the answer is addressed in a Medium article linked to within the nymag article.
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Thank you! I’ll let you know what I think after I plow through it!
…Okay, I’ve read that back in the 13th century, children weren’t cared about as much because a lot of them died earlier, either at birth, or later, for whatever reason (contagious disease, congenital defects, et cetera). So yeah, anyone one knows is going to die early, they won’t be too attached to them. So when infantile mortality rates went down, due to advances in disease control and medicine, children were no longer just seen as more workers on the family collective. And of course, not all families were like that.
I’m about halfway done with the first link.
Okay, done with that one. Genetics: Yes. You can have the nicest folks raise two kids, and one can come out great and the other not-so-much. In such cases, seems fair odds someone may come up with “Well your great grandpa was committed when he was 23…come to think of it…” - you see where I’m taking this. Plus the propensity for substance abuse in my family, specifically my dad’s side. We could have our own AA meeting and fill a room, LOL!
Teachers. YES! My peers affected me negatively because my teachers liked me. I was respectful, did my homework, and behaved in class. And I remember all the teachers who influenced me positively, if not their names.
So many factors involved - I wonder what the next twenty years will bring? I don’t know if I’ll ever have grandchildren (I’m ambivalent about that), but even so, I want to know so if need be, I can help out with the children of others.
And, for fun, from “My Fellow Americans” (1996), excerpted by President Russell Kramer, portrayed by Jack Lemmon: “I’ve always said that our dreamsare like our children. They need our encouragement and support to grow. They must be nurtured and sheltered…but…
…allowed to run free.” Corny, but the message is relevant. Well, at least to me.
Thank you @DavidMcRaney, for fulfilling my request. The first link was enough, lol.
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Most of the research suggests that the primary influence on adolescents isn’t their parents, it’s their peer group. Keep an eye on your kid’s friends.
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Smart but socially disconnected kids tend to go one of two ways. At best, it’s “I wish there were less arseholes in the world; therefore, I should try not to be an arsehole”. At worst, it’s “arseholes run the world. Fuck it; if you can’t beat 'em, join 'em”.
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Then we must be the Anomaly Family! Not I’m Joan Crawford, or Natalie Wood’s mom (she ripped the wings off of butterflies to get Natalie to cry for the camera), but at age 28.5, I really think the best course is that he make his own choices and learn from the consequences; since he does forget things, and yes, he lives with me (didn’t mention that earlier, whoops) and his room and video games and Gundams and PC are alll in the basement.
Comes down to this: we’re both adults who have a big connection because I carried him around in my uterus for 10.5 months, and because I’m intelligent enough to have, since he lived with me for most of his life, instilled the values of honesty, integrity, respect and self-respect into him. But it’s not been easy for either one of us.
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Done right, it is possible for parents to be a part of their kid’s peer group. 
And genetics have a role as well. It’s not that good people have good kids, but things like impulse control, aggression and empathy do have a genetically-shaped neurological basis.
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I firmly believe that never forgetting I was once a not-adult myself has helped my relationship with my son greatly. I still stop to look at bugs and birds and read the books I grew up with. I am lucky.
What?!?
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There were a lot of Februaries that year.
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My son? Um…he was late. Well, it sure FELT like 10.5 months, it was during the Drought of 1988! And I went from 115 lbs to 166!
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Sounds like me as well. I have Kanner’s autism, was bullied throughout school, have few friends IRL (largely by choice) and could be the poster boy for clinical depression. However, I could never be one of these people. Not because I was raised right, but because I’m a decent human being.
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That is an insanely long pregnancy.
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Yes, it helps at least have one or the other, if not both.
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Oh, my mom swore up and down that I was an 11-month baby; but she was 38, and I was only her second complete pregnancy. Had to have a haircut and my fingernails trimmed.
Elephants are what, a year-and-a-half to nearly two years? And their ankles don’t even swell!
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I was born a month premature, but weighed over nine pounds. I can only imagine if I was on time, or, God forbid, late.
He was 10 lbs, 8 oz, and I hadda have an emergency C-section after 14 hours of labor because both his head and chest were both 11" around.
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Although it seems like for most traits that have been studied, the evidence has supported Judith Rich Harris’ original proposal about the irrelevance of “nurture”, I did recently come across this article which said:
The conscious decisions we make as parents—how strict or supportive we are, whether we send our kids to daycare—should show up as the effect of the shared environment. But Harris reported there was little there. Not much has changed: A massive 2015 research review analyzed “7,804 traits from 2,748 publications,” including millions of twin pairs. For about 70 percent of traits, shared environment didn’t seem to do much at all. By contrast, genes were consistently powerful, typically explaining about half the variation in the traits.
Certainly, there are some nuances here. Parents do affect some important things, including social values and religion, which are, respectively, 27 percent and 35 percent explained by the shared environment.
Since “social values” are the reason the issue of parenting came up on this thread, it’s worth calling attention to the fact that this is a partial exception to Harris’ rule, though 27% is still smaller than most people would likely expect intuitively, and I don’t know how they quantified that trait exactly.
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The all-trite.
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Don’t believe it, and be highly suspicious of anything else written by whoever wrote that.
Perhaps I misrepresented the text; this is where I got that from:
I’ve long said a parent should do two things: love the child unconditionally, & raise them to be a responsible human being.
Knowing right from wrong, evil from good, legal from illegal, and facing the consequences of their actions is a big part of it.
I wish more parents recognized that!
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