Top Quotes: “The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do” — Judith Rich Harris
Introduction
“Children cannot learn how to behave by imitating their parents, because most of the things they see their parents doing — making messes, bossing other people around, driving cars. lighting matches, coming and going as they please, and lots of other things that look like fun to people who are not allowed to do them — are prohibited to children. From the child’s point of view, socialization in the early years consists mainly of learning that you’re not supposed to behave like your parents.”
“There is no question that the adult caregivers play an important role in the baby’s life. It is from these older people that babies learn their first language, have their first experiences in forming and maintaining relationships, and get their first lessons in following rules. But the socialization researchers go on to draw other conclusions: that what children learn in the early years about relationships and rules sets the pattern for later relationships and later rule-following, and hence determines the entire course of their lives.
I used to think so, too. I still believe that children need to learn about relationships and rules in their early years; it is also important that they acquire a language. But I no longer believe that this early learning, which in our society generally takes place within the home, sets the pattern for what is to follow. Although the learning itself serves a purpose, the content of what children learn may be irrelevant to the world outside their home. They may cast it off when they step outside as easily as the dorky sweater their mother made them wear.”
“Most socialization studies gather a good deal more data from their subjects than we did in our 10-and-books study: there are usually several measurements of the home environment and several measurements of each child. It’s a bit more work but well worth the trouble. If we collect, say, five different measurements of each home and five different measurements of the child’s intelligence, we can pair them up in twenty-five ways, yielding twenty-five possible correlations. Just by chance alone, it is likely that one or two of them will be statistically significant. What, none of them are? Never fear, all is not lost: we can split up the data and look again, just as we did in our broccoli study. Looking separately at girls and boys immediately doubles the number of correlations, giving us fifty possibilities for success instead of just twenty-five. Looking separately at fathers and mothers is also worth a try: “Divide and conquer” is my name for this method. It works like buying lottery tickets: buy twice as many and you have twice as many chances to win.”
“The way a parent acts toward a particular child depends on the child’s age, physical appearance, current behavior, past behavior, intelligence, and state of health. Parents tailor their child-rearing style to the individual child. Child-reading is not something a parent does to the child: it’s something the parent and the child do together.”
“John Watson assumed that if two children are different, it must be because they are treated differently by their parents — an assumption shared by my childless Uncle Ben. But, as most parents realize shortly after the birth of their second child, children come into this world already different from each other. Their parents treat them differently because of their different characteristics. A fearful child is reassured; a bold one is cautioned. A smiley baby is kissed and played with; an unresponsive one is fed, diapered, and put in its crib. The effects the socialization researchers are interested in are parent-to-child effects: the parent has an effect on the child. There are also effects that go in the opposite direction: the child has an effect on the parent. Child-to-parent effects, I call them.
Generalization 2 said that children who are hugged are more likely to be nice, children who are spanked are more likely to be unpleasant. Turn that statement around and you get one that is equally plausible: nice children are more likely to be hugged, unpleasant children are more likely to be spanked. Do the hugs cause the children’s niceness, or is the children’s niceness the reason why they are hugged, or are both true? Do spankings make children unpleasant, or are parents more likely to lose their temper with unpleasant children, or are both true? In the standard socialization study, there is no way to distinguish these alternative ideas.”
“The evidence suggests that parents do tend to treat identical twins more alike than they treat fraternal twins. When adolescent twins were asked how much affection or rejection they had received from their parents, identical twins were more likely than fraternal twins to give matching reports. If one identical twin said that her parents made her feel loved, the other was likely to say the same thing. But if one fraternal twin reported that her parents made her feel loved, the other might say either that she also felt loved or that she felt rejected. Parents may give their identical twins different outfits and different toys, but nonetheless they seem to love them about the same (or not love them about the same). Whereas with fraternal twins — who often differ considerably in appearance and behavior — they might find one a good deal more lovable than the other. So it is probably true that identical twins tend to have more similar environments than fraternal twins.”
“A study showed that a mother is, on average, more attentive to her baby if the baby is cute than if the baby is homely. (The cuteness of the babies was rated by independent judges — a panel of undergraduates at the University of Texas.) Although all the babies in this study were well cared for, the cute babies were looked at more, played with more, and given more affection than the homely ones. In their report, the researchers quoted a letter written by Queen Victoria to one of her married daughters. According to the queen, who was something of an expert on babies (she had borne nine of them), “An ugly baby is a very nasty object.” Most ugly babies get better looking over time, but think about the ones who don’t. People aren’t as nice to homely children as they are to pretty ones. When homely children do something wrong, they are punished more harshly. If they don’t do anything wrong, people are quicker to think that they did. Homely children and pretty children have different experiences. They grow up in different environments.”
“The socialization researchers are right about this. The trouble is, as you will see in the next chapter, the trick is not to explain why identical twins are so much alike — whether it’s because of their identical genes or their similar experiences.
The trick is to explain why they are not more alike. Even identical twins reared in the same home are far from being identical in personality.”
“The result, for the majority of the psychological characteristics that have been studied, is that roughly half of the variation is attributable to the subjects’ genes, the other half to their environment. But the half attributed to heredity includes indirect effects, the environmental consequences of the effects of the genes. That means that the other half of the variation must be due to “pure” environmental influences — influences that are not, either directly or indirectly, a function of the genes.”
“The flip side of the coin is seldom mentioned. The flip side of the coin is that identical twins reared in the same home are not nearly as alike as you would expect them to be. Given how similar the reared-apart twins are, you probably think that the reared-together ones must be as alike as two copies of your annual Christmas letter. In fact, they are no more alike than identical twins separated in infancy and reared in different homes. Though they have many little quirks in common, there are also many little differences between them.
They are no more alike than the ones reared in different homes! Here are two people who not only have the same genes but who also grew up in the same home at the same time with the same parents, and yet they do not have the same personality. One might be friendly (or shy), the other more (or less) so. One might look before she leaps, the other might not leap at all. One might disagree with you but hold his peace while the other tells you you’re full of crap. I am talking about identical twins. These people are so alike in appearance that you have trouble telling them apart, but give them a personality test and they will check off different answers. The correlation of personality traits (as estimated by scores on personality tests and in various other ways) is only about .50 for identical twins reared in the same home.”
“The unexpected results started appearing in the mid-1970s. By the late ’70s, enough data had been collected to make it look like there was something wrong with the basic premises of behavioral genetics. Not the genetic premise — that was okay. People who share genes are more alike in personality than people who don’t share genes. It was the premise about sharing an environment that didn’t seem to be working properly. Study after study was showing that pairs of people who grew up in the same home were not noticeably more alike in personality than pairs who grew up in two different homes. And yet the results didn’t fit the entirely-genetic prediction either, because genetic relatives weren’t alike enough — the correlations were too low. Something other than genes was exerting an effect on the subjects’ personalities, but it didn’t seem to be the home in which they were reared. Or if it was the home, it was working in an inexplicable manner. It wasn’t making siblings more alike, it was making them less alike.”
“The behavioral geneticists looked at a wide variety of personality traits (though not, as far as I know, risibility) and the results were about the same for all of them. The daft showed that growing up in the same home, being reared by the same parents, had little or no effect on the adult personalities of siblings. Reared-together siblings are alike in personality only to the degree, that they are alike genetically. The genes they share can entirely account for any resemblances between them; there are no leftover similarities for the shared environment to explain.“
“In their herculean review of birth order research, Ernst and Angst examined all the studies they could find on personality and birth order-studies published anywhere in the world between 1946 and 1980. The data consisted of direct observations of the subjects’ behavior; ratings by their parents, siblings, or teachers; and scores on various personality tests. By putting together all these results, Ernst and Angst expected to verify the hypothesis that “Personality varies with birth order: there is a “firstborn personality.”
They did not verify it. What Ernst and Angst found, first of all, was that most, of the studies that purported to show birth order effects were irredeemably flawed. In most cases the researchers had failed to take into account differences in family size and socioeconomic status, variables that are themselves correlated and that can bias the results. Ernst and Angst eliminated the flawed studies, put together what they had left, and what did they find? No consistent birth order effects on personality. The majority of studies yielded no significant effects.”
“Here’s what I think. Middle-class Americans of European descent try to use the Just Right parenting style, because that is the style approved by their culture. If they don’t use it, it’s because they have problems or their kid does. If they have problems, it could be because they have disadvantageous personality characteristics that they can pass on to their kid genetically. If the kid has problems — a difficult temperament, for instance — then the Just Right parenting style might not work and the parents might end up switching to the Too Hard method. So among Americans of European descent, parents who use a Too Hard child-rearing style are more likely to be the ones with problem kids. This is exactly what the style-of-parenting researchers find.
In other ethnic groups — notably Americans of Asian or African descent — cultural norms differ. Chinese Americans, for example, tend to use the Too Hard parenting style — the style Baumrind called Authoritarian — not because their kids are difficult, but because that’s the style favored by their culture. Among Asian and African Americans, therefore, parents who use a Too Hard child-rearing style should not be more likely to have problem kids.
Again, this is exactly what the researchers find. What they find, in fact, is that Asian-American parents are the most likely of all American parents to use the Too Hard style and the least likely to use the Just Right style, and yet in many ways Asian-American children are the most competent and successful of all American children. Although this finding contradicts their theory, the style-of-parenting researchers continue on undaunted.”
“Learning to do things with Mommy is all well and good, but the child does not automatically transfer this learning to other contexts. This is a wise policy, because what is learned with Mommy might turn out to be useless in other contexts — or worse than useless. Consider, for example, a baby I will call Andrew. Andrew’s mother was suffering from postpartum depression, an affliction that is not uncommon in the first few months after childbirth. She was able to feed Andrew and change his diapers, but she didn’t play with him or smile at him very much. By the time he was three months old, Andrew too was showing signs of depression. When he was with his mother he smiled infrequently and was less active than usual for babies of that age — his face was serious, his movements muted. Fortunately, Andrew didn’t spend all his time with his mother: he spent part of it at a day nursery, and the caregiver at the nursery was not depressed. Watch Andrew with his nursery caregiver and you will see a different baby, smiley and active. The somber faces and muted movements common in the babies of depressed mothers are “specific to their interactions with their depressed mothers,” according to researchers who studied babies like Andrew.
Different behaviors in different social contexts have also been noted in older infants, infants of walking age. Researchers have studied how toddlers behave at home (by asking their mothers to fill out questionnaires) and at day-care centers (by observing them there or by asking the caregivers at the center) and found that the two descriptions of the children’s behavior do not agree. “There exists the possibility that the toddler’s actual behavior differs systematically in the home and day-care settings,” admitted one researcher.”
“At home there are birth order effects, no question about it, and I believe that is why it’s so hard to shake people’s faith in them. If you see people with their parents or their siblings, you do see the differences you expect to see. The oldest does seem more serious, responsible, and bossy. The youngest does behave in a more carefree fashion. But that’s how they act when they’re together. These patterns of behavior are not like albatrosses that we have to drag along with us wherever we go, all through our lives. We don’t even drag them to nursery school.”
“My favorite example of a failure to transfer behavior from one context to another involves picky eating — a common complaint among the parents of young children. You would think a picky eater in one setting would be a picky eater in another, wouldn’t you? Yes, it has been studied, and no, that’s not what the researchers found. One-third of the children in a Swedish sample were picky eaters either at home or in school, but only 8% were picky in both places.”
“”Many bilingual people,” reported Kolers, “say that they think differently and respond with different emotions to the same experience in their two languages.” If they use one language exclusively at home, the other exclusively outside the home, the home language becomes linked to the thoughts and emotions experienced at home, the other to the thoughts and emotions experienced outside the home.”
“Most people do go home again, and the moment they walk through the door and hear their mother’s voice from the kitchen — “Is that you, dear?” — the old personality they thought they had outgrown comes back to haunt them. In the world outside they are dignified, successful women and men, but put them back at the family dinner table and pretty soon they are bickering and whining again, just like they did in the good old days. No wonder so many people hate going home for holidays.”
“One of the reasons you didn’t believe me when I told you that the nurture assumption is a myth is that there’s so much evidence to support it. You can see that parents have effects on their children!”
“Much of the evidence used by socialization researchers to support their belief in the nurture assumption consists of observations of the child’s behavior in the presence of the parents, or questionnaires about the child’s behavior filled out by the mother. Researchers want to demonstrate effects of the home environment — for example, after a divorce — so they observe the children in the home, a home where a lot of unpleasant things have happened recently. Worse yet, they ask the parents — not exactly what you’d call neutral observers, especially after the turmoil of a divorce — to fill out a questionnaire about the child’s behavior. Predictably, these methods often show that the children of divorce are in significantly worse shape than those whose parents remained married. If the observations are made outside the home, away from the parents, the differences between the offspring of divorced and nondivorced parents get much smaller or go away entirely.”
“Socialization research has demonstrated one thing clearly and irrefutably: a parent’s behavior toward a child affects how the child behaves in the presence of the parent or in contexts that are associated with the parent.”
Why Don’t Parents Sociailize?
“I can think of four reasons why it would not be in an offspring’s best long-term interests to allow itself to be overly influenced by its parents.
First, as behavioral geneticist David Rowe has pointed out, a predisposition to learn only from its parents would prevent the offspring from picking up useful innovations introduced by other members of its community. Since young animals, not older ones, are more likely to come up with useful innovations, it is to an offspring’s advantage to learn from its peers as well as from its elders. What it learns from its peers is also likely to be more timely, better suited to the current conditions.
The second reason has to do with variety. The easiest way to produce young that are exactly like their parents is to clone them, and some species of plants and animals do avail themselves of that method. Cloning is highly efficient. Noah could have filled up the Ark in half the time if he had specialized in species that beget by cloning: he would have needed only one of each kind. But every clone is exactly like its siblings, so anything that killed one of them — a lethal microorganism, for example could kill them all. Sexual reproduction originated because it introduced variety in the offspring (each combination of egg and sperm produces a unique assortment of genes) and thus enabled larger organisms to keep a step ahead of the smaller ones that plague them. However, variety in the offspring has other advantages as well. In changing times, it increases the chances that one of the offspring will be suited to the new conditions and will survive. In difficult times, it increases the number of ecological niches the members of the family can inhabit. And in good times and bad, variety within a family can provide a wider range of skills and a broader base of knowledge that will be useful to the family as a whole.
Like the other animals that Noah invited onto the Ark, humans inherit many of their behavioral characteristics from their parents. If parents had the power to influence their children by environmental means as well as genetically, the children would be too similar to the parents and too similar to each other. They would be too much like little clones.
The third reason why it wouldn’t make evolutionary sense to design children to be programmed by their parents is that children can’t count on having parents. We worry about all the children being reared today in single-parent homes and compare it to the halcyon days of fifty years ago, when parents came in Arkable pairs. But having two parents, one of each sex, was not something that children in ancestral times could take for granted. Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon reports that among the Yanomamö — Amazonian Indians who inhabit the rainforests of Brazil and Venezuela — the likelihood that a child of ten will still be living with both biological parents is only one in three. Although the divorce rate is comparatively low among the Yanomamö — Chagnon estimates that 20 percent of their marriages break up — the death rate is high. In a tribal society, a child’s chance of surviving goes down if he or she loses either parent, but it doesn’t go to zero. If children required parents in order to learn what they have to learn, losing a parent would have been a death warrant under ancestral conditions.
The final reason has to do with the competing interests of parents and children. As evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers has pointed out, what’s best for the parents is not necessarily best for the kids. Take, for example, weaning. A mother may want to wean her child in order to get ready for the next baby, but the child wants to be nursed as long as possible and to hell with the next baby. Trivers uses this conflict of interests to account for the fact that human children often begin to act babyish again after a younger sibling is born. Young apes and monkeys have been observed to do the same thing. Since parental care tends to be given preferentially to the youngest and most vulnerable offspring, the offspring that acts babyish may persuade its parent to give it more than its share. The offspring that can put on the most convincing show of neediness gets fed first.
In other ways, too, the parents’ interests may not coincide with the child’s. Perhaps the parents would like their daughter to remain with them and take care of them in their old age, or act as nursemaid to her brother’s children, or marry the rich old man who would pay them a good bride-price, whereas she has other ideas. Trivers concludes that the offspring’s best policy is to watch out for its own interests while trying to remain on good terms with its parents:
The offspring cannot rely on its parents for disinterested guidance. One expects the offspring to be preprogrammed to resist some parental manipulation while being open to other forms. When the parent imposes an arbitrary system of reinforcement (punishment and reward) in order to manipulate the offspring into acting against its own best interests, [natural] selection will favor offspring that resist such schedules of reinforcement. They may comply initially, but at the same time search for alternative ways of expressing their self-interest.”
“The lives of hunter-gatherer children depended more on their group’s survival than on their parents’ because even if their parents died they had a chance of surviving if their group did. Their best hope of success was to become a valuable group member as quickly and convincingly as possible. Once they were past the age of weaning they belonged, not just to their parents, but to the group. Their future prospects depended, not on making their parents love them, but on getting along with the other members of the group — in particular, the members of their own generation, the people with whom they would spend the rest of their lives.”
Personality
“I went to school each day with children from my neighborhood, but not one of them would play with me or talk to me. If I dared to say anything to them, it was ignored. Pretty soon I gave up trying. Within a year or two I went from being active and outgoing to being inhibited and shy. My parents knew nothing of this — they saw no major changes in my behavior at home. The only thing that changed, as far as they were concerned, was that I was spending a lot of time reading. Too much time, in their opinion.
Then, a couple of months after the beginning of eighth grade, my family moved once more, and my days as an outcast were over. We moved back to Arizona, where I had spent my early years. The kids there were not snooty or sophisticated; I had friends again, though just a few. And the years of solitude, of finding solace in books, were beginning to pay off: my classmates were referring to me as a “brain” and I started making good grades — this was something new for me — and seeking other brainy kids to pal around with. But I remained inhibited and insecure. The kids in the snooty suburb had accomplished what my parents could not: they had changed my personality.
Children are born with certain characteristics. Their genes predispose them to develop a certain kind of personality. But the environment can change them. Not “nurture” — not the environment their parents provide — but the outside-the-home environment, the environment they share with their peers.”
“Children in traditional societies also learn their language in the play group — at two and a half, they’re just beginning to talk. They do not learn it from their parents because their parents do not talk to them much. Their conversational partners are other children. Older children simplify their speech a bit when they’re talking to younger ones, but they do not provide the kind of language instruction that parents give their toddlers in our society — the question-asking, the patient rephrasing of the learner’s poorly phrased statement, the smile or pat when something is said exceptionally well. So the children in traditional societies learn language at a slower rate. But learn it they do. They all become competent users of the language that is spoken in their community. And they all become socialized.”
“An anthropologist studied two Zapotec villages not far apart in southern Mexico. Their inhabitants speak the same language, plant the same crops. But in La Paz, aggression is rare and disapproved of; in San Andres it is pervasive and accepted as a fact of life. The homicide rate in San Andres is more than five times that of La Paz. The anthropologist saw two San Andres brothers throwing rocks at each other. Their mother, he reported with ill-concealed disapproval, “did nothing to stop this rather dangerous activity and simply remarked that her boys always fought.””
“When children do imitate their parents, they don’t do it blindly: they are careful about it. They do it only when they think the parent is behaving normally or typically, the way other people in their society behave. They become conscious of such things at a surprisingly early age. A German-born colleague told me that his four-year-old daughter refuses to speak German to him when they are in the United States but she is quite willing to do so during visits to Germany. Children also decide, at an early age, that women and men are “supposed to” do different things. One of my daughters, at around age five, announced that fathers are not supposed to do the cooking.
“And mothers are not supposed to do the hammering and sawing?” I asked her.
“That’s right,” she said, though she had the grace to look embarrassed. In her home, the father did about half the cooking, the mother did all the hammering and sawing.
Kids probably get these ideas partly from television and storybooks. But they check them for accuracy in the fantasy games they play with their friends in the nursery school or day-care center. When children play games like House or Fireman, they are not pretending to be their parents (even if Daddy happens to be a fireman): the roles are stereotypes, painted with a broad brush and agreed upon by a committee of children.”
“There is only one way to get a preschooler to learn to like a disliked food: seat her at a table with a group of children who do like it and serve it to all of them.
Preschoolers’ preferred models are other children. By the age of three or four they have begun to tailor their own behavior to that of their nursery school playmates and, what’s more, they have begun to bring that behavior home. The easiest way to see this is to hear it: they are starting to pick up the accents of their peers. The daughter of a British psycholinguist was “speaking black English like a native” after four months of attending a nursery school in Oakland, California.”
“Children get their ideas of how to behave by identifying with a group and taking on its attitudes, behaviors, speech, and styles of dress and adornment. Most of them do this automatically and willingly: they want to be like their peers. But just in case they have any funny ideas, their peers are quick to remind them of the penalties of being different.”
“They found that peer acceptance or rejection was associated with “overall life status adjustment” in adulthood; having or not having a friend in grade school was not.
Friendship is a dyadic relationship. One can have a talent for friendship even if one has no talent for commanding the attention or respect of one’s groupmates. Children who have low status in the peer group, or no status at all, often have successful friendships. During my sojourn in the snooty suburb I did have one friend. She was three years behind me in school and two years younger, and she lived next door. As far as I know, our unequal friendship had no long-term effects on either of us. Children accommodate their behavior to their friends in the same way they accommodate their behavior to the standards of their peer group, but for the friends the accommodations are shortlived and specific to the relationship, managed by the part of the mind that specializes in working models — the relationship department, not the groupness department. Sometimes friendships appear to have long-term effects, but that is because most friendships are between children who are members of the same psychological group.”
“Because girls and boys form separate gender groups during middle childhood, socialization is specific to gender. A child doesn’t get socialized to behave like an American — he gets socialized to behave like an American boy, or she gets socialized to behave like an American girl. The norms of behavior differ for the two groups. Timidity and shyness, for instance, are acceptable in girls’ groups but unacceptable in boys’ groups. On the other hand loudness and excess exuberance are frowned upon by children of both sexes: the ideal in Western societies is to act “cool.”
Some researchers in Sweden tracked a group of children from the age of eighteen months to sixteen years. A few of these children started out timid and shy; a few were the opposite boisterous and uninhibited. These characteristics did not change much between eighteen months and six years, but from six to sixteen two things happened: the boisterous children of both sexes calmed down and became more moderate in their behavior, and the boys who had started out shy and timid were no longer distinguishable from the other boys. The shy, timid girls didn’t change much, but the shy, timid boys changed a lot. Timidity is unacceptable among boys, and a boy who acts that way will be teased and bullied by his peers until he learns to master his distress.”
“What he found was that children’s attitudes toward schoolwork change if they switch from one group to another over the course of a school year. If a child moves into a clique of academic achievers, her attitude toward schoolwork is likely to improve; if she moves out of it, her attitude gets worse. Kindermann’s findings demonstrate that children’s attitudes toward achievement are influenced by their group affiliations. The changes he measured could not have been due to changes in the children’s intelligence or in their parents’ attitudes, since neither is likely to reverse direction over the course of a single school year.””
“Immigrant cultures are generally lost after one, two, or at most three generations. Sociologists regard this as a gradual process, but it only appears to be gradual. It is gradual for the group as a whole but not for individual families. The old culture is lost in a single generation as soon as a family moves away from the Chinatown or the Mexican-American neighborhood to an area where they are no longer surrounded by people of the same national background. What makes it look gradual is that families don’t all move away at the same time. Some go as soon as they can afford to, others wait a generation or two.”
Kid Culture
“Languages can be passed along in the same way. Nyansongo children in Africa have a private language of dirty words for describing certain parts of the body. These words are not used by adults and are forbidden in their presence. Little children learn them from older ones and pass them along, when their turn comes, to still younger ones. The words are part of the children’s culture. They are not part of the adults’ culture.
Then, of course, there are children’s games. British researchers Iona and Peter Opie spent their lives documenting the games that children play when they are out of doors and out of the purview of parents and teachers. “If the present-day schoolchild was wafted back to any previous century,” said the Opies, “he would probably find himself more at home with the games being played than with any other social custom.” They found English, Scottish, and Welsh schoolchildren still playing games that date back to Roman times.
When children play in the street… they engage in some of the oldest and most interesting of games, for they are games tested and confirmed by centuries of children, who have played them and passed them on, as children continue to do, without reference to print, parliament, or adult propriety. These games are not taught to children by adults; they’re not even taught to children by teenagers.”
“Bottle-feeding has gone over big in the Third World and the change is not always a benign one. On the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico, Mayan women who as infants had been fed in the traditional way — on milk from their mothers’ breasts — are now feeding their own infants on formula from a bottle. The grandmothers of these babies do not approve: they believe that breast-fed babies are healthier and plumper. As it happens, the grandmothers are right. A researcher found that the bottle-fed babies were prone to gastrointestinal infections and as a result tended to be scrawny. “Why,” asked the researcher, “have Yucatecan parents given up an old, adaptive breast-feeding practice in favor of a new, maladaptive bottle-feeding one?” Because that’s what their friends and neighbors are doing. So what if that’s not how Mama used to do it? So what if she disapproves?”
“This is how I believe culture is normally transmitted: from the parents’ peer group to the children’s. Not from parent to child but from group to group — parents’ group to children’s group.”
“Like all other aspects of the culture, what is portrayed on the television screen will have long term effects on an individual’s behavior only if it is incorporated into the culture of the peer group. It often is.”
“If the kids in one neighborhood are generally sensible and law-abiding, and those in another neighborhood are not, it isn’t just because the well-behaved kids have rich parents and the other ones do not. It isn’t just because they have educated parents and the other ones do not. The financial status and educational level of their neighbors also has an effect on the kids. The fact that children are like their parents isn’t informative: it could be heredity, it could be environment, who knows? But the fact that children are like their friends’ parents is very informative: it can only be environment. And since most kids don’t spend a whole lot of time with their friends’ parents, the environmental influence must be coming to them by way of their friends. It is delivered, according to group socialization theory, by the peer group.”
“When you see children behaving like their parents, it is easy to take it as evidence for the nurture assumption. But children and parents not only share genes: they also live in the same village or neighborhood and belong to the same ethnic group and socioeconomic class. In most cases the children’s culture is similar to the adults’ culture. Unless you pay attention to the exceptional cases in which the children’s culture is not like the adults’, it looks like the children learned to behave like that at home.”
“In a remote corner of the Dominican Republic, a mutation occasionally crops up that makes genetic males look like females at birth. At puberty their testosterone kicks in and masculine characteristics appear: the voice deepens, the shoulders broaden, and what appeared to be a large clitoris develops into a small penis. Researchers have studied eighteen of these people who were reared as girls. When their bodies became manlike in appearance, all but one of them chose to switch genders and abandon the female names and identities they grew up with. They married women; they took on men’s jobs.”
“Children, he says, compare themselves to the boys and girls they know and decide “I am the same” as one kind and “I am different” from the other. On the basis of how they feel inside — what their interests are, how they want to behave — they put themselves into one gender category or the other. And that is the category in which they are socialized.”
“Teachers have power and responsibility because they are in control of an entire group of children. They can influence the attitudes and behaviors of the entire group. And they exert this influence where it is likely to have long-term effects: in the world outside the home, the world where children will spend their adult lives.”
Language & Race
“Black kids who do well academically are pressured by their peers not to work so hard. They are failing to conform to the norms of their group: they are “acting white.” These kids do not get their anti-school attitudes from their parents. Parents of all racial and ethnic groups think education is important and hold high expectations for their children’s academic success. Some researchers have found greater emphasis on education among black and Hispanic parents than among European Americans.”
“Eleven months after he came to the United States, at the age of eight and a half, Joseph’s use and understanding of English were rated as equivalent to that of an American-born six- or seven-year-old, though he still spoke with a Polish accent. After another year he had caught up with his agemates and his accent was barely detectable. The psycholinguists didn’t check on Joseph again until he was fourteen; at that point his pronunciation was indistinguishable from that of his American-born peers, even though he continued to speak Polish at home. His performance in school showed a similar trend: he experienced some difficulty in reading in the early grades, but from the fifth grade on, his grades were average or a little above.
There was no group of Polish Americans in Joseph’s school, no group of non-English-speaking kids with which he could identify. Like Daja Meston he was sui generis, and one isn’t enough to make a group. So he categorized himself as just a kid, a second-grade boy, and adopted the norms of behavior appropriate for that social category.”
“Let’s say Joseph had gone to a school that offered a bilingual program for children who couldn’t speak English. Would he have been better off?
Certainly he would have found the transition easier. Certainly the first months in his new school would have been less stressful. But would he have learned English as rapidly or as well?
This is a controversial question but by now you know that I am not one to shrink from controversy. The answer is no. Bilingual programs have been, in the words of one knowledgeable critic, a dismal failure.”
Group socialization theory can explain why these programs fail. They fail because they create a group of children with different norms — norms that permit them not to speak English, or not to speak it well. The fact that their teachers might speak grammatical, unaccented English is not enough. In the schools for the deaf, it’s not the teachers who cause the children with “a good bit of hearing” to stop talking. Most of the teachers in those schools can hear.
Language is both a kind of social behavior and a kind of knowledge — something that can be taught. Teachers can transmit knowledge but they have only limited power to influence the behavioral norms of their students. Even an excellent teacher of English will be frustrated by the slowness of her students’ progress unless she can convince them that speaking English is the norm for their group. The hard part is not keeping them afloat: it’s persuading them to swim against the current.
In areas where there are many immigrant families, bilingual programs enable children to spend most of the school day in the company of other children with whom they share a native tongue A teacher observed,
The Russian students end up talking to each other in Russian, the Haitian kids talk in Creole, the Hispanic ones in Spanish. They stick together and create subcultures. They go to school together, they spend the day together.
If there aren’t enough Russian kids to form a group of their own, programs designed to teach them English lump them together with other immigrant groups.
One of the counselors, smiling, said that some of the Russian students speak English with a Spanish accent, while others have picked up a Jamaican accent.””
“Now you can see why kids who go to private schools and parochial schools do so well. These schools serve homogeneous populations: the children who go to them come from homes where the parents care enough about such things to actually pay for their kids’ education. Throw a few scholarship students into these schools, sink or swim, and they take on the behaviors and attitudes of their classmates. They take on their culture. Margaret Thatcher, the former prime minister of Britain, was a scholarship student at a fancy private school.
And now, perhaps, you can see why it might not work to send a large number of kids from low-income neighborhoods to a private or parochial school. They might form a group of their own and retain the attitudes and behaviors they brought with them to the school.”
Conclusion
“The effects of heredity and environment can be disentangled by means of behavioral genetic methods. The same methods used to study personality characteristics have also been used to study obesity, and with much the same results. Identical twins, whether they were reared together or apart, are usually very similar in weight in adulthood — much more similar than fraternal twins. And adoptees do not resemble in fatness or thinness either their adoptive parents or their adoptive siblings.
Think of it — two adopted children are reared in the same home with the same parents. Their parents may be couch potatoes who nosh on caramel corn, or they may be dedicated broccoli eaters who work out daily in the gym. Both children are exposed to the same parental behaviors; both children are served the same meals and have access to the same pantry. And yet one child turns out lean and fit, the other is obese.
The heritability of fatness and thinness is somewhat higher than that of personality characteristics: about .70. But the important point is that the variation in weight that’s not due to the genes — the part that’s due to the environment — cannot be blamed on the home environment. There is no evidence that the parents’ behavior has any long-term effects on their children’s weight and very good evidence that it does not. And yet newspaper columnists and pediatricians go on telling parents, in tones that admit no uncertainty, that if they “set a good example” their children will be thin for life.
This is not merely an error: it is an injustice. If you have the misfortune to have a weight problem and your children have the same misfortune, you are blamed not only for your own presumably bad eating and exercising habits: you are also blamed for theirs. It’s your fault you are overweight and it’s your fault your kids are, too.”
“Large nationally representative surveys indicate that frequent father contact has no detectable benefits for children. Nor does having another biological relative living in the home: the presence of a grandmother doesn’t help. In homes with live-in grandmothers, kids are left alone less often than in homes with two biological parents, yet that doesn’t stop them from dropping out of school or getting pregnant. In homes with stepfathers, kids are given as much supervision as in homes with biological fathers — they are as likely to have their whereabouts monitored or their homework checked — yet that doesn’t stop them from dropping out of school or getting pregnant. The number of years the kids spend in a single-parent family also doesn’t matter: those whose fathers stuck around until they were on the brink of adolescence are no better off than the ones whose fathers went bye-bye when they were babies or, for that matter, fetuses.
The fatherless ones who are better off — and this is curious, too — are the ones whose fathers have died. “Children who grow up with widowed mothers,” McLanahan said, “fare better than children in other types of single-parent families.” In some studies, in fact, they fare as well as children who grow up with two living biological parents.”
“McLanahan and Sandefur found that changes of residence could account for more than half of the increased risk of high school dropout, teen births, and idleness among adolescents being reared without their fathers. Together, changes of residence plus low family income could account for most of the differences between kids with dads and kids without them.”
“A twin study of divorce offers a different explanation. More than 1,500 pairs of adult identical and fraternal twins answered questions about their own marital histories and those of their parents. The divorce rate was 19 percent among the twins whose parents had remained married. Among those whose parents were divorced, the chances of getting divorced were considerably higher: 29 percent. The chances were just as high — 30 percent for those with a divorced fraternal twin, and they were higher still — 45 percent — for those with a divorced identical twin. The analysis churned out by the researchers’ computer was boringly similar to those of other behavioral genetic studies: about half of the variation in the risk of divorce could be attributed to genetic influences — to genes shared with twins or parents. The other half was due to environmental causes. But none of the variation could be blamed on the home the twins grew up in. Any similarities in their marital histories could be fully accounted for by the genes they share. Their shared experiences — experienced at the same age, since they were twins of parental harmony or conflict, of parental togetherness or apartness, had no detectable effect.
Heredity, not their experiences in their childhood home, is what makes the children of divorce more likely to fail in their own marriages. But don’t bother to rummage through the chromosomes in search of a divorce gene. There is no divorce gene. Instead there is an assortment of personality characteristics, each roughhewn by a complex of genes and shaped and sanded by the environment, that together increase the chances that a person will marry unhappily.”
“The baby-care problem that brings the most complaints from American parents is sleep disturbances: the baby won’t sleep. The baby keeps them up at night. Most pediatricians advise the parent to get the baby accustomed to sleeping alone. But a baby in a wandering hunter-gatherer band was never left alone under normal circumstances. If he found himself alone, and if his first whimpers did not immediately fetch his mother, he was in serious trouble. Chances are that either his mother was dead or she had decided she couldn’t take care of him. The group was moving on and they weren’t taking him! He was a goner if he couldn’t quickly persuade them to change their minds. Screaming was the only persuader he had. He screamed because he was terrified and angry, and with good reason.
Babies are amazingly adaptable. Most American babies adapt quite well to sleeping alone. But some do not. Many parents — my younger daughter among them — are relieved when you tell them it’s okay to let their baby sleep with them, that it’s what nature intended. They hate letting the baby cry. It is going against nature to let a baby cry, and yet many parents do it — though they suffer almost as much as the baby — because it’s what some advice-givers recommend.”
“She has worked hard; I give her full marks. But parenting is not supposed to feel like hard work, any more than sex is. Evolution provides carrots as well as sticks. Nature gets us to do what she wants us to do by making it pleasurable for us to do it. If parenting were hard work, do you think chimpanzees would bother? Parents are meant to enjoy parenting. If you are not enjoying it, maybe you’re working too hard.”
“The fifth mistake is to ignore our evolutionary history and the fact that, for millions of years, our ancestors lived in groups. It was the group that enabled those delicate creatures, unequipped with fangs or claws, to survive in an environment that did have fangs and claws. But animal predators were not their greatest threat: the most dangerous creatures in their world were the members of other groups. That is still true today.”
“The group is the natural environment of the child. Starting with that assumption takes us in a different direction. Think of childhood as the time when young humans turn themselves into accepted and valued members of their group, because that is what they needed to do in ancestral times.
During childhood, children learn to behave the way people of their age and sex are expected to behave in their society. Socialization is the process of adapting one’s behavior to that of the other members of one’s social category.”
“We learn how to disguise our differentness; socialization makes us less strange. But the disguise tends to wear thin later in life: I see socialization as a sort of hourglass: you start out with a bunch of disparate individuals and as they are squeezed together — the pressure of the group makes them more alike. Then in adulthood the pressure gradually lets up and individual differences reassert themselves. People get more peculiar as they grow older because they stop bothering to disguise their differentness. The penalties for being different are not so severe. Children identify with a group of others like themselves and take on the norms of the group. They don’t identify with their parents because parents are not people like themselves — parents are grownups. Children think of themselves as kids, or, if there are enough of them, as girls and boys, and these are the groups into which they are socialized.”
“The processes that I have been talking about in this book generally go on below the level of consciousness. We identify with a group of people. We learn to speak and behave like these people; we take on their attitudes. We adapt our speech and behavior to different social contexts. We develop stereotypes of our own group and of other groups. These things can be brought into consciousness but that’s not where they live. In this book I have been talking about things that children do without noticing them, without having to exert conscious effort. It leaves the tops of their minds free to do other things.
Groups and relationships: they are both important to us but in different ways. Our childhood experiences with peers and our experiences at home with our parents are important to us in different ways. The bond between parent and child lasts a lifetime. We kiss our parents goodbye not once but many times; we do not lose track of them. Each visit home gives us opportunities to take out family memories and look at them again. Meanwhile, our childhood friends have scattered to the winds and we’ve forgotten what happened on the playground.
When you think about childhood you think about your parents. Blame it on the relationship department of your mind, which has usurped more than its rightful share of your thoughts and memories.”
