Is Deciding Where You Live the ONLY Important Parenting Decision? How Should Parents Feel If They Have Little Influence On How Their Children Turn Out? Is there Anyway Nurture Can Defeat Nature?

The Best Paragraph I've Read: As Bryan Caplan notes in his 2011 book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, parents have only small effects on their children’s health, life expectancy, education, and religiosity (though studies have found that they have moderate effects on drug and alcohol use and sexual behavior, particularly during the teenage years, as well as how kids feel about their parents). Some examples: One of the largest randomized controlled trials on breastfeeding found that it had no significant long-term effect on a variety of outcomes. A careful study of television use among preschoolers found that TV had no long-term effects on child test scores. A randomized trial suggests that teaching kids cognitively demanding games, such as chess, doesn’t make them smarter in the long term. A meta-analysis of bilingualism found that it has only small effects on a child’s cognitive performance, and that even these may be due to a bias in favor of publishing positive study results. This paragraph comes from an article in the Atlantic.  The article is titled: "The One Parenting Decision That Really Matters."  The article is written by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.  You can read the full article here: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/parenting-decisions-dont-trust-your-gut-book-excerpt/629734/ Zac and Don discuss the article's conclusions about parenting and location.  Should parents accept that on average they will have little influence on how their children turn out as adults?  Is there anyway nurture can fight back against nature?  How should we think about the data that suggests where you raise your child is the most important parenting decision?  Zac and Don reference the location data from The Opportunity Atlas.  You can visit the interactive map and data here: https://www.opportunityatlas.org/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/bestparagraph/message