Is that really true? At my school your peer group was heavily influenced by your interests. Kids who played sports hung out together, kids into band hung out, kids in honors classes hung out. And kids with no other interests hung out too. By and large this last group had parents who weren’t involved in their kids’ lives.

It’s just one data point, and there were many non-troubled kids who had non-involved parents. But I can’t think of many cases of the converse, troubled kids with parents who actively were invested in their kids’ success.

There are probably no simple answers when it comes to how a person's character forms. I just wanted to point out that "the parents are at fault" is not the whole truth either.

As are genetics. Psychological illnesses often first manifest in the teenage years and they happen in all kinds of families. People always want to look for some kind of reason but sometimes there just isn't one.

I've heard it as the adage 'you are the average of the 5 closest people to you'.

> Parent have little influence on that.

Depends if the parents can afford to live where they want. For me growing up, friends were people who lived close enough to bicycle or walk. Given where I lived this meant some were jocks, some were rich, and some were poor.

We were closer to the poor side, but having rich (basically both parents were doctors or some other professional) friends taught me a lot. Namely, there is a path to not being poor. My parents for better or worse put me in that neighborhood.

There is quite a lot parents can do to stack the odds, though of course nothing is ever certain. Signing their kids up for extracurricular activities to keep them busy after school is something my parents did. And not all teenagers are disobedient all the time; twice my parents forbade me from hanging out with somebody. Maybe it's a coincidence, but one of those people is now in prison for domestic violence, and the other is dead from drug abuse. In retrospect I think my parents were right to put their foot down in the case of those two.

And this is a good thing. Stable friendships can balance out parental failure to some degree.