The Nurture Assumption

1 card

1. 01

   Most parent–child correlations can be explained by genes plus the peer group, and an honest parenting course has to make this counterargument itself, or it is selling certainties the data does not support.

   The Nurture Assumption · 1998

   The part of the environment that counts appears to be the part siblings do not share.

   Harris was not an academic, and the book caused a storm precisely because the argument is hard to dismiss comfortably. Her starting point is twin and adoption studies. These show, repeatedly, that traits like extraversion or conscientiousness resemble each other between biological relatives even when they grow up in different houses, and resemble each other little between adoptive siblings raised in the same house. The part of the environment that counts appears to be the non-shared part, meaning what siblings do not have in common. Harris proposes that this environment is largely the peer group: children learn how someone like them behaves from other children, not from adults — hence the accent of immigrants' children, which is the street's and not the parents'. What she nonetheless leaves to parents, and what is often forgotten by those who quote her triumphantly: the choice of environment, meaning neighbourhood, school and company; the relationship itself, which is lived and matters in its own right; and the absence of abuse, which is not a personality variable but a harm variable.

   “Parents do not shape their child's personality or character. Children are shaped, outside the home, by the environment they share with their peers.”

   Open the card →