Dear Camille:

Chris

Dear Chris:

Media reports about "The Nurture Assumption" have been confusing and overblown. I have indeed dutifully looked at Harris' book several times in stores, but quite frankly, I found it too rambling, anecdotal and contradictory to purchase or take seriously. Apparently originating as an article in a psychology journal three years ago, it is yet another example of minor effusions puffed up too rapidly into full-scale books by publishers who know how to offer contracts but not how to develop substantive projects.

Character and personality have always fascinated me, and they inspired the psychological orientation of my writing on art and culture. My understanding of the formation of adult personae comes from wide-ranging sources, such as Sir James George Frazer's survey of tribal rites of passage in "The Golden Bough"; Freud's conflict-based analysis of the psychodynamics of "family romance" in bourgeois society; and even Babylonian astrology (revived in the 1960s), which as a practical discipline over the millennia has accumulated a stunning mass of psychological insights.

After more than a century of the nature-nurture debate, the libraries are packed with a rich variety of commentary informed by anthropology, psychiatry, social psychology and evolutionary biology. In the past 30 years, there has been increasing evidence of a genetic component in characteristics of personality like shyness and aggression. The discoveries of science have made little impact, however, on academic humanities departments, where extreme social constructionism (via feminism and post-structuralism) has been the dominant credo since the 1970s.

"The Nurture Assumption" offered a tremendous opportunity to change the intellectual climate in the U.S., but it is too poorly executed to do so. Its claims are simply absurd that parents have no influence on child development and that Harris has made a dazzling new discovery about peer pressure -- which has been studied and documented for 50 years.

Parents are permanently shaping and imprinting a child's mental and emotional life from his or her earliest weeks and months. The first three to six years in particular are critical in training a child how to process information, express thoughts and feelings and channel energy and desire constructively. Coping behavior -- how one handles frustration and stress -- must be systematically taught by the primary caretakers.

Since I am the product of a supportive, attentive and yet highly structured Italian-American family, where whining was not tolerated, I have no patience whatever with the kind of loud, annoying displays and tantrums that are ignored by unembarrassed or ineffectual American parents in grocery stores and other public spaces. Such undisciplined behavior by children would cause vergogna or "shame" to Italian families, bringing discredit on the entire clan and its ancestry. Prudent parents know how to give the tiniest toddlers clear signals about appropriate limits in public, hushing or hustling them out immediately when they disturb others. Persistence and consistency are crucial -- with children or with animals like horses and dogs.

In my tumultuous visit to PC-saturated Brown University in 1992, where I needed security guards to shepherd me through the seething mob, I saw the disgraceful results of permissive, "progressive" early parenting -- screaming, spoiled, infantile young women whose sense of objective reality had never gelled. Affluent American students these days are either hysterics or melancholics.

Harris gives precisely the wrong message. As a teacher for 27 years, I think American children need more parental attention and control, not less. Harris' book, which is about one woman's painful struggle with health and family problems, should have been marketed as what it is -- a memoir.