Frankenfolio Chapters 11-16 Debate
Read the following
Debunking the "Nurture Assumption."
SUSAN DENTZER: For years, conventional wisdom has held that all this parental nurturing will
definitively shape a child's personality and behavior. In a recently published book, author Judith
Harris calls this belief "the nurture assumption," and she says it's just wrong.
JUDITH HARRIS, Author, "The Nurture Assumption:" It's the assumption that what makes
children turn out the way they do, aside from their genes, the environmental part of child
development, is the experiences they have at home, and in particular the experiences they have
with their parents.
SUSAN DENTZER: Harris argues that besides passing on genes, parents' nurturing probably has
less impact over the long-term than other aspects of children's environment - such as their peers.
JUDITH HARRIS: It's really in the second half of the 20th century that this idea of parental
importance has become so popular and, in my view, exaggerated. I'm not saying that parents don't
matter. I'm saying that parents matter in some ways and don't matter in other ways, and we have
to look and study where they do, and where they don't matter, and not assume that they matter
everywhere without scientific justification for it.
What should parents worry about?.
SUSAN DENTZER: Harris's book has lobbed a grenade into what might be called the "parenting
establishment" - the legion of experts offering advice on everything from limiting television to
controlling tantrums. Her ideas have prompted critical news coverage and commentary - as well
as condemnation from child development specialists. One is researcher and practicing child
psychiatrist Dr. Stanley Greenspan.
DR. STANLEY GREENSPAN: The biggest worry about this book, it's going to tell parents it
doesn't make a difference what you do. It doesn't make a difference if you are loving, if you are
warm, if you are intimate. So the worst part of this is that parents - I think most parents are too
smart for that - but that any parent believes the message, they could devalue what's so important
about what they do give to their children - the love, the warmth, the security, the building blocks
of healthy self-esteem, healthy thinking, and healthy patterns of communication.
SUSAN DENTZER: By contrast, psychologist Steven Pinker of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology thinks Harris's work is a turning point in developmental psychology.
STEVEN PINKER: It's a shocking discovery. It's one that I think most people would not have
predicted. It poses a question, how do we explain this very large component of personality that's
not genetic but that just as surely doesn't come from growing up in a particular home?
SUSAN DENTZER: Harris would seem an unlikely warrior to mount an assault on the parenting
industry. She is a mother of two daughters, a grandmother, and a writer of psychology textbooks.
She was tossed out of a psychology graduate program at Harvard more than three decades ago
because her professors didn't think she'd amount to much. In effect, she has now waded into an
age-old controversy: What makes the difference in the way human beings turn out? How much is
nature, that is, genes, or nurture, the way that your parents bring you up. Researchers have long
struggled to define the relationship.
STANLEY GREENSPAN: Nature/nurture work more as a dance, not as a horse race. But it's
really like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Once the dance starts, it's how they interact together.
JUDITH HARRIS: You can certainly look at Fred Astaire separately from Ginger Rogers. Of
course, they dance together. Nobody questions that they dance together. But it is possible, using
certain techniques, to tease them apart and to look at them separately.
SUSAN DENTZER: In fact, researchers have been doing just that for years, and in the process
have found a decisive role for nature or genes.
STEVEN PINKER: The behavioral geneticists did that with studies of adoptees and twins and
found that virtually all of the correlation between parents and children, comes from their genetic
similarity, that is, if you look at two kids who grow up in the same household, they are no more
similar than two children who grow up in different households, on average, in their personality.
Interpreting the evidence.
SUSAN DENTZER: Behavioral geneticists have concluded that about half of the variation that
crops up among people is due to heredity, in other words, to their genes, but that leaves about one
half of these variations unexplained. It's long been assumed that these must stem from the other
partner, nurture or parenting. But Harris says this partner may have been a victim of mistaken
identity - the result of faulty research by child development experts.
JUDITH HARRIS: They were producing results that showed that parents who read to their
children, parents who were themselves educated, and who were interested in educational
achievement and educational enrichment of their children, they were finding results that showed
that such parents did have smarter and brighter kids. The problem was they weren't - their
techniques weren't able to distinguish between genetic influences and environmental influences.
It was assumed just without really any basis in fact, it was assumed that it was because of the
parenting.
SUSAN DENTZER: In fact, Harris concluded that the other partner dancing with nature wasn't
parenting, but rather forces at work in the broader environment that children grow up in. She
came up with something she calls "group socialization theory," the notion that children's peers,
along with other groups that they might become involved in, are the factors in addition to genes
that help to shape personality and behavior. Harris believes that research on the children of
immigrants provides one of many clues that she's on the right track. She told us the story of a
child she called Joseph.
JUDITH HARRIS: His parents came from Poland, and they settled in a rural area of Missouri
where they were the only people from Poland, and no other people spoke Polish. In a year or so
Joseph was speaking English like an American, and he's going to adopt the culture and language
of his peers, even though he continues to speak Polish at home with his parents.
SUSAN DENTZER: But Stanley Greenspan believes Harris has misinterpreted the research on
immigrants and understated the crucial role of parents in stimulating early language development.
STANLEY GREENSPAN: Completely mistaken, completely naïve. Children learn the structure
of language from pre-verbal communication, from the rhythm of utterances. Later on, once you
have that, you can learn a new language but the fundamental ability to relate and think itself has
learned very early in life before peers are even important.
Parenting: weighing credit and blame..
SUSAN DENTZER: But Harris still insists that the parenting establishment underplays what
every parent of a teenager knows - that peers really do have a determining impact on personality
and behavior. Along with Professor Pinker, we decided to talk with some MIT students about the
respective influence of their parents and their peers. Senior Leslie Pipe told us that she was close
to her parents and believed that they had profoundly shaped her - at least until she went away to
college.
SUSAN DENTZER: So what inspired you to have blue and purple and beautiful red hair?
PIPE: It was sort of a rush activity for my dorm, to try to get kids in my dorm.
SUSAN DENTZER: What is the message it sent
PIPE: Dare to be different, I guess.
SUSAN DENTZER: Dare to be different by looking like me?
PIPE: Right. (laughing)
SUSAN DENTZER: The mother of another MIT student, Paula Goldstein, came forward to tell
us about her two sons - the MIT senior and her 28 year old elder son, some she described as "not
accomplished." She asked whether her parenting could explain the difference in her two sons.
STEVEN PINKER: Anything that is consistent the research suggests doesn't have a long-term
influence on the personality of the kids when they grow up.
PAULA GOLDSTEIN: So then it's not my fault. I want to be responsible for the kid who's
graduating MIT, though.
JUDITH HARRIS: Well, I think this parent has really answered it for herself. If she wants to take
the credit for child A, she also has to take the blame for child B. I'm saying, well, you can't take
the credit, but on the other hand, you don't have to take the blame.
Parents can create the right environment for their children..
SUSAN DENTZER: Harris says parents can do things to affect how their children turn out - help
them choose the right friends, for example.
JUDITH HARRIS: All parents know this, and they've been doing this for a very log time, and
they've always tried to do this, to move to the right neighborhood, to put their children in the right
school.
SUSAN DENTZER: She even suggests that parents make sure some children get plastic surgery,
so they will fit in.
JUDITH HARRIS: Only if the child has some facial anomaly that will evoke teasing from peers.
A child can be made very miserable by being teased over something that he or she can't help.
SUSAN DENTZER: It's this kind of advice to parents that disturbs critics like Greenspan.
STANLEY GREENSPAN: The advice is terrible because she also goes further and says have
plastic surgery, if your nose is too long. It totally presents a kind of conformist view, conform to
the peer group and you'll be okay.
SUSAN DENTZER: Harris admits that her theory of group socialization is just that - a theory that
merits further research and exploration. Until that research is in, she counsels parents to enjoy
day-to-day parenting more and worry about its long-term effects less.
JUDITH HARRIS: I think that parents are spending every free minute of their time reading to
their children, and praising their children, and hugging and kissing their children, and still feel
that's not quite enough, and I'd like them to lighten up a bit.
SUSAN DENTZER: But Harris says this advice and her research shouldn't be misconstrued to
undervalue parenting.
SUSAN DENTZER: I'm a mother of two young boys. Am I chopped liver?
JUDITH HARRIS: No. You are essential to your children's happiness. You have the power in
your hands to give your child - children a happy childhood, and I hope that you will give your
children a happy childhood, because every child deserves that.
SUSAN DENTZER: Even if they object to some of Harris's other views, parents will probably
agree with her on one thing - whether or not they control their children's tomorrows, they surely
control their todays.