Environment shapes emotional cognitive abilities more than genes

Have you considered that you might have been the golden child and they weren't?

People can cause great harm with the best of intentions. Especially when they are overwhelmed.

Children who have been neglected end up having impaired emotional regulation in adulthood. You can view it as genetics, or see it as a lesson of what you could have been had you been born in different shoes.

It isn't a satisfying conclusion or story, but it is what it is. What matters is picking up the pieces and moving on.

Not an expert, but I believe the human brain uses some mechanisms to stay on the same track even if there are problems with that track. Practically, if something bad did happen to your siblings and it was memorable, it's possible they held on to it and lived as though their lives were predetermined from that. This means they are choosing to ignore your example and your mom's example.

(edit: almost forgot, remember they are afraid of your mom and afraid of leaving their current state, contributes to them staying where they are)

Well, I can vouch for your siblings’ experience. Both me and my brother were raised by same parents but we turned out very different. I remember endless poverty, my parents fighting, lot of chaotic moments regarding my education progress and merits, being chastised for every little mistake and a lot of abusive parenting in guise of strictness and it had been so traumatic that I still suffer from panic attacks when I have waves of my childhood.

My brother has an entirely different memory, loving and supportive nurturing parents, wealth and prosperity, very friendly parents who never fought, lots of social interactions, overall a good childhood.

The thing is, when I was the only child, my father was rising out of poverty, I was born to a very underaged mother(she decided to keep my while my father wanted abortion), then my parents had extremely unrealistic expectations and wanted to raise me as the ideal model kid and unintentionally abusing me by following wrong parenting advises from wrong people because sadly children do not come with a user manual(my mom’s joke). But once my brother came in the family, my father has achieved wealth and better understanding of parenting and was less stressed, so he and my mom took their lessons from my childhood and raised my brother correctly(imho).

So, it is indeed possible to have entirely different childhood for siblings in the same house. Heck, when my brother was growing up, I still suffered some old strict parenting which was only limited to me because the dynamic was already there for me, but my brother was different.

My so often realises these beahviors when we get together at my parent’s place. My brother is sometimes surprised that, the parenting I received was something that he could never withstand and he is grateful that my parents did not repeat that, though sometimes he also claims that it could be different generation thing.

That being said, I have no grudge against my parents, poverty can make people do weird things and parenting is hard. But yes, living on the same house under same parents, siblings can have polar opposite experience.

> My siblings fail the marshmallow test over and over again as adults.

The marshmallow test is one of those pseudo scientific things that fails to replicate. It’s not actually a thing and has no proven correlation to anything of substance.

Raising children and watching others raise them, I compare notes in detail.

I recently had an outing where I was the only "active" father. I had a dozen children begging for my attention. They were cutting in line to engage with me. Other fathers looked on. They all knew my tricks, jokes but I was the only one engaging.

I do not hear about a father figure. Did you have one and they did not?

I ask because while single moms may put in the effort the results are inconsistent. I had a mostly absent father but his direction and instruction kept me grounded. I didn't thrive until a new father figure encouraged me and helped me see my potential.

Children that grow up in narcissistic homes often report having different recollections of their childhoods based on the particular role assigned to them by the narcissistic parent. These roles range from golden child, to lost child, to scapegoat, truth teller and many more. Some children also end up taking on the enabler role unknowingly. My mom is a covert narcissist and it took me many, many decades to realize it since most of the literature online deals with overt narcissism. I don’t mean to sound prescriptive, this may or may not be relevant to your specific case but hopefully it’s helpful to someone in a similar situation as mine.

> I would've thought that a twin study where identical twins were raised in different environments would be far more instructive?

Both are instructive, but identical twins raised in different environment is a very small group compared to the other group, and there's a very strong confounding factor between them that's likely to have a massive impact on the later results: being separated from you twin brother/sister indicates you've had some pretty chaotic early life.

Si se puedes!

Emotional self regulation is a normed behavior that is modelable.

Head start programs would thus be justified in having SEL Social and Emotional Learning components; but how much more effective is parental behavioral modeling than non-parental caregiving?

Can't be done.

In Africa, they say "It takes a village".

One of perhaps 20 questions to split the sets with: "Can people change?"

>These cognitive functions can be categorized into a two-order hierarchy based on the levels of cognitive processes. Second-order cognition including metacognition and mentalizing monitors and regulates first-order cognitive processes.

This way of modeling Cognitive functions in two distinct hierarchical ways, is it the same theory underlying the idea of "System 1 & System 2" presented in "Think fast and slow" by Daniel Kahneman?

How accepted/supported by empirical evidence is this model