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Comment by jgrahamc | Hacker News Reader

When I was in British middle school I got into trouble for bringing a small tape recorder to school. A teacher saw it, it was confiscated and I was in deep trouble. When I tried to explain to the deputy head that it was a tape recorder and not a radio (which was specifically forbidden by school rules) I was told to "shut up" and that I didn't have the "right to speak" because I had broken a rule.

In the end my parents went to the headmaster and gave him an earful.

The good news is that the school's behaviour had a lasting impression on me: people in authority act like assholes because they are in authority.

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When I have kids I plan to teach them at a very early age to stand their ground when dealing with situations like this. The first step to protecting yourself from this kind of aggression is knowing it for what it is and not fearing it.

Consider yourself extremely lucky to have such understanding parents.

I do. I owe my parents an enormous amount. Hence the special thanks to them in my book. They made a tremendous impact in my life by allowing me to be me.

According to evolutionary psychology, you would have been yourself no matter what. For example, Steven Pinker sustains in The Blank Slate that the influence of parenting on personality, IQ and other more specific traits is pretty much negligible (as long as you have "reasonable" parents). Variance in those traits is 40-50% heritable, 50% due to factors outside the control of parenting (accidents, diseases, peer groups, randomness during development) and 0-10% due to parenting.

This sounds very counterintuitive to many people because it's not the way we would like it to be. Many studies of adopted siblings, twins separated at birth, and natural siblings who grew up in different families support this hypothesis.

You could argue, then, that your parents are responsible for choosing where you grew up and your peer group, and who your other parent is. They're still 100% responsible for how you turned out, it's just the critical decisions happened before you were born.

Not exactly. Your brain is shaped partly by randomness in the womb or in the environment that is not directly under their control. This doesn't include decisions such as whether your mother drinks or smokes but more chaotic variables that cannot be controlled. Also, your parents can do their best to choose what they consider a good environment (e.g. a city or a school) but your innate personality is a stronger indicator of the groups that you will tend to associate with in that context. This is why siblings who grow up in the same environment chosen by their parents can have extremely different personalities and peer groups.

This model seems mistaken. Certainly in the negative direction, parents can "bring down" a kid far beyond the 10% that they supposedly have influence over.

I realize it's just a model and not intended to be entirely accurate. Just seems like a very small piece of the story.

Parents can give you opportunities. At about 12 they found me a computer science tutor, and that pretty much sealed by future career (for better). This was _NOT_ random. It was only one of a very long string of stuff they tried very deliberately in order to find my "thing".

As a kid I did briefly a whole lot of stuff, from swimming to skating dance to karate. Most of it didn't catch at all - I still have two left feet - but the stuff that did made a real difference. And almost all of it was at my parent's initiative.

Every time I hear that kind of a story, I wonder if I should come back from UK to my home country when I need to send my kids to school; just so they can go to a normal place. Sure - it may be a less known school. But at least you get treated in a normal way and the rules are not that different between the school and any public place (i.e. you'd have to have a knife in your hand to get stopped). I can't imagine any teacher there asking me about any electronic equipment to be honest... (apart from genuine interest, or in a "do you really want to bring that to school - for your own safety" way)

What is your home country?

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