Despite growing up in a wonderful environment, why do some kids not turn out well?

Because we’re all individuals with our own minds and lives and we aren’t solely a product of our upbringing.

Get mixed up with the wrong friends. Depression. Slow thyroid. School is easy and boring and the person never had to work very hard in childhood and adolescence and never learns how to work hard. Addiction, anything from computers gams to hard drugs. Plus, I do think some of our personality we are born with. Some people are less ambitious.

Oh but that term “do poorly in life” is vague isn’t it? Some people would rather work as minimum wage earner than by profiting from selling cigarettes and alcohol for example.

It’s nature vs. nurture, and nobody really understands why one can be so much more powerful than the other.

By contrast, there are children who grow up unloved, neglected, and impoverished—they begin life way behind the starting line—yet grow into wonderful, caring people.

I personally think that just because we think it may look good on the outside does not give any indication of what it was like on the inside. Looks can be deceiving. It also depends on how many teachers are in the classroom.

The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
~Aldous Huxley

Unless you have a preschool teacher who is in love with Dr.Suess at which point you can teach a kid to be real smart :p

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You’re on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who’ll decide where to go.

Does “poorly in life” mean getting stuck on drugs or other crime, or just not being the model of First World material success?

You can’t always tell what a family is like from the outside, even if all appears to be nuclear and middle-class.
Also, as others have pointed out, there is always the variable of individual temperament.
Sometimes kids from rough families can turn out well, and I would postulate that is because of choice as well as the intervention of helpful outsiders.
We are all the ever-changing relationship of an organism and its environment.

What does a wonderful environment mean?

Good parenting, stable environment.

We still have free choice. We can use it for good or for bad.

Because what may seem like a “wonderful environment” to you, may feel like a living hell to them.

I think your problem is “a good family life”. What is that, exactly? Even siblings can experience their upbringing differently.

It’s not all nurture. Nature has a lot to do with it, I’d think.

No one knows what goes on behind closed doors. If you are looking at another family from the outside in, you don’t know everything about the family. Appearances can be very deceiving.

Life is a series of choices. One bad choice can lead you down a bad path. Some people just don’t think through the consequences of their choices.

This reminds me of an ex friend of mine. This guy grew up in what many would call a good environment, his father was kind of absent in his life but his mom was super doting and over-committed to him to compensate at the expense of never having her own life and always putting him first. She was trying to be a good mother to her only child but what, she actually accomplished was spoiling him into becoming an absolute sociopath with no regard for the feelings of others. After all, he had been led to believe the world really did revolve around him. So he turned out to be a real jerk—manipulative, codependent and kind of evil all around. Nobody talks to him anymore because of all the times he’s screwed his friends over and otherwise betrayed our trust to further his agenda.

He never learned the meaning of the word “no” because he was so used to getting his way all the time as a kid, teenager, and into his early adulthood. He wanted to go to Europe? She paid for it. He wanted a new car? She took a loan to finance it. He wanted to go to Europe again and fail out of community college at the same time? She let him go using what should have been his tuition money to fund it. (AKA HER hard-earned money wasted so he could do what he wanted and pretty much be rewarded for getting kicked out of school) The list really goes on and on, but you get the idea.

Now, despite having every opportunity handed to him, he’s a now an obese McDonald’s manager/community college dropout who still sleeps with his childhood blankie (no joke) and spends most of his time smoking pot and impersonating women so he can troll for dudes on the internet. Regardless, his delusional Mom still fawns over what a “good boy” and how “successful” he is despite him so clearly being the opposite.

See the pattern?

I had another friend as a child and teen who was similar as well. Her mother was also a single Mom and felt unnecessarily guilty for and tried to make up for it by spoiling her rotten. The outcome? She was also a jerk and lost all of her friends. Nobody knows what happened to her but we assume it isn’t good. She had the “perfect” (albeit delusional) mom and still turned out to be a rotten biatch.

The lesson I take from this is that “perfect parenting” is definitely not about spoiling your kids and handing every thing to them. Doing so can be just as damaging as abuse and really breed some real pieces of work. I recently read some articles about how French moms raise their kids and while I do think it oversimplifies I also think it raises some good points. American society is so child-centric that women are expected to give everything up for their kids at the expense of their own sanity and this doesn’t necessarily do the child any favors and certainly doesn’t help them be well-adjusted adults.

So perhaps the the typical American “ideal” of a parent isn’t so ideal after all… And I think many people (especially us women) tend to confuse providing an “ideal environment” with being at the constant service of your bratlings This is something I’ll certainly be thinking about before I have kids.

We are all different. Perhaps the well off children get too much handed to them on a silver platter and so that they don’t appreciate it and get lazy.

Some children have next to no adult supervision and do very well. My childhood was pure pandemonium. No Father and my Mom was always working or sleeping. At home nothing made sense. It was like something out of a Franz Kafka novel. There were no adults to guide me (except for one very strong willed 4th grade teacher who wouldn’t put up with any of my non-sense). Also Jack Lalanne on TV was a very good influence on me and I’m sure millions of others. Anyway I’m no great success story but I did manage a relatively high level of success.

How do you define good parenting?

In his defense, @Rarebear is asking absolutely the right questions. You have to define what all of these vague terms mean: “wonderful environment”, “not turn out well”, “good family life”, and even mental illness.

The question is overly vague. Do you mean by “not turning out well” living on lower income than what might be possible for them to earn? Or do you mean living in jail because of criminal activity? (And it would be helpful to dig deeper even there, because some people’s “criminal activity” is someone else’s “freedom fighting” – and I’m not speaking of terrorists here, either).

@CWOTUS is spot on. Thanks.

@Mama_Cakes I was just trying to clarify your question so I could give you a cogent answer. I apologize for offending you.

And I apologize for my reaction.

Okay, so now that that’s out of the way,
What is good parenting?
What is a wonderful environment?
What is “not turn out well”?
What is “mental illness”? (I say this because I know many kids with mental illness who are great)

I’ll start with the good parenting question, though. What does that mean?

@Rarebear , I think that’s worthy of a who new question!

@Judi Probably. I’m going out of town, though away from computers, so I may do it next week. Or someone else can.

I’ve noticed a pattern in which those who didn’t have to experience hardships usually lack the ability to feel empathy and compassion for those less forunate. I’m not saying the latter is true for everybody in this category but for a good deal of them it is. It’s also possible that the kids feel they either can’t, or don’t want to live up to such high standards. These are subjective terms which were mentioned in the OP so I did my best to try to answer this.

I was wondering for a moment how @Rarebear was a dick? The theory sort of proves true that a “dick” to you can often just be a “Richard” to others.

@Paradox25 My experience has been that people view the same behavior as not so bad and catastrophic. This touches on what some jellies mentioned about how sibs in the same family can have very different opinions of their childhood and how their parents parented. Blatant physical and sexual abuse pretty much everyone can agree on. Then there is this whole grey area. I look back on some ridiculous things my mom did as funny, and my sister sees them as neglectful or borderline abusive. We agree on some of the messed up things my parents did, but her emotional response is very different than mine. I think her expectation of parents in general is very high and not easily realistic. She thinks my expectations are too low. She looks back and thinks she had a pretty shitty time growing up, I don’t think that. She did have some pretty crappy things happen, some at home, and some outside of the home. More than me, she dealt with more than me. But, it seems to me she makes my parents culpable for more than what should be their share of some of her difficult times. But, I am not her, I am talking from my perspective; I did not experience all she experienced. I really care that she has a difficult time with it all. I see this in many many families. Each child does grow up slightly differently in each family. Birth order, parents in a different place emotionally or financially, but overall most parents are the same people in the house with all their children.

Speaking of abusive environments Toddlers and Tiara, there is your typical abusive environment. If these children grow up and end up not having too many problems it is inspite of it.

Let’s say you have 2 fraternal (not identical twins) of the same sex. In theory the parents are most likely to treat them very similarly and the environment would be virtually the same. Here’s the difference. Maybe one of the twins does not have an aptitude for math, or reading but the other one does. The second twin will probably have an easier, more pleasant go of things. Maybe the first twin is not perceived to be attractive by the population at large, whereas the second one is. There have been studies that show that attractive people have an easier/better chance at getting jobs and mates and even regular friends, than un-attractive people. Maybe the first twin is not physically coordinated, whereas the second one is. The first twin might have a more embarrassing time in school and among friends because of that. Even though it appears that things are the same for both kids (they don’t need to be twins, I was just using this as an example to illustrate a similar up-bringing) there are unseen obstacles for all people, and because humans are different, even with identical twins (as opposed to fraternal twins) and have different personalities and abilities to cope with their own real and perceived shortcomings.