The variety in temperament, interests and ability between even siblings varies greatly. The people most eager to share parenting advice is usually parents only one child who is calm and attentive :) I've seen several parents in that category have a second child and come out shocked.

I'm believe that beyond a base level of food, clean clothes and love, your influence as a parent is marginal. It's also a wildly unpopular but intelligence is highly genetic (at least 50% of outcome determined by genes).

I wouldn't argue against intelligence being highly genetic.

But people usually aren't talking about intelligence. They're talking about success in life, be it career or school.

Our oldest old had a terrible time at math, and the teacher thought she was doing well in the start because she never asked questions.

But the first practice test showed otherwise. After that we made a point to ensure she understands math. It was a rough couple of months at the start of the year, but that's paid dividends and the last 5 have been pretty smooth.

She didn't get smarter. And if she didn't have parents with the time and ability to help her, she woulda flunked.

If it’s 50% genetic, you’d see lineages of scientists or brilliant in whatever but it doesn’t seem to happen often does it?

Check out the Dyson family.

A few months of effort at home with our 6yo got him from being well behind in reading to caught up with his classmates. We had no idea he was struggling until his teacher told us.

The effort at home involved gentle encouragement and keeping him focused on the phonics homework. It wasn’t tough on him or us but it has restored his confidence and he’s keeping up with his classmates now.

This is totally the kind of problem that could have festered and led to poor outcomes for him in all of his schooling if we’d ignored it.

Relevant comic: https://imgur.io/8g2UAGS

I do believe parentage changes "the difficulty level" of life. Some kids are born to loving, nurturing, well-off parents and essentially "play the game of life" on level easy. Some kids play on level hard. However, it's the kid's own choice how they will play it.

The heredity of intelligence actually depends on the environment. Those high percentages you mention only emerge in a 'stable' environment. That's not saying that people can grow (far) beyond their genetic makeup, but the opposite can happen.

If you think of (defending against) all those negative effects, I think the impact of a parent goes well beyond the basics you mention. That goes even further when you consider all other skills that one can foster that benefit a future member of our society.

The thing you’re missing is that it generally doesn’t matter how much YouTube a kid watches. Parents stress out too much over doing everything exactly right when it probably doesn’t matter that much. Kids are pretty resilient and hard to screw up.

Most kids grow up to be average adults with average jobs doing average things. No amount of Smarter Everyday is likely to change that. And if they do grow up to be an astronaut or whatever, Smarter Everyday shouldn’t get all the credit, it’s more luck of the draw.

> And if they do grow up to be an astronaut or whatever, Smarter Everyday shouldn’t get all the credit, it’s more luck of the draw.

I'm not sure an astronaut is the best profession to get your point across here. The resume of an astronaut is normally off the charts. They put in an absolute fuck ton of work, it's definitely not luck of the draw.

From a stat I saw it's something like 10 astronaut candidates selected from a pool of around 18,000 applicants. So really doing a fuck ton of work doesn't give you a very good chance to become an astronaut because hardly anybody becomes an astronaut. That's 17,990 people with off the charts resumes who go home disappointed.

My point was that generally there's no parenting method that produces a specific outcome very consistently. Kids are generally going to end up how they're going to end up no matter how many Baby Beethoven CDs you make them listen to. It's just easy to fool ourselves into thinking that "this method works" because we don't see the million other people who end up the same way as a result of a different method.