>tell that to children born to neglectful parents or ones abandoned in orphanages or ones born into poverty; I could go on but you get the picture
There are definitely cases where the parent's decisions negatively influence the lives of their children. But as someone who also had similar experiences growing up, I can also tell you that the amount of which these influences can take a hold of the life of a person also comes down to how much the individual allows it to happen. Unless you are suffering from some sort of aggressive emotional abuse, or physical abuse, then there is a certain amount of freedom involved in the decision of a person. I found out very early on that parents aren't exactly always the best role models and that I probably should consider them as regular human beings than anything else.
This very idea sometimes never comes into the realization of some people, and they allow their emotions and the progress of their lives to be completely influenced by decisions that their parents made or continue to make.
Every person is an individual with different personalities, abilities to make life choices, find happiness, experience success in different types of careers, so on and so forth.
There's the potential of someone who was born into complete and utter poverty with nothing going for them, to manage success through society. The only thing keeping a person from this is the person itself. Mental blockage is something very present in many people, so they resort to identifying themselves as victims instead of adopting a mindset which allows them to grow as people.
I'd also like to touch on the subject of poverty, as you mentioned. Definitely there are cases in life where people are born severely disadvantaged in comparison to the average person, and no matter what they do the likelihood of them managing to leave poverty is unlikely. But then you'd be going into an argument where it is implied that society owes something towards an individual just by existing. And that argument is null and void, nobody should expect handouts from anything or anybody, it would completely ruin the very foundations of what society is built around, which is by there having an expectation for a person to partake and contribute. And even then, in theory, there isn't really anything keeping anybody down. Society is built around the idea that it wants capable people to be successful, nobody benefits from there being a system that keeps certain people down while allowing others to prosper solely by being born under certain situations. The way things function is by thinking about an average person, giving these people opportunities based around their individual abilities, people who find themselves in poverty are not the average person, so you can't expect society to somehow change in the way it works by giving so much more opportunities to a certain specific class of people above others. There's always going to be people out there who are less advantaged than others, be it by being less capable or being born under a certain context which makes it more difficult for that person to succeed. Personally, I'd rather be putting attention towards the average person, as they outnumber those who find themselves in poverty, and due to the fact that just taking numbers into consideration, it is way more likely for an average person to have abilities that are meaningful and have the potential to make the world a better place for everyone in society. People born in poverty are born in poverty because of the people responsible for their existence, their parents, their families, etc. If those people were unremarkable people, unable to show traits which could make them leave poverty, then chances are, that the person born in poverty also inherited these same things from their parents. Poverty is not always something that just happens by chance, it can, but staying in poverty is another subject entirely.