Songs From The Wood

Thus began an article published in 1995 in the eminent psychology journal, Psychological Review. In 1997, the American Psychological Association awarded the author of the article, the George A. Miller Award for “outstanding recent article in psychology”. A book based on the article titled “Nurture Assumption” was declared a NYT Notable Book and went on to become a finalist in the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. Steven Pinker, in a glowing foreword for the book, called her work “truly rare” and said, “I predict that it will come to be seen as a turning point in psychology”.

The iconclastic author was not a distinguished academic or considered an expert in the field. She was a former writer of college psychology textbooks. Many years ago, she had been rejected from pursuing her doctorate in Psychology at Harvard University by George A. Miller, of the very same George A. Miller award. Described as an “elfin, fragile grandmother”, the author’s story of rise from obscurity to fame was itself eye-catching.

I ran across a reference to “Nurture Assumption” via the usual, often visited Frontal Cortex. I was struck by the argument that parents are not particularly important in determining a child’s behavior (and only as an footnote or afterthought is it mentioned that “parents are not important in determining the child’s behavior outside of the home”). Was this just a “cherished cultural myth” as Harris put it ?

Even at a very superficial level, the statement that parents don’t matter rang false. Just take genes. But, I like to think I’m open minded and give every idea some measure of my consideration before discarding it. Of course, being a parent and thinking that this was one of my greatest responsibilities in life made my curiosity more than academic (and may even have biased my opinion). So, I checked out the book from the local library.

Harris writes lucidly and cogently. She wastes no time in getting to the bone of her contention: “‘Heredity and environment’ – that’s what we called them back then. Nowdays, they’re more often referred to as ‘nature and nuture’…. Nature and nurture rule. Nature gives parents a baby; the end result depends on how they nurture it. Good nurturing can make up for many of nature’s mistakes; lack of nurturing can trash nature’s best efforts. …. Nurture is not a neutral word: it carries baggage. … The use of nurture as a synonym for environment is based on the assumption that what influences children’s development, apart from their genes, is the way parents bring them up. I call this the nurture assumption. … My first job is to show that the nurture assumption is nothing more than that: simply an assumption“.

Ahh! I said to myself, she’s already modified her eye-catching start. She’s replaced “parents” with “parenting”. But even the modified hypothesis felt a little too far-fetched. Here I am, struggling to this day with neuroses caused partly, I think, by attitudes instilled in me by my parents. I see my sister struggle with her share of them and Shanthala too. And we’re not the only ones. You read (and hear) about abused kids becoming abusive in their later lives, of the culture of fathers abandoning their responsibility, begetting generations with such behavior. So, is “any parenting” good enough ? Everything I’ve read makes me think that parenting is part biology, part culture. Was she addressing aspects of middle class, white American culture ?

Harris rested her focus on the field of developmental psychology and it’s practitioners whom she terms “socialization researchers”. She writes: “Socialization research is the scientific study of the effects of the environment – in particluar, the effects of the parents’ child-rearing methods or their behavior toward their children – on the children’s psychological development. It is a science because it uses some of the methods of science, but it is not, by and large, an experimental science. … Since socialization researchers do not, as a rule, have any control over the way parents rear their children, they cannot do experiments. Instead, they take advantage of existing variations in parental behavior. … In other words, they do correlational studies.”

She goes on to write a withering criticism of socialization research as a science because correlation is not causation,  because they ignore the effects of genes in arriving at their conclusions. She also, quite validly, talks of the “effects of the effects of genes”. She says, “A child’s timidity causes his mother to reassure him, his sister to make fun of him, and his peers to pick on him. A child’s beauty causes her parents to dote on her and wins her a wide circle of admiring friends.” In other words, parents are more patient with happy children than grumpy children, parents tend to show off their cute, smiling bundle than sensitive, crying infants. Did the child smile more because the parents were patient with her or the other way around ?

Harris postulated that compared to parenting, genes and “peer groups” are more predictable factors for how children turn out. In the modern nuclear family, with overspent and overworked parents, the effect of peer groups on the ever increasing number of latchkey kids seems quite logical. I wondered how this theory held up in other cultures. In small tribal groups where the shared values of the group are much higher than in modern urban neighborhoods, the effect of peers and parents is probably identical. The same can be said of traditional societies like the one I grew up in, where people from a common caste share a ritual and tend to spend time together. In such a system, even at school, kids tend to mix with others “like them”, are encouraged to do so by their parents and elders.

The history of parenting in America makes for interesting reading. Ann Hulbert’s “Raising America” is an excellent, well-written and detailed guide on this subject. In the Introduction, she writes: “Raising children has rated very near to sex – and to success – as an American fixation, especially since the start of the twentieth century and particularly among the middle class. ‘In no other country,’, one historian noted in the 1950s, ‘has there been so pervasive a cultural anxiety about rearing of children.’” Among the books I browsed soon after Maya was born, I recall one of the authors commenting on how strange it is, this modern tradition of women going to hospitals to give birth, armed with books rather than with mothers and grandmothers. My speculation is that this is not unusual for a country based entirely on immigrants. In many cases, the immigrants landed without their elders or relatives, without the benefit and wisdom of their prior experience in raising kids. Subsequent generations moved away from their parents in search of opportunity. Homesteaders faced the task of raising kids almost alone. The industrial revolution had ushered in a new belief in technology and in white coated scientists dispensing wisdom in subjects that fixed assembly lines, diseases and parenting. So, coupled with the isolation from the parenting wisdom of prior generations, turning to the experts for guidance on parenting became commonplace.

Ann Hulbert writes that national conferences on parenting peppered the past century, with support coming, in many cases, from no less an authority than the White House, conferences such as the National Congress of Mothers in 1899, Conference on Modern Parenthood in 1925, Midcentury White House Conference on Youth and Children in 1950, White House Conference on Families in 1980 and White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning in 1997. The goal was to find the scientific underpinning of parenting and use them to guide a new generation of parents. Ann Hulbert writes: “At the successive meetings, each marking a new generation of parents and of expertise, the verdicts grew more mixed and alarmed: scientific lore was spreading, yet hand in hand with rising expectations of parents’ and children’s performance went rising apprehensions of failure as the American family, everyone agreed, fought for survival in a society rapidly encroaching on its hallowed terrain. … As the new millenium approached, ‘raising a scientifically correct child’, … risked becoming a ‘neurotic national pastime’.” Books such as Parenting Inc. document the continuing neuroses.

Much of American psychology was dominated by behaviorism and empiricism, ideas based on the assumption that we’re born blank slates, that who we become is largely (if not solely) based on environment (or nurture as the word became more commonly used). Proponents of this school such as James Broadus Watson famously proclaimed that given a dozen children and complete control of raising them, he could turn them out to be whoever he wanted them to be: engineer, doctor, beggar-man, thief. These experts decried mothers against kissing and cuddling their babies, warning them that this would result in adults ill-suited to the demands of an impersonal, urban, modern world. Ironically, a few years later, some of these very same experts then charged that autism was caused by “frigid”, emotionally aloof mothers. What a mess! Behaviorism is in severe decline, but by no means completely dead. In many fields such as socialization research, it apparently plods on. People continue to believe that their bad parenting is a principal cause in their children turning out to be bad.

Returning to Harris, does she think parents are completely insignificant ? In a chapter titled “What Parents Can Do”, Harris writes: “.. it wouldn’t be fair – and it wouldn’t be accurate – to leave you with the impression that parents are wallpaper”. She talks of treating kids well because that’s what you do to sustain a good relationship. She ends the chapter with: “Don’t worry about what the advice-givers tell you. Love your kids because kids are lovable, not because you think they need it. … Relax. How they turn out is not a reflection of the care you have given them.”

Many years ago, when we first began to try conceiving, a friend advised me that “children are not like algorithms. You cannot expect predictable output based on specific input”. A common joke goes “Before I had kids, I had three theories on parenting. Now, I have three kids and no theories”. Given the modern world and its demands, the nuclear family and its consequences, parenting is hard. Why should I spend time with Maya when I can be busy at work, seeking the next promotion, the next patent, the next accolade ? I’ll certainly be more acknowledged for that rather than caring for Maya (a friend pointed out that even Buddha abandoned his responsibility as a parent). Why should I bother spending time with Maya instead of setting her in front of a TV and writing this entry at 6 PM instead of 2 AM ? Because I hope that in the process, I can teach her something about valuing people more than objects, about how I valued her and my time with her. I can only hope that all this will lead to us being close twenty, thirty years from now, that she can cherish this relationship and use it as a guide for her future relationships. Beyond doing our best and hoping, what more can we do ?

“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.” – Kahlil Gibran