Bad parenting or neglectful often produces bad outcomes does it not?

This is unfortunate to read. Of course everything doesn’t need to be planned, but food and shelter are the bare minimum.

Bad outcome in what way? Even if you’re a so-called bad parent, they’ll still have a similar life expectancy, and a similar chance of creating grandchildren.

Maybe they won’t be an A student when they reach school but does it actually matter?

There’s kids who literally survived the Holocaust in Nazi Germany and lived very successful lives after.

That said there is a natural instinct to be a decent parent. You don’t really have to try or be ready to. Just need to be around. In my opinion it’s similar to the instinct to turn off a burning stove - a bunch of common sense stuff that requires zero planning.

Success as a parent is much more than just "my child is alive and getting older"

Are they becoming a happy person? good, moral person? Do they contribute to society or are they a drain on society? Do you, the parent, have to bail them out of jail every other weekend?

Don't neglect your kids, people. Please.

A child's peer group has more influence over those questions than parents do. It's no excuse to neglect your children, but society places far more blame on parents than is warranted IMO.

While the child's peer group does have the strong influence on a few of those questions, it's probably worth noting that as the parent you build the tools that allows the child to develop the peer group that allows for them to be happy.

The unfortunate reality is that this groundwork is laid from around 0-10. After that it's a lot harder to correct the mistakes and the influence then definitely falls much more under peers than the parents.

exactly. i didn't have a peer group as a child. and my parents are the only ones responsible for that. i am not blaming them, because they couldn't do better, but most definitely their influence and making sure that i am in an environment where i can make friends is something they were responsible for.

Not really. The most meaningful outcome for a child's life is the mate selection of the parents. Parenting generally has no effect; see the letter sent to Maher as a really good synopsis: https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/taming-the-tiger-mo...

I'm not disagreeing with what you've linked said but it's pretty well documented that there are negative events that can lead to long term impacts on children. The letter you linked seems to glance over parents who are abusive, whether that is verbal, physical, or neglectful.

For those that want to dive in a little bit these are Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE). It's not an end all be all chance that you'll develop something with a long term impact but the more you experience the more likely you are to do so.

https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/riskprotectivefa...

You can do everything right and your kid will still have an ACE.

Lil Timmy falls down a well, or has a really handsy neighbour, or has to see someone get hit by a car.

Like, obviously, don't beat your kids, but you don't need to be superlative parent, esp. since a great deal of their education and raising will happen, essentially, in someone elses workplace (i.e. school).

Surely for such a counterintuitive idea, we can do better for evidence than a rambling blog post about a letter to a TV show host. The evidence for such a strong claim should be pretty strong, and given the state of the replication crisis in the relevant fields, linking to a bunch of studies doesn't mean much anymore.

Completely disagree. You do whatever with your own life. But kid is a 3rd person that you bring. If the life they are coming to is already bad, financially, legged behind from others in many ways, or any other, that's selfish. Forcing someone to terrible start without their consent.

Parent should first make sure they are good to bring someone else and not to give a disadvantage start, playing gamble with life who did not ask.

It is insane to me that people think otherwise.

How callous can you be to bring a life into the world and think "i'm just gonna wing it" in this day and age. The kid didn't ask to be brought here, it is 100% under the responsibility and care of whoever decided to have it.

I'm not saying people shouldn't wing it, but some people clearly think they (or other parents) can control more things than are practical or healthy. You should try to be a responsible parent, but knowing how much you need to worry about individual things isn't easy. It's not practical to do everything various people say you should do. One expert will advise the opposite of what another does, and over times people flip flop back and forth. In the end I don't see how it couldn't involve some level of winging things.

So to preface this, my spouse and I are trying for our first kid so I'm not a parent yet. I've been reading a lot and talking to friends who are parents.

> If the life they are coming to is already bad, financially, legged behind from others in many ways, or any other, that's selfish. Forcing someone to terrible start without their consent. > > Parent should first make sure they are good to bring someone else and not to give a disadvantage start, playing gamble with life who did not ask.

Literally every aspect of raising a kid is a gamble, but there are degrees to these things. What counts as a "disadvantage" isn't always clear, let alone the degree to which it is actually harmful. Making a few mistakes or not doing things perfectly is probably fine. There is a huge problem with pregnancy and parenthood where controlled studies can't be done for ethical reasons, the number of confounding variables is about as extreme as it can get, and the outcomes you're measuring often aren't even well defined (what does it mean to have succeeded as a parent? What does it mean for someone to have a happy life?).

It's important to try to make your kids have a happy life, but there's a lot of disagreement on how exactly to do that. One factor that seems to have a huge effect is having parents who express their love for their kids and spend time with them. It's important for parents to take care of themselves and their relationship with their partner. One part of that is not burning yourself out trying to hyper-optimize things.