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The Nature of Nurture: Parents or Peers?

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From: Jerome Kagan
To: Judith HarrisPosted Friday, Oct. 30, 1998, at 3:30 AM ET

Dear Judy:

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This reply to your essay deals directly with your claim that parents have no power to mold their child's personality and that they exert no important long-term effects on the child.
First, let us clear up the meaning of correlations. Astrophysics deals only with correlations, yet it has been able to infer deep principles. Moreover, watch out or you will be damaging your argument. Your claim that parents have little effect is based on correlations, albeit low ones. If correlations are no basis for inferring anything important then you, too, are on weak epistemological grounds.
I begin the rebuttal with the August 1998 issue of Child Development, our premier journal. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development research group reports the results of a study of over 1,000 children from 10 different cities who were exposed to very different forms of surrogate care, along with children raised only at home. When the children were assessed at age 3, there was very little effect of form of surrogate care, while family influences were the major cause of variation among the children. The authors wrote, "What transpires in the family appears to be more important in explaining children's early social and emotional development than ... quality, quantity or stability of type of care."
You claim that the reason children of parents who talk frequently to their child are more verbal is attributable to genes. However, this argument is vitiated by a study published in Science in 1978. Schiff, et al., studied working-class children who were adopted early into upper-middle-class homes and compared the intellectual talents of these adopted children with that of their siblings who remained with their working-class parents. The adopted children had significantly higher intelligence scores than the nonadopted children who were genetically related to them. The differences in cognitive skills had to be due to the family practices and not to genes. (See Schiff, et al., Science, 1978, 200: 1503-1504.)
Perhaps the most serious source of vulnerability in your position comes from the fact that children from different cultures behave very differently even before peers have had a chance to have a serious effect. The work of the Whitings has proved this point to the satisfaction of most scientists. I trust that you will not claim that rural Mexican children are more nurturant and less aggressive than New England children because of heredity.
A third flaw in your argument comes from studies of young children orphaned by war--World War II and the Korean War. These children were adopted by nurturant families and years later their intense anxiety and retarded cognitive abilities were muted in a serious way. There is no other way to account for this result without attributing power to family practices. (See Rathbun, et al., American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 1958, 28: 408-415; Winick, et al., Science, 1975, 190: 1173-1175.)
Finally, I believe you ignore one of the most important influences on children; namely, the identification with the parents. I could find no reference in your book to any study that dealt with this process. A child with an incompetent, unemployed, impulsive parent is ashamed of that parent and his or her image of self is affected by that shame. On the other hand, the child with a competent, talented, reflective parent feels a certain pride that has a benevolent effect on personality development. Most memoirs ascribe extraordinary power to these processes. (See J.S. Mill; C. Darwin; F. McCourt.)
I know of no culture that claims that parental character and practices have a minimal effect on children. I take that universal fact to mean that a truth is contained there. The fact that your review of the literature led you to a very different conclusion suggests that your review was selective, indifferent to data that were not consistent with your position (see Schiff, for example), and perhaps colored by the a priori bias you arrived at for reasons that remain obscure.

Jerry