As I was writing this review, two friends called to ask me about ''that book that says parents don't matter.'' Well, that's not what it says. What ''The Nurture Assumption'' does say about parents and children, however, warrants the lively controversy it began generating even before publication.
Judith Rich Harris was chucked out of graduate school at Harvard 38 years ago, on the grounds that she was unlikely to become a proper experimental psychologist. She never became an academic and instead turned her hand to writing textbooks in developmental psychology. From this bird's-eye vantage point, she began to question widespread belief in the ''nurture assumption -- the notion that parents are the most important part of a child's environment and can determine, to a large extent, how the child turns out.'' She believes that parents must share credit (or blame) with the child's own temperament and, most of all, with the child's peers. ''The world that children share with their peers is what shapes their behavior and modifies the characteristics they were born with,'' Harris writes, ''and hence determines the sort of people they will be when they grow up.''
The public may be forgiven for saying, ''Here we go again.'' One year we're told bonding is the key, the next that it's birth order. Wait, what really matters is stimulation. The first five years of life are the most important; no, the first three years; no, it's all over by the first year. Forget that: It's all genetics! Cancel those baby massage sessions!
What makes Harris's book important is that it puts all these theories into larger perspective, showing what each contributes and where it's flawed. Some critics may pounce on her for not having a Ph.D. or an academic position, and others will quarrel with the importance she places on peers and genes, but they cannot fault her scholarship. Harris is not generalizing from a single study that can be attacked on statistical grounds, or even from a single field; she draws on research from behavior genetics (the study of genetic contributions to personality), social psychology, child development, ethology, evolution and culture. Lively anecdotes about real children suffuse this book, but Harris never confuses anecdotes with data. The originality of ''The Nurture Assumption'' lies not in the studies she cites, but in the way she has reconfigured them to explain findings that have puzzled psychologists for years.
First, researchers have been unable to find any child-rearing practice that predicts children's personalities, achievements or problems outside the home. Parents don't have a single child-rearing style anyway, because how they treat their children depends largely on what the children are like. They are more permissive with easy children and more punitive with defiant ones.
Second, even when parents do treat their children the same way, the children turn out differently. The majority of children of troubled and even abusive parents are resilient and do not suffer lasting psychological damage. Conversely, many children of the kindest and most nurturing parents succumb to drugs, mental illness or gangs.
Third, there is no correlation -- zero -- between the personality traits of adopted children and their adoptive parents or other children in the home, as there should be if ''home environment'' had a strong influence.
Fourth, how children are raised -- in day care or at home, with one parent or two, with gay parents or straight ones, with an employed mom or one who stays home -- has little or no influence on children's personalities.
Finally, what parents do with and for their children affects children mainly when they are with their parents. For instance, mothers influence their children's play only while the children are playing with them; when the child is playing alone or with a playmate, it makes no difference what games were played with mom.
Most psychologists have done what anyone would do when faced with this astonishing, counterintuitive evidence -- they've tried to dismiss it. Yet eventually the most unlikely idea wins if it has the evidence to back it up. As Carole Wade, a behavioral scientist, puts it, trying to squeeze existing facts into an outdated theory is like trying to fit a double-sized sheet onto a queen-sized bed. One corner fits, but another pops out. You need a new sheet or a new bed.
''The Nurture Assumption'' is a new sheet, one that covers the discrepant facts. I don't agree with all the author's claims and interpretations; often she reaches too far to make her case -- throwing the parent out with the bath water, as it were. But such criticisms should not detract from her accomplishment, which is to give us a richer, more accurate portrait of how children develop than we've had from outdated Freudianism or piecemeal research.
The first problem with the nurture assumption is nature. The findings of behavior genetics show, incontrovertibly, that many personality traits and abilities have a genetic component. No news here; many others have reported this research, notably the psychologist Jerome Kagan in ''The Nature of the Child.'' But genes explain only about half of the variation in people's personalities and abilities. What's the other half?
Harris's brilliant stroke was to change the discussion from nature (genes) and nurture (parents) to its older version: heredity and environment. ''Environment'' is broader than nurture. Children, like adults, have two environments: their homes and their world outside the home; their behavior, like ours, changes depending on the situation they are in. Many parents know the eerie experience of having their child's teacher describe their child in terms they barely recognize (''my kid did what?''). Children who fight with their siblings may be placid with friends. They can be honest at home and deceitful at school, or vice versa. At home children learn how their parents want them to behave and what they can get away with; but, Harris shows, ''These patterns of behavior are not like albatrosses that we have to drag along with us wherever we go, all through our lives. We don't even drag them to nursery school.''
Harris has taken a factor, peers, that everyone acknowledges is important, but instead of treating it as a nuisance in children's socialization, she makes it a major player. Children are merciless in persecuting a kid who is different -- one who says ''Warshington'' instead of ''Washington,'' one who has a foreign accent or wears the wrong clothes. (Remember?) Parents have long lamented the apparent cruelty of children and the obsessive conformity of teen-agers, but, Harris argues, they have missed the point: children's attachment to their peer groups is not irrational, it's essential. It is evolution's way of seeing to it that kids bond with each other, fit in and survive. Identification with the peer group, not identification with the parent, is the key to human survival. That is why children have their own traditions, words, rules, games; their culture operates in opposition to adult rules. Their goal is not to become successful adults but successful children. Teen-agers want to excel as teen-agers, which means being unlike adults.
It has been difficult to tease apart the effects of parents and peers, Harris observes, because children's environments often duplicate parental values, language and customs. (Indeed, many parents see to it that they do.) To see what factors are strongest, therefore, we must look at situations in which these environments clash. For example, when parents value academic achievement and a student's peers do not, who wins? Typically, peers. Differences between black and white teen-agers in achievement have variously been attributed to genes or single mothers, but differences vanish when researchers control for the peer group: whether its members value achievement and expect to go to college, or regard academic success as a hopeless dream or sellout to ''white'' values.
Are there exceptions? Of course, and Harris anticipates them. Some children in anti-intellectual peer groups choose the lonely path of nerdy devotion to schoolwork. And some have the resources, from genes or parents, to resist peer pressure. But exceptions should not detract from the rule: that children, like adults, are oriented to their peers. Do you dress, think and behave more like others of your generation, your parents or the current crop of adolescents?
by Carol Tavris, NY Times (1998) | Read more:
Judith Rich Harris was chucked out of graduate school at Harvard 38 years ago, on the grounds that she was unlikely to become a proper experimental psychologist. She never became an academic and instead turned her hand to writing textbooks in developmental psychology. From this bird's-eye vantage point, she began to question widespread belief in the ''nurture assumption -- the notion that parents are the most important part of a child's environment and can determine, to a large extent, how the child turns out.'' She believes that parents must share credit (or blame) with the child's own temperament and, most of all, with the child's peers. ''The world that children share with their peers is what shapes their behavior and modifies the characteristics they were born with,'' Harris writes, ''and hence determines the sort of people they will be when they grow up.''
The public may be forgiven for saying, ''Here we go again.'' One year we're told bonding is the key, the next that it's birth order. Wait, what really matters is stimulation. The first five years of life are the most important; no, the first three years; no, it's all over by the first year. Forget that: It's all genetics! Cancel those baby massage sessions!What makes Harris's book important is that it puts all these theories into larger perspective, showing what each contributes and where it's flawed. Some critics may pounce on her for not having a Ph.D. or an academic position, and others will quarrel with the importance she places on peers and genes, but they cannot fault her scholarship. Harris is not generalizing from a single study that can be attacked on statistical grounds, or even from a single field; she draws on research from behavior genetics (the study of genetic contributions to personality), social psychology, child development, ethology, evolution and culture. Lively anecdotes about real children suffuse this book, but Harris never confuses anecdotes with data. The originality of ''The Nurture Assumption'' lies not in the studies she cites, but in the way she has reconfigured them to explain findings that have puzzled psychologists for years.
First, researchers have been unable to find any child-rearing practice that predicts children's personalities, achievements or problems outside the home. Parents don't have a single child-rearing style anyway, because how they treat their children depends largely on what the children are like. They are more permissive with easy children and more punitive with defiant ones.
Second, even when parents do treat their children the same way, the children turn out differently. The majority of children of troubled and even abusive parents are resilient and do not suffer lasting psychological damage. Conversely, many children of the kindest and most nurturing parents succumb to drugs, mental illness or gangs.
Third, there is no correlation -- zero -- between the personality traits of adopted children and their adoptive parents or other children in the home, as there should be if ''home environment'' had a strong influence.
Fourth, how children are raised -- in day care or at home, with one parent or two, with gay parents or straight ones, with an employed mom or one who stays home -- has little or no influence on children's personalities.
Finally, what parents do with and for their children affects children mainly when they are with their parents. For instance, mothers influence their children's play only while the children are playing with them; when the child is playing alone or with a playmate, it makes no difference what games were played with mom.
Most psychologists have done what anyone would do when faced with this astonishing, counterintuitive evidence -- they've tried to dismiss it. Yet eventually the most unlikely idea wins if it has the evidence to back it up. As Carole Wade, a behavioral scientist, puts it, trying to squeeze existing facts into an outdated theory is like trying to fit a double-sized sheet onto a queen-sized bed. One corner fits, but another pops out. You need a new sheet or a new bed.
''The Nurture Assumption'' is a new sheet, one that covers the discrepant facts. I don't agree with all the author's claims and interpretations; often she reaches too far to make her case -- throwing the parent out with the bath water, as it were. But such criticisms should not detract from her accomplishment, which is to give us a richer, more accurate portrait of how children develop than we've had from outdated Freudianism or piecemeal research.
The first problem with the nurture assumption is nature. The findings of behavior genetics show, incontrovertibly, that many personality traits and abilities have a genetic component. No news here; many others have reported this research, notably the psychologist Jerome Kagan in ''The Nature of the Child.'' But genes explain only about half of the variation in people's personalities and abilities. What's the other half?
Harris's brilliant stroke was to change the discussion from nature (genes) and nurture (parents) to its older version: heredity and environment. ''Environment'' is broader than nurture. Children, like adults, have two environments: their homes and their world outside the home; their behavior, like ours, changes depending on the situation they are in. Many parents know the eerie experience of having their child's teacher describe their child in terms they barely recognize (''my kid did what?''). Children who fight with their siblings may be placid with friends. They can be honest at home and deceitful at school, or vice versa. At home children learn how their parents want them to behave and what they can get away with; but, Harris shows, ''These patterns of behavior are not like albatrosses that we have to drag along with us wherever we go, all through our lives. We don't even drag them to nursery school.''
Harris has taken a factor, peers, that everyone acknowledges is important, but instead of treating it as a nuisance in children's socialization, she makes it a major player. Children are merciless in persecuting a kid who is different -- one who says ''Warshington'' instead of ''Washington,'' one who has a foreign accent or wears the wrong clothes. (Remember?) Parents have long lamented the apparent cruelty of children and the obsessive conformity of teen-agers, but, Harris argues, they have missed the point: children's attachment to their peer groups is not irrational, it's essential. It is evolution's way of seeing to it that kids bond with each other, fit in and survive. Identification with the peer group, not identification with the parent, is the key to human survival. That is why children have their own traditions, words, rules, games; their culture operates in opposition to adult rules. Their goal is not to become successful adults but successful children. Teen-agers want to excel as teen-agers, which means being unlike adults.
It has been difficult to tease apart the effects of parents and peers, Harris observes, because children's environments often duplicate parental values, language and customs. (Indeed, many parents see to it that they do.) To see what factors are strongest, therefore, we must look at situations in which these environments clash. For example, when parents value academic achievement and a student's peers do not, who wins? Typically, peers. Differences between black and white teen-agers in achievement have variously been attributed to genes or single mothers, but differences vanish when researchers control for the peer group: whether its members value achievement and expect to go to college, or regard academic success as a hopeless dream or sellout to ''white'' values.
Are there exceptions? Of course, and Harris anticipates them. Some children in anti-intellectual peer groups choose the lonely path of nerdy devotion to schoolwork. And some have the resources, from genes or parents, to resist peer pressure. But exceptions should not detract from the rule: that children, like adults, are oriented to their peers. Do you dress, think and behave more like others of your generation, your parents or the current crop of adolescents?
by Carol Tavris, NY Times (1998) | Read more:
Image: Goodreads
[ed. See also: The Nurture Assumption: First Chapter (Judith Rich Harris, NY Times).]
[ed. See also: The Nurture Assumption: First Chapter (Judith Rich Harris, NY Times).]
