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T A B L E_ T A L K

"We can't afford it, honey": How do you explain financial constraints to your children? Join the discussion in Table Talk's Mothers area

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R E C E N T L Y

Drama Queen
Cast your vote for the worst meal a mother ever served
(09/16/98)

I want your sex
By Lisa Moskowitz
Forays into sex selection could result in a nation of girls
(09/15/98)

Words that sing
By Polly Shulman
Children's books that make words sing
(09/14/98)

We're here, we're ... uh ... straight?
By Sallie Tisdale
Using prayer, therapy and makeup to help gays "return" to heterosexuality
(09/11/98)

Rain on the parade
By Jeffrey Obser
Youth march or media circus?
(09/10/98)

BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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THE NURTURE ASSUMPTION: WHY CHILDREN TURN OUT THE WAY THEY DO | BY JUDITH RICH HARRIS | FREE PRESS | 480 PAGES

BY KATIE ALLISON GRANJU | In a recent New Yorker article, Judith Rich Harris, author of "The Nurture Assumption," the most widely publicized book on issues of human development since "The Bell Curve," is quoted as saying that one of her primary reasons for writing the book was to alleviate parental guilt.

"A lot of people who should be contributing children to our society, who could be contributing very useful and fine children, are reluctant to do it or are waiting very long to have children because they feel it requires such a huge commitment," explains Harris. "If they knew that it was OK to have a child and let it be reared by a nanny or put it in a day-care center or even to send it to a boarding school, maybe they would believe that it would be OK to have a kid."

"Great," remarked a friend and fellow mother of three after reading Harris' comments. "Just what we need: more parents with less commitment."

Believe it or not, that's precisely what America needs, according to Harris and the Alice-in-Wonderland premise she sets forth in "The Nurture Assumption." In the New Yorker piece, as well as in recent articles in Time and Newsweek, among others, Harris and her supporters argue passionately that today's parents are being asked to commit just too damn much time and attention to nurturing our kids -- an essentially useless endeavor -- because we have been sold "a bill of goods" that children are impacted in any meaningful way by our parenting. Our naive belief that parenting matters is what Harris has dubbed "the nurture assumption." Harris says she wants to release parents from the bondage of a supposedly widespread "cultural myth": the idea that, through our child-rearing practices, "We can make our children turn out any way we want." After all, "Children are not empty canvases on which parents can paint their dreams," chides Harris in the chapter of her book titled "What Parents Can Do." The author further advises that we poor misguided souls currently in the parenting trenches should "give it up" because her own review of the scientific literature (from the fields of child development, psychology, anthropology and even primatology) has revealed startling new evidence that "parenting matters zilch." As for those of us adults who believe that our own parents' actions strongly influenced the people we have become, well, according to Harris and her assembled evidence, we are simply deluding ourselves.

While reading Harris' book, one cannot help but be impressed with her ability to weave together and render readable a vast array of seemingly random data in an attempt to support her bizarre and utterly counterintuitive ideas. However, the reader is also left with the strong impression that, despite the fact that she has clearly crafted a book she believes to be for and about everyday families, Judith Rich Harris must not have spent much time hanging around with any real, live parents if she thinks that we are all so arrogant as to assume that we have the power to personally script our children's tomorrows. In fact, Harris' work can sound quite scintillating and paradigm-busting until you realize that few, if any, parents actually hold the views against which the author argues so eloquently.

In her eagerness to demolish what she defines as the nurture assumption, Harris is tilting at windmills. I mean, come on! How many of you mamas out there actually base your day-to-day parenting decisions on the belief that you have the omniscient ability to sculpt every detail of your personal version of procreative perfection? I know that I don't. As the mother of three little people, each as fundamentally different from one another (and from me) as can be, it became painfully obvious to me some time back that, in many ways, I am just along for the ride. Actually, in discussions in recent days with a wide range of parents, including everyone from a Jewish lesbian mother from Brooklyn to a married evangelical Christian father in the Bible Belt, I have been unable to find one person who assumes that the way in which he nurtures his offspring can guarantee any particular outcome. Perhaps somewhere between Freud and the advent of behavioral genetics there were a few parents out there who genuinely believed that they alone held the key to every aspect of their children's fate, but not today.

We now know (and Harris acknowledges) that a large part, maybe even the largest part, of who any child will become is inborn. So if parents accept that giving birth to and parenting a genetically unique individual presents perhaps the greatest act of blind faith in all of human relationships, why do we continue to do it? Why, knowing as we do that no matter how hard we try, we still might end up with a member of Heaven's Gate or even a Mark David Chapman, do we keep trying? Why, ultimately, does parenting matter? And why is Judith Rich Harris so dead wrong in her analysis concluding that it does not?

N E X T_ P A G E: What doesn't parenting do?