Parental Influence: Overrated?

[Adebisi]

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I have a problem with this. What they specifically failed to find is similarities between the parents and the children. That doesn't equate to failing to find that the parents have an effect on their children. The parental-influence camp don't claim that parents can or do produce clones of themselves personality-wise, so it's really a strawman that's being dismissed.


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Nice catch. I'd be willing to bet a substantial amount of money that people who had really f'd up things going on in the family when they were kids are significantly more likely to have issues as adults. Parents might not be able to shape their kids' personalities however they please, but to assert they have no effect is pretty absurd. If you took two cloned babies and placed one with stable, loving parents, and the other with an abusive, alcoholic father and mentally unstable mother, you'd probably be able to see how big an effect parents can have.

I think maybe the way that parents really affect their child's development is through how they behave, rather than how they try to raise their kid. If the parents are constantly fighting about money, I think their kid is more likely than average to be either really tight with money or really reckless with it as an example.