It was these Lord of the Flies things that loomed largest. I see my son do the same, when I drop him off at school and watch the Che Guevara of the kitchen turn into the Mr Pooter of the classroom. This, says Harris, is quite normal. It is called code switching. Children have a different personality for each social context.
Parents can still matter, of course.
For a start, they provide the genes. And by treating children cruelly, or by letting them get into disastrous peer groups, they can probably still derail a child's development. Divorce, Harris believes, has no lasting effect on children's personalities. But parents should not matter. Being a good parent means, almost by definition, not influencing the personality of your child, but letting the child develop his or her own personality in reaction to his or her own peers.