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| Introduction to the Second Edition | |
| Foreword to the First Edition | |
| Preface to the First Edition | |
| "Nurture" Is Not the Same as "Environment" | |
| The Nature (and Nurture) of the Evidence | |
| Nature, Nurture, and None of the Above | |
| Separate Worlds | |
| Other Times, Other Places | |
| Human Nature | |
| Us and Them | |
| In the Company of Children | |
| The Transmission of Culture | |
| Gender Rules | |
| Schools of Children | |
| Growing Up | |
| Dysfunctional Families and Problem Kids | |
| What Parents Can Do | |
| Th | |
| Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved. |
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INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION
They called me "the grandmother from New Jersey" and they said I had a hell of a nerve. I do, in fact, live in New Jersey, and ten years ago, when the first edition of The Nurture Assumption was published, I was sixty years old. And I did indeed have a grandchild, though she was still quite small. Now she's on the brink of adolescence and my youngest grandchild -- I now have four -- is in nursery school.
As for the hell of a nerve, sorry, that hasn't changed. This is the second edition of The Nurture Assumption, but its message remains the same. The "experts" are wrong: parental nurturing is not what determines how a child turns out. Children are not socialized by their parents. The nurture assumption is a myth and most of the research used to support it is worthless. Diplomacy has never been my strong suit.
In spite of its uncompromising message, and the tumultuous criticism that greeted its first appearance, the book has been called back for an encore. I suspect the reaction to its second appearance will be far less tumultuous. To some extent at least, times have changed.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. My first job is to introduce you to the revised edition of The Nurture Assumption. As you've already noticed, I've provided it with a new introduction. Appendix 2, "Testing Theories of Child Development," is also entirely new. Among other things, Appendix 2 describes some research -- so fresh that, as I write these words, some of the studies have not yet been published -- designed to test my theory. Designed, interestingly enough, not by developmentalists but by criminologists.
The most conspicuous change you'll find in this edition is the addition of endnote numbers: little superscripts like this,1 sprinkled here and there throughout the text. The numbers take you to correspondingly numbered endnotes in a section at the back of the book, right after Appendix 2. The first edition had no little superscripts, though there were plenty of endnotes at the back. They were labeled with a page number and a phrase -- a few words that linked them to a particular spot on the specified page. I thought it was an elegant system because it left the text uncluttered.
Unfortunately, there were problems with that system. People could read a paragraph and not know whether I had provided a reference in an endnote or was simply talking through my hat. Worse still, some readers never discovered the endnotes at all. Some of these unobservant people complained, loudly and publicly, about their absence.
The endnotes are even more important in this edition, because that is where you will find much of the new material. For example, I made a prediction in Chapter 12 about the kinds of anti-smoking ads that would or would not be successful in lowering the chances that a teenager will smoke. The endnote contains an update on that prediction: two studies, done after the publication of the first edition, that assessed the effectiveness of two different anti-smoking ad campaigns. Not to keep you in suspense, one series of ads was effective, the other was not. Would you care to guess which one was sponsored by the tobacco industry?
Aside from the citations of specific articles and books (which are listed alphabetically in References), the endnotes also contain other information -- details or things of interest that didn't fit into the text. Before you start reading a chapter, it might be a good idea to glance through its endnotes, to get a quick preview of what they have to offer.
For those who are fond of statistics, the total number of endnotes in this edition is 805 (versus 717 in the first edition). The reference list now contains 770 items (versus 691 in the first edition). A few references have been deleted; many new ones have been added.
The text itself has undergone many small changes and a few medium-sized ones. I've corrected minor errors and touched up passages that were confusing or hard to read. More important, I've rewritten some sections in order to take account of what has subsequently been learned about the topic under discussion. But neither in the text nor in the endnotes have I attempted to take account of everything that's happened, and everything I've learned, since the first edition was published. To do that would mean writing a whole new book.
As it happens, I've done that. Its title is No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality. It contains, in addition to an update of the research, an update of the theory. Not a major renovation -- that wasn't necessary. The new version of the theory is basically an elaboration of the one presented in the book you currently have in your hand. More bells and whistles, as computer people say. The original version of the theory does a good job of explaining socialization but is a bit vague in accounting for individual differences in personality, noticeable even in identical twins raised in the same home. No Two Alike focuses on these personality differences, whereas The Nurture Assumption is mainly about socialization.
It is now clear to me that socialization and personality development are two distinct processes. Socialization adapts children to their culture, with the result that they become more similar in behavior to their peers of the same sex. Personality development has the opposite effect: it preserves or widens individual differences. It was an error on my part to conflate these two processes. The fact that they have been conflated by every psychologist since Freud is no excuse. As demonstrated by the story (told here in Chapter 1) of the behaviorists' rejection of Freudian psychology, the rejection of assumptions almost never goes far enough.
No one, however, accused me of not going far enough when the first edition of this book appeared ten years ago. On the contrary, I was depicted as a wild-eyed radical. An extremist. People might have accepted with a yawn the idea that parents' influence on their children had been somewhat overestimated, but what I was proposing was far more heretical: that parents have no lasting influence on their children's personalities or on the way they behave outside the home. This proposition doesn't mean that parents are unimportant -- they have other roles to play in their children's lives. But the subtleties were lost when the media compressed my argument into three little words. "Do Parents Matter?" asked the cover of Newsweek. "Do Parents Matter?" asked Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker. Parents were understandably offended by the question. Opinion pieces appeared in almost every newspaper and magazine on the continent. Even Rural Heritage, a publication that describes itself as "a bimonthly journal in support of farming with horses, mules and oxen," expressed an opinion.
In Chapter 19 of his book The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker described some of the things that happened after The Nurture Assumption, as he put it, "hit the fan." Somehow I had managed to incur the wrath of both liberals and conservatives. Critics with Ph.D.s pointed out that I didn't have a Ph.D. and therefore didn't know what I was talking about. Developmental psychologists lined up to tell journalists about all the evidence I had supposedly ignored. Some people accused me of giving parents permission to abuse or neglect their children -- untrue! -- or of claiming that children don't need parents -- also untrue.
But good things happened, too. I had spent the previous twenty years working quietly at home, seldom seeing anyone outside my family. Suddenly everyone wanted to talk to me. Journalists and television crews beat a path to my door. When the foreign editions of the book started to appear -- there are fifteen translations -- journalists from abroad came to call. And letters arrived, via e-mail and post, from people in all walks of life and from many different countries. A few of them were nasty but the overwhelming majority were nice.
The Nurture Assumption even inspired a cartoon by the famous (now retired) cartoonist Jules Feiffer. The six panels show a man lying on a psychoanalyst's couch. He's saying, "All my life I've blamed my mother when I couldn't hold a girl, or keep a job....But then this new book comes out -- With scientific proof that our parents don't have much effect on how we turn out. It's our peers!...It wasn't my mother who ruined my life. It was Freddy Abramowitz."
No, it wasn't Freddy Abramowitz. But Feiffer was not the only one to make that mistake. Let me take this opportunity to clear up some misunderstandings about the role of peers in "how we turn out."
First, though it's true that you can't blame your hangups on your relationship with your mother, you can't blame them on your relationship with Freddy Abramowitz, either. Relationships do matter -- they generate powerful emotions and take up a large portion of our thoughts and memories -- but nevertheless they don't have much effect on how we turn out. My theory doesn't attribute socialization to relationships with peers or even to interactions with peers.
My use of the term "peer group" also led to some confusion. The term makes you think of a group of teenagers who hang around together. Indeed, a group of teenagers who hang around together is a peer group. But in this book the term is used in a much broader way. As explained in Chapter 7, what I really mean by "group" is "social category." A social category -- for example, girl -- may be an actual group of people, but it doesn't have to be. By identifying with the social category girl, a young human is socialized as a female child. She learns how children are expected to behave (not exactly like grownups). She learns how girls are expected to behave (not exactly like boys). She can identify with the social category girl even if she has never seen more than two or three other girls together in one place. She can categorize herself as a girl even if the other girls don't like her and don't want to play with her. Even if she doesn't like them.
The confusion about peer groups led to other misunderstandings. The theory proposed in this book, group socialization theory, isn't mainly about teenagers. It isn't about something that happens to older children but not to younger ones, or that happens more and more as children get older. I'm talking about something that begins as soon as children go out of the house and find themselves in a place where there are other children. It can begin as early as age two and certainly, for most children, by age three.
Nor does the theory describe something that has recently gone wrong in our society, due to some imagined shortcoming of parents. Though the culture has indeed changed, the children of today are not more influenced by their peers than were the children of yesterday. Group socialization theory has to do with the way a child's mind works. Children's minds work no differently today than they did in earlier times.
Thus, what I say in this book doesn't apply only to children in complex, urbanized societies like our own. Anthropologists, ethologists, and historians have found that styles of parenting differ dramatically from one society to another and from one historical period to another. And yet, despite these differences, children are the same the world around. In every society, children show a strong desire to get together with other children. And what they do when they get together is basically the same, all over the world and all through history.
Another misconception is that my rejection of the nurture assumption was based mainly on evidence from twin studies. That evidence is important but it doesn't stand alone. It is important because it dovetails with many other perplexing findings that keep turning up. The fact that only children don't differ in any important way from children with siblings, for example. Or that young children who go to day-care centers don't differ in any important way from those cared for at home by their parents. Or that those who have two parents of the same sex don't differ in any important way from those who have one of each sex. And so on. You'll find lots of other observations in this book that don't fit into the standard view of child development. These observations, stored in a corner of my mind, laid the groundwork for the epiphany described in Chapter 12. As one astute reader noted, "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." Eventually one gets tired of the popping and throws out the old sheet.
Despite that housewifely metaphor, it wasn't my experiences as a full-time mother that caused me to throw out the nurture assumption. It was evidence (see the endnotes). During the time I was personally experiencing motherhood, my beliefs about child development were entirely conventional. By the time I started questioning those beliefs, my children were grownups, embarked on successful adult lives. Too bad I can't take credit for the way they've turned out.
But the fact that my theory is supported by evidence doesn't mean it has been proved. The character in the Jules Feiffer cartoon said the book contains "scientific proof that our parents don't have much effect on how we turn out." Scientifically speaking, a statement like "don't have much effect" cannot be proved, because it's impossible to prove a negative -- what statisticians call a "null hypothesis." Rather than trying to prove the null hypothesis, I'm defending it. I'm taking the position that the way parents rear their children has no important effects on the way the children turn out. Now it's up to the people who believe in the nurture assumption to find evidence that would enable them to reject that null hypothesis. They need convincing evidence -- evidence that holds up to close scrutiny.
They still haven't found it, though decades of work have been devoted to the effort. At least, they hadn't found it as of 2005. That was when an unusually candid developmental psychologist publicly admitted, in an essay in the online magazine Edge, that "psychologists have not yet proven to skeptics that parents have a strong influence." The developmentalist, Ellen Winner of Boston College, was one of a group of scientists and technologists who replied to the question "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" Winner said she believes that "parents do shape their children." She still believes in the nurture assumption, even though she cannot prove it. She hasn't given up hope, however, that someday proof will be found, and that Judith Rich Harris will be consigned to her proper place in the halls of infamy.
Other professors of psychology, less knowledgeable or less forthright, have been claiming ever since 1998 that they already had the proof. I've spent a lot of time investigating those claims. Some of my findings were unsurprising -- flaws in methodology and so forth -- but some were deeply unsettling, even for a jaded old bird like me. You'll find that story in Chapters 3 and 4 of No Two Alike.
Near the beginning of this introduction I said, with uncharacteristic cautiousness, "To some extent at least, times have changed." That statement requires an explanation. To what extent, and in what way, have times changed?
For one thing, there is now more acceptance of the idea that behavior is influenced by genes and that individual differences in behavior are due in part to differences in genes. People are more willing to admit that children can inherit behavioral quirks and personality characteristics from their parents, along with the color of their hair and the shape of their nose. This has been a cultural shift -- a gradual one -- and I had nothing to do with it, of course. Nevertheless, it may have made people a little more receptive to my message. The point is that most of the observations that until recently had been attributed to parental influence are actually due (as explained in Chapters 2 and 3) to the genetic similarity of parents and children. So it is a mark of progress that statements such as "I got that from my mother" are now heard as ambiguous: Are you talking about heredity or do you mean you learned it from your mother? Ten years ago, it almost always meant "learned it from my mother."
Was it this cultural shift that led to greater acceptance of my theory? Or was it the fact that new findings, consistent with the theory, kept turning up? Over time, the early, angry response to The Nurture Assumption has softened noticeably, both within and outside of academia. Today, the book is widely cited in textbooks and journal articles. It's assigned and discussed in courses in many colleges and universities; it shows up on exams.
On the other hand, many of these citations and discussions are unfavorable. Often I am used as a straw man that students are invited to overturn. The favorable mentions are more likely to come from fields other than developmental psychology -- criminology, for example. Though a few developmentalists have been won over, most have not. As a result, many of them are still doing the same kind of research that is dissected so mercilessly in this book. The kind I called, at the beginning of this introduction, worthless. It is worthless because the methods used by these researchers give them no way to distinguish between the influence of the child's environment and the influence of the child's genes. My primary interest is environment, not genes. But we cannot tell what the environment does to a child unless we know what the child brings to that environment.
In his foreword to the first edition of The Nurture Assumption (you'll find it right after this introduction), Steven Pinker made a rash prediction about the book: "I predict it will come to be seen as a turning point in the history of psychology." Perhaps it is too soon to judge whether psychology has rounded a bend; perhaps it will take the perspective of twenty or thirty years. Even at this point, though, there are signs of a slight shift in direction. Within developmental psychology, I've noticed that descriptions of procedures and results are beginning to sound a bit defensive. Greater progress has been made in other areas of psychology. And the e-mail I receive from students gives me high hopes for the younger generation coming up.
There are fewer signs of progress outside academia. People's increased understanding of genetics hasn't caused them to lose their faith in the nurture assumption. A recent issue of Time, for example, featured several articles on obesity in children. Though genes and culture are acknowledged to play a role, the onus is still on parents. "How can parents teach their children to be in control of their own eating habits?" one article asks. "Why is it so important for parents to set a good dietary example for their kids?" The trouble is that there's no evidence that what parents teach their kids about eating, or the example they set, has any long-term effects on the kids. As explained in Chapter 13, adult adoptees show no signs of having been influenced in their eating habits by the adoptive parents who reared them. Body weight isn't entirely genetic, but the part that is not genetic cannot be blamed on the home or the parents.
One of my hopes was that I could make child-rearing a little easier, a little less stressful for parents. Alas, it has not happened, as far as I can tell. Parents are still using the anxiety-ridden, labor-intensive style of parenting prescribed by their culture; they've paid no attention to my well-meaning advice to lighten up. Even my own daughters are rearing their children that way.
But why should I expect to have an influence on my own daughters?
Judith Rich Harris
Middletown, New Jersey
June 2008Copyright © 1998, 2009 by Judith Rich Harris
Excerpted from The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do by Judith Rich Harris
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