JHLT's Full Review: Judith Rich Harris - The Nurture Assumption: Why C...
Just why the heck do kids turn out the way they do? We all know good parents with bad kids, and bad parents whose kids are marvels. According to Harris, Freud was wrong, the Behaviorists were wrong, and chances are that you are, too.
Harris writes a breezy, everything-you-know-is-wrong account that draws on fairy tales, her own experience as the mother of one frisky kid and another more to the mold born, and fascinating research from linguistics, psychology, and anthropology. E.g., why do those Yanomamo kids tie their foreskins to a string worn around the waist? We speak of "the mother tongue," but why do kids idiolects more often sound like, well, you know, like-- their peers.
What sweet revenge this book must have provided feminists, sceptics of academe, and Ms. Harris. It was based on an article she wrote for The Psychological Review, an article for which she received The George A Miller Award. The irony is that this same George Miller kicked her out of Harvard's Psychology Department 37 years earlier because he didn't think she would amount to much.
We all know that children are a product of nature and nurture. About nature, the only debate is how much? (Roughly 50% in most scientific judgement.) It is the nurture part of the equation that Harris attacks. Conventional wisdom assumes that nurture is the parents' influence. Harris shows how much this is pure assumption (the title, of course), and how peers are the determining factor for our children, indeed for children from the Congo to New York, from the Rain Forest to Beijing.
Stephen Pinker, Professor of Psychology at MIT says that "One seldom sees a work that is at once scholarly, revolutionary, insightful, and wonderfully clear and witty....I predict it will come to be seen as a turning point in the history of psychology."
Like Darwin, Harris provides a simple idea of vast explanatory power. You'll never see the world the same after reading this book. You'll probably want to send a copies to their children.
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