The nurture assumption
Overview: This groundbreaking book, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times notable pick, rattled the psychological establishment when it was first published in 1998 by claiming that parents have little impact on their children's development. In this tenth anniversary edition of The Nurture Assumption, Judith Harris has updated material throughout and provided a fresh introduction. Combining insights from psychology, sociology, anthropology, primatology, and evolutionary biology, she explains how and why the tendency of children to take cues from their peers works to their evolutionary advantage. This electrifying book explodes many of our unquestioned beliefs about children and parents and gives us a radically new view of childhood.
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What Hacker News says
- I am also raising a bilingual 3–year-old in Spain. I speak to him only in English. But i have recently read The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris, which argues convincingly that his English will be limited in certain important ways unless he also has a native English-speaking peer group.
- Well since I am not an American it's not really that common in the Netherlands. Plus as @ElijahLynn mentions: Scocial needs. I read "The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do" by Judith Rich Harris (highly recommend doing so before starting with kids). And it contains a nice example of a boy that is home-schooled by two teachers. The kids is brilliant and and 21 becomes the youngest University teacher. He writes a book on model trains that is considered to be the most boring book that exists and he offs himself. At least this is what I remember of the book. I think the example says it all... Edit: I do understand the need for home-schooling with the school shootings and all. Maybe that is why it is not that common in other countries?
- This is very true.
However, it's likely to be correlation rather can causation. Loving parents pass on loving genes.
I recommend Judith Rich Harris's book "The Nurture Assumption" on the topic. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nurture_Assumption)
- I think even more important than home is peer groups. Research I read about in The Nurture Assumption [0] convinced me that much more important than home life (home life being called "shared environment" I believe because in a twin study it's the thing most shared by two non-biologically related siblings) is peer environment. If your friends all think that learning isn't cool and tend to do drugs or whatever, children will follow in that path, and parenting affects that very little despite our intuitions.
How to solve the peer group problem? As far as I know it's extremely difficult, even more than reforming home life. You can split up peer groups and distribute their members into peer groups with different mindsets and they will generally conform, but the ratio has to be quite steep towards the peer group you're integrating into. I don't know what the number but I would guess something like 15 to 1. There's definitely not enough middle and upper class classrooms to go around to house all kids from more troubled areas under my stated assumptions. But perhaps the process could be incremental?
- Right. You're touching on another important factor: everyone, and especially children, want to belong to a group. They do this by adopting values similar to their peers.
When those peer groups have values that include playing video games and exclude exploring learning, it's very hard to motivate members of the group to explore learning. I don't actually have any data on this, but I suspect that applies even under extrinsic motivators. In other words, telling the cool kids who hate school that they will get bad grades if they don't learn more will not make them learn more. It will simply become a badge of honour to have bad grades.
Perhaps the single most important job of a teacher is to attempt to create a single group of the class[1] with which every student identifies, and then imbue that group with the value of learning.
I don't think the way to do this is by promising rewards (good grades) for good performance (doing exactly what the teacher asks.) The way to do it is to encourage self-directed exploration and mastery, with a sense of a greater good. (This sounds like something out of an Italian-inspired educational philosophy, but as far as I'm concerned, it's just rather simple reasoning from the principles of motivation and social behaviour as we know them.)
In the end, this is a really tough problem. If children are convinced (based on interactions with their peer groups) that learning sucks, then it's really hard to change their mind. This goes for adults as well. I'm not saying there's a magic formula to make everything work out right.
What I'm saying is that there are two insufficient and contradictory methods. I think one of them is slightly less bad than the other one.
[1]: It might sound like creating multiple groups would be easier and accomplish the same thing, but the danger with that is that small natural variations in the value of learning between these groups could get exaggerated in an attempt to create group identities. I.e. if one group is just about considered more school-happy than the other group, then that will become a point both groups can use to distinguish between themselves: one group will intentionally become more ignorant of the benefits of learning to separate its members from the other. It has to be one single group for them to all adopt the same value of learning.
Edit: I almost forgot. For more on this, see The Nurture Assumption – well worth a read.
- This is a good and interesting read regardless, but I'll just point out that when studies are properly controlled for confounders, the "relationship with the early caregivers" matters much less than we want to think. Maybe not even at all.
What shapes us are our interactions with our early peers. This makes sense from a hunter-gatherer point of view too; those are the people we will spend almost all our life with.
I highly recommend reading The Nurture Assumption for more on this. The author effectively argues with evidence for why relationships with parents are nothing more than relationships with parents.
It really opened my eyes both for things that went on in my upbringing, the upbringing of people I know, and taught me what is going to be important as I raise my son.
