How to Succeed in Childhood

by Judith Rich Harris

very day, tell your children bad for kids. In those days, spanking was that you love them. Hug considered not just the parents’ right but them at least once every 24 their duty. hours. Never hit them. If they Partly as a result of the major retoolings Edo something wrong, don’t say, “You’re in the advice industry, child-rearing styles bad!” Say, “What you did was bad.” No, have changed drastically over the course of wait—even that might be too harsh. Say, this century. Although abusive parents instead, “What you did made me unhap- have always existed, run-of-the-mill par- py.” ents—the large majority of the popula- The people who are in the business of tion—administer more hugs and fewer giving out this sort of advice are very angry spankings than they used to. at me, and with good reason. I’m the Now ask yourself this: Are children turn- author of The Nurture Assumption—the ing out better? Are they happier and better book that allegedly claims that “parents adjusted than they were in the earlier part don’t matter.” Though that’s not what the of the century? Less aggressive? Less anx- book actually says, the advice givers are ious? Nicer? nonetheless justified in their anger. I don’t pull punches, and I’m not impressed by their air of benevolent omniscience. Their advice is based not on scientific evidence It was Sigmund Freud who gave us the but on prevailing cultural myths. idea that parents are the be-all and end-all The advice isn’t wrong; it’s just ineffec- of the child’s world. According to Freudian tive. Whether parents do or don’t follow it theory, children learn right from wrong— has no measurable effect on how their that is, they learn to behave in ways their children turn out. There is a great deal of parents and their society deem accept- evidence that the differences in how par- able—by identifying with their parents. In ents rear their children are not responsible the calm after the storm of the oedipal cri- for the differences among the children. sis, or the reduced-for-quick-sale female I’ve reviewed this evidence in my book; I version of the oedipal crisis, the child sup- will not do it again here. posedly identifies with the parent of the Let me, however, bring one thing to same sex. your attention: the advice given to parents Freud’s name is no longer heard much in the early part of this century was almost in academic departments of , the mirror image of the advice that is given but the theory that children learn how to today. In the early part of this century, par- behave by identifying with their parents is ents were not warned against damaging still accepted. Every textbook in develop- their children’s self-esteem; they were mental psychology (including, I confess, warned against “spoiling” them. Too much the one I co-authored) has its obligatory attention and affection were thought to be photo of a father shaving and a little boy

30 WQ Winter 1999 A Meeting (undated), by Marie Bashkirtseff pretending to shave. Little boys imitate The Magic Years was popular in the 1960s: their fathers, little imitate their moth- ers, and, according to the theory, that’s Thirty-month-old Julia finds herself how children learn to be grownups. It alone in the kitchen while her takes them a while, of course, to perfect mother is on the telephone. A bowl the act. of eggs is on the table. An urge is It’s a theory that could have been experienced by Julia to make thought up only by a grownup. From the scrambled eggs.... When Julia’s child’s point of view, it makes no sense at mother returns to the kitchen, she all. What happens when children try to finds her daughter cheerfully plop- behave like grownups is that, more often ping eggs on the linoleum and than not, it gets them into trouble. scolding herself sharply for each Consider this story, told by Selma plop, “NoNoNo. Mustn’t dood it! Fraiberg, a child psychologist whose book NoNoNo. Mustn’t dood it!”

Raising Children in America 31 Fraiberg attributed Julia’s lapse to the Consider the experiments of develop- fact that she had not yet acquired a super- mental psychologist Carolyn Rovee- ego, presumably because she had not yet Collier. A young baby lies on its back in a identified with her mother. But look at crib. A mobile with dangling doodads what was Julia doing when her mother hangs overhead. A ribbon runs from the came back and caught her egg-handed: baby’s right ankle to the mobile in such a she was imitating her mother! And yet way that whenever the baby kicks its right Mother was not pleased. leg, the doodads jiggle. Babies are delight- ed to discover that they can make some- hildren cannot learn how to behave thing happen; they quickly learn how to Cappropriately by imitating their par- make the mobile move. Two weeks later, if ents. Parents do all sorts of things that chil- you show them the mobile again, they will dren are not allowed to do—I don’t have to immediately start kicking that right leg. list them, do I?—and many of them look But only if you haven’t changed any- like fun to people who are not allowed to thing. If the doodads hanging from the do them. Such prohibitions are found not mobile are blue instead of red, or if the only in our own society but everywhere, liner surrounding the crib has a pattern of and involve not only activities such as squares instead of circles, or if the crib is making scrambled eggs but patterns of placed in a different room, they will gape social behavior as well. Around the world, at the mobile cluelessly, as if they’ve never children who behave too much like seen such a thing in their lives. grownups are considered impertinent. Sure, children sometimes pretend to be t’s not that they’re stupid. Babies enter adults. They also pretend to be horses and Ithe world with a mind designed for monsters and babies, but that doesn’t learning and they start using it right away. mean they aspire to be horses or monsters But the learning device comes with a or babies. Freud jumped to the wrong con- warning label: what you learn in one situ- clusions, and so did several generations of ation might not work in another. Babies do developmental psychologists. A child’s not assume that what they learned about goal is not to become an adult; a child’s the mobile with the red doodads will work goal is to be a successful child. for the mobile with the blue doodads. What does it take to be a successful They do not assume that what worked in child? The child’s first job is to learn how the bedroom will work in the den. And to get along with her parents and they do not assume that what worked with and to do the things that are expected of their mother will work with their father or her at home. This is a very important the babysitter or their jealous big sister or job—no question about it. But it is only the kids at the daycare center. the first of the child’s jobs, and in the long Fortunately, the child’s mind is run it is overshadowed in importance by equipped with plenty of storage capacity. the child’s second job: to learn how to get As the cognitive scientist put along with the members of her own gener- it in his foreword to my book, “Rela- ation and to do the things that are expect- tionships with parents, with siblings, with ed of her outside the home. peers, and with strangers could not be Almost every psychologist, Freudian or more different, and the trillion-synapse not, believes that what the child learns (or human brain is hardly short of the compu- doesn’t learn) in job 1 helps her to succeed tational power it would take to keep each (or fail) in job 2. But this belief is based on one in a separate mental account.” an obsolete idea of how the child’s mind That’s exactly what the child does: keeps works, and there is good evidence that it is each one in a separate mental account. wrong. Studies have shown that a baby with a

> Judith Rich Harris, the author of The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (1998), is a former writer of college textbooks on . The essay that led to her controversial book won an award from the American Psychological Association. Copyright © 1999 by Judith Rich Harris.

32 WQ Winter 1999 depressed mother behaves in a subdued but the children reply in English. What fashion in the presence of its mother, but the children of immigrants end up with is behaves normally with a caregiver who is not a compromise, not a blend. They end not depressed. A toddler taught by his up, pure and simple, with the language mother to play elaborate fantasy games and culture of their peers. The only does not play these games when he’s with aspects of their parents’ culture they retain his playmates—he and his playmates are things that are carried out at home, devise their own games. A preschooler such as cooking. who has perfected the delicate art of get- ting along with a bossy older is no more likely than a first-born to allow her peers in nursery school to dominate her. A ate-20th-century native-born Ameri- school-age child who says she hates her Lcans of European descent are as eth- younger brother —they fight like cats and nocentric as the members of any other cul- dogs, their mother complains —is as likely ture. They think there is only one way to as any other child to have warm and serene raise children—the way they do it. But that peer relationships. Most telling, the child is not the way children are reared in the who follows the rules at home, even when kinds of cultures studied by anthropolo- no one is watching, may lie or cheat in the gists and ethologists. The German etholo- schoolroom or on the playground, and gist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt has described vice versa. what childhood is like in the hunter-gath- Children learn separately how to erer and tribal societies he spent many behave at home and how to behave out- years observing. side the home, and parents can influence In traditional cultures, the baby is cod- only the way they behave at home. dled for two or three years—carried about Children behave differently in different by its mother and nursed whenever it social settings because different behaviors whimpers. Then, when the next baby are required. Displays of emotion that are comes along, the child is sent off to play in acceptable at home are not acceptable the local play group, usually in the care of outside the home. A clever remark that an older sibling. In his 1989 book Human would be rewarded with a laugh at home Ethology, Eibl-Eibesfeldt describes how will land a child in the principal’s office at children are socialized in these societies: school. Parents are often surprised to dis- cover that the child they see at home is not Three-year-old children are able to the child the teacher sees. I imagine join in a play group, and it is in teachers get tired of hearing parents such play groups that children are exclaim, “Really? Are you sure you’re talk- truly raised. The older ones explain ing about my child?” the rules of play and will admonish The compartmentalized world of child- those who do not adhere to them, hood is vividly illustrated by the child of such as by taking something away immigrant parents. When immigrants set- from another or otherwise being tle in a neighborhood of native-born aggressive. Thus the child’s social- Americans, their children become bicul- ization occurs mainly within the tural, at least for a while. At home they play group. . . . By playing together practice their parents’ culture and lan- in the children’s group the mem- guage, outside the home they adopt the bers learn what aggravates others culture and language of their peers. But though their two worlds are separate, they and which rules they must obey. are not equal. Little by little, the outside This occurs in most cultures in world takes precedence: the children which people live in small commu- adopt the language and culture of their nities. peers and bring that language and culture home. Their parents go on addressing Once their tenure in their mothers’ them in Russian or Korean or Portuguese, arms has ended, children in traditional

Raising Children in America 33 cultures become members of a group. We have no difficulty splitting up contin- This is the way human children were ua. Night and day are as different as, well, designed to be reared. They were designed night and day, even though you can’t tell by evolution to become members of a where one leaves off and the other begins. group, because that’s the way our ancestors The mind constructs categories for people lived for millions of years. Throughout the — male or female, kid or grownup, white evolution of our species, the individual’s or black, deaf or hearing — and does not survival depended upon the survival of his hesitate to draw the lines, even if it’s some- or her group, and the one who became a times hard to decide whether a particular valued member of that group had an edge individual goes on one side or the other. over the one who was merely tolerated. Babies only a few months old can cate- gorize. By the time they reach their first uman groups started out small: in a birthday, they are capable of dividing up Hhunter-gatherer band, everyone the members of their social world into cat- knows everyone else and most are blood egories based on age and sex: they distin- relatives. But once agriculture began to guish between men and women, between provide our ancestors with a more or less adults and children. A preference for the dependable supply of food, groups got big- members of their own social category also ger. Eventually they became large enough shows up early. One-year-olds are wary of that not everyone in them knew everyone strange adults but are attracted to other else. As long ago as 1500 b.c. they were children, even ones they’ve never met sometimes that large. There is a story in before. By the age of two, children are the Old Testament about a conversation beginning to show a preference for mem- Joshua had with a stranger, shortly before bers of their own sex. This preference the Battle of Jericho. They met outside the grows steadily stronger over the next few walls of the beleaguered town, and years. School-age girls and boys will play Joshua’s first question to the stranger was, together in places where there aren’t many “Are you for us or for our adversaries?” children, but when they have a choice of Are you one of us or one of them? The playmates, they tend to form all- and group had become an idea, a concept, and all-boy groups. This is true the world the concept was defined as much by what around. you weren’t as by what you were. And the answer to the question could be a matter of he brain we won in the evolutionary life or death. When the walls came tum- Tlottery gave us the ability to catego- bling down, Joshua and his troops killed rize, and we use that skill on people as well every man, woman, and child in Jericho. as things. Our long evolutionary history of Even in Joshua’s time, genocide was not a fighting with other groups predisposes us novelty: fighting between groups, and to identify with one social category, to like wholesale slaughter of the losers, had been our own category best, and to feel wary of going on for ages. According to the evolu- (or hostile toward) members of other cate- tionary biologist , it is “part gories. The emotions and motivations that of our human and prehuman heritage.” were originally applied to real physical Are you one of us or one of them? It was groups are now applied to groups that are the question African Americans asked of only concepts: “Americans” or Colin Powell. It was the question deaf peo- “Democrats” or “the class of 2001.” You ple asked of a Miss America who couldn’t don’t have to like the other members of hear very well but who preferred to com- your group in order to consider yourself municate in a spoken language. I once saw one of them; you don’t even have to know a six-year-old go up to a 14-year-old and ask who they are. The British social psycholo- him, “Are you a kid or a grownup?” gist Henri Tajfel asked his subjects—a The human mind likes to categorize. It bunch of Bristol schoolboys—to estimate is not deterred by the fact that nature often the number of dots flashed on a screen. fails to arrange things in convenient Then half the boys were privately told that clumps but instead provides a continuum. they were “overestimators,” the others that

34 WQ Winter 1999 they were “underestimators.” That was all injury might cuss a bit, but he would bear it took to make them favor their own up stoically. group. They didn’t even know which of their schoolmates were in their group and which were in the other. he idea for group socialization theo- he most famous experiment in Try came to me while I was reading an Tsocial psychology is the Robber’s article on juvenile delinquency. The arti- Cave study. Muzafer Sherif and his col- cle reported that breaking the law is high- leagues started with 22 eleven-year-old ly common among adolescents, even boys, carefully selected to be as alike as among those who were well behaved as possible, and divided them into two equal children and who are destined to turn into groups. The groups—the “Rattlers” and law-abiding adults. This unendearing the “Eagles”—were separately transport- foible was attributed to the frustration ed to the Robber’s Cave summer camp in teenagers experience at not being adults: a wilderness area of Oklahoma. For a they are longing for the power and privi- while, neither group knew of the other’s lege of adulthood. existence. But the first time the Rattlers “Wait a minute,” I thought. “That’s not heard the Eagles playing in the distance, right. If teenagers really wanted to be they reacted with hostility. They wanted adults, they wouldn’t be spraying graffiti to “run them off.” When the boys were on overpasses or swiping nail polish from brought together in games arranged by drugstores. If they really wanted to emulate researchers disguised as camp counselors, adults they would be doing boring adult push quickly came to shove. Before long, things, like sorting the laundry or figuring the two groups were raiding each other’s out their taxes. Teenagers aren’t trying to cabins and filling socks with stones in be like adults; they are trying to contrast preparation for retaliatory raids. themselves with adults! They are showing When people are divided (or divide their loyalty to their own group and their themselves) into two groups, hostility is disdain for adults’ rules!” one common result. The other, which I don’t know what put the idea into my happens more reliably though it is less well head; at the time, I didn’t know beans known, is called the “group contrast about . It took eight effect.” The mere division into two groups months of reading to fill the gaps in my tends to make each group see the other as education. What I learned in those eight different from itself in an unfavorable way, months was that there is a lot of good evi- and that makes its members want to be dif- dence to back up my hunch, and that it ferent from the other group. The result is applies not only to teenagers but to young that any pre-existing differences between children as well. the groups tend to widen, and if there Sociologist William Corsaro has spent aren’t any differences to begin with, the many years observing nursery school chil- members create them. Groups develop dren in the United States and Italy. Here is contrasting norms, contrasting images of his description of four-year-olds in an themselves. Italian scuola materna, a government- In the Robber’s Cave study, it happened sponsored nursery school: very quickly. Within a few days of their first encounter, the Eagles had decided that In the process of resisting adult the Rattlers used too many “cuss-words” rules, the children develop a sense and resolved to give up cussing; they began of community and a group identity. to say a prayer before every game. The [I would have put it the other way Rattlers, who saw themselves as tough and around: I think group identity leads manly, continued to favor scatology over to the resistance.] The children’s eschatology. If an Eagle turned an ankle or resistance to adult rules can be seen skinned a knee, it was all right for him to as a routine because it is a daily cry. A Rattler who sustained a similar occurrence in the nursery school

Raising Children in America 35 and is produced in a style that is differences among their members—differ- easily recognizable to members of ences in personality. Even identical twins the peer culture. Such activity is reared in the same home do not have iden- often highly exaggerated (for tical personalities. When groupness is not instance, making faces behind the salient—when there is no other group teacher’s back or running around) around to serve as a foil—a group tends to or is prefaced by “calls for the atten- fall apart into individuals, and differences tion” of other children (such as, among them emerge or increase. In boys’ “look what I got” in reference to groups, for example, there is usually a possession of a forbidden object, or dominance hierarchy, or “pecking order.” “look what I’m doing” to call atten- I have found evidence that dominant boys tion to a restricted activity. develop different personalities from those at the bottom of the ladder. Group contrast effects show up most Groups also typecast their members, clearly when “groupness”—Henri Tajfel’s pinning labels on them—joker, nerd, term—is salient. Children see adults as brain—that can have lifelong repercus- serious and sedentary, so when the social sions. And children find out about them- categories kids and grownups are salient — selves by comparing themselves with their as they might be, for instance, when the group mates. They come to think well or teacher is being particularly bossy—the poorly of themselves by judging how they children become sillier and more active. compare with the other members of their They demonstrate their fealty to their own own group. It doesn’t matter if they don’t age group by making faces and running measure up to the standards of another around. group. A third-grade boy can think of him- This has nothing to do with whether self as smart if he knows more than most of they like their teachers personally. You can his fellow third-graders. He doesn’t have to like people even if they’re members of a know more than a fourth-grader. different group and even if you don’t much like that group — a conflict of interests summed up in the saying, “Some of my best friends are Jews.” When groupness is ccording to my theory, the culture salient, even young children contrast Aacts upon children not through themselves with adults and collude with their parents but through the peer group. each other in defying them. And yet some Children’s groups have their own cultures, of their best friends are grownups. loosely based on the adult culture. They can pick and choose from the adult cul- ture, and it’s impossible to predict what they’ll include. Anything that’s common to earning how to behave properly is the majority of the kids in the group may Lcomplicated, because proper behav- be incorporated into the children’s cul- ior depends on which social category ture, whether they learned it from their you’re in. In every society, the rules of parents or from the television set. If most behavior depend on whether you’re a of the children learned to say “please” and grownup or a kid, a female or a male, a “thank you” at home, they will probably prince or a peon. Children first have to fig- continue to do so when they’re with their ure out the social categories that are rele- peers. The child whose parents failed to vant in their society, and then decide teach her that custom will pick it up from which category they belong in, then tailor the other children: it will be transmitted to their behavior to the other members of her, via the peer group, from the parents of their category. her peers. Similarly, if most of the children That brief description seems to imply watch a particular TV show, the behaviors that socialization makes children more and attitudes depicted in the show may be alike, and so it does, in some ways. But incorporated into the norms of their groups also work to create or exaggerate group. The child whose parents do not

36 WQ Winter 1999 permit him to watch that show will pathy, not blame. Nowadays parents are nonetheless be exposed to those behaviors likely to be held culpable for anything that and attitudes. They are transmitted to him goes wrong with their child, even if they’ve via the peer group. done their best. The evidence I’ve assem- Thus, even though individual parents bled in my book indicates that there is a may have no lasting effects on their chil- limit to what parents can do: how their dren’s behavior, the larger culture does child turns out is largely out of their hands. have an effect. Child-rearing practices Their major contribution occurs at the common to most of the people in a cul- moment of conception. This doesn’t mean ture, such as teaching children to say it’s mostly genetic; it means that the envi- “please” and “thank you,” can have an ronment that shapes the child’s personality effect. And the media can have an effect. and social behavior is outside the home. In the hunter-gatherer or tribal society, I am not advocating irresponsibility. there was no privacy: everybody knew what Parents are in charge of how their children everybody else was doing. Nowadays chil- behave at home. They can decide where dren can’t ordinarily watch their neighbors their children will grow up and, at least in making love, having babies, fighting, and the early years, who their peers will be. dying, but they can watch these things They are the chief determiners of whether happening on the television screen. their children’s life at home will be happy Television has become their window on or miserable, and they have a moral oblig- society, their village square. They take ation to keep it from being miserable. My what they see on the screen to be an indi- theory does not grant people the license to cation of what life is like—what life is sup- treat children in a cruel or negligent way. posed to be—and they incorporate it into Although individual parents have little their children’s cultures. power to influence the culture of chil- dren’s peer groups, larger numbers of par- ents acting together have a great deal of power, and so does the society as a whole. ne of my goals in writing The Through the prevailing methods of child ONurture Assumption was to lighten rearing it fosters, and through influ- some of the burdens of modern parent- ences—especially the media—that act hood. Back in the 1940s, when I was directly on peer-group norms and values, a young, the parents of a troublesome society shapes the adults of the future. Are child—my parents, for instance—got sym- we shaping them the way we ought to?

Raising Children in America 37