A Seductively Simplistic Theory
HOFFMAN, LEON
A Seductively Simplistic Theory The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do By Judith Rich Harris Free Press. 350 pp. $25.00. Reviewed by Leon Hoffman Co-director,...
...In fact, behavioral geneticists stress that exactly how childhood environment affects adult personality remains an enigma...
...One is culture acquisition in mid-childhood, like speech patterns...
...But Harris and Steven Pinker, the prominent evolutionary psychologist who wrote the Foreword, rightly point out that genes do not explain all of a person's behavior...
...Not for Harris, however...
...Possibly as a result of her antipsychoanalytic bias, Harris appears unaware of the profound limitations of a New Zealand study she says demonstrates her belief that the impact of parents on children is limited to genes...
...Freud's contribution to the problem of human aggression, to cite one example, is absent from her discussion of children and hate...
...According to Harris, there isn't any good evidence to demonstrate this...
...Her name was Diana...
...Rather, it is to say that surroundings are powerful reinforcers and have to be changed if the drug habit is to be eliminated...
...Immigrant youngsters pick up friends' speech patterns...
...She fails to address the problem of trying to separate genetic from environmental (that is, parental) influences, and does not seem to realize that an infinite number of interactions occur between parents and children during the first three years of life...
...And it matters what peers do and the genes a child has...
...Her implicit message also has a destructive side: "As long as you don't beat your child it really does not matter what you do...
...Of course it matters what parents do...
...It is only the slightest exaggeration to say that Harris' message is seductively simple...
...One of the first pieces of advice given to the severely addicted is to eliminate their associations with the people, places and things connected with drug use...
...She may learn the specifics of the right kind of doll from her friends, and get upset if hers is not the same one "cool" kids have...
...Such a princess did live, not so very long ago...
...But it is the parents who most often blame themselves for the children's shortcomings...
...In essence she tells parents, "Don't feel guilty...
...Yet without any interaction between the two it is hard to account for the myriad variations in a person's friendships and romances, successes and failures, degrees of happiness and unhappiness, plus many other emotional states...
...Is it possible for someone to feel miserable inside even though she seems to have a fairy-tale existence...
...Cinderella learned when she was quite small that it was best to act meek when her stepmother was around, and to look unattractive in order to avoid arousing her jealousy...
...Two factors in particular brought her to this conclusion...
...The whole thing works if you accept one simple idea: that children develop different selves, different personas, in different environments," Harris tells us...
...And since adults usually aren't delinquents, if adolescents were trying to emulate them they would not be either...
...Was it merely the "group socialization effect...
...Few would dispute the claim that a great deal of behavior is group influenced...
...The mystery for her is why psychologists believe the chief influence in a child's environment is parental...
...Children can blame their troubles on their parents, as can professionals...
...The study focuses on impulsive 18-year-olds who had trouble establishing and maintaining close relationships, and who had originally been judged impulsive at age three...
...Harris concludes erroneously that the presence of these symptoms at such a young age unambiguously indicates their source to be genetic...
...Nevertheless, it is simplistic to say we understand a girl's doll play because she follows her peers in this activity...
...But the author uses ex post facto reasoning to argue that the peer group causes an individual's behavior The root of Harris' faulty logic, I think, is her failure to conceptualize a complex interaction of genetic influences, parental behavior, children's behavior and feelings (including their conscious and unconscious wishful thinking), and all the other aspects of the environment...
...She seems to believe the major aim of psychoanalysis is to induce guilt in parents when children have difficulties...
...One peer group may favor dolls and another toy animals...
...What Harris seems to studiously ignore is that each person has unique feelings, wishful fantasies and memories that give special meaning to the events and activities in his or her life...
...Instead, the girl plays with her doll, imagines she is a grown-up with a baby, and perhaps fantasizes that one day she will really be like mommy...
...Certainly it is true that children cannot engage in most adult activities...
...although she criticizes Freud and his ideas, she does not evince any grounding in psychoanalytic developmental theory...
...But the flippant closing line of The Nurture Assumption, "Cinderella, by the way, turned out fine," raises more questions than it answers...
...And even you do beat him, it will only affect his relationship with you, nothing else...
...Another dubious assumption that Harris makes concerns her notion of two distinct "modules" in the human brain which function independently...
...Reviewed by Leon Hoffman Co-director, Parent Child Center, New York Psychoanalytic Society Have you ever wondered why the wicked stepsisters did not recognize Cinderella at the ball...
...One of the central tasks in working with parents is to help them recognize and deal with their overwhelming sense of guilt and responsibility...
...Harris gives no sign of understanding this...
...Her stepsisters didn't recognize her at the ball not just because she was dressed differently: her whole demeanor was different—her facial expressions, her posture, the way she walked and talked...
...by looking pretty...
...Yet this does not mean the street corner crowd is responsible for the addiction...
...Thus doll play would have a very different significance for a girl whose mother had just given birth than it would for one whose mother had not...
...She is convinced that the overriding influence on children is the peer group...
...Well, parenting is an impossible job...
...A little girl can't have a baby like mommy, nor is she allowed to have sex with daddy...
...One specializes in dealing with group behavior, the other handles dyadic—or one-on-one—behavior...
...Judith Rich Harris says her "group socialization theory" clears up the entire mystery...
...Just because Cinderella married the prince...
...Outside the cottage no one insulted Cinderella or treated her like a slave, and she discovered that she could win friends...
...So why did Cinderella turn out fine...
...It's not your fault...
...How does Harris know that...
...When one sees a child acting like its parents, Harris notes, it is generally assumed they are the cause...
...Unlike Harris, I would need much more still unavailable information to adequately answer that question...
...in search of playmates...
...Why, then, has Harris' approach attracted wide attention...
...Yes, genes account for similarities between parents and their children...
...They had never seen her outside-the-cottage persona...
...This is the nurture assumption...
...This is puzzling in someone so well-read...
...the second is anti-adult behavior in adolescence, like delinquency...
...But from time to time she would slip out of the cottage...
...In an effort to redress the excesses of those who reinforced particularly mothers' tendencies to feel totally accountable for their children, Harris has promoted a thesis with the potential to make parents feel helpless and impotent...
...She noticed that neither could be attributed to imitating parents...
...It is these individual complexities, along with the importance of unconscious mental activity and the influence of the past on the present, that form the basis of the psychoanalytic frame of reference...
...Furthermore, to her it seems selfevident that children don't learn from mimicking their parents because most of the defining things parents do children are not allowed to do...
Vol. 81 • November 1998 • No. 13
