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No, it impacts some people in ways you can see and not others. There's a pretty big difference.
I mean, yes, most people with fucked up childhoods had fucked up childhoods because their parents needed anger management class/alcoholics anonymous/whatever. Ordinary middle class people need to chill out about thinking they're going to traumatize their kid. But it's not all the child's genes. It's not hard to find people who were traumatized by step-dads or whatever after normal and well adjusted dad got rammed by a drunk driver, and who are really affected by this.
Could you clarify this? Because it sounds very much like saying that the position is right but unprovable, that parenting is important but leaves no tangible and measurable evidence of its importance. But I'm sure that's not your point.
It's also not hard to find people whose I Coulda Been a Contenda speech involves truly absurd turns of chance, or people who live similarly negative lives for no discernible reason at all. It's not hard to find people traumatized by birth dad. It's not hard whose birth dad was a very nice guy, a devout guy at 7am mass every morning, who still wound up all fucked up and addicted messes. Kids' sexual ethics are one of the classic realms of parental obsession; I can name as many liberals' kids who turned into prudes as I can examples of the proverbial Catholic schoolgirl gone wild.
Anecdote isn't data, and where there is so much noise in all the actual results, it seems like we should step back on the importance of parenting overall, beyond the basics that we can really point to positives on, and virtue-ethics points that don't rely on their effectiveness to justify themselves. Feed your kids nutritious food, get them a basic education, encourage their interests, supervise them enough to make sure they don't kill themselves, take them to Church long enough for them to pick up a basic sense of religion, teach them a work ethic, then hope they pick up the baton and keep running.
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