The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1998

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Foreword-Chapter 3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Chapters 13-15

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Children’s Agency and Individuality

In making an argument for her “group socialization theory,” Judith Rich Harris establishes Children’s Agency and Individuality. To Harris, science considers children passive receptacles for their parents’ influence, like “blank slates” waiting to be programmed. She critiques this simplistic, unscientific model of childhood: “The nurture assumption implies that children are born with empty brains which their parents are responsible for filling up” (111), despite these adults having been children themselves with no less agency. Harris asserts “Children are not incompetent members of the adults’ society: they are competent members of their own society, which has its own standards and its own culture” (187). She regards parents and children with sympathy, as both groups should be recognized as their own people with limited responsibility for others. While parents are important to their children, Harris supports her theory by giving them grace and placing some responsibility on children and their peers.

Children’s active participation in their own subculture(s) is an essential part of Harris’s theory. She highlights how children influence each other by jointly deciding which behaviors and traits to value in their group, and which to ban. She compares children to committee members who approve of matters together: Being young, “Children cannot develop their own cultures, any more than they can develop their own languages, except in the company of other children” (187). For example, peer groups can decide expectations regarding academics and fashion. In other words, this group mentality can veer towards peer pressure if unchallenged. Harris continues to demonstrate children’s co-creation of norms and rules by citing a 1950s study: In it, all-male peer groups discussed their reasons for winning a baseball game, and decided it was their civility that helped them. One boy suggested that the group never swear, and the others agreed. Overall, Harris’s examples of children’s subcultures portray children as intelligent, willful individuals who influence each other through shared experiences.

The Importance of Peer Groups

Through evidence highlighting peers’ influence on each other, Harris establishes The Importance of Peer Groups. She believes children act on their human instinct to imitate other children, particularly older children, rather than their parents. This is partly due to many adult activities being barred from children or directly discouraged. Harris notes children who grow up in traditional, non-industrial societies tend to spend much of their time in mixed-age and mixed-sex groups. In these peer groups, younger children learn by watching older children and following their rules:

A child starts out being the youngest and smallest in his playgroup and gradually moves up in the ranks. He has the experience of being pushed around by everyone and, later, the experience of having younger and smaller children look up to him (168).

In forging bonds within a peer group, children become more invested in their peers’ approval than that of their parents. Harris supports her argument by noting peers influence each other in ways that parents seem unable to. For example, immigrant parents are not always their children’s primary influence, as children often readily adopt the secondary language of their peers. Furthermore, Harris points to a child who adopted the dialect of the Black Californian children at her daycare: “Although this child probably spent more time with her British mother than with her African-American playmates, it was their accent, not her mother’s, that was influencing her speech” (179). Again, peers influence each other by deciding acceptable activities to signal belonging. For example, teenagers may pick up smoking to distinguish themselves from adults, who consider it unhealthy. Harris explains parental influence as smokers or non-smokers is irrelevant, that “The environment influences a teenager to smoke or not to smoke in only one way: she is more likely to smoke if her peers do” (265). Overall, her examples reinforce children’s instinct to seek out peer groups and receive their influence.

The Limits of Parental Influence

Harris’s most unique, somewhat taboo theme is The Limits of Parental Influence. She engages the reader with anecdotes to explain how and why parents’ efforts are challenged by their children. She describes her own experience raising two daughters, and having little influence over her youngest’s behavior. To Harris’s chagrin, her youngest smoked and neglected her studies. Harris attributes these habits to peer socialization: “I emphasized the yuckiness and not the health risks. It didn’t work. She belonged to a group—the burnouts—in which smoking was the thing to do. It was a group norm” (265). In addition to personal stories, Harris offers scientific evidence to demonstrate parental limits: She cites a study which reveals children tend to behave differently at home than they do at school or other activities. The study recorded children’s reactions to opportunities to cheat in different social contexts, and researchers found that while parental morality mattered at home, it did not seem to transfer to other contexts: “In particular, a kid who resisted the temptation to break rules at home, even when no one was watching, was about as likely as anyone else to cheat on a test at school or in a game on the playground” (202).

Harris supports this finding with more evidence regarding children’s behavior in different contexts. When dealing with problematic behavior in children, researchers found that intervention was only successful in changing behavior in the place of intervention: School intervention only improved children’s behavior as students, and parenting intervention only improved children’s behavior at home. This demonstrates the limits of parents’ influence on their children, because “When the culture outside the home differs from the culture inside it, the outside culture wins” (180). While Harris’s examples challenge the role of parents, she speaks as a fellow parent and encourages her peers to simply support their children the best they can.