It seems wrong to single out environmental causes as dominant. There are parents with multiple children who all did fine except one. Anyway, we know it's a complicated mix of genetics and environment and either factor can be decisive.
> Parents are sacrosanct in this country and there is no actual community to give much in terms of help. Peoples suburban homes are their castle and nobody knows how much neglect or abuse is going on behind closed doors until the kid shows up at school with a “behavior disorder”. Simply put: people who are completely incompetent to care for another human being much less an immature one’s emotional or physical or developmental needs get full legal protection. I think this is underappreciated in society since everyone who is a parent experienced many difficulties and they imagine all the ways things could go wrong. They are usually being charitable to the other parents though - the bar at which a child develops a secure emotional attachment is not that high.
Parents are much less sacrosanct in the US/UK than anywhere else.
No one actually knows how to raise children. We have decided to let parents experiment on their children and this seems correct to me. The more we mandate certain parenting techniques, the more it will become clear that the "science" behind child-rearing is not reliable. We'll be screwing up children uniformly instead of haphazardly. I think it's better to let parents do their best. This leaves us with some children who were over-disciplined and some who were under-disciplined and this is a better outcome than everyone being screwed up in the same way.