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

“[…] what I was proposing was far more heretical: that parents have no lasting influence on their children’s personalities or on the way they behave outside the home. This proposition doesn’t mean that parents are unimportant—they have other roles to play in their children’s lives.”

Judith Rich Harris reflects on how her group socialization theory is taboo for many experts and non-experts, who are attached to the idea of parental influence being the most important aspect of a child’s life. This quote clarifies that Harris is not arguing that parents are “unimportant,” just that they do not influence their children’s personalities as much as some scholars think.

“The goal of the later generations of researchers was not to find out whether parents influence their children’s development but to discover how they influence it. The procedure became standardized: you look at how the parent rears the child, you look at how the child is turning out, you do that for a fair number of parents and children, and then, by putting together all the data and looking for overall trends, you try to show that some aspect of the parent’s child-rearing method had an effect on some characteristic of the child.”

Harris frames psychology’s Freudian roots, furthered by Behaviorists John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner, as grounded in a false assumption. To her, many studies are inherently flawed because they assume parenting is the most important influence in child development. This quote challenges the reader to consider how bias may inform how psychologists design and report studies.

“In both kinds of studies, the researchers collect data on the goodness of the style (life or childrearing) and the goodness of the presumed outcome (health or child). In both kinds of studies, the goal is to show that if you do the right thing you will obtain the desired result. In both kinds of studies, the results come in the form of correlations, and correlations are intrinsically ambiguous.”

Harris compares correlational studies from epidemiology and psychology. This quote casts doubts on the legitimacy of correlation reporting, since some researchers draw conclusions from correlations which are impossible to prove. This reporting assumes parenting decisions produce certain traits in children.