bad parents, on the contrary, I actually think my parents were the best I could have growing up and in many ways I am grateful to them.  They taught me about right and wrong, about good and bad, and they taught me that happiness is one of the most important things in the world.  That last point was perhaps the reason my parents left so many choices in life to me to make rather than choosing for me.  My religious beliefs, which schools I went to, what I studied, all these I was free to follow as I pleased.  There are many other choices I got to make but I emphasise these as they are most relevant to this post.

What we do, reflects on us and on those who raised us, regardless of how much influence they retain over us when we put distance between them and ourselves.  What I find interesting however is that there seems to be a line that's drawn.  What marks this line is very hard to define but when crossed, your actions are attributed to you alone.  No thought is given to your parents or anyone else who influenced your life.  There's quite a few people throughout history who fall into this category and rather ominously the majority of them are people who have done unspeakable things.  Pick the worst man or woman from history you can think of and imagine "What would his/her mother think!?" - I doubt you'll blame their parents for what they did, whoever you thought of, it illustrates a point though - we have a choice whether to act in the way we were raised or to do as we wish, so why do people assume your actions are ever indicative at all of the way you were raised?

In psychology this is known as the nature versus nurture debate and at one point or another every human behaviour has been discussed in this context and the field of behavioural psychology continues study of this debate and the questions it raises.

As a gay man one particular annoyance for me is the debate of whether you are gay due to the way you were raised or if you chose to be gay - for me the answer is neither, I was born gay, it wasn't due to how I was raised or any choice I made.  I knew I was gay when I was a kid and there were boys I really liked more than just as friends, it wasn't until my teenage years when other guys took interest in girls and I had none, seeing other guys and feeling everything they did for girls but for them instead.  That's another story though.

My question of the day is, what defines the line where we stop blaming the parents for someone's actions and blame the person themselves?