Do Parents Matter?

A researcher argues that peers are much more important than parents, that psychologists underestimate the power of genetics, and that we have a lot to learn from Asian classrooms


SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND: 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?


JUDITH RICH 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 that no convincing evidence existed 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.


MIND: 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 My attempt to track down those unpublished studies is described in my second book, No Two Alike [W. W. Norton, 2006].


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, not because of my nagging but because of a greater awareness of genetic influences on personality. It’s no longer enough to show, for example, that parents who are conscientious about child rearing tend to have children who are conscientious about their schoolwork. Is this correlation the result of what the children learned from their parents or of the genes they inherited from them? Studies using the proper controls consistently favor the second explanation. In fact, personality resemblances between biological relatives are attributable 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.


Ful Article: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=do-parents-matter

i think parents do matter. parents provide the basic and fundamental values for their children. it's just that during a certain time in the children's lives, friends seem to be everything in their world. but in the end, they rarely forget values taught and influences by their parents.