Advice on soothing the unbelievers:

Derb—Regarding your ‘role of parenting’ posts on The Corner, I agree with you (and Pinker and Harris, etc.) But clearly those who have not yet come around are shocked at the low percentage of influence on your children that is directly attributable to parenting. So, it might help to make more of a point (as Harris does with the ‘indirect’ effect of genes) of the indirect, positive effect that parents can have.
E.g.
1. Marry well (genes)
2. Provide the best food, shelter, love you can
3. Whatever you do, don’t move them from neighborhood to neighborhood while they are young (unless once or twice to get them away from a bad out-side-the-home situation (NOT pursuing dad or mom’s career)
4. Keep a close eye, and influence when you can, who they hang out with.

[Derb] A lot of the results coming out of the human sciences are shocking to a lot of people. The curious thing is that they would have been LESS shocking 50 or 100 years ago. Somehow, over the last few decades, we seem to have taken refuge in a vast structure of wishful thinking about human nature. We have, to borrow one of Fred Reed’s words, enstupidated ourselves.

The fact that the direct effects of parenting are not very consequential was understood perfectly well by the parents I grew up among, my own and my friends’. Not having much education, they were essentially pre-Freudian. The current 24/7 style of parenting would have struck them as bizarre. They didn’t want anything to do with us. “What are you doing in the house? Go out and play. Make sure you’re back in time for dinner.” Their folk wisdom was pretty much in line with these new revelations that people find so shocking. A kid who turned out bad from decent parents was “bad in the bone” (genetics) or “fell in with a bad crowd” (out-of-home socialization). Zero to ten percent of the time they might have suggested the parents were at fault. Those are the numbers: 45-50, 45-50, 0-10.

Reinforcing evidence comes from anthropology. The modern human brain did most of its evolving in those few hundred thousand years when we lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers. From what we can observe of those groups that still exist, kids are let loose after weaning, around age three, to be socialized by their peers, older children, and the other adults of the group. (No doubt with instructions to “make sure you’re home in time for dinner.”) We are a social animal.