It’s true that childhood matters, and parenting matters, but no single element of a person’s life fully shapes their future. Parents can neither take as much credit nor as much blame as they think they should for the way their children turn out. Nature and nurture, heredity and environment, parenting and peers are all tightly woven together, and all have served to mold each of us into the adults we are today. Finding a definitive reason for why a particular person is having the struggles they are having is not always possible. All we can do is to meet our emotions, as Neal did, with as much
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