From a hard scientist at a shmancy sciencey university:

Mr. Goldberg, I think your point about what science can tell us — point 3 in this Corner post — is a good one. What do most studies of factors influencing child development look for? Drug use, age at which sexual activity is initiated, emotional problems, etc. In other words, pretty dicey stuff. But how does a child become studious (not peer socialization, I imagine)? Say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ (ditto)? Develop a taste for classical music and literature? My background is not in the social sciences (I’m a chemist), but I’ll wager that life is still far more subtle than the science is capable of understanding. You could check out this page (which mentions the first Corner rile-up over parenting). I found the following interesting (bottom of the page): “One thing Jonah’s right about is that culturally specific traits are transmitted in the family. Read the Alford paper from last year on political orientation and genetics. To summarize, your* propensity to be political at all has a modest genetic component (.36), but no family component (.02). Your actual political opinions have a medium genetic component (.32) and a modest family component (.16). But the actual party you affiliate with has a nontrivial family component (.41) and a small genetic component (.14). Same for specific religion vs. religiousness.” Also, here’s the abstract of a recent Developmental Psychology paper. Genetics do explain some childhood effects of divorce — but not all: “Parental divorce is associated with problematic offspring adjustment, but the relation may be due to shared genetic or environmental factors. One way to test for these confounds is to study offspring of twins discordant for divorce. The current analyses used this design to separate the mechanisms responsible for the association between parental divorce, experienced either before or after the age of 16, and offspring well-being. The results were consistent with a causal role of divorce in earlier initiation of sexual intercourse and emotional difficulties, in addition to a greater probability of educational problems, depressed mood, and suicidal ideation. In contrast, the increased risk for cohabitation and earlier initiation of drug use was explained by selection factors, including genetic confounds.”