– Nurtured by their mothers and/or fathers, students enter STEM disciplines and STEM-related careers through multiple pathways in addition to the anticipated pipeline.
– Incidents of circumstantial and planned parent curriculum making surfaced when the data was serially interpreted. What students know, how they are bent by their parents and others, and what they remember’ congealed and brought them to this point in their beginning STEM-related careers.

– Other themes that emerged included:
(1) Relationships between (student) learners and (teacher) parents: all three students eventually launched themselves into STEM careers, having experienced full-circle relationships between themselves as learners and a variety of ‘teachers (parents and teachers acting as teachers).’
(2) Invitations to inquiry: parents presented their children with confounding challenges that helped them to grow academically. Whether intentional or circumstantial, the students were provided with ‘invitations to inquiry.’
(3) Modes of inquiry: parents were not delivering ‘rhetoric of conclusions’ to their children. Instead, they were involving them in active learning and active testing of alternatives through informal project-based learning.
(4) The improbability of certainty: they were exposed to the idea that people will not know everything all the time and the acceptance that advances in scientific field do take place.
(5) Changed narratives=changed lives.