Why Home Doesn't Matter

Prospect ^ | May 2007 | Judith Rich Harris

[blam]

Why home doesn't matter

May 2007
Judith Rich Harris

The BBC series "Child of Our Time" assumes that studying children with their parents will help us understand how their personalities develop. But this is a mistake: parents influence their children mainly by passing on their genes. The biggest environmental influences on personality are those that occur outside the home

During much of the 20th century, it was considered impolite and unscientific to say that genes play any role in determining people's personalities, talents or intelligence. But we're in the 21st century now, the era of the genome. So when Robert Winston informs us, at the opening of each episode of the BBC1 documentary series Child of Our Time, that we're going to "find out what makes us who we are," we know he's going to say that people are the way they are partly for genetic reasons. (In case you've missed it, Child of Our Time is a project tracking the lives of 25 children for their first 20 years, returning to them each year to assess their progress. This year's series—the seventh—is being screened in three episodes, starting on Sunday 6th May.)

Child of Our Time is itself a sign of scientific progress because of its enlightened approach to the genome. Nevertheless, the series is scientifically misleading. Simply depicting the lives of 25 children, or sprinkling little "experiments" here and there throughout the programmes, sheds no light on the nature vs nurture question. Psychologists studied child development in this way for the better part of a century and learned remarkably little. Observing children at home or in school, individually or in groups, is not the way to answer the question of why they turn out the way they do.

[maine-iac7]

Why Home Doesn't Matter Translation: Therefore, the State can take over the training (aka indoctrination) - the parents will legally be only caretakers: feed, cloth and house. But never forget, they belong to the State. (Have they been talking to Hillary)

[SunkenCiv]

Wily was doing that research, he apparently didn’t consider the ramifications. Sorry, your highness.

[maine-iac7]

Then, too, some folks just ain't wired right...

Got that right...and if they don't receive the right nurturing to counteract it, they grow up to be liberal Socialists...

[SunkenCiv]

:’)

[SunkenCiv]

the first Christian, Alexander the Great

that's difficult to prove.

[Verginius Rufus]

There's a song in one of the Gilbert & Sullivan comic operas that goes something like:

"Every boy and every girl,
Who's born into the world alive,
Is either a little Liberal,
Or else a little Conservative."

[Verginius Rufus]

Was Thomas Aquinas a twin? I recall hearing that he had a sister, who was killed by a bolt of lightning that struck the bed they were both sleeping in as young children...but don’t recall if she was his twin.

[SunkenCiv]

Dunno, but I think one was a liberal, the other a conservative. :’)

[Smokin' Joe]

I read an older hardcover version my grandfather had (I wish I knew what happened to that book!)--for pleasure. He was a fan of Mark Twain and Connan Doyle, and passed that on.

The dialect presented no problems, Southern Maryland at the time was rife with dialect, from Gullah to E'rstn Shurman(Eastern Shoreman), and many folks spoke with a distinct Southern accent.

Television and Yankee invasion/condescension have done much change that.

[AZLiberty]

But this is a mistake: parents influence their children mainly by passing on their genes. The biggest environmental influences on personality are those that occur outside the home

Most of the comments have addressed the first sentence here rather than the second. The second sentence is only true to the extent that parents give their children over to society rather than take responsibility for them themselves.

Home school bump!

[ThanhPhero]

I have one quibble with this and that is language. I have been around many immigrant households from non-English backgrounds, most Vietnamese, some not. Uniformly, those families that insist that only English be used in the household, even thought the parents do not speak it well, produce children with heavy accents in English. Those families that speak only their native language at home produce children who speak both languages without accent, or rather, with the accents of, respectively, their parents in their native language and their peers in English.

It is not that the author is "wrong" but I think he overlooked that difference.

Aside for personal aesthetics: Girls who retain a bit of a Vietnamese accent in English have one of the most pleasing sounds in the language.

[Kevmo]

bmflr

[blam]

"Those families that speak only their native language at home produce children who speak both languages without accent, or rather, with the accents of, respectively, their parents in their native language and their peers in English."

My son's best friend and Best Man (wedding) was a Vietnamese guy, Hue Nguyen. I agree with you about the accent. His parents were 'boat people' in the mid 70's.

Great family. All the kids in that family excelled.

[ThanhPhero]

In the community here I know people who got out at the last minute in 75 and more who came out in the first wave in the late 70s and others who came out in the second wave in the 80s. Typical is Lien, then 14, whose last memory of Viet Nam is of climbing a cargo net up the side of a freighter in the Sai Gon River with her 3 year old cousin on her back after watching her aunt get crushed between the hull and the dock. It is hard to imagine that kind of desperation with the world collapsing around you.

[Swordmaker]

"Every boy and every girl,
Who's born into the world alive,
Is either a little Liberal,
Or else a little Conservative."

Since Liberals are much more supportive of abortions, it shouldn't be too long until the Conservatives are born far more often...

[ninonitti]

I wonder if any twin studies to determine difference between pairs of siblings based on vaginal vs cesarian birth?

Perinatal memories of womb/birth trauma?

[Caramelgal]

And, the first Christian, Alexander the Great.

…that's difficult to prove.

Alexander the Great (356 BC – 323 BC)?

Not only would that be difficult to prove, me thinks that would be down right impossible.

RightWhale – were you thinking of Constantine I (c. 280 –337 AD) – the first Christian Roman Emperor?

[John Leland 1789]

You know, this is pretty obvious. If you send your children out of the home and away from their parents for most of their waking hours, and then the children sit in front of a TV or computer screen while they are in the home, the parents are not going to be the major influence. This is a big D U H!

But how about home-schooled children that are with at least one loving parent almost all of the time? What if the source of information going into their pea brains is from parents and older siblings, instead of public school teenage sex maniacs and teachers in their 20s who, morally are trained by the humanists in the university systems? What about the children in homes where the HOME has always mattered and still does?

[Skywalk]

Even Constantine would be wrong as he was clearly not the FIRST to believe in Christ.

I’m thinking there’s some kind of ‘interpretation’ of Alexander that leads RW to believe he was the first Christian (which would mean, to me, that he was the FIRST person to experience/believe in Christ.)

OF course, I have heard that Jesus is a synthesized retelling of Alexander the Great or Elijah. So who knows what RW means.

[Old Professer]

My sister was a breech birth - they ended up using tongs and manipulation.