NURTURING CHILDREN'S NATURE

...A child doesn't dismiss his family...

...She rightly slams Frank Sulloway for telling us that the birth order of children affects their behavior outside the home as well as in it...

...And as for all those studies about troubled children in step-families and foster families who are wrestling with their losses, all Harris thinks they prove is that the children were moved too much and didn't have stable peer groups...

...Her younger daughter, now a successful mother and nurse, once walked on the wild side, and the author's poignant memories of that rebellion still blister with a pain that makes her sound sometimes defensive and at other times almost euphoric...

...But they may not be necessary for children over the age of five or six," she adds...

...tics to suit their "intuition" and for saying that parents are responsible for the way their children behave...

...And though she considers genetic effects, she never talks about the effects of a child's body chemistry...

...It takes supervision to keep a child out of trouble...

...And he gets that philosophy from his parents, not his friends...

...The ignoring of contrary data is one of the major problems of The Nurture Assumption: The book is generally well researched, but its author's citations are highly selective...

...By the 1960s they were chauffeur-ing their children everywhere— whether they lived in the far-flung suburbs or not—and by the end of the 1970s they were giving them more toys and clothes and shoes then they could ever wear out...

...When he said that everything a mother did—or didn't do—affected her child for life, mothers were starting to own more time-saving appliances and to have more free time than they ever had before—and were feeling less important by the minute...

...Freud was another one whose ideas satisfied the needs of an era...

...And neither do their children, poor dears, who are dancing as fast as they can to keep up with their well-planned little lives...

...There is no relation between the goodness of the home and the goodness of the child, the author says, short of a really rotten home...

...But she simply dismisses the claim, made by Harvard's Howard Gardner, that children manifest various kinds of intelligence (and indeed Harris doesn't seem to have read Gardner carefully enough to discover that he identifies not "several" but eight distinct kinds...

...Arnold Gesell is cited only once, although his institute defined every step of a child's physical, mental, and emotional development, and T. Berry Brazelton isn't mentioned at all, despite his fine research on the early years...

...If the parents are supportive and the family functions well, the child will develop the character he needs to withstand temptation, but if they are too critical or too rigid or too permissive, his core will be weak and he will either turn into a loner or he will turn to his friends—to the family he has made...

...She then attempts to demolish hundreds of socialization studies to prove her case...

...In the late 1980s they upped the ante again and began to program every minute of their children's day, pushing them into after-school classes, organizing them into teams—and incidentally robbing them of the many goofy pleasures that happen when children spontaneously build a fort in the backyard or put together a pick-up game of football on the playground...

...Each child is born to be a certain type of person, and each child is reared in a slightly different style, because his parents are different, too...

...She does admit that babies need parental figures because parents "are an aspect of the environment, like light and pattern, that a baby's brain needs to develop normally...

...Whether you agree with Piaget and Kohlberg, or prefer Carol Gilligan on morality and gender differences, their theories at least deserve what they don't get in The Nurture Assumption: a thoughtful consideration of a child's budding nature and how it might influence him far more than his friends or his parents at certain ages...

...Harris's book will color the next generation of arguments about child development, and it may even correct some excessive parental attention, but it suffers from the same affliction that the author finds in the "nurture assumption": It's selling parents a bill of goods...

...The child who feels good about himself—because he feels safe and loved and competent—will choose friends who have good values and good instincts...

...The world that children share with their peers . . . shapes their behavior and modifies the characteristics they were born with and . . . determines the sort of people they will be when they grow up...

...According to Harris's logic, these efforts that parents have made for the past fifty years have hardly mattered a whit...

...She's wrong...

...But if his self-esteem is low, he will choose friends who mirror his own image...

...For older children, a stable peer group may be more important...

...Parents have begun to suspect that they're overdoing it a bit, and Harris gives them a wonderful excuse to lighten up...

...Since children want to conform, it must be other children, rather than parents, who decide their fate...

...he enlarges it...

...This finding has been replicated in many studies, but is not mentioned by Harris...

...And the children let themselves be shaped, not because they want to be successful adults, she says, but because they want to be successful children...

...Unfortunately, The Nurture Assumption is also deeply mistaken, crippled by a thesis far larger than its author can defend...

...At that point—and only at that point—his behavior will depend on them...

...NURTURING CHILDREN'S NATURE Why Parents Still Matter By Marguerite Kelly With her latest study, child-development psychologist Judith Rich Harris has given us a landmark book that provokes praise and outrage on almost every page—with good reasons for both...

...Freudian theory encouraged them to focus on their children with a single-minded-ness the world had never known...

...When teenagers break laws, Harris says, they do it because they're following their friends—which is no doubt a real factor—but Kohlberg also points out that youngsters before their mid-teens can't think well in abstractions and therefore they can't internalize their conscience...

...The nurture assumption implies that children are born with empty brains which their parents are responsible for filling up," and this, Harris declares, is nonsense...

...If nothing else, her theory offers an emotional balm for any parent who has ever agonized over a wayward child—including Harris...

...Harris has a good deal to say about personality, but she doesn't cite Stella Chess or even Carl Jung for their seminal explanations of various temperaments and the way they mold behavior...

...Harris begins by blasting present-day psychologists for twisting statisMarguerite Kelly is a syndicated columnist and author who writes on family issues...

...Harris reports—and usually condemns— most child-development research based on "socialization" (as the nurture assumption is called), but she ignores any other research that might explain a child's behavior and perhaps upset her own conclusions...

...And then she does some serious intuiting herself, telling us that a child's behavior depends much more on his genes and his friends than on his parents...

...A young child is profoundly influenced by his parents, siblings, and assorted relatives at first, and as he gets older he expands his circle to include a few buddies from nursery school, then a kindergarten teacher, a new neighbor, a fellow Scout—adding and subtracting friends as he grows up...

...Parents can encourage the right kind of friends until their children leave home, just by the rules they set...

...Judith Wallerstein's much-cited work on the evils of divorce, for example, Harris calls "worthless," adding that most children of divorce do fine "in the long run...

...In some ways, she is wonderfully right...

...In many ways, however, she is terribly wrong...

...There's not a line about Erik Erikson either, although he told us how we grow psychologically from ages one to seventy, or Jean Piaget, who delineated our mental stages, or Lawrence Kohlberg, who also thought that moral development followed a sequential pattern...

...Harris does admit that parents can help children choose the right friends—by living in a good neighborhood and sending them to a good school—but she says this only works until they're about ten...

...Genes are responsible for much of a child's behavior and intelligence and for all of his looks...

...It's a theory custom-made to soothe a sorry mother's heart, and as the theories of psychologists and psychiatrists so often do, it comes along at the right time...

...you raise pigs...

...Today parents are so busy working to pay for all this attention that they say they have no time to call their own...

...Here is Harris's group-socialization theory at its most startling: "Children would become the same sort of adults if we left their lives outside the home unchanged—left them in their schools and their neigh-borhoods—but switched all the parents around...

...The Nurture Assumption is original and often wise, witty and warm, and so precise that its author uses "rear" instead of "raise" to speak of what parents do to children (which may make her the first person to do that since my Aunt Kay put her hands on her hips to tell me, all those years ago, "Honey, you rear children...

...But every child must grow up with a philosophy of fairness and honesty, respect and affection, trust and freedom, kindness and generosity, responsibility and accountability...

...More important, she mentions almost none of the real players in child development...

...Rowdies never like to hang out with teenagers who have to live by rules much stricter than the ones under which they themselves live...