Question: How can I raise a well-adjusted child?

This one is easy. 

Go grab some dice.  Choose the luckiest one.  Roll it.

Did you get a number higher than 3?  Congratulations!  You'll have a better than average adjusted child! 

Get a 1?  Oh, man, I am so sorry.  Save up for therapy and/or a good defense attorney.

My point here is that children are amazingly complex systems.  You can try to influence them, set a good example, be there for all their emotional blah blah blah, but you can never tell what the end result will be.  All your hard work could by undone by one of their peers saying, "Everyone hates you because you're fat."

BAM!  Snake eyes!  Your kid just developed a life-long eating disorder.

When systems are as complex as these, with a nearly infinite number of influences, trying to predict the outcome is like trying to predict chaos.  Chaos is tough stuff, but you can make a pretty good stab at modeling parts of it by using randomness.  That's where the the handy dandy dice come in.  Aim for boxcars.

Now, I'm not saying that you shouldn't TRY to be a good parent, sensitively attuned to your child's emotional needs.  My wife does all that good crap, and I'd bet it does more good than harm, but my kid has had the same set of neuroses for nearly her entire life.  Did I cause them?  Probably, but hell if I know what I did.

Kids are hard.  Prepare for random.