The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do

FROM THE PUBLISHER

How much credit do parents deserve when their children turn out well? How much blame when they turn out badly? This book explodes some of our deepest beliefs about children and parents and gives us something radically new to put in their place. With eloquence and wit, Judith Harris explains why parents have little power to determine the sort of people their children become. It is what children experience outside the home, in the company of their peers, that matters most. Parents don't socialize children: children socialize children. Harris looks with a fresh eye at the real lives of real children and shows that the nurture assumption is nothing more than a cultural myth. Why do the children of immigrant parents end up speaking in the language and accent of their peers, not of their parents? Why are twins reared together no more alike than twins raised apart? Why does a boy who spends his first eight years with a nanny and his next ten years in boarding school nevertheless turn out just like his father? The nurture assumption cannot provide an answer to these questions. Judith Harris can. Through no fault of their own, good parents sometimes have bad kids. Harris offers parents wise counsel on what they can and cannot do, and relief from guilt for those whose best efforts have somehow failed to produce a happy, well-behaved, self-confident child.

FROM THE CRITICS

Marjorie Williams - Washington Monthly

This is a fascinating, wildly entertaining, and in many ways persuasive book. Harris is a wonderful writer.

Ann Crittenden - Nation

Buried in the fine print. . .are so many caveats that the book's thesis virtually evaporates. . . .What does affect a child's . . .development?. . . .Harris' answer: peers. . . .I can't help thinking about. . .young men brought down on the battlefield. Fallen among their comrades. . .the wounded warriors cry out not for their buddies but for their mothers.

Margaret G. Alter

Harris certainly hit a nerve....[She] is also a motherthus representative of many voices rarely heard in the academic literature. —Books & Culture: A Christian Review

Publishers Weekly

Harris, author of a college-level textbook on child development, offers a contribution to the increasingly popular trend to absolve parents from feeling responsible for the rearing of their children. The inability of psychologists to demonstrate that parents have predictable effects on children, it is argued, vitiates the long-standing assumption of parents' crucial role in children's personality development. While the author's skepticism of the view that parents' behavior produces necessary and direct effects on children is itself well founded, her counterpoint to the "nurture assumption" is not. Rather than attempting to examine the evident complexity of parental influence on children, the author instead avoids the problem altogether, asserting that one must recognize "that children learn separately, in each social context, how to behave in that context." By consequence, the primary influence on a child's social development, Harris asserts, is not the family setting (in which the author thinks children merely learn how to behave toward other family members), but rather the peer group. Pleasant as this theory may be to some parents, this book contains not a shred of empirical research to support it. What substitutes for research are numerous anecdotes and pages of opining. Here, for example, is one of many personal observations the author uses to bolster her own argument: "I believe high or low status in the peer group has permanent effects on the personality. Children who are unpopular with their peers... never get over that. At least I didn't." While this kind of evidence is unlikely to sway the critical reader, it will undoubtedly find favor among those parents who, like the author, find in this book's thesis a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, which will mitigate guilty feelings about how they treated their children--feelings that, as the book implies, need not be analyzed. First broadcast to 20/20. BOMC alternate, QPB selection. (Sept.)

Abigail Trafford - The Washington Post

If Harris and her controversial theory of Peer Power can bring some balance into the child-rearing debate, she has done the American family a favor. . . .As she writes, 'Love your kids because they are lovable' not because you think they need it.' Read all 11 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Steven Pinker