Invoking personality is to the behavioral science as invoking God is to the natural sciences. One can explain anything by appealing to personality, and as such it explains nothing. Psychologists have been trying to make sense of personality for over a century without much success (the best efforts so far have been a five factor model [Big 5] which has ultimately pretty minor predictive value), which is why most behavioral scientists have learned to simply leave personality to the philosophers and concentrate on much simpler theoretical framework.
A much simpler explanation is what your parent offered. And to many behavioralists it is actually the same explanation, as to a true scotsm... [cough] behavioralist personality is simply learned habits, so—by Occam’s razor—you should omit personality from your model.