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The Nature of Nurture: Parents or Peers?

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from: Judith Harris
to: Jerome Kagan

Posted Thursday, Nov. 19, 1998, at 3:30 AM ET

Dear Jerry,

OK, you've made your point--I'm sorry I accused you of being unscientific. But is this the place to talk about epistasis and the wing anomalies of fruit flies? Why don't we save the technicalities for a specialized journal, where I'd be happy to go on debating you till the last fruit fly wears out its telomeres.
Better still, I could find you a behavioral geneticist to argue with. This is not my quarrel. My interest is not primarily in heredity. I'm interested in the environment--in how the child's environment shapes the child. It was you, not I, who wrote an entire book on inborn differences in temperament. "Thus," you said in it, "inhibited and uninhibited behaviors are heritable" (Galen's Prophecy, Page 168). The reason I didn't bother explaining that heritability depends upon the population measured is that it's not relevant: My book is not about heritability.
Heredity concerns me mainly in a negative way: I want to control or eliminate its effects, the better to judge the effects of the environment. My point was that the studies you use to support your position, including the one from the August 1998 issue of Child Development that you mentioned in your first posting, use methods that cannot disentangle the effects of heredity and environment. You don't have to take my word for it: The authors of that study admitted it themselves! (See Page 1,168 of that article.)
Nor is it enough to disentangle genetic effects from environmental ones: We also need to disentangle environmental influences from each other. That often isn't done either. You needled me for admitting, on Page 317 of my book, that we don't know why children who are abused by their parents grow up with psychological problems. But the reason we don't know is that researchers haven't done the work: They haven't separated the effects of parental abuse from other environmental factors. For example, children who are physically abused by their parents are often treated badly by their peers as well, because risk factors that increase the chances that a child will become a victim in the home--slow development, a difficult disposition--also increase the chances that he or she will become a victim on the playground. When this unfortunate individual ends up with psychological problems, psychologists assume that the parental abuse was to blame. No one has bothered to find out whether being picked on or rejected by peers might actually be a better predictor. It's simply taken for granted that what happens at home must matter more.
What really disappoints me is the evidence that, even though you've been attacking my book for two months now, you still haven't looked at more than a few odd pages here and there. People who've read the book tell me they found it very interesting--even fun. The Nurture Assumption is about how evolution shaped the human mind and how the child's mind, as a result of that evolutionary history, is predisposed to conceptually divide people into categories--male/female, kid/grown-up, good reader/bad reader--and to put the self into one of the categories. "Self-categorization," Australian social psychologist John Turner calls it. Children identify not with their parents but with a group of people they see as being "like me." Under ordinary conditions they don't see a grown-up as being "like me" because grown-ups are in a different social category, with different rules of behavior. Identification with a parent is real but comes much later--it doesn't happen until the offspring can plausibly be included in the same social category as the parent. The embarrassment children feel when their parents don't measure up is not due to identification, at least not in the sense you mean. It's the same embarrassment they feel when they have to go to school carrying a Mickey Mouse lunchbox when everyone else has a Lion King lunchbox.
I never said that peer groups homogenize their members. Groups make their members more alike in some ways but also act to widen the differences among them. Of course living in the same neighborhood doesn't turn children into little clones--neither does living in the same family!
My theory of child development is new, speculative, and largely untested. But it does a good job of explaining a lot of annoying little things that don't fit into traditional theories. It explains why only children, who bear the full brunt of their parents' attention, do not differ in personality from children with siblings. Why generations of upper-class British boys, reared by nannies and sent to boarding schools at the age of 8, turned out so much like their fathers. Why girls and boys behave as differently in egalitarian societies as in sexist ones, and why these differences show up in some situations and not in others. Why well-behaved children become rebels in their teens and then solid citizens in adulthood. And why the children of immigrants end up with the language and accent of their peers, not of their parents--and not something in between, either.
Yes, my theory is still speculative: It has not been proved. But what you are attacking me for is not my theory. What you are attacking me for--the assertion that parents have little or no long-term influence on the personality, intelligence, or mental health of their children--is not new, is not mine, and is not speculative. It is firmly grounded in evidence. The evidence is of many different kinds and has been accumulating for nearly 20 years. It indicates that, across a wide range of households, variations from one household to another--including variations in how the parents rear their children--have no measurable effects on how the children turn out.
I am by no means the first to point out the implications of these findings--see David C. Rowe's excellent book, The Limits of Family Influence--nor will I be the last. David Cohen, a University of Texas professor with a background in clinical psychology, is currently putting the finishing touches on a book called Stranger in the Nest: Do Parents Really Shape Their Child's Personality, Intelligence, or Character?
Stopping me--telling people that I don't know what I'm talking about--will not help your cause. This is not a leak that can be plugged: It's the beginning of a deluge. I know this must be upsetting to someone who has put in 45 years laboring under what has turned out to be a false premise. I don't blame you for being mad at me. But killing the messenger will not stop the message.
What I'm really shouting is not "Fire!"--it's "Hey, the emperor isn't wearing any clothes!" If that message sounds to you like "Fire!" it's not surprising. After all, Jerry, you're one of the tailors.

Judy

dialogues
entries
123456
from: Judith Harris
to: Jerome Kagan

Posted Thursday, Nov. 19, 1998, at 3:30 AM ET
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Judith Rich Harris is the author of The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do. Jerome Kagan is a professor of psychology at Harvard and author of several books, including Nature of the Child. Click to purchase The Nurture Assumption or Nature of the Child from Amazon.com.
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