It's difficult for someone without kids to say much about parenting. After all, I've never had to raise anyone, I do not know what works and what does not, and what little parenting knowledge I might have is gleaned primarily from slowly fading memories of my own childhood. However, that said, I have a sneaking suspicion that nobody else quite knows what to do when it comes to child rearing anyway.
I say this mostly because the majority of what you read on the subject comes in the form of wildly divergent studies and theories. For example, now a study suggests summer holidays should consist of largely unstructured freedom without camps, summer assignments or anything apart from an open world to explore. Other people insist that children need structure, and that the summer should be all about planned activities and continuing education. Personally, as the guy without kids, I question whether or not all of these studies, recommendations and so on are missing a pretty important component. What works for a kid probably depends on the kid, rather than what a mountain of studies and research would suggest.
The problem with people as a whole is that there is rarely one solution, or one universal solution. What I find enjoyable and rewarding might not be shared by the people around me, or even within the people of the same family. Even watching two brothers, who have identical parents and largely similar upbringing, you're going to find an extremely divergent range of interests, hobbies, likes and dislikes, parents who know what worked with one kid would just be a disaster with the other. On an individual level, you have a job that is completely different every time and has a major learning curve.
We live in a world where such learning curves are not really there in most other areas. Technology, despite bugs in various systems, is something reliable. Everything works as described, when something goes wrong there's a clear solution and method of repair. Even in nature, gardening has a lot of clear rules to follow and suggested practices to make everything work well. People want the same kind of simplicity for raising their own kids, it makes sense, it means that it's a job you can do well with research and you will have an eventual solution if you try hard enough.
That's why studies about parenting and the best way to raise your kids are popular, it's an attempt to find a solution to something that nobody has ever done perfectly in the history of human endeavor. We have decided that research is the way out of so many other problems, research can also help us reliably raise kids that are happy, intelligent and successful, there's a trick in there somewhere.
The problem is that there's no trick. There are too many variables, most of which a parent can't control. Teachers and classmates are going to have as much of an impact on a kid's future as the parents, for example, and I know that a personality conflict between me and one of my teachers did a surprising amount to shape my own life. A parent can figure out what not to do, what is inarguably bad, but other things are much more difficult and individual. It's a field where there is no certainty, and it's hard to reflect that in statistics.
