Why parents make such bad parents

I was 17 when the town I was born in was declared Indiarsquos first city to achieve 100 per cent literacy This was a big deal for me I could now say that I was born in Kottayam Indiarsquos first totally literate town People would join the dots and come to the right conclusion namely that I must be a very clever fellow Irsquod diplomatically omit certain details such as leaving Kottayam two weeks after birth visiting it only four times since then and neither speaking nor reading MalayalamA part of me wanted to believe that being born in a smart city automatically made me smart I took to embellishing Kottayamrsquos profile claiming falsely that Arundhati Roy was born there she was born in Shillong after seeing it referred to in her first novel Irsquod tell people that my birth town produced Booker prize winnersI donrsquot make these silly claims any more but I do still wonder am I who I am because of something my parents did Let me say the quiet part loudmdashhow important are parents in shaping our personalities and livesRead on but you might not like the answerLetrsquos be logical for a moment Good parenting and genes alone could not possibly explain who we become or else why are your siblings so different from you Even when siblings are similar is it really because of something the parents didMy children are both musical she sings like a nightingale and he composes brilliantly My father was an accomplished Carnatic musician and Irsquove been into music from my school days I used to play Bachrsquos flute sonatas to my yet fetal son I regularly sang them both to sleepMay I claim that they are musical because I nudged them in that direction and exposed them to musicThe truth is less satisfying The nurses noted of my daughter that at four months she ldquohad an inborn sense of music and would turn on her tummy and rock in perfect rhythm whenever music was playedrdquo True her mother played a huge role in her overcoming her shyness and pushing her out of her comfort zone to the stage as an opera singer I cannot claim to have done more than pay the piano tutor and voice coachMy daughter is a singer because she was born a singer She is still discovering what else she can beMy son has released several reverently reviewed hiphop albums discovered his musical propensities on his own in far away Canada I was literally the last to knowSo how much do parents really matter Can good parents make a childrsquos life great A survey of 2000 parents conducted by OnePoll found that parents make roughly 1750 decisions in a babyrsquos first year alone including what to name them breastfeed or not how tightly to swaddle and so onSome continue making decisions in ldquothe best interests of the childrdquo well after the child is an adult But startling evidence showing how little these parental decisions matter emerged in data from Holt International an adoption agency that has been finding parents for tens of thousands of Korean and other orphans since the 1950sSince child placements are random scientists were able to study how parenting affected genetically unrelated children who were given to the same parents If parenting mattered these children should have ended up more or less alikeThey didnrsquot Unrelated children adopted by the same family were only marginally more alike than unrelated children raised separatelyOther venerable parenting truths fall quickly A 65year study of 13889 Belarussian infants found that breastfeeding had no great longterm impact that watching TV didnrsquot really affect preschoolersrsquo test scores that teaching your kid chess or languages didnrsquot up their odds of becoming a millionaire geniusIf all that hard parenting we do doesnrsquot matter what does The surprising answer ismdashlocation according to data scientist Seth StephensDavidowitzIn a sweeping study that used economic data spanning several generations from US tax records Indianborn Harvard professor Raj Chetty found hard evidence that location and community strongly influence a childrsquos development and economic prospectsEinstein might not have come up with EMC2 if he had been brought up in a fishing family in Papua New Guinea Steve Jobs might not have created the iPhone if hersquod been a Scottish grouse hunterrsquos sonWhere you choose to bring up your child will affect her life more than any other decision you take as a parentWhat if I had been born in Dharavi or a government clerkrsquos home in Delhirsquos Lodhi Colony instead of Kottayam Would I not be writing this column today Would I have written The Book of Answers Would music be such a big part of my lifeI know Maybe I would have been that tattooed rebel defacing the cityrsquos empty walls with outrageous but unforgettable slogans sprayed anonymously at night while everyone sleptHere viewed from there C Y Gopinath in Bangkok throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai the city that raised him You can reach him at cygopigmailcomSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper