Why Parents Still Matter.

AuthorWilliams, Marjorie
PositionReview

Children learn a lot from their peers--but not everything

THE NURTURE ASSUMPTION:

Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do - Parents Matter Less Than You Think and Peers Matter More

By Judith Rich Harris

The Free Press, $26

What a chump I've been. All those nights of dragging myself down the hallway to answer the cries of a lonely or frightened child. All those baby-sitters I've interviewed to be sure I'm leaving my kids with a nice one. All those moments in which I've bitten back a temporary fury, forcing myself to speak patiently to my intransigent son or daughter. According to Judith Rich Harris, the author of this controversial new book, none of these actions, or my failure to take them in the future, is going to have any lasting effect on my children at all.

The Nurture Assumption, which was born to a glowing profile in The New Yorker and a Newsweek cover story, is commonly referred to as the Parents-Don't-Matter book. Bluntly, it is Harris's thesis that the only lasting influences on one's personality are genes and peers--the peer groups of childhood and adolescence. Our common belief that what parents say and do to children will have a crucial effect on their lives is simply a mass delusion, nothing more than "a cherished cultural myth."

Harris has an interesting history. Thrown out of Harvard's graduate program in psychology as a non-conformist, and bedridden for much of her adulthood by an autoimmune disease, she became a writer of college psychology textbooks--work she could do from home. That work enrolled her in a running seminar on the latest research in developmental psychology, while her isolation encouraged her to see all that work with an outsider's skepticism. Now a 60-year-old grandmother, she had a Road-to-Damascus experience one day ("It was January 20, 1994") while reading a study of why adolescents so often break the law. It was, the researcher suggested, a bid for "mature status, with its consequent power and privilege."

Wait, thought Harris; that can't be right. Teenagers aren't trying to be good grown-ups ("If teenagers wanted to be like adults they wouldn't be shoplifting nailpolish from drug-stores or hanging off overpasses to spray I LOVE YOU LISA on the arch. They would be doing boring adult things like sorting the laundry and figuring out their income taxes"); no, they're trying to be successful teenagers.

In this beginning, Harris found the germ of a theory that enabled her to explain away all the anomalies that had troubled her in the literature on parenting styles and child development: essentially, the fact that all the developmental psychology research in the world had failed to nail down any significant, predictable correlations between how parents treat their kids and how those kids turn out--any that could not instead be laid at the door of their genetic link, that is.

Harris believes, in keeping with the research of behavioral geneticists, that about 50 percent of any person's fate is written by his or her genetic endowments. (And the way she lays out and explains this research is among the best services of her book.) But the other 50...

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