>
> The Nurture Assumption:
> Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do
>
> Whether it's musical talent, criminal tendencies, or fashion sense, we
> humans want to know why we have it or why we don't. What makes us the
> way we are? Maybe it's in our genes, maybe it's how we were raised,
> maybe it's a little of both--in any case, Mom and Dad usually receive
> both the credit and the blame.
>
> While it has been shown that genetics is only partly responsible for
> behavior it is also true that parents play a very minor role in mental
> and emotional development.
>
> The Nurture Assumption explores the mountain of evidence pointing away
> from parents and toward peer groups as the strongest environmental
> influence on personality development. Rather than leaping into the
> nature vs. nurture fray, Harris instead posits nurture (parental) vs.
> nurture (peer group), and in her view your kid's friends win, hands
> down.
>
> This idea, difficult as it may be to accept, is supported by the
> countless studies Harris cites in her breezy, charming prose. She is
> upset about the blame laid on parents of troubled children and has
> much to say (mostly negative) about "professional parental advice-
> givers." Her own advice may be summarized as "guide your child's peer-
> group choices wisely," but the aim of the book is less to offer
> guidance than to tear off cultural blinders.
>
> 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.
>
> ...children learn separately, in each social context, how to behave in
> that context. By consequence, the primary influence on a child's
> social development is not the family setting (in which children merely
> learn how to behave toward other family members), but rather the peer
> group.
>
> The Nurture Assumption:
> Why Children Turn Out the Way They
Dohttp://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684857073/
>
> ----------------------------------------
>
> The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris, who argues that
> children's personalities are shaped by their genes as well as by their
> environments, so similarities between children and their parents may
> come from their shared genes and not just from the effects of
> parenting...
>
> - The Nurture Assumption, How Much Parents Shape Children, Birth
> Order, Critical Stages
>
> THOUGH BEHAVIORAL GENETICISTS have known about the heritability of
> mental traits (First Law) for decades, it took a while for the absence
> of effects of the shared environment (Second Law) and the magnitude of
> the effects of the unique environment (Third Law) to sink in. Robert
> Plomin and Denise Daniels first sounded the alarm in a 1987 article
> called "Why Are Children in the Same Family So Different from One
> Another?" The enigma was noted by other behavioral geneticists such as
> Thomas Bouchard, Sandra Scarr, and David Lykken and spotlighted again
> by David Rowe in his 1994 book The Limits of Family Influence. It was
> also the springboard for the historian Frank Sulloway's widely
> discussed 1996 book on birth order and revolutionary temperament, Born
> to Rebel. Still, few people outside behavioral genetics really
> appreciated the importance of the Second and Third Laws.
>
> It all hit the fan in 1998 when Judith Rich Harris, an unaffiliated
> scholar (whom the press quickly dubbed "a grandmother from New
> Jersey"), published The Nurture Assumption. A Newsweek cover story
> summed up the topic: "Do Parents Matter? A Heated Debate About How
> Kids Develop." Harris brought the three laws out of the journals and
> tried to get people to recognize their implications: that the
> conventional wisdom about childrearing among experts and laypeople
> alike is wrong.
>
> It was Rousseau who made parents and children the main actors in the
> human drama. Children are noble savages, and their upbringing and
> education can either allow their essential nature to blossom or can
> saddle them with the corrupt baggage of civilization. Twentieth-
> century versions of the Noble Savage and the Blank Slate kept parents
> and children at center stage. The behaviorists claimed that children
> are shaped by contingencies of reinforcement, and advised parents not
> to respond to their children's distress because it would only reward
> them for crying and increase the frequency of crying behavior.
> Freudians theorized that we are shaped by our degree of success in
> weaning, toilet training, and identification with the parent of the
> same sex, and advised parents not to bring infants into their beds
> because it would arouse damaging sexual desires. Everyone theorized
> that psychological disorders could be blamed on mothers: autism on
> their coldness, schizophrenia on their "double binds," anorexia on
> their pressure on girls to be perfect. Low self-esteem was attributed
> to "toxic parents" and every other problem to "dysfunctional
> families." Patients in many forms of psychotherapy while away their
> fifty minutes reliving childhood conflicts, and most biographies
> scavenge through the subject's childhood for the roots of the
> grownup's tragedies and triumphs.
>
> By now most well-educated parents believe that their children's fates
> are in their hands. They want their children to be popular and self-
> confident, to get good grades and stay in school, to avoid drugs,
> alcohol, and cigarettes, to avoid getting pregnant or fathering a
> child while a teenager, to stay on the right side of the law, and to
> become happily married and professionally successful. A parade of
> parenting experts has furnished them with advice, ever changing in
> content, never changing in certitude, on how to attain that outcome.
> The current recipe runs something like this. Parents should stimulate
> their babies with colorful toys and varied experiences. ("Take them
> outside. Let them feel tree bark," advised a pediatrician who shared a
> couch with me on a morning television show.) They should read and talk
> to their babies as much as possible to foster their language
> development. They should interact and communicate with their children
> at all ages, and no amount of time is too much. ("Quality time," the
> idea that working parents could spend an intense interlude with their
> children between dinner and bedtime to make up for their absence
> during the day, quickly became a national joke; it was seen as a
> rationalization by mothers who would not admit that their careers were
> compromising their children's welfare.) Parents should set firm but
> reasonable limits, neither bossing their children around nor giving
> them complete license. Physical punishment of any kind is out, because
> that perpetuates a cycle of violence. Nor should parents belittle
> their children or say that they are bad, because that will damage
> their self-esteem. On the contrary, they should shower them with hugs
> and unconditional affirmations of love and approval. And parents
> should communicate intensively with their adolescent children and take
> an interest in every aspect of their lives.
>
> A few parents have begun to question the imperative to become round-
> the-clock parenting machines. A recent cover story in Newsweek
> entitled "The Parent Trap" reported on the frazzled mothers and
> fathers who devote every nonworking minute to entertaining and
> chauffeuring their children for fear that they will otherwise turn
> into ne'er-do-wells or cafeteria snipers. A similar story in the
> Boston Globe Magazine with the ironic title "How to Raise a Perfect
> Child ..." elaborates:
>
> "I'm overwhelmed with parenting advice," says Alice Kelly of Newton.
> "I read all about how I'm supposed to be providing my children with
> enriching play experiences. I'm supposed to do lots of physical
> activity with them so I can instill in them a physical fitness habit
> so they'll grow up to be healthy, fit adults. And I'm supposed to do
> all kinds of intellectual play so they'll grow up smart. Also, there
> are all kinds of play, and I'm supposed to do each-clay for finger
> dexterity, word games for reading success, large-motor play, small-
> motor play. I feel like I could devote my life to figuring out what to
> play with my kids." ...
>
> Elizabeth Ward, a Stoneham dietician, has been puzzling over why-
> parents are so "willing to be short-order cooks, preparing two or
> three meals at a time" in order to please the kids.... [One reason] is
> a belief that forcing a kid to choose between eating what's presented
> or skipping a meal will lead to eating disorders-a thought that
> probably never occurred to parents in earlier decades.
>
> The humorist Dave Barry comments on the experts' advice to parents of
> adolescents:
>
> In addition to watching for warning signs, you must "keep the lines of
> communication open" between yourself and your child. Make a point of
> taking an interest in the things your child is interested in so that
> you can develop a rapport, as we see in this dialogue:
>
> FATHER: What's that music you're listening to, son?
>
> SON: It's a band called "Limp Bizkit," Dad.
>
> FATHER: They suck.
>
> ... You should strive for this kind of closeness in your relationship
> with your child. And remember: If worse comes to worst, there is no
> parenting tool more powerful than a good hug. If you sense that your
> child is getting into trouble, you must give that child a great big
> fat hug in a public place with other young people around, while
> saying, in a loud, piercing voice, "You are MY LITTLE BABY and I love
> you NO MATTER WHAT!" That will embarrass your child so much that he or
> she may immediately run off and join a strict religious order whose
> entire diet consists of gravel. If one hug doesn't work, threaten to
> give your child another.
>
> Backlash aside, is it possible that the experts' ...
>
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