(Originally written summer 2006 for a now-defunct website. I'd've written it a bit differently now, as a divorced father of two sons. But I think it holds up well, and my parenting experience strengthens, not weakens, my belief in the book's premises.)
" 3. The advantage of twins is…
a. Having a spare in case one blows out.
b. Having both a control and experimental group to test out your theories on nature versus nurturing, love versus neglect and human parents versus wolf pack.
c. Fooling your neighbors into thinking you’ve mastered the science of teleporting children across the room.”
- from ‘Parental Standardized Aptitude Test’, by Francesco Marciuliano
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Judith Rich Harris’s the Nurture Assumption – a book about why people end up with the personalities they end up with – may well be, in my opinion, the single most brilliant work of scientific argument I’ve ever read. I mean brilliant in the sense of “original”, of “superbly constructed”, of “fun to read”, and, especially, of “persuasive”.
Non-fiction books are written all the time in the hopes of convincing readers to abandon old beliefs on an issue and adopt new ones. People tend to like and feel invested in their beliefs, though, so I think it’s far more common for people (me included) to read books that strengthen, and perhaps slightly alter, the opinions they already have. This is more true the more knowledgeable a reader is about the topic, and the better able they are to support and defend their prior positions.
When I first read the Nurture Assumption in early 2002, I had long since earned a minor in Psychology at college, and had continued to read in the field for years since. I had strong (and normal) beliefs about the ways that a young human does or does not learn to be kind, smart, confident, honest, happy, etc; beliefs that I considered well-informed.
Those beliefs mattered to me, too. I’ve vaguely intended at least since I was eight to be a father, though only recently have those plans started to edge towards the real world [ed: achieved that very October]; and I’ve pretty much intended all along to be a terrific one. Judith Rich Harris’s book, then, burst onto my scene and explained to me – however charmingly – the myriad ways in which my intentions were at least partly deluded. Time and again I would form an objection; time and again her very next chapter would tear the objection into little pieces, forcing me to think of a new one, equally short-lived.
Thus her book achieved a rare thing: it told me I was wrong about something important, and made me respond with “I’ll take it under consideration”. I tentatively started to examine the world around me using her perspective, and kept finding it convincing. When I re-read the book years later, it was just as compelling, but this time for its beautiful statement of what, in most cases, have come to seem clear truths. This didn’t happen just to me, either; it happened to my Mom, who has after all been a parent, and it happened to quite a few leading psychologists who’d actually _published_ theories that Harris dismembered. And so I come to recommend this book and its arguments to you, whether you intend at first to approve of them or not.
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So how _do_ people achieve their distinct and individual adult personalities? I will pretend for a moment, as Harris can’t afford to, that you’re open to a direct statement of it, right from the beginning. The scientific evidence – originally and most persuasively from studies of identical twins reared apart and from studies of adopted children – has long made it clear that, within a loosely shared culture (e.g., the United States), personalities vary 50% due to genes and 50% due to environment. Harris reviews this evidence carefully and well (although those of you allergic to evidence of the importance of genes should simply spend some time around nurseries: I think you’ll see that some kids are happier, more curious, crabbier, louder, grabbier or huggier than others from the very beginning of life outside the womb).
What Harris demonstrates for the first time is that the 50% based on environment is mostly caused by the child’s peers … particularly (though not only) when the child is between the ages of 6 and 12.
Parents-or-guardians are important, of course. Children raised malnourished, or hidden away, or abused in medically-threatening ways, will of course be especially likely to turn out deformed or anti-social. Harris also allows that extemely charismatic, extremely high-effort-making parents may have unusual ability to shape their children. A gifted home-schooler might, for example; or a parent who becomes a mentor, from his-or-her own home, to an entire neighborhood of children. Furthermore, parents do have some control (though far from perfect control) on how a child behaves _when the parent is present_. Plus again the parent has some control over whether the child grows up liking the parent, feeling loved by the parent. All of which is important, in its place.
But within the range of normal variation, how a parent treats a child has _almost zero long-run effect_ on the personality of their children. (Nor, indeed, does birth-order, as Harris takes a fiercely-argued chapter and appendix to establish.)
I didn’t believe it at first either! Remember that. There are thousands of studies that seem to prove otherwise, and besides, it’s just common sense that kids are shaped by their parents. Look at all the time they spend at home! Look at all the behavioral models the parents display! Look how often kids end up a whole lot like their parents: is that really due only to genes?
Of course it’s not, Harris agrees, but she provides other explanations that better fit the evidence. Those thousands of studies, she argues with passion and depth (and statistical appendices for the interested), are universally victim to any of several flaws. As for the “common sense” importance of parents, it’s obvious in our culture and time, but _not_ to all humans generally. It is, furthermore, a “common sense” based heavily in forgetting what it’s like to be a child … which, Dr. Seuss or Jim Henson or Robert Cormier aside, most people do.
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The identical-twins-reared apart studies have their fun aspects, true stories from scientific journals that are worthy of a National Enquirer. “There was the story of the two Jims: both bit their nails, enjoyed woodworking, drove the same model Chevrolet, smoked Salems, and drank Miller Lite; they named their sons James Alan and James Allan… There was the story of Jack Yufe and Oskar Stohr, one reared in Trinidad by his Jewish father, the other in Germany by his Catholic grandmother. When reunited, they were both wearing rectangular wire-frame glasses, short mustaches, and blue two-pocket shirts with epaulets; both were in the habit of reading magazines back-to-front and flushing toilets before using them; both liked to startle people by sneezing in elevators. And there was the story of Amy and Beth, adopted into different homes: Amy a rejected child, Beth doted upon. Both girls suffered from the same unusual combination of cognitive and personality deficits”.
Not that there’s a sneezing-in-elevators gene – we imagine these things are semi-random outcomes of similar clusters of personality traits – but the numbers back up a nonetheless strong correlation between such identical twins. Enough, as I said, to give genetics about half the credit for person-to-person variation.
The evidence on adoptive children – collected from studies with titles ranging from the blandly neutral “Reared-together siblings” to “Unexpected results” – is also worth mentioning even in a review, I think. “Behavioral geneticists looked at a wide variety of personality traits … the results were about the same for all of them. The data showed that growing up in the same home, being reared by the same parents, had little or no effect on the adult personalities of siblings … For some psychological characteristics, notably intelligence, there is evidence of a transient [short-term] effect of the home environment during childhood: the IQ scores of pre-adolescent adoptive siblings show a modest correlation. But by late adolescence all non-genetic resemblances have faded away. For IQ as for personality, the correlation between adult adoptees reared in the same home hovers around zero”.
That’s numbers, trends. We need to insert some story, to match the story told by parenting manuals, in which kids learn to talk, to draw, to eat certain foods, to read or not read books, from their parents. A few particular counter-examples, mostly covered by Harris, come quickly to mind:
Children of immigrants. On the Simpsons, Lisa and Milhaus discover that the Italian pizza chef was raised in Springfield and speaks no Italian: “I only speak-uh, a-what-choo-call, uh-Broken Eng-ulish. Uh-like-uh my father”. But it’s funny because it’s absurd: when parents speak the wrong language, the child learns to “code-switch”. Harris’s first of several examples: “Researchers studied a seven-year-old boy – I’ll call him Joseph – who moved with his parents from Poland to rural Missouri. In school, Joseph listened quietly for several months, watching the other children for clues as to what the teacher was saying. With neighborhood friends he was more willing to make mistakes and he started practicing his English with them almost immediately. At first Joseph’s speech sounded like that of a toddler – ‘I today school’ – but within a few months he was speaking serviceable English, and after two years he was using it like a native, with hardly a trace of an accent. The accent eventually went away entirely, though he continued to speak Polish at home”.
(Immigrants who move later in childhood show effects based on peer-group language, even if the parents’ language never changes: e.g., a man who moved from France to the U.S. at the age of 12, who “does arithmetic in French, his calculus in English”.)
Deaf children of non-deaf people. Deaf children in organized deaf communities, similarly, learn sign language as fluently as normal children learn normal languages, although their parents cannot give any help. Deaf children without organized deaf communities will create their own pidgin sign languages, again free from adult interference.
Classic upper-class British boarding-school children. For hundreds of years, the leading British male citizens were (as upper-class Americans increasingly are) reared primarily by immigrant nannies, then sent away to boarding schools at age five – then would grow up into spitting images of their dads. This makes no sense if it's the actions of mom and dad that dictate their personality – they’d grow up like working-class immigrant nannies, surely?
Children whose parents try to raise them without sex-role expectations, television, or whatnot. To quote another review of this book, “A friend of mine swore she would raise ‘Disney-free’ children and refused to give her children any Disney products, take them to Disney movies, or expose them in any way to anything Disney. Despite my friend's earnest efforts, her daughter, at age four, was obsessed with the Disney Pocahontas”. I believe Harris gives the example – though I’ve heard so many like it, and I can’t locate it in the book right now – of a female friend who’s a doctor, yet overheard her daughter playing house and insisting “Girls can’t be doctors!”.
In general, speaking as someone who hates gender roles, I’ve known a sad number of parents who tried very hard to leave gender expectations open, yet ended up with sons wanting toy guns and girls wanting frilly dolls. Even in homes where the peaceful liberal daddy worked from home, while the mommy went out and earned the bigger income.
Siblings who grew up in the same darn house, with the same parents, a couple years apart, even sharing half their genes, and not ending up alike at all. Harris admits that one of her initial prompts to think about this subject came when she was complaining, decades ago, about how her second teenage daughter was rebellious and angry at her, when her first daughter had been so sweet. “Do you treat them both the same?”, she was asked – and the answer was no, of course not, because the kids were two different people. Do you treat everyone you care about the same: give them the same gifts, reassure them in the same ways, talk about the same things, keep in touch by identical schedules? You do? Man, I bet they really appreciate that. Weirdo.
In punishment for daring to discuss her personal experiences, Harris has taken mean-spirited criticism for writing “out of the author’s own ego … 'If one of the girls is not acting properly, that’s nothing to do with me'". Me, I believe her when she protests that both of her daughters are now (in different ways) loving and worthwhile adults. If Daughter No.2 was still a source of shame, would Harris go out of her way to mention her in the middle of a scientific argument?
Plus, I hardly need her example to believe that siblings can be very different. My wife Cindy’s the third of three daughters. Her middle sister, though a very nice and likeable person, doesn’t strike me as any more like Cindy than a stranger nabbed off a suburban street would be. Her oldest sister has never chosen to meet me, though she lived a subway ride from Cindy and me for years, but I know that when Linkin Park sing “I’m one step closer to the edge, and I’m about to break” (or the same song’s “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”), Cindy thinks about the months the two of them lived together near Boston.
(An aside. The comment section where I found the "author's own ego" line also included this complaint: “The author suggests early on that instead of child abuse causing children to be unpleasant, perhaps it is the unpleasant children who are abused. This is the most irresponsible thing I have ever read in a parenting book”. That's like criticizing a book about World War II for stating that gay people and Jews were especially likely to be murdered by Hitler. They _were_; it is fair to say so; it neither excuses Hitler nor blames the gays or Jews.
There’s strong evidence that naturally sweet-tempered and good-looking kids aren't usually the ones who get abused. This makes sense, if you’ve ever dealt much with both kinds of kids, and noted which you’ve felt the secret urge to throttle. Harris takes a risk in saying so, sure, but she’s extremely clear that abusing mean ugly shrieky kids is still wrong.)
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Harris didn’t form her brand new theory right away. She was, for one thing, a professional author of psychology textbooks: it had been her job to write, under her own name, about how the choice of toilet-training technique (to pick a favorite topic of my Childhood Development professor) shapes a child’s entire future. True, the facts said that parents contributed half the child’s adult personality just by passing on DNA. True, examples like the above made it unlikely that the parents _also_ contributed the other half by how they raised said child. What remained was an explanation of who else, in the environment, was doing the shaping – and why.
As this review is running long, I’ll summarize wildly: kids are shaped by the people they want to be. They don’t want to be grownups. Except for rare aren’t-they-so-cute stories that mom and dad will repackage for ages, kids don’t try to pay (or pretend to pay) the bills. They don’t talk about careers, mull over paint samples, or beg to learn their parents’ filing system. If mom tries to make them eat weird food or wear weird clothes or talk in decades-old slang, the kids will rebel the moment mom isn’t looking, if they have any sense. (It never occurred to me to rebel, until some small but key gestures in high school – buying lunch instead of carrying my big grey steelworkers’ lunchbox, wearing jeans instead of slacks – removed me from the absolute bottom of the school’s social ladder, where even the other losers hadn’t hung out with me.)
Cindy and I will raise our kids on organic vegetarian food, including Morningstar Farms Grillers Prime that taste better than any fast-food burger. Yet no matter how many times the kids watch Babe and Charlotte’s Web, we gotta expect some allowance money to be spent at McDonald’s. That’s because kids want to be like _more popular, slightly older kids_. And those kids? Want to be like the kids a little cooler and older than them. That is what will make their life better. They will find their group (brain, jock, preppie, goth) and their role (leader, follower, jokester), and that, not a weekend in public with the folks, will let them find their way.
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Why do we come in believing in the all-powerful parent, then: one who can be sued if the child does something wrong, one who can be blamed if the child is miserable? Many reasons, some of them recent and faddish, but some due to scientific error. The Nurture Assumption is a superb primer on the scientific method, worth reading for that alone, as Harris investigates all manner of well-intentioned scientific mistakes. But here’s a speedy run-through:
>> The influence of genes often looks just like like the influence of parenting. E.g., parents who own a lot of books probably like to read; their kids will have a good shot at getting genes that make them like to read; then it looks like the presence of books made the kids want to read. Similarly, parents who listen and communicate well will tend to have children who grow up to listen and communicate well; parents who are short-tempered will tend to have children who grow up to be short-tempered. But only if the child is genetically theirs.
>> If parents have similar values to those of their community – which is the case more often than not – their kids will turn out like other kids in the community. The collective power of a hundred parents is much stronger than the power of any one parent over his or her own child … although the advertisers, the media, the schools, and the economy are still in there playing large roles.
>> Until late adolescence, as I mentioned, the kid’s personality still can show clear effects from how s/he was raised.
>> Psychologists usually only work with one child of a given set of parents. So they're prone to taking the client’s word on what the parents were like. Yet there’s extensive evidence that happy people see other people as happier, that angry people see other people as meaner, that depressed people see other people as less loving, etc. Bruno Bettelheim for many years blamed autism – a purely genetic condition – on unloving mothers, and treated autists accordingly. It never occurred to him, even as the evidence mounted, that it’s hard for a mother to keep hugging and cooing to a child who never responds.
>> We often judge the influence of parents by watching how someone interacts with their parents – and the influence of birth order by watching the oldest, middle, and youngest (or whatever) kids at the family table. Well, sure: of course how you were raised will affect how you act around the people who raised you. And sure, at home, the oldest kid often will be the responsible one, the middle the more rebellious, and suchlike.
At home, Cinderella was a shy, quiet pushover; luckily, the Prince didn’t meet her at home. Even on moral matters like honesty, studies have shown almost no correlation between whether a person will lie or steal when he believes himself unobserved at home, and whether s/he’ll do the same outside the home.
>> Besides all of which, there’s a professional bias: a study which seems to prove that parental behavior X causes trait Y is publishable. A study which finds no correlation is deemed a failure, and will normally be locked away.
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I rate the Nurture Assumption a hyper-enthusiastic five stars based on its central argument. Harris does, also, briefly give recommendations to parents and to teachers. The things she says to teachers (who can sometimes have a lot of power) are mere sketches but quite interesting: I’d love to see someone design an entire book around them.
Her recommendations to parents, I have mixed feelings about. A few, which emerge when she discusses other cultures, make perfect sense to me: thus Cindy and I (when the time comes) will indeed keep our baby’s crib in the bedroom with us for the first year or so. Others I have doubts about, for a simple reason: Harris shouldn’t say stuff like that about my mother.
Seriously: a lot of her advice boils down to ways to keep your kid from being a freaky weird outsider like I was. If you’d be horrified to raise me, then she’s giving good advice. In which case I still am too, by telling you to read her book. Funny how that works, huh?
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