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

Harris reminisces about how her own childhood shaped her personality. As a child she was loud, confident, and active, which her parents sometimes found frustrating. After switching neighborhoods and schools, she became a social outcast. Harris’s experience of being ignored for four years prompted her to become quiet, shy, and insecure. She feels this experience had a lasting impact on her development: “The children in the snooty suburb had accomplished what my parents could not: they had changed my personality” (137).

As infants, all primates are interested in engaging with other infants. In the first few years of their lives, primate infants—humans and chimps—develop an attachment to their mothers, whom they depend on for food and protection. Harris frames this as a “psychological leash” which tethers baby to mother (139). Developmentalist Mary Ainsworth tested the security of the mother-infant bond, and Harris agrees with her findings—that infants respond to their mothers depending on how these women behaved in the past. However, Harris does not agree infants use this bond as a subconscious template for later attachments. She asserts people create secure or insecure relationships with different people. Harris acknowledges mothers are important, but they cannot be a substitute for peers. She points to research which shows parental attachment is essential in a child’s early years, but only having parental relationships can be damaging. She highlights The Importance of Peer Groups through stories of abuse, captivity, and concentration camps. Harris argues these children were able to overcome extreme trauma and become healthy adults because they bonded with peers, which made them psychologically resilient.

In general, babies and toddlers are interested in interacting with each other. Traditionally, playgroups would be informally organized and multi-aged; in contemporary America, children are separated by age at school and thus have more playmates of their own age. Harris claims older children tend to prefer the company of their peers and have little contact with parents (150); thus, they tend to imitate peers. Harris believes the most important social category for children is gender, because boys and girls differ in play styles and for most of them, gender is “identifiable.” As a result, people are most socialized by peers of the same gender. “Middle childhood,” which begins when children become more intellectually advanced at age seven or eight, is particularly important: In their peer groups, children collectively decide who to look to as a leader and who to demote, which can have a lasting effect on people’s personalities.

Harris describes culture as learned behavior, and anthropologist Margaret Mead hypothesized that culture is transmitted from parent to child. In her analysis of two New Guinea groups—the Arapesh and the Mundugumor—Mead argues they employed opposing parenting strategies (peaceful and violent). Harris rejects this theory, as the supposedly peaceful Arapesh also engaged in war, but were no less gentle with their babies. She also points out that similarities in personality between children and their parents can be attributed to genetics. Likewise, some traits, such as aggression, may be due to natural selection. Unlike personality, culture is not genetic but learned. Figuring out which factors are the most important in cultural transmission is difficult, since many factors work in tandem. Harris is particularly interested in immigrant families because “[…] When the parents belong to one culture and the rest of the community belongs to a different culture, we can at least distinguish the effects of the parents from the effects of outside-the-family influence” (176).

Some children are raised in closed communities, such as Hasidic Jewish or Canadian Hutterian children, who attend schools separate from broader culture. Immigrant children tend to become “bicultural,” integrating into broader culture around peers while retaining their native language and customs at home (178). These children are “code-switchers,” changing languages depending on their social context. Over time, they become more proficient in their new home’s language than in their native language. Thus, Harris argues that neither parenting decisions nor children’s imitation of parents explains cultural transmission. In fact, some children are raised in situations in which they form a different culture from the adults in their lives. For example, there have been numerous cases of deaf children of hearing parents learning sign language against their parents and teachers’ wishes. In one case in Nicaragua, a group of deaf children spontaneously created a sign language different from their parents’ spoken Spanish, or American Sign Language. Harris concludes these children did not need to imitate adults to acquire culture, that “culture is transmitted by way of the children’s peer group” (185).

Overall, Harris argues academics should not portray children as blank slates or incomplete adults in need of adult influence—but active participants in their own cultures. Just as children establish norms in consultation with each other—such as evading authority and using taboo words—adults also have peer groups. Parents share and create norms about parenting, and are concerned about fitting in with peers. They then transmit this culture: “The children’s culture is a variant of the adult culture, and the adult culture they know best is the one they were exposed to at home. They bring that culture with them to the peer group” (197). With that said, Harris cites studies that show children who live in neighborhoods with a high rate of delinquency are at high risk of becoming delinquents themselves. However, when these children move to new neighborhoods, their behavior improves, regardless of whether they moved with their parents or not. Again, Harris laments how easy it is for socialization researchers to find correlations between parenting decisions and children’s behavior without considering other influences. She cites a study that showed children make different moral choices at home than at school or while playing sports, proving parental influence may not extend beyond the home. She reiterates that children’s culture tends to borrow from adult culture, but children alter it as necessary.