Blueprint for behavior Book says parents just play genetic part in personality

By Kim Painter and Nanci Hellmich
Copyright 1998 USA Today
Augsut 24, 1998


Imagine getting no blame and no credit for the child you raise.

It won't be your fault if the kid becomes a serial killer.

But you won't get to brag if she wins a Nobel Prize.

That's the idea behind a controversial book arriving in stores that says parents can quit worrying about shaping a child's personality. The Nurture Assumption (The Free Press, $ 26) says parental influence ends at conception, when a child inherits a parent's tendency to smoke or get depressed or be kind. After that, all the careful parenting in the world -- the bedtime hugs and storybooks, the timeouts and groundings -- don't make a whit of difference in the kind of people children become, author Judith Rich Harris says.

In Harris' world, peers, not parents, rule.

Parents "don't have any important long-term effects on the development of their child's personality," writes Harris, who bases her findings on radical new interpretations of existing studies. The former textbook author has no doctorate and no academic affiliation, but her research, first published in a scholarly journal, just won an award from the American Psychological Association.

And it's launching the hottest debate over nature and nurture in years.

Her thesis: Yes, personality is determined half by genes and half by environment, just as many researchers say. But the environment that matters isn't the home; it's the day-care center, the schoolyard and the neighbor's yard, the places where children truly become loners or leaders, winners or wimps.

We no longer hunt and gather in groups, but we are socialized in them, she says.

Goodbye, toxic parents; hello, toxic peers?

Not so fast, says a chorus of critics, some of whom are calling Harris' ideas downright dangerous. Many studies have found that parents influence children's characters, they say. Just this weekend researchers reported to the American Sociological Association that children whose dads took an active parenting role had fewer behavioral problems.

"Of course, no one would say that parents are wholly responsible for the way their children turn out," says British child-care expert Penelope Leach. "But to be saying that parents have no contribution -- it doesn't matter how you treat your kid -- seems patently ridiculous."

Attachment to adults in infancy and early childhood is central to personality development, Leach says. And, she says, "it's a dangerous point of view to suggest that it will all come out in the playground -- that there is not much point in trying to listen to children, to love them, to hug them, to build mutual respect and understanding. I don't like the idea of telling parents they don't matter."

Eileen Shiff, a child development education teacher at Paradise Valley Community College in Phoenix, is "incensed." She calls the Harris book an "attention getter" ungrounded in research.

"The book is going to sell big time because it's absolution for parents who are having trouble with their kids. It's 'don't blame me, blame their friends,' " she says.

Even Temple University psychologist Frank Farley, who heads the APA division that granted Harris' award -- an award for integrating various aspects of psychology -- calls her conclusion "premature and potentially dangerous." If her book sells well, Farley says, "many parents may say, 'We can't influence them anyway, so why try?' "

Of course, if Harris were proved right, a lot of psychologists and parenting experts might find themselves unemployed.

And Harris, who has two children, emphasizes the ways in which her ideas could help guilt-ridden parents.

Experts who have put parenting at the center of child development have "made you feel guilty if you don't love all your children equally, though it's not your fault if nature made some kids more lovable than others," she tells parents in her book. "They've made you feel guilty if you don't give them enough quality time, though your kids seem to prefer to spend their quality time with their friends. . . . They've made you feel guilty if you hit your child even though big hominids have been hitting little ones for millions of years. Worst of all, they've made you feel guilty if anything goes wrong with your child. It's easy to blame parents for everything: They're sitting ducks. Fair game ever since Freud lit his first cigar."

Harris doesn't say parents are totally immaterial. A child's happiness and well-being are in their hands for 18 years or more, she says. And parents help shape a child's skills; they can even help pick his peers. She concedes that children severely neglected or abused by parents can be too "brain-damaged" to benefit from group socialization.

But outside the home, the typical child can shuck what he learns from parents "as easily as the dorky sweater their mother made them wear," she says. It's out among their peers that kids don the personas of neighborhood bullies, class clowns or class brains, and those are the traits that stick, Harris says.

Harris, who has a chronic autoimmune disease and declined interviews because of illness, does have some impressive supporters.

Harris' claim is "radical," says Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "But I think the evidence is there that parents don't really matter. And there is evidence -- not proven -- that the peer group supplies 50% of personality.

"She is trying to explain a set of facts she didn't discover herself but have come in the last decade, and people pretend they don't exist because they're so shocking."

Many studies, he says, have found no parental effect on personality once genes are taken into account.

Harris says studies of adopted children and twins raised apart show a stunning lack of linkage between children and parents who don't happen to share the same genes: When the genetic connection is missing, she says, children simply don't grow up to resemble the people who raised them. One of the studies she draws on is the famous Minnesota study of twins separated in infancy and reared apart.

David Lykken, a University of Minnesota professor of psychology who worked on the twin study, says Harris' take on that research "is very accurate, and the conclusions she draws are very accurate." He says Harris' work should "make hundreds of developmental psychologists nervous."

He says Harris takes particularly stinging aim at the widely accepted idea that almost all crucial development in personality and intellect is set in motion in the first three years of life, when, common sense tells us, parents have more sway than peers.

"Show us the clear-cut evidence that adult personality is shaped and formed in the first years of life. They (psychologists) can't do it. It doesn't exist. Most of the studies have confounded genetics and environment. They've studied people reared by their own biological parents."

Harris also cites other kinds of studies. She says kids from loving homes in bad neighborhoods -- with troublemaking peers -- are more likely to land in jail, get pregnant or drop out of school than kids from crummy homes in great neighborhoods.

And she suggests that we often mistake chickens for eggs: Maybe nice children are well-treated by parents because they are nice children, not the other way around.

Others have reached very different conclusions from the research Harris uses to build her case. But more important, critics say, are the truckloads of other research that strongly suggest parents have a tremendous, lasting influence on children.

"She's highly selective in her so-called research and, in my opinion, has no developmental perspective," says Michael Myerhoff, a developmental psychologist and director of the Education for Parenthood Information Center in Lindenhurst, Ill.

"She reached the conclusion she reached by ignoring a tremendous amount of evidence," Purdue University psychologist Theodore Wachs says.

For many critics, Harris' position is just too pat.

"Anyone with two children can see that a small child learns a heck of a lot from the older children, but to try to exclude other ways of learning, like learning from parents, is absurd," says pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton, author of several best-selling child-development books.

Harris dismisses the Brazeltons of the world. "Don't worry about what the advice-givers tell you," she tells parents. "Love your kids because kids are lovable, not because you think they need it. Enjoy them. . . . They are not yours to perfect or ruin."

While Harris' ideas may go too far, they do invite an overdue discussion, says Betty Holcolm, a senior editor at Working Mother magazine and author of Not Guilty! The Good News About Working Mothers (Scribner, $ 25). "Maybe we can get people to think more about the quality of experiences children have outside the home. I think historically we've discounted those experiences because we've overcounted the influence parents have."

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