November/December 1998
By Jerome Kagan
Editor's Note: A new book by Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, argues that peers have more influence than we think and parents have less. For the sake of discussion, we asked Jerome Kagan, a psychologist at Harvard University, to share his views about the importance of parents in their children's lives.
That parents exert a minor influence and peers a major influence on a child's development-the chief claim in The Nurture Assumption-ignores some important facts, ones that are inconsistent with this book's conclusions. Indeed, there is ample evidence that, for better or worse, parents do shape their children.
Consider, for example, that the best predictor of a child's verbal talent is the frequency with which the parents talk and read to the child. A verbally talented child is more likely to get better grades in school, and therefore is a little more likely to attend a better college. That, in turn, makes it more likely that in adulthood he or she will land a better job.
Moreover, a parent's education (whether they are, for example, a high school dropout or a college graduate) can predict how their child will fare in the world. Parental educational attainment, which is related to their child-rearing practices, predicts, among other things, the probability of aggressive behavior and the likelihood of psychiatric problems when these children become adults.
Although parents clearly do matter, parental influences are subtle, complex, and, at the moment, very difficult to measure objectively. One of the most important of these processes has been called identification. Children assume that some of the qualities of their parents belong to them and, as a result, they experience the emotions that would follow that belief.
A girl with a competent, well-liked mother feels pride because she is identified with a parent who has desirable characteristics, and she will carry that pride through adolescence. By contrast, the child with a parent who is incompetent, impulsive, drinks too much, and is not liked by neighbors is likely to carry shame into adolescence and adulthood. The childhood shame that Frank McCourt, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir "Angela's Ashes," felt when he found his father drunk in a local bar is one example of the consequences of identification.
Unfortunately, a great deal of the evidence cited to support the idea that parents don't matter much is based on questionnaires in which people are asked to describe themselves. They respond to such questions as: "Do you like parties?" "Are you afraid to take risks?" "Do you prefer to be alone or with friends?" and "Do you worry a lot?" But this source of evidence is too crude to capture a child's pattern of identification with parents.
Indeed, such questionnaire evidence yields answers that have a special quality. For example, when parental questionnaires are used, the estimated degree of genetic influence on the child's shyness increases as the child grows older. But when the evidence on shyness comes from actual observation of the child at home or in the laboratory, the estimate of genetic influence decreases. The direct observations are probably more accurate reflections of a child's personality than the parents' descriptions.
Put simply, reliance on questionnaires as a strategy to evaluate parental influence is a little like trying to understand the galaxies without the advantages of a telescope. For this reason, the claim that parents are relatively unimportant is premature.
It is useful to recall that at the turn of the century a majority of Americans believed that the poor school performance and uncivil behavior of children of European immigrants was probably due to genes. Careful scientific work during the succeeding decades corrected that serious misjudgment. In fact, many of those children became some of America's leading citizens during the first half of this century.
So why has The Nurture Assumption received so much publicity? One reason may be that many American parents feel tense, worried, and occasionally guilty about how their children turn out. Any book that reduced some of that concern would be greeted with joy and might be followed by a temporary muting of the burden of responsibility for the child's growth.
But the evidence of parents' importance remains woven throughout everyday life. The child who is told that he cannot have dessert because he is too loud or impetuous at dinner is, most of the time, better behaved the next day. The child who is consistently encouraged by a parent to overcome a fear of swimming in the ocean will take more risks the next summer.
Telling parents that they have little influence on their children, in light of the scientific evidence and their daily encounters with their children, is a little like declaring on a foggy September morning that all the trees have disappeared because you cannot see them.
Jerome Kagan is Starch Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. His research during the last 15 years has been on temperamental biases in children, especially fearful and fearless profiles.
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