I just finished reading the Judith Harris book "The Nurture Assumption", 
and found it quite entertaining.  Her thesis is that the quality of 
parenting is not very important in how kids turn out.  Her claim is 
that people are really very good at context switching, and that the
various contexts do not interact much at all.  In particular, kids have
an "At Home" context, an "At School" context, and an "Out There"
context.  The "Out There" is the peer group context, and is the 
context that people move into when they become adults.  Since the
contexts interact very little, adult personality (or "fate" if you
will) is little influenced by the "At Home" context, which is what
style of parenting can influence.

A couple of examples of context switching that I found fairly convincing:
Cussing.  My kids essentially never cussed at home, though I presume
they were as foul-mouthed as any other teenager away.  I can only
recall obscenities in direct quotes, and, a time or two, when speaking
to somebody else and I was closer than they thought.
Birth order effects.  It is obvious that firstborns are more responsible,
but also bossier, etc. etc. than laterborns.  Obvious, that is in a home
context.  So obvious that people keep looking for them time and again
with personality tests given to adults, and finding none.  (Well, firstborns
are more successful on the average, but that's because success tends to
run in families, and more successful families tend to have fewer children,
and hence a higher percentage of firstborns.)

All this is somewhat disappointing to those of us with really successful
children, and if taken seriously, curtails our bragging rights, especially
for those of us with successful stepchildren.

But the book is good mainly because Ms. Harris is a very good writer.  She
makes even fairly dull material quite readable.  For example, she talked 
about the statistical sin of calculating statistical significance using
the sample which suggested a hypothesis as if it were a fresh sample selected
to test the hypothesis.  She implies that this is so common in sociology
that hardly anybody bothers remarking on it.  (Even astronomers do it on
occasion, but at least some of us notice.)  As it happens, I had just read 
some remarks by Dick Feynman on the same subject.  As one might expect, 
Feynman went right to the heart of the matter in two or three sentences, 
and then moved on.  Ms. Harris spent a couple of pages on it, and didn't 
get to what I consider the heart of the matter until she returned to it in 
an appendix.  However, it was a very entertaining and readble couple of pages.

In general she is more convincing in pointing out what is wrong with the
conventional wisdom about the effects of parenting than she is in
demonstrating that her own theories are really correct, though her 
corpus of theory hangs together fairly well without any really glaringly
obvious problems.

I especially liked her remark that it seems a little silly that parents
are now being advised to administer discipline in terms like, "What you
have done makes me very unhappy," whereas on the playground, in the peer 
group, which really has more influence on how ones life turns out, discipline 
is being administered in terms like, "You shithead."