Notice how the lone medical expert represented was skeptical of the findings. That's because among serious psychologists and those who study genetics, the view

Notice how the lone medical expert represented was skeptical of the findings. That's because among serious psychologists and those who study genetics, the view advocated here is pretty much exactly wrong: your childhood experiences have almost no effect on the adult you become. The public and the media tend to believe otherwise, and regularly put out stories like this one, perpetuating the myth. But it's just not true. We've known for years that the genes you inherit from your parents are far more important than whatever parenting they do. Adopted siblings raised in the same household grow up to be no more similar than strangers plucked off the street. And identical twins raised apart grow up to be ridiculously similar -- almost creepily so -- despite having no shared environment. When you run the correlations, genes turn up as a large factor in every single measurable outcome (education level, income, IQ, height, weight, personality, choice of college major, and so on), whereas shared environment -- where you grew up, how your parents raised you, your socioeconomic status -- begins as a moderate impact while you are a child and then slowly disappears in your teens, until at age 25, your IQ and personality have basically nothing to do with whether your parents read to you at night or spanked you or talked to you or ignored you completely, or what siblings you grew up with, or what house you grew up in, or what town you grew up in. (Coincidentally, ACE is a relevant acronym here, but it stands for something different than from what it does in the article. Additive genetics, Common environment, and unique Environment are the components of the outcome of twin studies. Common environment is the factor of your parents and household, and unique environment is every other environmental factor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_study#Methods http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_study#Methods) Now, there is a small caveat to the above. If you were severely abused as child that can impact you later, but it truly has to be severe abuse. To lower a child's IQ, you'd have to really starve them or deprive them of key nutrients -- but this pretty much never happens in the US. A diet of only McDonald's is more than sufficient to prevent this kind of stunting. Likewise, the sexual or physical abuse would have to be pretty extreme to impact you later -- much more than this story let on. ----------------- So, the real story behind this NPR piece is that people with bad parents often grow up to have problems not because of bad parenting, but because their bad parents happened to pass them bad genes. In other words, the common cause was that both the child and the parents had bad genes. You should never trust a study about parenting or the effects of the environment if it doesn't take genes into account. And this is where people get uncomfortable, because no one wants to believe that something you're born with, something you cannot change, is so important to who you are. The "truth" about the effects of genes and your environment does not fit in well with mainstream ideals of equality of opportunity and free will. Thus, the impact of genes are routinely downplayed everywhere you look, and environmental effects are raised up, like in this piece. There is broad, systemic bias at work, making the world out to be the way we want it, rather than the way it really is. But we do ourselves a profound disservice in this (often unintentional) act of twisting the truth to fit our ideals. It causes grief when we blame fat people for being lazy or lacking self control, when in reality their obesity is largely a product of their genes and the modern phenomenon of cheap and tasty food. We praise smart kids with lucky genes who get A's, while putting down their less bright peers, even if they worked harder, because they only managed to get C's. We love beautiful people, but shun their less appealing peers. So I ask you: Where is the compassion for those with unlucky genes? Where is the support for those who don't have the talent to live out the American Dream? Why is it that no one knows or cares about genetic luck -- probably the greatest source of inequality and unfairness in our world?