Nomi L. Harris

In 1998 Judith Rich Harris, an independent researcher and textbook author, published The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out The Way They Do. The book provocatively argued that parents matter much less, at least when it comes to determining the behavior of their children, than is typically assumed. Instead, Harris argued that a child’s peer group is far more important. The Nurture Assumption has recently been reissued in an expanded and revised form. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Harris about her critics, the evolution of her ideas and why teachers can be more important than parents.

LEHRER: Freud famously blamed the problems of the child on the parents. (He was especially hard on mothers.) In The Nurture Assumption, an influential work that was published 10 years ago, you argued that parents are mostly innocent and that peers play a much more influential role. What led you to write the book?

HARRIS: It wasn’t just Freud! Psychologists of all persuasions, even behaviorists such as B. F. Skinner, thought the parents were responsible, one way or the other, for whatever went wrong with a child. One of my purposes in writing the book was to reassure parents. I wanted them to know that parenting didn’t have to be such a difficult, anxiety-producing job, that there are many different ways to rear a child, and no convincing evidence that one way produces better results than another.

But my primary motive was scientific. During the years I spent writing child development textbooks for college students, I never questioned the belief that parents have a good deal of power to shape the personalities of their children. (This is the belief I now call the “nurture assumption.”) When I finally began to have doubts and looked more closely at the evidence, I was appalled. Most of the research is so deeply flawed that it is meaningless. And studies using more rigorous methods produce results that do not support the assumption.

LEHRER: How did the field react?

HARRIS: The initial reaction was far off the mark. Professors of psychology were asked to give their opinion of the book before they’d had a chance to read it, so their comments were based on what they had heard about it. Many of them responded by saying that, “Harris has ignored a great deal of evidence.” But when pressed to specify the evidence I had ignored, they’d name the very same kinds of studies I had mercilessly dissected in the book. Or they’d tell the journalist about a study that hadn’t yet been published but that, when published, would prove that Harris was wrong. My attempt to track down those unpublished studies is described in my second book, No Two Alike.

As time went on, the professors calmed down. Some of them began to listen to what I was saying, perhaps because I was also publishing articles in academic journals. My work is now cited in many psychology textbooks and assigned in college courses. Of course, most developmental psychologists still don’t agree with me, but at least they’re acknowledging that there’s another point of view.

There has also been some improvement in research methodology, due not to my nagging but to a greater awareness of genetic influences on personality. It’s no longer enough to show, for example, that parents who are conscientious about childrearing tend to have children who are conscientious about their schoolwork. Is this correlation due to what the children learned from their parents or to the genes they inherited from them? Studies using the proper controls consistently favor the second explanation. In fact, personality resemblances between biological relatives are due almost entirely to heredity, rather than environment. Adopted children don’t resemble their adoptive parents in personality. I’m not particularly interested in genetic effects, but the point is that they have to be taken into account. Unless we know what the child brings to the environment, we can’t figure out what effect the environment has on the child.
 
LEHRER: Why do you think this is such a controversial idea? In other words, why are we so convinced that parents must matter?