A new theory suggests kids learn their behaviour from their peer group, not their parents. But should we let home life off the hook, asks John Diamond
The Jesuits, it turns out, were too optimistic by half. Give them your boy until he is seven by all means, but the best they’ll be able to return to you will be a seven-year-old boy. Giving you the man, as promised, is beyond them, or any other adult. Because according to the current hot theory in the United States it’s not adults who determine the childish psyche, and certainly not parents, but other people’s children.
According to one Judith Rich Harris, the developed personality is the result of nature and nurture acting in roughly equal quantities. So far, so uncontroversial. But while the proportion of nature to nurture has been the subject of endless debate and research, it’s always been assumed that the nurture part of the equation refers to family influence – parents or the lack of them, siblings and their position in the family, the intellectual life, or otherwise, at home, and so on.
Not so, says Harris. Writing about her forthcoming book, The Nurture Assumption, she says: “Sure, children learn things at home. But they learn new things, different things, when they go out. And it’s what they learn out there that they carry with them to adulthood, because out there is where they are destined to spend the rest of their lives.”
And this is the theory which has been taken up by the latest New Yorker. It doesn’t quite say so, but the implication is clear: at last the having-it-all generation can relax, guiltless, with an academic thesis to call its very own.
The basis of Harris’s book, and the article in the American Psychological Review on which that book is based, is simple: as parents we have no influence, however hard we try, over the people our children will grow up to be. Those people will be formed by their interactions with their peers.
Note well: Harris does not mean that parents don’t have quite as much influence as was once thought, or that the home may not be precisely the developmental cocoon we once believed it to be, nor merely that our children’s school-friends play a greater part in their development than we imagined. No: she means that peer pressure, peer regard, peer example is all. Genetic factors being equal, a child brought up in a bookish home but who hangs out with illiterates will herself become a functional illiterate.
The book will sell in vast numbers and the glossy magazines will all run thoughtful pieces on how we knew all along that it wasn’t our fault that our children are more fractious, demanding, selfish and delinquent than we had expected them to be, given their perfect forebears, but there are two reasons to be wary of the thesis.
The first is easy: Harris has no proof. Most of the theories I learned were the result of substantial pieces of research in which vast numbers of children or parents were observed, questioned, evaluated. Some of the results were obvious, some absolute, many equivocal. But at least somebody had asked a question and gone out into the field to find the answer.
Not Judith Rich Harris. She is, depending on which rags-to-riches story you read, an academic in the field of developmental psychology, taking time out from academia, or a lowly writer of psychology textbooks. Either way, she is a grandmother who, at the time she had her revelation, was confined to her New Jersey house by an auto-immune disease and writing her latest psych-dev textbook at her publisher’s behest.
She had just read an academic paper on juvenile delinquency when the idea struck. The paper said, in short, that one of the reasons adolescents behave in the antisocial way they do is because they want adult status “with its consequent power and privilege”.
“It was as if a light had gone on in the sky,” she told the New Yorker. Adolescents don’t smoke or steal or drive other people’s cars because they want to be like smoking, acquisitive, car-driving adults, but because they want to be like other smoking, stealing, driving adolescents.
The New Yorker gives some of the riddles which are solved by this insight. Why, it asks, do the children of recent immigrants almost never retain the accents of their parents? How is it that the children of deaf parents learn to speak as well as those whose parents have always spoken to them?
Harris took the thesis further. If 50% of our personality is genetically ordered then it might well be that the reason parents who cuddle their children have cuddly children is because of a cuddling gene rather than because of the cuddling environment.
She can’t prove this is true, she says, but then again you can’t prove she’s wrong. She’s been through the research and it appears there’s not a single study which demonstrates the effect of the environment on the developing child.
This is arguable: the New Yorker, for instance, quotes the “largest and most rigorous experiment” as one which followed adopted children from birth and compared them to the adoptive parents. In fact, the study looked at just 245 children and seems to have stopped when the children were seven, which says little about the adolescence with which Harris is concerned.
But there is another reason for doubting her premise. It feels wrong.
It isn’t how things are to most parents. In fact, Harris speaks of the adolescent psyche as something purely mechanical: an emotionless tool which solves problems, avoids difficulties, plots tactics for getting through life.
It is, above all, the psyche of the infantilised American consumerist mind which sees the adolescent worried that it doesn’t have the same shoes as its peers as a reasonable basis for an adult personality.
True, just as there are parents who would like to believe themselves not to be responsible for their children’s behaviour, there are those who are desperate to believe that their children are them writ small and cute.
But there is more that is suspicious here. The theory crumbles if we use it against itself and say that perhaps the child does not become like its friends but finds friends among those who support its tastes and views.
Then there is Harris’s own life. Were it not that her own story gives any of us permission to pluck theories from the air, I might not mention it, but our new guru is a mother of one natural and one adopted child.
The natural child was easily raised, the adopted child went through many behavioural problems. And yet, says Harris, she raised them identically.
Which, of course, is what all parents say in their defence when the facts could suggest otherwise.
Reading Harris’s New Yorker interview one could get the impression that this isn’t so much an academic theory as a defence against some domestic denial.
And, a defence is just what panicky parents are looking for.