The tl;dr is that if you fall into the cohort that could likely adopt a child, your parenting decisions aren’t going to make much of an impact, beyond affecting your kid’s memories of their childhood and their relationship with you. And that doesn’t mean parents should become apathetic, but that it’s better to care about expressing warmth and kindness instead of stressing about achievement.
There's a hypothetical world in which organ distribution is so efficient and prevalent that the average fatal car crash saves net lives. What a strange kind of "trolley problem" that raises...
And these two books have good, if somewhat redundant surveys of the research:
- No Two Alike: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1099821
- Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10266902
The tl;dr is that if you fall into the cohort that could likely adopt a child, your parenting decisions aren’t going to make much of an impact, beyond affecting your kid’s memories of their childhood and their relationship with you. And that doesn’t mean parents should become apathetic, but that it’s better to care about expressing warmth and kindness instead of stressing about achievement.