On Jan 14, 4:27 pm,

The problems that the children of hippies experienced have been
blamed on the supposed bad parenting of them by the hippies. This is
the case of misconstruing cause and effect. The root of the problem
is that the parents lived by one set of values while living in a
society that ran by another.

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 Do
http://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' advice might be
sound? Perhaps the parent trap is the mixed blessing of scientists'
knowing more and more about the effects of parenting. Parents can be
forgiven for carving out some time for themselves, but if the experts
are right they must realize that every such decision is a compromise.

So what do we really know about the long-term effects of parenting?
Natural variation among parents, the raw material of behavioral
genetics, offers one way of finding out. In any large sample of
families, parents vary in how well they adhere to the ideals of
parenting (if some didn't stray from the ideal, there would be no
point in offering advice). Some mothers stay at home, others are
workaholics. Some parents lose their tempers, others are infinitely
patient. Some are garrulous, others taciturn; some unreserved in their
affection, others more guarded. (As one academic said to me after
pulling out a picture of her toddler, "We virtually adore her.") Some
homes are filled with books, others with blaring TV" sets; some
couples are lovey-dovey, others fight like Maggie and liggs. Some
mothers are like June Cleaver, others are depressed or histrionic or
disorganized. According to the conventional wisdom, these differences
should make a difference. At a bare minimum, two children growing up
in one of these homes-with the same mother, father, books, TVs, and
everything else-should turn out more similar, on average, than two
children growing up in different homes. Seeing whether they do is a
remarkably direct and powerful test. It does not depend on any
hypothesis about what parents have to do to change their children or
how their children will respond. It does not depend on how well we
measure the home environments. If anything that parents do affects
their children in any systematic way, then children growing up with
the same parents will turn out more similar than children growing up
with different parents.

But they don't. Remember the discoveries behind the Second Law.
Siblings reared together end up no more similar than siblings
separated at birth. Adopted siblings are no more similar than
strangers. And the similarities between siblings can be completely
accounted for by their shared genes. All those differences among
parents and homes have no predictable long-term effects on the
personalities of their children. Not to put too fine a point on it,
but much of the advice from the parenting experts is flapdoodle.

But surely the advice is grounded in research on children's
development? Yes, from the many useless studies that show a
correlation between the behavior of parents and the behavior of their
biological children and conclude that the parenting shaped the child,
as if there were no such thing as heredity. And in fact the studies
are even worse than that. Even if there were no such thing as
heredity, a correlation between parents and children would not imply
that parenting practices shape children. It could imply that children
shape parenting practices. As any parent of more than one child knows,
children are not indistinguishable lumps of raw material waiting to be
shaped. They are little people, born with personalities. And people
react to the personalities of other people, even if one is a parent
and the other a child. The parents of an affectionate child may return
that affection and thereby act differently from the parents of a child
who squirms and wipes off his parents' kisses. The parents of a quiet,
spacey child might feel they are talking to a wall and jabber at him
less. The parents of a docile child can get away with setting firm but
reasonable limits; the parents of a hellion might find themselves at
their wits' end and either lay down the law or give up. In other
words, correlation does not imply causation. A correlation between
parents and children does not mean that parents affect children; it
could mean that children affect parents, that genes affect both
parents and children, or both.

It gets worse. In many studies, the same parties (in some studies the
parents, in others the children) supply the data on both the parents'
behavior and the child's. Parents tell the experimenter how they treat
their children and what their children are like, or adolescents tell
the experimenter what they are like and how their parents treat them.
Those studies-suspiciously-show much stronger correlations than ones
in which a third party assesses the parents and the child. The problem
is not just that people tend to look at themselves and at their
families through the same rose-colored or jaundiced lenses, but also
that the relationship between parents and adolescents is a two-way
street. Harris sums up the problems when commenting on a widely
publicized 1997 study. The authors claimed, solely on the basis of
teenagers' responses to a questionnaire about themselves and their
families, that "parent-family connectedness"-close bonds, high
expectations, lots of affection-is "protective" against adolescent
ills such as drugs, cigarettes, and unsafe sex. Harris notes:

A happy person tends to check off upbeat answers to all the questions:
Yes, my parents are good to me; yes, I'm doing fine. A person who
cares about presenting a socially acceptable face to the world checks
off socially acceptable responses: Yes, my parents are good to me; no,
I haven't been in any fights or smoked anything illegal. A person who
is angry or depressed checks off angry or depressed responses: My
parents are jerks and I flunked the algebra test and to hell with your
questionnaire....

... Perhaps what misled those eighteen federal agencies into thinking
they were getting their 25 million dollars worth was the positive way
the researchers phrased their findings: good relationships with
parents exert a protective effect. Expressed in a different (but
equally accurate) way, the results sound less interesting: adolescents
who don't get along well with their parents are more likely to use
drugs or engage in risky sex. The results sound still less interesting
expressed this way: adolescents who use drugs or engage in risky sex
don't get along well with their parents.

Yet another problem crops up when researchers direct all their
questions to the parents rather than to the offspring. People behave
differently in different settings. That includes children, who tend to
behave differently inside and outside the home. So even if parents'
behavior does affect how their children behave with them, it may not
affect how their children behave with other people. When parents
describe their children's behavior, they describe the behavior they
see in the home. To show that parents shape their children, then, a
study would have to control for genes (by testing twins or adoptees),
distinguish between parents affecting children and children affecting
parents, measure the parents and the children independently, look at
how children behave outside the home rather than inside, and test
older children and young adults to see whether any effects are
transient or permanent. No study that has claimed to show effects of
parenting has met these standards.

If behavioral genetic studies show no lasting effects of the home, and
studies of parenting practices are uninformative, what about studies
that compare radically different childhood milieus? The results,
again, are bracing. Decades of studies have shown that, all things
being equal, children turn out pretty much the same way whether their
mothers work or stay at home, whether they are placed in daycare or
not, whether they have siblings or are only children, whether their
parents have a conventional or an open marriage, whether they grow up
in an Ozzie-and-Harriet home or a hippie commune, whether their
conceptions were planned, were accidental, or took place in a test
tube, and whether they have two parents of the same sex or one of
each.

Even growing up without a father in the house, which does correlate
with troubles such as dropping out of school, remaining idle, and
having babies while a teenager, may not cause the troubles directly.
Children with experiences that should make up for the missing father,
such as having a stepfather, a live-in grandmother, or frequent
contact with the birth father, are no better off. The number of years
that the father was in the house before leaving makes no difference.
And children whose fathers died do not have the poor outcomes of
children whose fathers walked out or were never there. The absence of
a father may not be a cause of adolescent problems but a correlate of
the true causes, which may include poverty, neighborhoods with lots of
unattached men (who live in de facto polygyny and hence compete
violently for status), frequent moves (which force children to start
from the bottom of the pecking order in new peer groups), and genes
that make both fathers and children more impulsive and quarrelsome.

The 1990s was the Decade of the Brain and the decade in which parents
were told they were in charge of their babies' brains. The first three
years of life was described as a critical window of opportunity in
which the child's brain had to be constantly stimulated to keep it
growing properly. Parents of late-talking children were blamed for not
blanketing them in enough verbiage; the ills of the inner city were
blamed on children's having to stare at empty walls. Bill and Hillary
Clinton convened a conference at the White House to learn about the
research, at which Mrs. Clinton said that the experiences of the first
three years "can determine whether children will grow up to be
peaceful or violent citizens, focused or undisciplined workers,
attentive or detached parents themselves." The governors of Georgia
and Missouri asked their legislators for millions of dollars to issue
every new mother with a Mozart CD. (They had confused experiments on
infant brain development with experiments-since discredited-alleging
that adults benefit from listening to a few minutes of Mozart.) The
pediatrician and childcare guru T. Berry Brazelton had the most
hopeful suggestion of all: that nurturance during the first three
years will protect children from the lure of tobacco when they become
adolescents.

In his book The Myth of the First Three Years, the cognitive
neuroscience expert Jon Bruer showed that there was no science behind
these astonishing claims. No psychologist has ever documented a
critical period for cognitive or language development that ends at
three. And though depriving an animal of stimulation (by sewing an eye
shut or keeping it in a barren cage) may hurt its brain growth, there
is no evidence that providing extra stimulation (beyond what the
organism would encounter in its normal habitat) enhances its brain
growth.

So nothing in the research on family environments contradicts the
behavioral geneticists' Second Law, which says that growing up in a
particular family has little or no systematic effect on one's
intellect and personality. And this leaves us with a maddening puzzle.
No, it's not all in the genes; around half the variation in
personality, intelligence, and behavior comes from something in the
environment. But whatever that something is, it cannot be shared by
two children growing up in the same home with the same parents. And
that rules out all the obvious somethings. What is the elusive Mister
Jones factor?

The Blank Slate
The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Steven Pinker
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670031518/qid=1086630363/
http://alumweb.mit.edu/opendoor/200205/pinker.shtml

--------------------------------------------

PARENTS

In 1960 a graduate student at Harvard received a letter from George A.
Miller, head of the department of psychology, dismissing her from the
Ph.D. program because she was not up to the mark. Remember that name.
Much later, stuck at home with chronic health problems, Judith Rich
Harris took up writing psychology textbooks, books in which she
faithfully relayed the dominant paradigm of psychology-that
personality and much else was acquired from the environment. Then, 35
years after leaving Harvard, as an unemployed grandmother, having
happily escaped academic indoctrination, she sat down and wrote an
article, which she submitted to the prestigious Psychological Review.
It was published to sensational acclaim. She was deluged with
inquiries as to who she was. In 1997, on the strength of the article
alone, she was given one of the top awards in psychology: the George
A. Miller award.

The opening words of Harris's article were:

Do parents have any important long-term effects on the development of
their child's personality? This article examines the evidence and
concludes that the answer is no.

From about 1950 onward psychologists had studied what they called the
socialization of children. Although they were initially disappointed
to find few clear-cut correlations between parenting style and a
child's personality, they clung to the behaviorist assumption that
parents were training their children's characters by reward and
punishment, and the Freudian assumption that many people's
psychological problems had been created by their parents. This
assumption became so automatic that to this day no biography is
complete without a passing reference to the parental causes of the
subject's quirks. ("It is probable that this wrenching separation from
his mother was one of the prime sources of his mental instability,"
says a recent author, referring to Isaac Newton.)

To be fair, socialization theory was more than an assumption. It did
produce evidence, reams of it, all showing that children end up like
their parents. Abusive parents produce abusive children, neurotic
parents produce neurotic children, phlegmatic parents produce
phlegmatic children, bookish parents produce bookish children, and so
on.

All this proves precisely nothing, said Harris. Of course, children
resemble their parents: they share many of the same genes. Once the
studies of twins raised apart started coming out, proving dramatically
high heritability for personality, you could no longer ignore the
possibility that parents had put their children's character in place
at the moment of conception, not during the long years of childhood.
The similarity between parents and children could be nature, not
nurture. Indeed, given that the twin studies could find almost no
effect of shared envkonment on personality, the genetic hypothesis
should actually be the null hypothesis: the burden of proof was on
nurture. If a socialization study did not control for genes, it proved
nothing at all. Yet socialization researchers went on year after year
publishing these correlations without even paying lip service to the
alternative genetic theory.

It was true that socialization theorists used another argument as
well: that different parenting styles coincide with different
children's personalities. A calm home contains happy children;
children who are hugged a lot are nice; children who are beaten a lot
are hostile; and so on. But this could be confusing cause and effect.
You could just as plausibly argue that happy children make a calm
home; children who are nice get hugged a lot; children who are hostile
get beaten a lot. Old joke: Johnny comes from a broken home; I'm not
surprised-Johnny could break any home. Sociologists are fond of saying
that a good relationship with parents "has a protective effect" in
keeping children off drugs. They are much less fond of saying that
kids who do drugs do not get on with their parents.

The correlation of good parenting with certain personalities is
worthless as proof that parents shape personality, because correlation
cannot distinguish cause from effect. According to Harris, it is
patent that socialization is not something parents do to children; it
is something children do to themselves. There is increasing evidence
that what socialization theorists have assumed were parent-to-child
effects are often actually child-to-parent effects. Parents treat
their children very differently according to the personalities of the
children.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the troubled matter of gender.
Parents who have children of different sexes will know that they treat
these children differently. Such parents do not have to be told about
the experiments in which adults rough-and-tumbled baby girls disguised
in blue and cuddled baby boys disguised in pink. But most such parents
will also hotly protest that the chief reason they treat their boys
differendy from their girls is because the boys and girls are
different. They fill the boy's cupboard with dinosaurs and swords, and
the girl's with dolls and dresses, because they know this is the way
to please each child. That is what the children keep asking for when
in a shop. Parents may reinforce nature with nurture, but they do not
create the difference. They do not force gender stereotypes down
unwilling throats; they react to preexisting prejudices. Those
prejudices are not in one sense innate-there is no "doll gene"-but
dolls and many other toys are designed to appeal to predisposing
prejudices, just as food is designed to appeal to human tastes.
Besides, the parental reaction itself is just as likely to be innate:
parents could be genetically predisposed to perpetuate rather than
fight gender stereotypes.

Once again, evidence for nurture is not evidence against nature, nor
is the converse true. I just listened to a radio program about whether
boys were better at soccer than girls or whether their parents just
pushed them that way. The proponents of each view seemed to agree
implicitly that their explanations were mutually exclusive. Nobody
even suggested that both could be true at the same time.

Criminal parents produce criminal children-yes, but not if they adopt
the children. In a large study in Denmark, being adopted from an
honest family into an honest family produced a child with a 13.5
percent probability of getting into trouble with the law; that figure
increased only marginally, to 14.7 percent, if the adopting family
included criminals. Being adopted from criminal parents to an honest
family, however, caused the probability to jump to 20 percent. Where
both adopting and biological parents were criminals, the rate was even
higher-24.5 percent. Genetic factors are predisposing the way people
react to "crimogenic" environments.

Likewise, the children of divorced parents are more likely to divorce-
yes, but only if they are biological children. Children whose adoptive
parents divorce show no such tendency to follow suit. Twin studies
reveal no role at all for the family environment in divorce. A
fraternal twin has a 30 percent probability of getting divorced if his
or her twin gets divorced, about the same correlation as with a
parent. An identical twin has a 45 percent probability of divorce if
his twin gets divorced. About half your probability of divorce is in
the genes; the rest is circumstance.

Rarely has an emperor seemed so naked as after Harris was finished
with socialization theory. None of this will come as a surprise to
people who have more than one child. Parenting is a revelation to most
people. Having assumed you would now be the chief coach and sculptor
of a human personality, you find yourself reduced to the role of
little more than a helpless spectator ***** chauffeur. Children
compartmentalize their lives. Learning is not a backpack they carry
from one environment to another; it is specific to the context. This
is not a license for parents to make their children unhappy-making
another person suffer is wrong, whether it alters the person's
personality or not. In the words of Sandra Scarr, the veteran champion
of the idea that people pick the environments to suit their
characters, "Parents' most important job, therefore, is to provide
support and opportunities, not to try to shape children's enduring
characteristics." Truly terrible parenting can still warp somebody's
personality. But it seems likely that (I repeat) parenting is like
vitamin C; as long as it is adequate, a little bit more or less has no
discernible long-term effect.

Harris got brickbats as well as bouquets. In a long response, the
authors of which included the doyenne of socialization theory, Eleanor
Maccoby, her critics surveyed studies supporting the notion that
parents do after all affect personality. They conceded that early
socialization theorists had exaggerated parental determinism, that
twin studies needed to be considered, and that a parent's behavior is
caused as much by the child's behavior as vice versa. They emphasized
that a criminal personality, even if partly genetic, is much more
likely to be expressed in a criminal environment. And they drew
attention to a series of studies demonstrating how drastically bad
parenting could permanently affect a child. Romanian orphans adopted
after the age of six months, for example, retain high levels of the
stress hormone cortisol throughout their lives.

They also drew attention to the work of Stephen Suomi on rhesus
monkeys. Suomi was a student of Harry Harlow who went on to build his
own monkey laboratory at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland
to continue Harlow's investigation of mother love. Suomi first
selectively bred monkeys to be high-strung. He then cross-fostered
young monkeys to adoptive mothers for the first six months of their
lives and studied their temperament and social life. A genetically
nervous baby reared by a genetically nervous foster mother turned into
a socially incompetent adult, vulnerable to stress and itself a bad
parent. But the same genetically jittery infant reared by a calm
foster mother-a "supermom"-became quite normal, even rather good at
rising to the top of the social hierarchy by making friends (sorry:
"recruiting social support") and evading stress. Despite its
genetically nervous nature, such a monkey could become a calm and
competent mother. Mothering style, in other words, is copied from the
parent rather than inherited.

Suomi's colleagues have since gone on to study the serotonin
transporter gene in monkeys. One version of the gene produces a
powerful and long-lasting reaction to maternal deprivation, whereas
the other version of the gene is immune to maternal deprivation. Since
this gene also varies in human beings and the variation correlates
with personality differences, this is a big finding. Translated into
human terms it would imply that some children can be virtually
orphaned and are none the worse for it; others need to be very well
nurtured by their parents to turn out normal-the difference lies in
the genes. Did we ever expect anything else?

By citing Suomi's studies, Harris's critics show that they have
already taken her lessons to heart: they are looking for how parents
react to a child's innate personality and how parents respond to
genes. In their own words, they no longer see parents as "molding or
determining" children. It is the nurturists who are calling for
moderation now. Gone is the triumphalism of Freud, Skinner, and
Watson. (Remember this? "Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed,
and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to
take any one of them at random and train him to become any type of
specialist I might select-doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and
yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants,
tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors.") Moral:
Being a good parent still matters.

- MORAL 3: PEERS

Harris's demolition of parental determinism is accompanied by the
construction of an alternative theory. She believes that the
environment, as well as the genome, has an enormous influence on the
personality of a child, but mainly through the child's peer group.
Children do not see themselves as apprentice adults. They are trying
to be good at being children, which means finding a niche within
groups of peers-conforming, but also differentiating themselves;
competing, but also collaborating. They get their language and their
accents largely from their peers, not their parents. Harris, like the
anthropologist Sarah Hrdy, believes that ancestral human beings reared
their children in groups, with women engaged in what zoologists call
cooperative breeding. The natural habitat of the child was therefore a
mixed nursery of children of all ages-almost certainly self-segregated
by sex for much of the time. It is here, not in the nuclear family or
the relation with parents, that we should look for the environmental
causes of personality.

Most people think of peer pressure as pushing the young toward
conformity. Seen from the. balcony of middle age, teenagers seem
obsessed with uniformity. Whether it be baggy many-pocketed trousers,
giant sneakers, bare midriffs, or baseball caps worn backward,
teenagers prostrate themselves before the tyrant of fashion in the
most craven way. Eccentrics are mocked; nonconformists are ostracized.
The code must be obeyed.

Conformity is indeed a feature of human society, at all ages. The more
rivalry there is between groups, the more people will conform to the
norms of their own group. But there is something else going on beneath
the surface. Under the superficial conformity in tribal costumes lies
an almost frantic search for individual differentiation. Examine any
group of young people, and you will find each playing a consistently
different role: a tough, a wit, a brain, a leader, a schemer, a
beauty. These roles are created, of course, by nature via nurture.
Each child soon realizes what he or she is good at and bad at-compared
with the others in the group. The child then trains for that role and
not for others, acting in character, developing still further the
talent he has and neglecting the talent that is lacking. The tough
gets tougher, the wit gets funnier, and so on. When a child
specializes in a chosen role, that role becomes what he is good at.
According to Harris this tendency to differentiate first emerges at
about the age of eight. Until that point, if a group of children asked
"Who is the toughest boy here?" all will jump up crying "Me!" After
that age, they will start to say "Him."

This is true within families as well as in school classes and street
gangs. The evolutionary psychologist Frank Sulloway sees each child
within the family as selecting a vacant niche. If the eldest child is
responsible and cautious, the second child will often become
rebellious and carefree. Small differences in innate character are
exaggerated by practice, not ironed out. This happens even among
identical twins. If one twin is more extroverted than the other, they
will gradually exaggerate this difference. Indeed, with regard to
extroversion psychologists find less correlation between fraternal
twins than between siblings of different ages: the very closeness in
age causes these twins to exaggerate their differences in personality.
They are less alike than they would be if they were two years apart.
This is also true of other measures of personality, and it seems to
indicate a tendency for human beings to differentiate themselves from
their closest companions by building on their innate propensities. If
others are practical, then it pays to be cerebral.

I call this the Asterix theory of human personality. In Goscinny and
Uderzo's cartoons about a defiant Gaulish village resisting the might
of the Roman empire, there is a very neatly drawn division of labor.
The village contains a strong man (Obelix), a chief (Vitalstatistix),
a druid (Getafix), a bard (Cacophonix), a blacksmith (Fulliautomatix),
a fishmonger (Unhygienix), and a man with bright ideas (Asterix). The
harmony of the village owes something to the fact that each man
respects the others' talents-with the exception of Cacophonix, the
bard, whose songs are universally dreaded.

The first person to draw attention to this human tendency to
specialize was probably Plato, but it was the economist Adam Smith who
put the idea into circulation, and it was upon this observation that
Smith built his theory of the division of labor-that the secret of
human economic productivity is to divide labor among specialists and
exchange the results. Smith thought that human beings were unusual
among animals in this respect. Other animals are generalists doing
everything for themselves. Though rabbits live in social groups, there
is no specialization of function among them. No human being is truly a
jack-of-all-trades in the same way. Said Smith:

In almost every other race of animals, each individual, when it is
grown up to maturity, is entirely independent, and in its natural
state has occasion for the assistance of no other living creature....
Each animal is still obliged to support and defend itself, separately
and independently, and derives no sort of advantage from that variety
of talents with which nature has distinguished its fellows.

But as Smith quickly went on to point out, specialization is useless
without exchange.

Man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it
is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will
be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his
favour, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him
what he requires of them. ... It is not from the benevolence of the
butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from
their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their
humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own
necessities but of their own advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses
to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens."

In this, Smith was supported by Emile Durkheim, who considered the
division of labor not just the source of social harmony but the
foundation of the moral order as well:

But if the division of labour produces solidarity, it is not only
because it makes each individual an exchangist, as the economists say;
it is because it creates among men an entire system of rights and
duties which link them together in a durable way.

I am intrigued by a coincidence: human adults are specialists, and
human adolescents seem to have a natural tendency to differentiate
themselves. Could it be that these two facts are connected? In Smith's
world, your adult specialty is a matter of chance and opportunity. You
inherit the family business, perhaps, or you answer a want ad. You may
be lucky and find a job that suits your temperament and talent, but
most people just accept that they must learn to do the job they have.
The role they played in an adolescent gang-as clown, raconteur,
leader, tough-is long forgotten. Butchers, bakers, and candlestick
makers are made, not born. Or as Smith put it, "The difference between
the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a street
porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from
habit, custom and education."

But human minds were designed for the Pleistocene savanna, not the
urban jungle. And in that much more egalitarian world, where the same
opportunities were open to all, talent may have determined your job.
Imagine a band of hunter-gatherers. In the gang of youngsters playing
around the camp fire are four adolescents. Og has just begun to notice
that he has leadership qualities-he seems to be respected when he
suggests a new game. Iz, on the other hand, has noticed that she can
make the others laugh when she tells a story. Ob is hopeless with
words, but when it comes to making a bark-strip net to catch rabbits
he seems to have a natural talent. Ik, by contrast, is already a
superb naturalist and the others are beginning to trust her to
identify plants and animals. Over the next few years, each individual
reinforces nature with nurture, specializing in one peculiar talent
until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. By the time they reach
adulthood, Og no longer relies on natural talent for leadership; he
has learned it as a trade. Iz has practiced the role of tribal bard so
well it is second nature. Ob is even worse at making conversation, but
he can now craft almost any tool. And Ik is a guru of lore and
science.

The original genetic differences in talent may be very slight indeed.
Practice has done the rest. But that practice may itself depend upon a
sort of instinct. It is, I suggest, an instinct peculiar to human
beings, deposited in the adolescent human brain by natural selection
over tens of thousands of years, and it simply whispers in the ear of
the juvenile: Enjoy doing what you are good at; dislike doing what you
are bad at. Children seem to have this rule firmly in mind at all
times. I am suggesting that the appetite for nurturing a talent might
itself be an instinct. Having certain genes gives you certain
appetites; finding yourself better at something than your peers
sharpens your appetite for that thing; practice makes perfect, and
soon you have carved yourself a niche within the tribe as a
specialist. Nurture reinforces nature.

Is musical or athletic ability nature or nurture? It is both, of
course. Endless hours of practice are what it takes to play tennis or
the violin well, but the people who have an appetite for endless hours
of practice are the ones with a slight aptitude and an appetite for
practice. I recently had a conversation with the parents of a tennis
prodigy. Had she always been good at tennis? Not especially, but she
was always eager to play, determined to join her elder siblings and
badgering her parents for tennis lessons.

Moral: Individuality is a product of aptitude reinforced by appetite.

NATURE VIA NURTURE - genes, experience, and what makes us human
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060006781/

-----------------------------------

A Review of Judith Harris's The Nurture Assumption

It is believed by most developmental psychologists, says Judith
Harris, that parents have great influence on how their children turn
out.
Though Harris, a writer of textbooks on child development, has gone
along with the "nurture assumption" of academic psychologists doing
research on child development, she has had second thoughts about the
assumption. The nurture assumption, she says bluntly, is unwarranted,
because none of the research has supported it.

Harris takes these psychologists to task because of the way they have
over the years reported their findings from their studies of parent-
child interaction. These studies, she points out, look only at the
effects parents have on children, but not at the effects that children
have on parents. A big mistake in research design, she believes.
Indeed, her main concern is with the constant error in research design
in studies of child development.

As a psychologist she understands, and is sympathetic with, the plight
of the people who teach psychology in universities. She knows they are
under pressure to do research and publish their findings, on peril of
being dismissed before becoming tenured. To avoid this downturn of
their academic careers they have no choice but to massage their
statistical findings (all academic psychologists are statisticians)
until they get what is called in the trade a "significant" index of
correlation or variation between what children and their parent do. In
most of these studies the amount of correlation, or in some studies
variation, that is claimed to be statistically significant, is of
little or no significance in the traditional usage of the word
'significance.' Academicians, she admits, are between a rock and a
hard place until they get tenure. After that they can be honest, but
then most stop doing research.

In the main, says Harris, children do not copy their parents. If they
copy anybody it is their peers so that they can fit in with their
group.

Children are just as good as adults in separating social contexts.
They know that what works with their parents, will rarely work with
their peers, and that what works with their peers, only rarely will
work with their parents. By separating social contexts they can
adjust what they say and do accordingly. What children learn from
their parents, may or may not be useful with their peers, usually not.
And what they learn from their peers, may or may not be useful with
their parents, again usually not.

Harris is careful to define the form and function of social groups,
realizing, as she clearly does, the enormous complexity of group
interactions. She concludes that the individual's peer groups have a
more powerful and long standing influence on the child's speech and
action than the individual's parents. There is, she says, much
socialization of children taking place in peer groups, socialization
being the process that establishes the role each member of a peer
group will play as he or she interacts with other members.
Furthermore, when role learning in one's peer group conflicts with
role learning in the family, the peer group is much more likely to win
in role casting. The roles a child learns at home, Harris believes,
are usually of little use at school and in the community.

As Harris asserts, genetics has much to say about how children of one
kind of temperament will influence, and be influenced by, peers or
parents of differing temperament. And it is temperament theory that
has been largely ignored by psychologists who study child dev