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The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, Revised and Updatedby Judith Harris
Synopses & Reviews
How much credit do parents deserve when their children turn out well? How much blame when they turn out badly? This electrifying 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.
Yet we cling to the "nurture assumption," our unquestioned belief that, aside from their genes, what makes children turn out the way they do is the way their parents bring them up. This assumption is so deeply embedded in our culture that it underlies everything we are taught about rearing children and everything we believe about the emotional hangups of adults. But that doesn't make it true. 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.
Using examples from folklore and literature as well as from scientific research, Harris shows us the world of childhood in all its richness and complexity. Relationships with parents and siblings are always important, but they vary from culture to culture. One aspect of childhood, however, is universal: the children's peer group. With a range that extends from the Yanomamö of the Brazilian rainforest to deaf Nicaraguan children learning to communicate for the very first time, Harris demonstrates the power peer groups have in shaping the lives of children. Along the way, we see that many cherished notions — such as the idea that early mother-child attachments set the pattern for later relationships — fail to explain what happens to real children, or to a girl named Cinderella, whose miserable home life did not keep her from being a great success in the world outside her cottage.
Harris has a message that will change parents' lives: they have been sold a bill of goods. Parenting does not match its widely publicized job description. It is a job in which sincerity and hard work do not guarantee success. 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.
The Nurture Assumption is a profound work that brings together insights from psychology, sociology, anthropology, primatology, and evolutionary biology to offer a startling new view of who we are and how we got that way.
This groundbreaking book, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and andlt;Iandgt;New York Timesandlt;/Iandgt; notable pick, rattled the psychological establishment when it was first published in 1998 by claiming that parents have little impact on their children's development. In this tenth anniversary edition of andlt;Iandgt;The Nurture Assumptionandlt;/Iandgt;, Judith Harris has updated material throughout and provided a fresh introduction.andlt;BRandgt;andlt;BRandgt;Combining insights from psychology, sociology, anthropology, primatology, and evolutionary biology, she explains how and why the tendency of children to take cues from their peers works to their evolutionary advantage. This electrifying book explodes many of our unquestioned beliefs about children and parents and gives us a radically new view of childhood.
About the Author
andlt;bandgt;Judith Rich Harrisandlt;/bandgt; is the author of andlt;iandgt;No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality andlt;/iandgt;. A former writer of college textbooks, Harris is a recipient of a George A. Miller award, given to the author of an outstanding article in psychology. She is an independent investigator and theoretician whose interests include evolutionary psychology, social psychology, developmental psychology, and behavioral genetics.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Steven Pinker
1 "Nurture" Is Not the Same as "Environment"
2 The Nature (and Nurture) of the Evidence
3 Nature, Nurture, and None of the Above
4 Separate Worlds
5 Other Times, Other Places
6 Human Nature
7 Us and Them
8 In the Company of Children
9 The Transmission of Culture
10 Gender Rules
11 Schools of Children
12 Growing Up
13 Dysfunctional Families and Problem Kids
14 What Parents Can Do
15 The Nurture Assumption on Trial
1 Personality and Birth Order
2 Testing Theories of Child Development
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