So I don't think we disagree as much as you think. I can see where you could read a strong parental responsibility vibe, since it was told from the perspective of a parent, and most of the anecdotes are (necessarily) from the perspective of …
So I don't think we disagree as much as you think. I can see where you could read a strong parental responsibility vibe, since it was told from the perspective of a parent, and most of the anecdotes are (necessarily) from the perspective of parents, but I think this is mostly a cultural shift (as evidence by the reference to therapeutic culture and all the statistics on the broader rise). Also the final story of the egg-eating pre-schooler was a story of culture.
That said, I think parents can have a great deal of impact as it relates to the occasional extreme negative experiences. It's hard to guarantee a great kid through parenting, but I think the probability you can really screw a kid up is much higher (the canonical example would be massive physical abuse) and I also think there are some experiences which are so singularly negative that if you can avoid them through parental intervention then there's a decent chance you will have dramatically changed the trajectory of things. (To flip the previous example by preventing some horrific experience like being assaulted or raped.)
So yes culture and society mostly trumps parenting (if we're putting genetics off-limits) but parents can have an outsized impacts when it comes to negative black swans.
As it pertains to black swans, I guess I would double down on my assertion. Culture will determine how the child deals with black swans.
As evidenced by the examples and your discussion, perception is nearly as variable as experience — with similar black swans serving as character building events (resilience) and character damaging events (trauma). In case of a black swan, if a parent says "I love you, but you will have to toughen up" and culture says "you poor thing, you're damaged and we need to nurture your damage", the same formula as I described above will play out. For the majority of the population, culture will determine the path.
The only way parents get to win is through "extreme" parenting combined with "extreme" barricading from culture.
So, I'm not sure we disagree at all. It's just that I think the gulf is SO wide, that the discussion is only relevant to extreme outlier parents, which stands in contradiction to the very idea of pop psychology/sociology and its incremental solutions.
I have talked about the dominance of culture as opposed to parents before:
https://www.wearenotsaved.com/p/the-ineffability-of-conservatism
So I don't think we disagree as much as you think. I can see where you could read a strong parental responsibility vibe, since it was told from the perspective of a parent, and most of the anecdotes are (necessarily) from the perspective of parents, but I think this is mostly a cultural shift (as evidence by the reference to therapeutic culture and all the statistics on the broader rise). Also the final story of the egg-eating pre-schooler was a story of culture.
That said, I think parents can have a great deal of impact as it relates to the occasional extreme negative experiences. It's hard to guarantee a great kid through parenting, but I think the probability you can really screw a kid up is much higher (the canonical example would be massive physical abuse) and I also think there are some experiences which are so singularly negative that if you can avoid them through parental intervention then there's a decent chance you will have dramatically changed the trajectory of things. (To flip the previous example by preventing some horrific experience like being assaulted or raped.)
So yes culture and society mostly trumps parenting (if we're putting genetics off-limits) but parents can have an outsized impacts when it comes to negative black swans.
As it pertains to black swans, I guess I would double down on my assertion. Culture will determine how the child deals with black swans.
As evidenced by the examples and your discussion, perception is nearly as variable as experience — with similar black swans serving as character building events (resilience) and character damaging events (trauma). In case of a black swan, if a parent says "I love you, but you will have to toughen up" and culture says "you poor thing, you're damaged and we need to nurture your damage", the same formula as I described above will play out. For the majority of the population, culture will determine the path.
The only way parents get to win is through "extreme" parenting combined with "extreme" barricading from culture.
So, I'm not sure we disagree at all. It's just that I think the gulf is SO wide, that the discussion is only relevant to extreme outlier parents, which stands in contradiction to the very idea of pop psychology/sociology and its incremental solutions.