It seems obvious that our parents profoundly shaped our lives. They nurtured us from a wee babe, changed our diapers, taught us our first words, held our hands as we began to walk, read us bedtime stories, reminded us of our manners, to say please, thank you, hello, good bye and how to shake hands, helped us with our homework, and counseled us as we faced the ups and downs of life.
This common sense notion about parenting is being challenged by an unknown textbook author named Judith Rich Harris. She believes that parents influence over the character and culture of their children is actually quite low. Who really matter in our children's lives, she asserts, are their peers.
To challenge the accepted understanding of developmental psychology as Harris does is either utterly foolish or terribly courageous. While I do not have time to present all the details of her arguments outlined in her book titled, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, this morning I will give you a broad outline of her thinking. Even though her ideas are new to the scientific community, she does not stand alone as some Don Quixote jousting with the professors in their ivory towered windmills. She has persuaded enough leaders in this field to be awarded the George A. Miller prize at the American Psychological Association annual meeting this past summer. This is quite ironic because Miller was the very one at Harvard who told her she would never amount to anything as a psychologist when she left Harvard's Ph.D program.
When people step out of line and challenge our conventional thinking, they are usually attacked. With the publication of Harris' book and her talk show circuit tour, she has raised a storm of criticism. Her lack of credentials, her review of the literature via interlibrary loan, and her lack of personal experimental research have been denounced. Some of this is unfair as she does not claim to be a professor or researcher but rather a synthesizer with the advantage from her years of writing textbooks of a broad interdisciplinary view. To keep up in their narrow specialty, most scientists are only able to read journals closely related to their own research. Generalists like Harris can step back and look for larger patterns that might escape those are not widely read or locked into one way of thinking.
One of the reasons I'm persuaded to pay attention to what she has to say is the power of her new theory to explain research findings which do not fit our conventional theories. When someone comes along with a simpler, more inclusive solution to a vexing problem, it is worth looking at their evidence and argument. Since the first publication of her discovery in the Psychology Review in September 1994, a remarkable feat in and of itself since she isn't a professor, she has won a number of the leaders in developmental psychology over to her side. Won them over to her side enthusiastically. When this happens, I think her ideas are likely to be worth our attention.
Harris' theory emerged out of her growing frustration with her reading in developmental psychology and her reflection on her life experience. When she was growing up, she knew immigrants in her neighborhood whose children, within a few years of being here, were speaking fluent English. How could this happen when their parents often couldn't even master the basics of our language and spoke with thick accents? Clearly they were not learning their English at home. Not only were they learning our language fluently but just as quickly they were absorbing our social customs and habits. Tim Parks, a British writer who reared three children in Italy, wrote with some dismay about watching his children becoming Italians right before his eyes. This is a common experience of immigrants -- to look at their children and do not even recognize them. My family lived in England for a year when I was 10. In less than a month, I had a thick Cockney accent. Who was responsible for these profound changes? Not my parents!
Another category of children who experience this cultural rift with their parents are the hearing children of the Deaf. The Deaf are not part of the "hearing culture." The Deaf have their own subculture which excludes the hearing world. When children are born to deaf parents, they often do not talk to their children hoping that their children will also be born without hearing so they will fit into their Deaf community. Only 10% of the children born to deaf parents cannot hear. Often these children get little support for learning to speak from their parents who communicate with them in sign language. Yet these children learn to speak fluently very quickly. And what is interesting is their signing skills often remain at an early childhood level limiting their communication with their parents. Who is teaching these children to speak? Not their parents!
Another troublesome problem of developmental psychology is figuring out the source of our similarities with our parents. We know of two sources: either genes or environment, nature or nurture. Researchers must design their experiments in such a way as to test for one or the other separating the two causes. The classic example is intelligence. Are children more intelligent because parents read to them and stimulate their early learning abilities or are they just born smarter because they have smart genes. If a scientist studies upper income college graduate parents and children, the genetic factor may actually dominate whatever parenting method or style is used.
Intelligence is only the beginning of the story of inherited characteristics. The debate rages as to whether our genes determine other characteristics, qualities and abilities. Much research has been done to prove both the nature and the nurture theories. Recently, the nature people have been gaining ground. The studies of twins raised apart have shown amazing correlation in character among children with the same DNA. The most disturbing research of this type was the Colorado Adoption Project run from 1975 to 1982. 245 adopted children were tracked for intelligence and personality characteristic correlation with their adopting parents along with a control group of parents raising their own children. There was a high correlation between intelligence and personality characteristics for the families raising their own children. The scores for the adopted children had almost no correlation with their adoptive parents - no more similar than a random sample taken on a street corner![1]
Research like this challenges the nurture assumption, the assumption that we get our character and culture from our parents. Even though we claim this parental power over our children, the nurture assumption, grounded in the idea of the nuclear family, is actually quite new. Up until several hundred years ago, for the most part, children were raised by many family members from great grand parents down to elder siblings. The degree of parenting autonomy we have today is unusual when compared with in the tribal cultures found around the world ruled by tradition. In a traditional community, it really is the village that is raising the child not the parents.
The problem for children trying to grow up is finding age appropriate role models. We are highly imitative creatures learning constantly from those around us. Harris refers to a fascinating study of a researcher and his wife who decide to raise their infant son along side a baby chimpanzee to see if the chimp raised to be a human child with a human playmate could learn to be like us. Unfortunately, they had to terminate their experiment because their young pre-schooler was far better at learning to be like a chimp -- quickly learning the chimp's language and behaviors -- than the chimp was learning to be human.
Children solidify their personality characteristics long before they become an adult. The problem is we aren't great models for them. Many of our adult behaviors such as driving, smoking, drinking, sexual behavior, working, and civic activities are limited or prohibited for them. Much of our sophisticated adult social behavior is incomprehensible to them. In many ways, adults are poor models for coping with being a child. We adults are very poor at telling them how to be successful in their world. Children are trying to learn to be children and socialize with kids their age. They can only learn to do that successfully from each other. They live in a different world than we do so it is very hard for us to enter their world which we have never known, even though it may seem similar to the one in which we grew up.
This actually makes a lot of evolutionary sense. Each generation must learn to adapt to the world they live in today rather than the one their parents live in. The situation is much like the two peaches story I told for the children. It was the children in the village who questioned the rule as they saw the peaches falling off the tree and rotting on the ground. Their parents responded, "If the two peach rule worked for my parents it will also work for you." It is our children who adapt more easily to change than we do. Cultural evolution isn't something we pass down to our children, it is something they figure out for themselves in each generation, creating the so called generation gap.
As Harris freely admits, the peers over parents theory is just that, a theory. She points to gaps in the research because no one has thought to look for or track peer influences in this way before. Future research may disprove some of the power of peers and augment the power of parents. Also, I suspect we will find that children vary depending on their sociability to how much influence their peers will have. AND I expect future research will confirm many of Harris' ideas.
I'm not convinced after reading her book that peers completely trump parents. Clearly, as Harris acknowledges, parents have a great deal of influence in the first several years of a child's life. No one would dispute the high value of early nurture for brain development. A child's feeling of self worth will help her cope with peers who are often very unkind and uncaring. In fact the child's sense of self esteem, I think, makes a big difference in what peer group he will be in. A child will only yield so much to their peer group before one rejects the other. The more a child has confidence in herself, the more she will resist being degraded by the group.
And it is also unquestionable that parents can do great harm to their children through their abuse and neglect.
Whether the child is showered with affection or abuse, parents, I believe, have influence on their children, just probably not to the degree we have thought in the past. Peers, as purveyors of the dominate culture, have far more influence than we have given them credit for
One of the fears Harris' writing has raised in the voices of her critics is that her work will give bad parents an excuse to be even worse and good parents may allow themselves to neglect their children since "it doesn't matter what we do anyway." Whether or not we can shape the character and culture of our children, our actions have a great deal of consequence for our lives with our children. If we neglect their intellectual, emotional and spiritual needs, we do so at everyone's peril.
Our goal, as Gibran so wisely put it, is to nurture them not into copies of ourselves but into their unique personhood. That personhood will be influenced by their genes and their peers and to some degree by us. If we give them tools and skills that trump the skills of their peers, they will be the leaders of their peer group and thus positively influence others. In particular, helping children to develop effective social skills will pay great dividends the rest of their lives.
Harris' theory is of great importance to all civic and religious organizations which deal with children. Her theory reminds us that we do not make ourselves or our children alone. We are the product of a lifetime of influences from many directions including our peers. When we select a neighborhood or a school district in which to live, we are also selecting the peers for our children. Unhealthy communities can have very negative effects on even healthy children. But didn't we already know this? Perhaps we didn't realize the depth of the influence before Harris stuck our nose in it.
Peer groups also develop in religious education programs like ours. The quality of the religious education program, the leadership, the teaching and the supervision can create the opportunity for the bonding of our youngsters in positive ways. What other religious tradition encourages such freedom of religious thought and exploration? What other tradition radically honors the inherent worth and dignity within each child? What other religious tradition teaches the use of the mind as central to one's religious journey which encourages the child to question, seek and learn directed from within?
I have heard from the graduates of good Unitarian Universalist religious education programs, a deep appreciation for what they had been given and a strong sense of connection with their UU peers. Our Young Religious Unitarian Universalist program for our youth feeds their deep need for a peer group which respects individual difference, something teenagers hunger for. We have within Unitarian Universalism the ability to create positive peer groups for our children that will change their lives for the better.
For me, one of the things I like the best about Harris's theory is the absolution it offers. We as parents are not the sole determinant of how our children will turn out. In fact, we may be only one of many influences. Most of us are good enough parents and need not beat ourselves up about not being perfect. Some children are just harder to raise than others. Don't we already know this? If we are good enough parents, how they turn out isn't our fault. Even if we were perfect parents, the peers may still win out. Just like everything else in life, we have limited control. All we can do is offer our love and support for our children until they take wing and fly off. It may be they are taking wing a lot earlier than we thought.
We may not be in control or even the determinant of our children's character, but without a doubt in my mind, we have influence - a lot of influence.
May we use our influence wisely to help raise the best children and grandchildren and great grandchildren we can.
Closing Words (from the end of Harris' book)
The bond between parent and child lasts a lifetime. We kiss our parents good bye not once but many times; we do not lose track of them. Each visit home gives us opportunities to take out family memories and look at them again. Meanwhile, our childhood friends have scattered to the winds and we've forgotten what happened on the playground.
When you think about childhood you think about your parents. Blame it on the relationship department of your mind, which has usurped more than its rightful share of your thoughts and memories.
As for what's wrong with you: don't blame it on your parents.
[1] From Do Parents Matter?, New Yorker Magazine, August 17, 1998, p.57