judith harris parents matter less than

Judith Harris - parents matter less than you think

The Nurture Assumption

Judith Harris is a real heroine of mine. Battling a chronic illness

and being outside of any formal University, she did some devastatingly

effective research resulting in the magnificent book The Nurture

Assumption.

She all but snuffed out conventional wisdom about childrearing, with

her crushing, and brilliantly researched, critique of prevailing

theories, and was awarded the prestigious George A Miller Award in

1998 (ironically he was also the person who turned her down for

research at Harvard) Harris has truly changed the face of

developmental psychology.

Parents Matter Less Than You Think and Peers Matter More

It's neatly summed up in her subtitle `Why Children Turn Out the Way

They Do; Parents Matter Less Than You Think and Peers Matter More.'

Finally destroying the last vestiges of Freud's theories about infant

development and many other developmentalist myths, most notably the

influence of parents on the personality of their children, she thinks

that most research fails to identify controls for heredity. Children

behave like their parents because they are genetically related and not

because parents treated them in any special way or because of some

childhood trauma. In fact growing up in any particular household

doesn't seem to have any significant affect on one's intellect or

personality.

No Two Alike

Her new book is another scorcher. In `No Two Alike' she tackles

another big issue - individuality, asking why people are so

`different'. Her attacks on the significance of birth order (it makes

no difference to personality) along with many other plausible

hypotheses are devastating. But it's her ideas around a `status'

system that is fascinating. This seems like a good candidate for