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Comment by jgrahamc | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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