August 17, 1998 The New Yorker

ANNALS OF BEHAVIOR Do Parents Matter? Judith Rich Harris and by

1.

The idea that will make Judith Rich Harris famous came to her, unbidden, on the afternoon of January 20, 1994. At the time, Harris was a textbook writer, with no doctorate or academic affiliation, working from her home in suburban New Jersey. Because of a lupus-like illness, she doesn’t have the strength to leave the house, and she’d spent that morning in bed. By early afternoon, though, she was at her desk, glancing through a paper by a prominent psychologist about juvenile delinquency, and for some reason a couple of unremarkable sentences struck her as odd: “Delinquency must be a social behavior that allows access to some desirable resource. I suggest that the resource is mature status, with its consequent power and privilege.” It is an observation consistent with our ideas about what it means to grow up. Teen-agers rebel against being teen-agers, against the restrictions imposed on them by adults. They smoke because only adults are supposed to smoke. They steal cars because they are too young to have cars. But Harris was suddenly convinced that the paper had it backward. “Adolescents aren’t trying to be like adults--they are trying to contrast themselves with adults,” she explains. “And it was as if a light had gone on in the sky. It was one of the most exciting things that have ever happened to me. In a minute or two, I had the germ of the theory, and in ten minutes I had enough of it to see that it was important.”

If adolescents didn’t want to be like adults, it was because they wanted to be like other adolescents. Children were identifying with and learning from other children, and Harris realized that once you granted that fact all the conventional wisdom about parents and family and child-rearing started to unravel. Why, for example, do the children of recent immigrants almost never retain the accents of their parents? How is it that the children of deaf parents manage to learn how to speak as well as children whose parents speak to them from the day they were born? The answer has always been that language is a skill acquired laterally--that what children pick up from other children is at least as important as what they pick up at home. Harris was

-1- asking whether this was true more few hours at a time. So she went to generally: what if children also learn the local public library and ordered the things that make them who they academic texts through interlibrary are--that shape their characters and loan and sent for reprints of scientific personalities--from their peer group? articles through the mail, and the This would mean that, in some key more she read the more she became sense, parents don’t much matter- convinced that her theory could tie -that what’s important is not what together many of the recent puzzling children learn inside the home but findings in behavioral genetics and what they learn outside the home. developmental . In six weeks, in August and September of “I was sitting and thinking,” Harris 1994, she wrote a draft and sent it off told me, looking bright-eyed as she to the academic journal Psychological clutched a tall glass of lemonade. She Review. It was an act of singular is tiny--a fragile, elfin grandmother audacity, because Psychological with a mop of gray hair and a little- Review is one of the most prestigious voice. We were in her kitchen, journals in psychology, and looking out on the green of her back prestigious academic journals do yard. “I told my husband, Charlie, not, as a rule, publish the musings of about it. I had signed a contract to stay-at-home grandmothers without write a developmental-psychology Ph.D.s. But her article was accepted, textbook, and I wasn’t quite ready and in the space below her name, to give it up. But the more I thought where authors typically put “Princeton about it the more I realized I couldn’t University” or “Yale University” or go on writing developmental- “Oxford University,” Harris proudly psychology textbooks, because put “Middletown, New Jersey.” Harris I could no longer say what my listed her CompuServe address publishers wanted me to say.” Over in a footnote, and soon she was the next six months, Harris immersed inundated with E-mail, because what herself in the literature of social she had to say was so compelling psychology and cultural anthropology. and so surprising and, in a wholly She read studies of group behavior in unexpected way, so sensible that primates and unearthed studies from everyone in the field wanted to know the nineteen-fifties of pre-adolescent more. Who are you? scholars asked. boys. She couldn’t conduct any Where did you come from? Why have experiments of her own, because I never heard of you before? she didn’t belong to an academic institution. She couldn’t even use a At this point, Harris’s health was proper academic library, because the not good. Her autoimmune disorder closest university to her was Rutgers, began to attack her heart and lungs, which was forty-five minutes away, and she sometimes wondered how and she didn’t have the strength long she had to live. But, at the to leave her house for more than a urging of some of her new friends

-2- in academe, she set out to write a book, and somehow in the writing of 2. it she became stronger. That book, “The Nurture Assumption,” will be published this fall, and it is a graceful, Judith Harris’s big idea--that peers lucid, and utterly persuasive assault matter much more than parents-- on virtually every tenet of child runs counter to nearly everything development. It begins, “This book that a century of psychology and has two purposes: first, to dissuade psychotherapy has told us about you of the notion that a child’s human development. Freud put personality--what used to be called parents at the center of the child’s ‘character’--is shaped or modified by universe, and there they have the child’s parents; and second, to remained ever since. “They fuck you give you an alternative view of how up, your mum and dad. They may the child’s personality is shaped.” not mean to, but they do,” the poet On the back cover are enthusiastic Philip Larkin memorably wrote, and blurbs from David Lykken, of the that perspective is fundamental to University of Minnesota; Robert the way we have been taught to Sapolsky, of Stanford; Dean Keith understand ourselves. When we go Simonton, of the University of to a therapist, we talk about our California at Davis; John Bruer, of parents, in the hope that coming to the James S. McDonnell Foundation; grips with the events of childhood and , of MIT--which, in can help us decipher the mysteries the social-science business, is a bit of adulthood. When we say things like writing a book on basketball and like “That’s the way I was raised,” having it endorsed by the starting we mean that children instinctively five of the Chicago Bulls. This week, and preferentially learn from their Harris will travel to San Francisco parents, that parents can be good for the annual convention of the or bad role models for children, American Psychological Association, that character and personality are where she will receive a prize for her passed down from one generation article. to the next. Child development has been, in many ways, concerned with “It’s as if the gods were making understanding children through their up to me all that they had done to parents. me previously,” Harris told me. “It was the best gift I could have ever In recent years, however, this idea gotten: an idea. It wasn’t something has run into a problem. In a series that I could have known in advance. of careful and comprehensive But, as it turned out, it was what I studies (among them the famous wanted most in the world--an idea Minnesota studies of twins separated that would give a direction and a at birth) behavioral geneticists have purpose to my life.” concluded that about fifty per cent

-3- of the personality differences among followed the children into their new people--traits such as friendliness, homes, giving them a battery of extroversion, nervousness, openness, personality and intelligence tests at and so on--are attributable to regular intervals throughout their our genes, which means that the childhood and giving similar tests to other half must be attributable their adoptive parents. For the sake to the environment. Yet when of comparison, the group also ran researchers have set out to look the same set of tests on a control for this environmental influence group of two hundred and forty-five they haven’t been able to find it. parents and their biological children. If the example of parents were For the latter group, the results were important in a child’s development, pretty much as one might expect: in you’d expect to see a consistent intellectual ability and certain aspects difference between the children of of personality, the kids proved to be anxious and inexperienced parents fairly similar to their parents. The and the children of authoritative and scores of the adopted kids, however, competent parents, even after taking had nothing whatsoever in common into account the influence of heredity. with the scores of their adoptive Children who spend two hours a day parents: these children were no more with their parents should be different similar in personality or intellectual from children who spend eight hours skills to the people who reared them, a day with their parents. A home fed them, clothed them, read to with lots of books should result in a them, taught them, and loved them different kind of child from a home all their lives than they were to any with very few books. In other words, two adults taken at random off the researchers should have been able street. to find some causal link between the specific social environment parents Here is the puzzle. We think that create for their children and the way children resemble their parents those children turn out. They haven’t. because of both genes and the home environment, both nature and One of the largest and most rigorous nurture. But, if nurture matters even studies of this kind is known as a little, why don’t the adopted kids the Colorado Adoption Project. have at least some greater-than- Between 1975 and 1982, a group chance similarities to their adoptive of researchers at the University parents? The Colorado study says of Colorado, headed by Robert that the only reason we are like Plomin, one of the world’s leading our parents is that we share their behavioral geneticists, recruited two genes, and that--by any measures of hundred and forty-five pregnant cognition and personality--when there women from the Denver area who is no genetic inheritance there is no planned to give up their children resemblance. for adoption. The researchers then

-4- This is the question that so and it may have taught them a good preoccupied Harris on that winter way of expressing their affection, morning four and a half years but it may not have been what made ago. She knew that most people them nice. Or take the example of in psychology had responded to smoking. The children of smokers are findings like those of the Colorado more than twice as likely to smoke project by turning an ever more as the children of nonsmokers, so powerful microscope on the family, it’s natural to conclude that parents assuming that if we couldn’t see who smoke around their children set the influence of parents through an example that their kids follow. In standard psychological measures it fact, a lot of parents who smoke feel was because we weren’t looking hard guilty about it for that very reason. enough. Not looking hard enough But if parents really cause smoking wasn’t the problem. The problem was there ought to be elevated rates of that psychologists weren’t looking in smoking among the adopted children the right place. They were looking of smokers, and there aren’t. It inside the home when they should turns out that nicotine addiction is have been looking outside the home. heavily influenced by genes, and The answer wasn’t parents; it was the reason that so many children of peers. smokers smoke is that they have inherited a genetic susceptibility to Harris argues that we have been in tobacco from their parents. David the grip of what she calls the “nurture C. Rowe, a professor of family assumption,” a parent-centered bias studies at the University of that has blinded us to what really (whose academic work on the limits matters in human development. of family influence Harris says was Consider, she says, the seemingly critical to her own thinking), has common-sense statements “Children analyzed research into this genetic who are hugged are more likely to be contribution, and he concludes that nice” and “Children who are beaten it accounts entirely for the elevated are more likely to be unpleasant.” levels of cigarette use among the Sure enough, if you study nice, well- children of smokers. With smoking, adjusted children, it turns out that as with niceness, what parents do they generally have well-adjusted seems to be nearly irrelevant. and nice parents. But what does this really mean? Since genes account for Harris makes another, subtler point about half of personality variations about parents. What if, she asks, among people, it’s quite possible that the cause-and-effect assumption nice children are nice simply because with niceness and hugging can also they received nice genes from their go the other way? What if, all other parents--and nice parents are going things being equal, nice children to be nice to their children. Hugging tend to be hugged because they may have made the children happy, are nice, and unpleasant children

-5- tend to be beaten because they are a number of colleagues have just unpleasant? Children, after all, are completed a ten-year, nine-million- born with individual temperaments. dollar study of seven hundred and Some children are easy to rear from twenty American families. Thirty-two the start and others are difficult, and teams of testers were recruited, and those innate characteristics, she says, they visited each family three times can strongly influence how parents in the course of three years, giving treat them. Harris tells a story about parents and personality tests, a mother with two young children-- videotaping interactions between a five-year-old girl, named Audrey, parents and children, questioning and a seven-year-old boy, named teachers, asking siblings about Mark--who walked by Harris’s house siblings, asking parents about one day when she was out in the children, asking children about front yard with her dog, Page. Page parents--all to find out whether the ran toward the children, barking differences in how parents relate menacingly. Audrey went up to the to each of their children make any animal and asked her mother, “Can predictable difference in the way I pet him?” Her mother quickly told those children end up. “We thought her not to. Mark, meanwhile, was that this was going to be a straight cowering on the other side of the shot,” Reiss told me. “The who street, and he stayed there even got the better micro environment after Harris rushed up and grabbed would do better, be less depressed, Page by the collar. “Come on, Mark, be less antisocial. It seemed like a the dog won’t hurt you,” the mother no-brainer.” It wasn’t. Plomin told me, said, and she waited for her son to “If we just ask the simple question come back across the street. What ‘Does differential parental treatment is the parenting “style” here that is relate to differences in adolescent supposedly so important in shaping adjustment?’ the answer is yes-- personality? This mother is playing hugely. If you take negative parents- two very different roles--coaxing the -conflict, hostility--it’s the strongest frightened Mark and reining in the predictor of negative adjustment brash Audrey--and in each case her of the siblings.” But the study was behavior is shaped by the actions and designed to look at genetic influences the temperament of her child, and as well--to examine whether children not the other way around. had personality traits that were causing parental behavior--and when This phenomenon--what Harris calls those genetic factors were taken child-to-parent effects--has been into consideration the link between explored in detail by psychological negative parenting and problems researchers. David Reiss, of George in adolescence almost entirely Washington University, and Robert disappeared. “The parents’ negativity Plomin, the behavioral geneticist isn’t causing the negative adjustment who headed the Colorado study, and of the kids,” Plomin said. “It’s

-6- reflecting it. This was a tremendous the house Cinderella learned that surprise to us.” What looks like she could win friends by being pretty nurture is sometimes just nature, and and charming. Harris says that this what looks like a cause is sometimes lesson--that away from our parents just an effect. we can reconstruct ourselves--is one that all children learn very quickly, and it is an important limitation on 3. the power of parents: even when they do succeed in influencing their Harris takes this argument one step children, those influences very often further. Consider, she says, the story don’t travel outside the home. of Cinderella: The Cinderella effect shows up all The folks who gave us this tale ask the time in psychological research. us to accept the following premises: For example, Harris notes that that Cinderella was able to go to in the August, 1997, issue of the the ball and not be recognized by Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent her stepsisters, that despite years Medicine there is a study showing of degradation she was able to that the more mothers spanked charm and hold the attention of a their kids, the more troublesome sophisticated guy like the prince, that the kids became. “When parents the prince didn’t recognize her when use corporal punishment to reduce he saw her again in her own home antisocial behavior,” the researchers dressed in her workaday clothing, report, “the long-term effect tends and that he never doubted that to be the opposite.” These findings Cinderella would be able to fulfill the made headlines across the country. duties of a princess and, ultimately, In the same issue of that journal, of a queen. however, another study of children and corporal punishment reached If you think of the influence of the opposite conclusion: “For most parents and the home environment children claims that spanking teaches as monolithic, this tale does seem aggression seem unfounded.” impossibly far-fetched. So why does The disparity is baffling until you the Cinderella story work? Because, remember the Cinderella effect. Harris says, all of us understand that The first study asked mothers to it is possible to be one person to our evaluate their children’s behavior at parents and another person to our home. Not surprisingly, it suggested friends. “Cinderella learned whenshe that repeated spanking contributes was still quite small that it was best to the kind of negative relationship to act meek when her stepmother that causes further misbehavior. The was around, and to look unattractive second study, however, asked kids in order to avoid arousing her how often they got into fights at jealousy,” Harris writes. But outside school, and the world of school is a

-7- very different place from the world clearly and irrefutably: a parent’s of home. Just the fact that a child behavior toward a child affects how wasn’t getting along with his mother the child behaves in the presence didn’t necessarily mean that he of the parent or in contexts that are wouldn’t get along with his peers. associated with the parent,” Harris concludes. “I have no problem with In another instance, Harris cites a that--I agree with it. The parent’s Swedish study of picky eating among behavior also affects the way the primary-school children. Some kids child feels about the parent. When a were picky eaters at school, some parent favors one child over another, were picky at home, but only a small not only does it cause hard feelings number were picky at home and between the children--it also causes school. A child who pushes away the unfavored child to harbor hard broccoli at the kitchen table might feelings against the parent. These gobble it down in the school cafeteria. feelings can last a lifetime.” But they In the same way, a child might don’t necessarily cross over into the be shy and retiring at home but a life the child leads outside the home- chatterbox in the classroom. Harris -the place where adults spend the applies the same logic to birth-order majority of their lives. effects--the popular idea that a good part of our personality is determined 4. by where we stand in relation to our siblings. “At home there are birth order effects, no question about it, Not long ago, Anne-Marie Ambert, and I believe that is why it’s so hard a sociologist at York University, in to shake people’s faith in them,” Ontario, asked her students to write Harris writes. “If you see people with short autobiographies describing, their parents or their siblings, you among other things, the events in do see the differences you expect their lives which made them most to see. The oldest does seem more unhappy. Nine per cent identified serious, responsible, and bossy. The something that their parents had youngest does behave in a more done, while more than a third pointed carefree fashion.” But that’s only at to the way they had been treated by home. Studies that look at the way peers. Ambert concluded: people act outside the home, and away from the parents and siblings, There is far more negative treatment don’t see any consistent effects at by peers than by parents.... In these all. The younger brother cowed by his autobiographies, one reads accounts older siblings all his years of growing of students who had been happy up is perfectly capable of being a and well adjusted, but quite rapidly dominant, take-charge figure when began deteriorating psychologically, he’s among his friends. “Socialization sometimes to the point of becoming research has demonstrated one thing physically ill and incompetent in

-8- school, after experiences such as “Adolescent males in this sample who being rejected by peers, excluded, lived in single-mother households did talked about, racially discriminated not differ from youth living in other against, laughed at, bullied, sexually family constellations in their alcohol harassed, taunted, chased or beaten. and substance use, delinquency, school dropout, or psychological This is Harris’s argument in a distress,” the study concluded. A nutshell: that whatever our parents child is better off, in other words, do to us is overshadowed, in the living in a troubled family in a good long run, by what our peers do to us. neighborhood than living in a good In “The Nurture Assumption,”Harris family in a troubled neighborhood. pulls together an extraordinary Peers trump parents. range of studies and observations to support this idea. Here, for Other studies have shown that example, is Harris on delinquency. children living without their biological First, she cites a study of juvenile fathers are more likely to drop out delinquency--vandalism, theft, of school and, if female, to get assault, weapons possession, and so pregnant in their teens. But is this on--among five hundred elementary- because of the absence of a parent, school and middle-school boys in Harris asks, or is it because of some Pittsburgh. The study found that factor that is merely associated with African-American boys, many of the absence of a parent? Having them from poor, single-parent, “high- a stepfather around, for example, risk” families, committed far more doesn’t make a kid any less likely to delinquent acts than the white kids. be unemployed, to drop out, or to be That much isn’t surprising. But when a teen-age mother. Nor does having the researchers divided up the black lots of contact with one’s biological boys by neighborhood the effect of father after he has left. Nor does coming from a putatively high-risk having another biological relative-- family disappeared. Black kids who a grandparent, for instance--in the didn’t live in the poorest, underclass home. Nor does it seem to matter neighborhoods--even if they were when the father leaves: kids whose from poor, single-parent families-- parents split up when they were in were no more delinquent than their their early teens are no better off white, mostly middle-class peers. At and no worse off than kids whose the same time, Harris cites another fathers left when they were infants. large study--one that compared the And, curiously, children whose fathers behavior of poor inner-city kids from die aren’t worse off at all. In short, intact families to the behavior of there isn’t a lot of evidence that those living only with their mothers. the loss of adult guidance and role You’d assume that a child is always models caused by fatherlessness has better off in a two-parent home, but specific behavioral consequences. the research doesn’t bear that out. So what is it? One obvious factor

-9- is income: single mothers have yourself and hoping that your child less money than married mothers, follows suit. A preschooler doesn’t and income has a big effect on the care what you think. But give the welfare of children. If your parents food to a roomful of preschoolers split up and you move from Riverdale who like it, and it’s quite probable to the South Bronx, you’re obviously that your child will happily follow suit. going to be a lot worse off--although From the very moment that children it’s not the loss of your father that first meet other children, they take makes the difference. This brings us their cues from them. to another factor: relocation. Single- parent families move more often than One of the researchers whom Harris intact families, and, according to one draws on in her peer discussion is major study, those extra changes William A. Corsaro, a professor of of residence could account for sociology at Indiana University and more than half the increased risk of a pioneer in the ethnography of dropping out, of teen-age pregnancy, early childhood. He was one of the and of unemployment among the first researchers to spend months children of divorce. The problem with crouching by swing sets and next divorce, in short, is not so much that to monkey bars closely observing it disrupts kids’ relationships with the speech and play patterns of their parents as that it disrupts kids’ preschoolers. In one of his many relationships with other kids. “Moving playground stakeouts, Corsaro is rough on kids,” Harris writes. “Kids was sitting next to a sandbox and who have been moved around a lot- watching two four-year-old , -whether or not they have a father-- Jenny and Betty, play house, and are more likely to be rejected by their put sand in pots, cupcake pans, peers; they have more behavioral and teapots. Suddenly, a third problems and more academic girl, Debbie, approached. Here is problems than those who have stayed Corsaro’s full description of the put.” scene:

After watching for about five minutes 5. [Debbie] circles the sandbox three times and stops again and stands All these findings become less next to me. After a few more minutes perplexing when you accept one of watching, Debbie moves to the of Harris’s central observations; sandbox and reaches for a teapot. namely, that kids aren’t interested Jenny takes the pot away from in becoming copies of their parents. Debbie and mumbles, “No.” Debbie Children want to be good at being backs away and again stands near children. How, for example, do me, observing the activity of Jenny you persuade a preschooler to eat and Betty. Then she walks over next something new? Not by eating it to Betty, who is filling the cupcake

-10- pan with sand. Unlike at a cocktail party, though, the play clusters are very fragile. “If the Debbie watches Betty for just a few phone rang right now,” Corsaro said seconds, then says,”We’re friends, to me when I met him, in his office right, Betty?” in Bloomington, “I could answer it, talk for five minutes, and then we Betty, not looking up at Debbie, could pick up where we left off. It’s continues to place sand in the pan easy for us. When you are a three- or and says, “Right.” four-year-old and you’ve generated something spontaneous and it’s going Debbie now moves alongside Betty, well, it’s not so easy.” The bell can takes a pot and spoon, begins putting ring. An adult can step in. An older sand in the pot, and says, “I’m child can disrupt things. As a result, making coffee.” they spend a lot of effort trying to protect their play from disruption. “I’m making cupcakes,” Betty replies. Betty and Jenny aren’t resistant to sharing when they initially say no to Betty now turns to Jenny and says, Debbie. They are already sharing, “We’re mothers, right, Jenny?” and the point of keeping Debbie at bay is to defend that shared play. “Right,” says Jenny. What has evolved in preschool The three “mothers” continue to culture, then, is what Corsaro calls play together for about twenty more access strategies--an elaborate set minutes, until the teachers announce of rules and rituals that govern when cleanup time. and how the third parties circulating through the playground are allowed To adults, this exchange looks to join an existing game. Debbie’s somewhat troubling. If you saw approach to the sandbox is what Debbie circling the sandbox over Corsaro calls nonverbal entry--the and over, you’d think she was shy first common opening move in the and timid. And if you came upon access dance. She’s waiting for an the three girls just as Jenny told invitation to join. It’s the same at an Debbie no you’d think Jenny was adult cocktail party. You don’t come selfish and needed to be taught to up to an existing conversation and share. In both cases, the children say, “May I join in?” You join the seem profoundly antisocial. In fact, group quietly, as if to demonstrate Corsaro says, the opposite is true. respect for the existing conversation. A preschool playground is rather When Debbie goes around and like a cocktail party. There are lots around the sandbox, she’s trying of informal clusters of kids playing to understand the basis of Jenny together, and the kids are in constant and Betty’s play. Corsaro calls this movement, from cluster to cluster. encirclement. Notice that when

-11- Debbie initially reaches for a teapot were selecting the smallest of their Jenny says no. Debbie hasn’t proved toys--the boys chose Matchbox toy that she understands the game cars, for example, and the girls little in question. So she retreats and plastic animals--and hiding them observes further. Then she makes in their pockets. These were only what Corsaro calls a verbal reference preschoolers, but already they were to affiliation--”We’re friends, right?” organizing against the adult world, It’s as if she were offering her bona defining themselves as a group in fides. She gets a positive response. opposition to their elders. “What I Now she enters again, this time found interesting was not that the making it absolutely clear that she kids wanted to bring their own toys understands the game: “I’m making but that when they smuggled them in coffee.” She’s in. This is how children they never played with them alone. learn to get along. Kids teach each They played with them collectively,” other how to be social. Indeed, to the Corsaro told me. “They wanted others extent that adults might get involved to know that they had them. They in an access situation--by, for wanted to share the toys with others. example, instructing Jenny and Betty They are not only sharing the toy but that they have to share with Debbie- sharing the fact that they are getting -they would frustrate the learning around the rule. This is what is process. unique. I think there is a real, strong emotional satisfaction in sharing Corsaro is a quiet, bearded man of things, in doing things together.” fifty, with the patient, stubborn air of Even for a child of three or four, the someone who has spent the better group is critical. part of his life sitting and watching screaming three-year-olds. Harris 6. E-mailed him when she was writing her Psycholo gical Review paper, and the two have struck up an on-line Judith Harris and her husband, friendship. Most people, Corsaro says, Charles, have two children. The first, want to figure out what his work says Nomi, is their biological daughter, about individual development. Harris, and the second, Elaine, is adopted. though, recognized at once what In that sense, Harris’s own family is a Corsaro considers the real lesson, kind of micro-version of the adoption which is the children’s immediate and studies that raise the question of powerful attraction to their own peer parental influence, and she says that group. Once, Corsaro spent close without the example of her daughters to a year in a preschool where the she might not have reached the children had been forbidden to bring conclusion she did. Nomi, the elder, their toys into the classroom. Before was quiet and self-sufficient as a long, he noticed that they had found child, a National Merit Scholar who a way around the rule: the children went on to do graduate work at

-12- MIT. “She is very much like me and time. She was in such pain that she Charlie,” Harris says. “She gave us couldn’t sit up for more than half an no trouble while she was growing up. hour. She tried taking a graduate She didn’t require much guidance, course in psychology, hoping to finish because she didn’t want to do a doctorate she had started, in the anything that we didn’t want her to early sixties, at Harvard, and she had do. Even before she could walk, she a fellow-student carry a cot to class would crawl off to another part of the so she could lie down during lectures. house, and I’d find her taking things But even that was too hard, so she out of a drawer and looking at them became a textbook writer, lying in her carefully--and putting them down bed, with a spiral-bound notebook carefully.” on her knee, and Nomi acting as her typist. She had pneumonia, a heart Elaine was different. “When she was murmur, pulmonary hypertension, little, all you had to do was look shingles, a year of chronic hives, down and she was there, right on my and a minor stroke. “Sometimes,” heels,” Harris recalls. “She always she says, “I felt like Job,” and in the wanted to be with people. We started midst of all her troubles her younger getting bad reports from the school daughter seemed out of control. right away--that she wouldn’t sit in her chair, and she was bothering “We had very bad years with her in other kids. When Nomi would ask her teens,” she recalls. “We didn’t a question, it was because she was know how to handle her.” Harris interested in the answer. When says that she began motherhood as Elaine would ask a question, it was a classic environmentalist, meaning because she was interested in having she believed that children would the interaction. Nomi would ask a reflect the environment in which question once. Elaine would often they were reared. Had she stopped ask a question several times. As the with Nomi, she says, she might have girls got older, Nomi became a brain attributed Nomi’s studiousness and and Elaine became a dropout. Nomi self-sufficiency and success to her was a member of a very small clique own enlightened parenting. It was of intellectual kids, and Elaine was a Elaine who made the puzzle posed member of the delinquent subgroup. by the adoption studies seem real. They went in opposite directions.” “I assumed that an adopted child would represent her environment, Harris has an optimistic air about her, and that if I could give Elaine the as if all her troubles had only served same kind of environment I gave to to strengthen her appreciation of life. my first child she would turn out- But it’s clear that bringing up Elaine -of course, not the same...” She represented a real crisis in her life. thought for moment. “But I certainly When Elaine was six and Nomi was didn’t expect that she would be so ten, Harris became ill for the first vastly different. I couldn’t see that I

-13- was having any effect on her at all.” how children turn out. The nurture Harris seems a little reluctant to talk assumption, by contrast, places the about those years, particularly since blame and the credit squarely on Elaine turned out, as she puts it, the parent, and has made it possible “amazingly well” and is now happy to demonize all those who fail to and married, with a toddler and a measure up to the strictest standards career as a licensed practical nurse. of supposedly optimal parenting. “I But it’s not hard to imagine the kind want to tell parents that it’s all right,” of guilt and frustration she must have Harris told me. “A lot of people who felt--maternal helplessness magnified should be contributing children to our by her physical debility--as she and society, who could be contributing Charles did everything that good very useful and fine children, are parents are supposed to do yet still reluctant to do it, or are waiting very came up short. Her epiphany was, in long to have children, because they a way, her release, because she came feel that it requires such a huge to believe that the reason she and commitment. If they knew that it Charles couldn’t see that they were was O.K. to have a child and let it having any effect on Elaine was that be reared by a nanny or put it in a parents really can’t have a big effect day-care center, or even to send it on their children. to a boarding school, maybe they’d believe that it would be O.K. to have There are a hundred ways of a kid. You can have a kid without explaining Nomi and Elaine, and having to devote your entire life-- there is, of course, something very your entire emotional expenditure--to convenient about the explanation this child for the next twenty years.” that Harris arrived at: it’s the kind of thing that the mother of a difficult Harris does not see children as child wants to believe. Harris has delicate vessels and does not constructed a theory that lets herself believe they are easily damaged off the hook for her daughter’s by the missteps of their mothers troubled childhood. It should be and fathers. We have been told, said, though, that the idea that Harris writes, to tell children not parents can control the destiny of that they’ve been bad but that what their children by doing all the right they did was bad, or, even more things--by providing children with appropriately, that what they did every lesson and every experience, made us feel bad. In her view, we by buying them the right toys and have come to insist on these niceties saying the right words and never only because we have forgotten what spanking or publicly scolding them--is the world of children is really like. just as self-serving. At least, Harris’s “Kids are not that fragile,” she writes. theory calls for neighborhoods, “They are tougher than you think. peers, and children themselves to They have to be, because the world share the blame--and the credit--for out there does not handle them with

-14- kid gloves. At home, they might hear relate to their parents: “Like living ‘What you did made me feel bad,’ video cameras, children record what but out on the playground it’s ‘You they observe.” This is the modern- shithead!’” day cult of parenting. It takes as self-evident the idea that the child is Is Harris right? She is the first to oriented, overwhelmingly, toward the admit that what she has provided is parents. But why should that be true? only, at this stage, a theory. From her Don’t parents, in fact, spend much of tiny study, off the main hallway of her their time instructing their children home in New Jersey, she is scarcely not to act like adults--that they in a position to do the kind of cannot be independent, that they multimillion-dollar, multi-year study cannot make decisions entirely by that is needed to test her hypothesis. themselves, that different rules apply “My guess is that some of the more to them because they are children? threatened elders in the field of psychology are going to go out of “If were their way to try and savage this,” an enterprise conducted by children, Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at there is no question that peer Stanford, says. “But my gut feeling relationships would be at the top of is that this is really important. Harris the list,” Peter Gray, a psychologist makes a lot of sense. Sometimes she at Boston College, told me. “But is a little doctrinaire”--he paused- because it is conducted by adults we -”but, boy.” Already, Harris has tend, egocentrically, to believe that helped wrench psychology away it is the relationship between us and from its single-minded obsession our children that is important. But with chronicling and interpreting just look at them. Whom do they the tiniest perturbations of family want to please? Are they wearing life. The nurture assumption, she the kind of clothing that other kids says, has turned childhood into are wearing or the kind that their parenthood: it has turned the parents are wearing? If the other development of children into a story kids are speaking another way, almost entirely about their parents. whose language are they going to “Have you ever thought of yourself learn? And, from an evolutionary as a mirror?” Dorothy Corkille Briggs perspective, whom should they be asks in her pop-psychology handbook paying attention to? Their parents- “Your Child’s Self-Esteem.” “You are -the members of the previous one--a psychological mirror your generation--or their peers, who will child uses to build his identity. And be their future mates and future his whole life is affected by the collaborators? It would more adaptive conclusions he draws.” And here are for them to be better attuned to the Barbara Chernofsky and Diane Gage, nuances of their peers’ behavior. That in “Change Your Child’s Behavior by just makes a lot of sense.” Changing Yours,” on how children

-15- 7. independence, because in many areas of life you obviously possess both of Harris’s health is more stable now, those traits in abundance. But for and when she was putting the some reason you have not been able finishing touches on her book this to bring them to bear on the kind summer she was sometimes able of problems in psychology to which to work at the computer twelve, this department is dedicated....We or even fourteen, hours a day. But are in considerable doubt that you anything more strenuous is out of the will develop into our professional question. The woman who says that stereotype of what an experimental what really matters is what happens psychologist should be.” outside the home rarely leaves the home--not for vacations, or even to see a movie. Indeed, none of the heavyweight psychologists who have befriended her since her Psychological Review article ran have ever met her. “Writing E-mail is my recreation,” she wrote me in an E-mail.

When Harris goes to San Francisco this week, for the A.P.A. convention, it will be a kind of coming-out party. In preparation, during the past few weeks she has had to go shopping. “I have to buy clothes,” she said. “I’ve hardly been out of the house in years.” On August 15th, she will take the stage and receive a prize named in honor of the eminent scholar George A. Miller. Almost four decades ago, Harris was kicked out of graduate school after only two years, and the dean who delivered the news was the same George A. Miller. The two have since corresponded, and Miller has termed the irony “delicious.” In her acceptance remarks, Harris told me, she intends to read from the letter that Miller wrote her long ago: “I hesitate to say that you lack originality and

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