Ask HN: Which parental action increased your happiness and success as an adult?

My parents were theologians and both grew up as missionaries kids in incredibly dangerous, remote, environments, the best thing they did was teach us to think critically and parse communication (especially persuasive communication) and complex ideas. They used the tools of hermeneutics, theology and philosophy to do this, they also exposed us to living philosophers and their writings and the fields many journals.

They became heavily involved in education, literacy and higher learning and their plans to go overseas for mission work were dropped.

Every week on the way home from from the different churches we went to they would ask us what the pastors had preached incorrectly, what assertions they had made that were not defensible with the text they had used. There was very occasionally nothing said incorrect but there was usually A LOT of indefensible and even contradictory teaching. Much of it was teaching dominant local cultural positions unsupported by or antithetical to the text.

My siblings went into successful careers in scientific research, law, tech and leadership roles.

Literacy, critical thinking and the ability to parse complex ideas are invaluable. Having an "objective" text to argue to made things much more approachable as children.

I would love to figure out how to do that with my own kids if I ever have them, I won't be taking them to church so I'm not sure how to replicate the same environment.

Edit: The other thing they did was they moved us to a very wealthy area when I was about 13, and even though health catastrophe destroyed my families fortunes and health (before taking the lives of both my parents while I was barely 20,) our financial proximity to wealth and our willingness to exploit ourselves did give us access to capital opportunities we wouldn't have had in a less affluent area.