When displayed in the school environment as well, these behaviors frequently lead to peer rejection, resulting in a drift toward associating with other rejected, aggressive children. Without adequate parental monitoring, this group of rejected, aggressive kids as teenagers can begin to get into serious trouble. The mistake that Ms. Harris makes in her book is that she only looks at the end point in this process. What Ms. Harris overlooks is the longer developmental process leading to hanging out with deviant peers in the first place, a process which begins much earlier in a child's life with ineffective, inconsistent parenting. Of course not.
Genes certainly play a role, and so do peers.
But research shows over and over again that children's relationship with their parents and parental effectiveness in monitoring their behavior are the most important factors leading to whether or not as adolescents children will engage in high risk behavior. That's both the good and the bad news. It's good news in the sense that whether or not our kids avoid high risk behaviors in adolescence is, to a very large extent, determined by us, their parents. The bad news is that it also means if we want our kids to avoid these high risk behaviors, we can't leave raising our kids to someone else. That's our job.