QUOTABLE:
ANNIE MURPHY PAUL

"What [David] Reiss and his colleagues discovered, in one of the longest and most thorough studies of child development ever attempted, was that parents appear to have relatively little effect on how children turn out, once genetic influences are accounted for. 'The original objective was to look for environmental differences,' says Reiss. 'We didn't find many.' Instead, it seems that genetic influences are largely responsible for how 'adjusted' kids are: how well they do in school, how they get along with their peers, whether they engage in dangerous or delinquent behavior. 'If you follow the study's implications through to the end, it's a radical revision of contemporary theories of child development,' says Reiss. 'I can't even describe what a paradigm shift it is.'"

"Do Parents Really Matter?," by Annie Murphy Paul,
Psychology Today, Jan.-Feb. 1998.