CHILD-DEVELOPMENT--- DO PARENTS REALLY MATTER?

Victor Bloom MD

Lately, our deep understanding of parental influence in child development has been faced with serious opposition. A new book, "The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do," (New York: Free Press, 1998), by Judith Rich Harris, challenges long-held notions that parents have a great influence on the development of the child into a unique adult personality. It was long held that children are different on the basis of their genetic endowment, but it was felt that the interaction between Nature and Nurture (heredity and environment) was dynamic and ongoing, and, as far as we could tell, with rare exceptions, the balance was 50-50.

Ironically, this Judith Harris is a non-PhD grandma who took a great interest in psychological research, even after she was kicked out of Harvard University's department of psychology. The faculty felt she would never develop in the "professional stereotype of what an experimental psychologist should be." She went on to write science textbooks and then research the nurture assumption, a calling which stemmed from deeply personal reasons. She had two daughters, one adopted and one natural. She assumes they both enjoyed all the advantages of a monied and cultured home. The natural child was adaptive and a good student, while the adopted child had a very difficult adolescence, doing poorly in school and being rebellious and defiant.

So naturally, from this small sample, Ms Harris generalized and thought that environment didn't matter. Instead, she was impressed by the impact of the peer group. When kids are five and above, they are increasingly shaped by the norms and mores, the manner and attitude, the dress and priorities of the peer group. This is well known. The author jumped to the conclusion, with her selective review of the literature, that between genetic and peer group influences, the parents have hardly any.

This idea was seized upon by many parents who agonize over the quality of their parenting, and worry over minor day-to-day details. The 'family bed' and 'time out' are the new ways to offer nurture and attachment, and inflict punishment. These changes in old-fashioned parenting have come about because of the overly worrisome attitudes about child-rearing. And they are based on the assumption that what parents do has great influence.

The logical conclusion that parenting should consist of 'benign neglect', was recommended by a famous British psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott. Parents could stop worrying and simply do what is natural and easy, it would be 'good enough'. However, we have been raising the bar, so to speak. Bruno Bettelheim, in his great parenting book, "A Good Enough Parent," really advised _optimal_ parenting, based on respect for the child and its development, promoting ever more empathy to the child for his developmental need for play (that is his work), nurturance, love and affection, and validation, in accordance to where he his developmentally.

According to Ms Harris, most child development books asserting that parental behavior is important, should be thrown out. This idea adds to the force which is countering traditional Freudian analytic theory, research and clinical work, of which there is an extensive literature.

Critics of Ms Harris, who are acquainted with the entire literature, say that she simply discounted research about parental influence, dismissing them casually as incompetent or irrelevant. If this is true, it is clear Ms Harris has an axe to grind. It is not difficult to ascertain what that is. It was her 'logical' conclusion that the difference in her two daughters, in which one had an egg-head peer group and the other had a delinquent peer group, was due to the peer group. She completely left out the parental influence over what peer group it was to which the child gravitated. And she overlooked the fact that even though she thought her two daughters had the identical environment, different children generate different environments. We all know families where there are good kids and rotten kids. They are not treated the same.

How does this happen? It happened in Ms Harris' family. Unfortunately, the author neglected to take into account that she adopted her daughter at the age of two months! God only knows what trauma or neglect happened in the first two months, a critical time when nurturing and protection, affection and comfort, are essential to the establishment of basic trust and the ability to love and be loved. My guess is that the difficult child, the adopted one, did not have the benefit of the mothering from birth on, nor possibly the IQ of the natural child. Chances are the adopted baby was at a disadvantage from day one in the Harris household. The natural child was praised for her good grades and the difficult one was punished for her defiance and rebellion. So of course, each child gravitated to her like peer-group.

So it was not the peer group that shaped the behavior of Ms Harris' two daughters. The peer group merely reinforced what was already there, shaped by genetics and parental influence, which is what we (almost) always thought. However, it is interesting how the media and pop-science culture has jumped on her bandwagon. Even more ironic is the fact that she was honored by the American Psychological Association in its annual meeting, in a keynote address named after the acting dean of the faculty group which kicked her out of academic research years before.

So taking all in all, I think the faculty was right in having voted to kick her out years ago.

Dr. Bloom is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Wayne State University School of Medicine. He is a Diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He is a member of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and corresponding editor of their quarterly journal, Academy Forum and on the editorial board of the Detroit Medical News. He welcomes comments and questions at his e-mail address: vbloom@comcast.net.