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A Toy Around Every Corner

Posted on October 27, 2009
by Dinesh Dutt

The past few weeks, when I go running, I stop midway and let Maya down from the stroller. Part of it is because I make the first part of my run so fast that I’m winded at the 3.5 mile mark (I run those miles at a 7 minutes/mile pace). The other part is that I let Maya down one day because I was tired for some other reason and since then, she insists on being let down. To run those miles non-stop, I try a different route.

At the 3.5 mile mark, we’re at the edge of the Shoreline marshlands. This close to the bay, Stevens creek is rarely dry, even in summer. I usually lead Maya away from the main track and onto a dirt track that parallels the paved track, but is broken up in places by the creek bed. Some sections are a little steep as they head down closer to the creek. The loose gravel and the descent makes things a little slippery for a 20 month baby. In the beginning, Maya took little steps, bending down the moment she her grip slipped, holding her arms out to balance herself. But, she didn’t want any help as she descended or ascended the path. Only sometimes did she reach out for my hand. Last week, the path was still muddy from the storm of the past week, but Maya went down like a pro, hardly slowing down and continuing to look around as she walked instead of being focused on taking the next step.

As the track levels out, it is quite close to the creek, though the creek is still hidden by the undergrowth in places. I take Maya closer to the water, especially when there are mallards and teals. Maya watches them fascinated. They waddle in the water, a little wary of the sudden interest so close. Maya says “quack, quack” pointing at them. They sometimes fly away from this attention. Sometimes, they put on a show for her. They dip their beaks in the water, to catch some food, becoming almost perpendicular to the liquid plane, their tails pointing straight up at the sky. Sometimes, they quack at each other. A couple of times, they flew in, using their feet to break their fall, making a big, splashing sound. Maya is enthralled.

If it isn’t the ducks, Maya is fascinated by the dead leaves that carpet the path in places. I can’t name most of the plants they belong to. But, Maya knows the word leaf. She points at them as she walks, picking one or two up for a closer examination. She usually selects one or two to carry back to the stroller. Most leaves are dry and brown, but some are still green. Maya examines them all closely, looking at me as she does so, asking me to explain them or name them. I say leaf and yeleh (leaf in Kannada).

This past Thursday, a crane and an egret were resting in the shallow creek. The crane was still on the bank, a little distance away. The white crane looks so beautiful and fragile, with its reedy legs. Maya can hardly contain her excitement after the initial surprise. She breaks into a run to get closer. I ask her to stop a little distance from the bird, to not scare it away. She heeds my message only for a moment or two. Seeing her too close, the crane spreads its wings and majestically glides a little distance away.

Maya’s also drawn to rocks and pebbles. She picks them up and examines them closely, her eyes gleaming. I tell her that we cannot take them with us and she reluctantly drops them back. She then reaches for the trees and massages her hand against the bark, feeling their texture.

These are Maya’s toys. Pebbles, leaves, sand, kitchen utensils. I dramatize. She does have a few of the more mainstream toys (mostly hand-me-downs) and a few puzzles.

Juliet Schor writes in “Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture” that a typical first-grader in the US can identify 200 brand names, accumulates toys at an average rate of seventy new toys per year, and spends an average of two hours in front of a TV per day. In 2002, children between the ages of 4-12 spent $30 billion of which toys were the number two spending category (sweets, beverages and snacks was the numero uno).

This is the the age of smart toys and edu-toys. When I was growing up, toys were meant for play, not to train (or educate as we like to say) or be smart. Living in the age of anxiety and dog-eat-dog, no instruction can start early enough. 62% of parents surveyed by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2004 said that educational toys are very important to children’s intellectual development. The anxiety has gotten so out of whack that there are toys such as those made by BabyPlus, which allow a pregnant woman to strap a device to her belly, twice a day, that then proceeds to produce sounds that are supposed to make for smarter babies right out of the womb. In the movie, Baby Mama, Tina Fey’s character wants the surrogate mother to listen to Mandarin tapes, based on the idea that learning a second language helps babies get smarter.

A Fisher-Price advertisement says: “We all want to be parents of the next Einstein” and markets their toys on the mantra that “the right toy at the right time will enrich the play experience of your little genius”. Another toy maker, Neurosmith, says that their toys “..stimulate key areas of the brain and actually help teach your child how to learn”. And parents are lapping these messages up. LeapFrog, a major educational toy vendor, alone notched $640 million in sales in 2004, according to Pamela Paul, author of the incisive “Parenting Inc.”. Baby Einstein, which dominates the baby media market has sales of $200 million annually. $200 million. Just for baby CDs and DVDs. According to a 2003 study, a third of all American babies from 6 months to 2 years old had at least one “Baby Einstein” video.

Are these educational toys “educational” or helpful or are they turning kids into passive consumers who demand that the world entertain them at the press of a button, rather than entertain themselves. Pamela Paul writes: “Many toys on the market today may as well have a sticker on them that says “Imagination Not Included”". She says that these toy manufacturers and parents are misguided in their understanding of “interactive” toys: it is the children that must interact with the toys and not the other way. She tells the story of a kid who asked “What does it do ?” when given an old-fashioned toy, puzzled that play didn’t involve pushing a button. She quotes my favorite pediatric anthropologist, Meredith Small, who fears that we’re either overstimulating our babies or stimulating them in wrong ways. Research supports her concerns.

  • A Harvard researcher, Chuck Nelson, who monitored what goes on inside infant brains, says that babies filter out a lot of what the toy is putting out, that they’re not like a sponge, absorbing everything.
  • Elizabeth Spelke, a famous developmental cognitive scientist says that her studies have found that attempting to teach infants things such as learning to read or count is useless at best, but possibly harmful. We evolved to learn about the world from real people, not the TV or DVD. Patricia Kuhl, a leading expert on child development especially w.r.t language conducted a study in which a native Mandarin speaker played for an hour with one group of babies. Three other control groups of babies were setup: one watched a video of the native Mandarin speaker playing with the babies, one heard an audio recording of the native Mandarin speaker speaking and the third group had no exposure to Mandarin at all. Of these, Dr. Kuhl found that only the group that only the first group of babies (with the live Mandarin speaker) tested as being capable of distinguishing Mandarin sounds from English.
  • Andrew Meltzoff, a co-author of the excellent “Scientist In The Crib”, says that his research has found that a key to language development is the baby’s ability to read the mother’s face, her reaction to various events and actions by the baby. These so-called interactive dolls/toys have an unchanging expression, no matter what the baby does. Another researcher, Catherine Tamis-LaMonda, concludes similarly based on her research with parent-baby interaction in “naturalistic” environments.
  • Laura Schulz, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT says that once children understand the causal relationship of a toy, they move on (pressing a button produces one of these six sounds). She says that children with these smart toys become passive absorbers and even develop impatience.
  • Alison Gopnik, another prominent developmental cognitive scientist, wrote an op-ed piece in NYT in which she says: “The learning that babies and young children do on their own, when they carefully watch an unexpected outcome and draw new conclusions from it, ceaselessly manipulate a new toy or imagine different ways that the world might be, is very different from schoolwork. Babies and young children can learn about the world around them through all sorts of real-world objects and safe replicas, from dolls to cardboard boxes to mixing bowls, and even toy cellphones and computers. Babies can learn a great deal just by exploring the ways bowls fit together or by imitating a parent talking on the phone. (Imagine how much money we can save on “enriching” toys and DVDs!)”. She writes that kids younger than five have a hard time being goal-oriented which is what so many of the so-called educational toys attempt to do.

On Sunday, NYT reported that Disney is offering refunds to parents who bought the Baby Einstein products, admitting that they did not produce the geniuses they promised.

All these so-called educational toys cost so much more than the old-fashioned ones. What’s worse in the modern world is that with the outsourcing of much of the manufacturing to China, parents are subject to the yearly scare of recalls because many of the toys are toxic. To avoid this, well heeled parents have begun to search for toys not made in China, hand-crafted toys, which are more expensive. No wonder a modern family cannot be supported on a single income. Worse still of course is the lack of time that parents have with their children. An absence that fuels the guilt that causes them to indulge in all these expensive toys. The executive VP of Chicco toy division explains the success of his division:
“My viewpoint is that with so many dual working parents, the guilt factor steps in. They’re looking for toys that make them feel good. They think, if I’m not around enough, something can fill in that void for me, maybe if the toy teaches them something.”

What does help babies ? In the article on Baby Einstein, Vicky Rideout, the VP of the Kaiser Family Foundation says: “To me, the most important thing is reminding parents that getting down on the floor to play with children is the most educational thing they can do.”. Alison Gopnik writes: “But what children observe most closely, explore most obsessively and imagine most vividly are the people around them. There are no perfect toys; there is no magic formula. Parents and other caregivers teach young children by paying attention and interacting with them naturally and, most of all, by just allowing them to play.”

This is what my parents and many parents of my generation and older did. This is how we evolved. Surrounded by people from whom we learnt to make sense of the world.

Maya runs around the dirt track by the Stevens creek, stepping on dry twigs and leaves, relishing the crackling sound that it makes. Sunlight dapples in the creek. A plane flies by overhead and Maya points to it. “Bye Bye”, she says. She spots an acorn on the ground and picks it up. She can’t say acorn yet, but I’m guessing that the smile on her face and her pointing at it is an indication that she recognizes this from the pictures she’s seen in her books. To her, there’s a toy around every corner and the world is a playground.

To see a World in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour - William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
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Naming The World

Posted on September 27, 2009
by Dinesh Dutt
Maya and Shanthala Reading Itsy Bitsy Spider

Maya and Shanthala Reading Itsy Bitsy Spider

For the past month and a half or two, Maya has been pointing at things, wanting to know their names. Around the same time, she started bringing books to us, asking us to read them to her. At first, she’d want to turn pages, staring at the pictures. Soon after, we started naming the things she pointed at and thus she began the naming of the world.

Shanthala and I had told each other that we wouldn’t hurry Maya’s development along, trying to get her to reach her developmental milestones any faster than she wanted to. We didn’t try reading to her or encouraging her to learn the alphabet or pick up anything. Let her enjoy her childhood, we said.

Watching Shanthala and me curl up with a book made her want to get a book too, I suppose. Pretty soon, she was picking up a book and forcing her way onto our laps. Soon, she was demanding a book even on the potty, as she tried to poop.

The nursery rhymes itsy-bitsy-spider, wheels on the bus go round and round, and twinkle, twinkle, little star were the first books that she enjoyed. We read them to her in our best sing-song voice and she demanded that we repeat them over and over again. Shanthala demonstrated far more patience than I in this part and soon, Shanthala had to only sit down and Maya would be hoisting herself onto Shanthala’s lap with one of these books.

A little later, we progressed onto books with animal pictures in them, naming each of the animals and trying to imitate their sounds. After agua (water in Spanish), her first word was probably bow-wow. From bow-wow to a cow’s moo took her a little longer, but the sounds started coming faster and faster. Her current attempt is to imitate a clock (with tick tock) and an owl (whoo, whoo). She hasn’t succeeded in imitating a cat’s meow. Every time she sees Kitty’s picture, the best she manages for a meow is a whimper.

Shanthala encouraged the nanny to borrow books in Spanish from the library and spend some time reading to Maya everyday. Shanthala and I named the beasts and the belfries in Kannada and English. Today, Maya can point to many an animal or object correctly when asked in either Kannada, English or Spanish.

Maya is usually the first to wake up, if Shanthala isn’t working. She holds my head as I struggle to wake up. She talks to herself as she holds me. Then as my eyes stay open a little longer than a flicker, she points to Kitty’s picture on our bedroom wall and looks at me eagerly. I say “Kitty” and she then points to a mask hanging on the opposite side of the wall and I say “mask”. Happily, she points to Kitty’s picture again and we repeat this till I’m awake. Maya fetches me my glasses and off we go.

In the movie, “Duma”, the narrator says that in Africa, if you name something, you must take responsibility for it. With naming the world, I hope Maya has started on a journey to be responsible for it, to be its caretaker, to live with an eye to protecting it for her children.

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Lying

Posted on August 29, 2009
by Dinesh Dutt

“All kids lie. Almost all kids will experiment with lying at least by the age of four. And if they start when they’re younger, you might think, oh no, my kid’s lacking morality. Actually, it’s a sign of their nascent intelligence because it’s more complicated to hold in your head, as a child, the truth and an alternative reality and then try to sustain that alternative reality.”

Wouldn’t it be parent heaven if the kids listened to us as they grew up ? That we didn’t have to deal with the self-assertion and rebellion of the terrible twos ? That we didn’t have to worry what are our children lying about ? That there were no sibling rivalry ? That we didn’t have to deal with being alienated during the teenage angst ?

From an evolutionary perspective, each of these stages have a reason for their existence. Sometime between years 1 and 2, a child begins to understand that what she wants is not necessarily what her caregivers want her to have. She begins to learn that she is a different individual than her caregiver. Till then, usually the baby and the caregiver are one, with the caregiver tending to just about every thing the child demands.

With co-author Ashley Merryman, Po Bronson – whose article on praising kids I wrote about a few entries ago – explores some of these issues in a new book called “Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children”.

Po Bronson says that teaching kids that telling the truth doesn’t always have negative repercussions is better at curbing lying than telling them that they would be punished if they lied. He says in an interview on NPR (National Public Radio):

“Well, 78 percent of American parents think that their teenagers can tell them anything. But the teens completely disagree, because while the average teen might be lying to their parents about 12 of the 36 common topics, even the teens who lie the least are still lying. They’re lying about five topics out of the 36.

Parents today imagine that there’s a tradeoff between being strict and being permissive and that the benefit of some permissiveness is honesty, that you’re going to hear the truth and not be kept in the dark. So you’ll be able to help. The science says that those permissive parents do not hear more truth from their kids.

And the best way to hear truth from kids is to set a few rules, consistently enforce them and then this is one that’s going to sound controversial, Robert, parents who negotiate occasionally with their teens. We need to see that some arguing with parents, a moderate amount of argument is actually a good thing, not a bad thing. That arguing is a sign of respect, not of disrespect.

Because to the teenager, they have two choices: telling the truth and leading to an argument or just outright lying. Arguing over the actual rules is a better alternative and very different thing than arguing over your authority as a parent to set rules at all.”

White lies are a fundamental fabric of our contemporary society. Children, who learn so much by imitating, can’t distinguish between the social white lie that we so casually utter and the lie that we get so upset with them about. What’s worse is we initiate them into the habit of lying. “Don’t ask for more even if you’re hungry, it’s not polite”.

A recent book on lying called “The Liar In Your Life” by Robert Feldman delves into this habit of lying. The startling fact is how much we lie and are lied to and how difficult it is for us to separate fact from fiction. Based on his research, Feldman concludes that most people lie at least thrice in a 10 minute conversation (other studies which have concluded similarly). He also says that most people don’t know that they’re lying and that his participants had to watch the videotapes of their conversations to realize how much they were lying. “It’s nice to meet you”, “How are you”, lies roll off our tongue thick and fast. And we’re not alone. The animal kingdom is replete with deception. That most of us seem to gravitate almost naturally towards that right amount of lying that make us good spouses, good citizens without tipping overboard into sociopaths is a sign to me that deception has deep biological roots.

Lying has more beneficial advantages than just being a social grease. Studies have shown that depressed people are far more honest about themselves and what they can control than non-depressed people. “Fake it till you feel it” or “Fake it till you make it” are gospel among those who teach courses on succeeding, building self-confidence or building hard-to-build new habits such as exercising. Placebos have been known to work in place of real medicine.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we ought to lie all the time. Trust is a key element in any good relationship. Cry wolf too much and no one will believe you and you’ll become somewhat of a social pariah. Feldman says that lying is much more easier and permissible in contemporary culture. For example, a study by Josephson Institute, a non-profit studying ethical issues, found that 64% of students cheated during a test, up from 60% in 2006. We live in a culture where the pressure to succeed, to be overachievers, is relentless and starts just about immediately after birth. We speak with awe everytime our little one reaches a milestone faster than the average. “Oh, my daughter started speaking when she was 10 months old”, “She has the vocabulary of a five year old” and on and on and on. Lying is one way to blow off some of that pressure. Credit card debt is another lie, an illusion that we have more than we really do, driven by a desire to acquire material artifacts in larger numbers than ever before in history, with a view that with their acquisition, comes happiness. Dealing with honesty also requires time and commitment, two items in scarce quantity in our lives today. No wonder our culture encourages and eases deception.

As a parent, these questions and issues take on a larger relevance and urgency than when I was not a parent. Learning to encourage honesty by not shooting the messenger, actively encouraging debate and disagreement, but also promoting conflict resolution may benefit Maya. But books like Po Bronson’s seem to raise doubts on folklore such as permissive parents will hear more of the truth from their kids.

Honesty, is such a lonely word
Everyone is so untrue
Honesty, is hardly ever heard
And mostly what I need from you – Billy Joel

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The Changed Geography Of Childhood

Posted on July 10, 2009
by Dinesh Dutt

Writing the entry on Maya’s romps in the park, I pondered again about the nature of childhood of Maya’s generation. Shanthala often reminisces of her carefree childhood when home was a revolving door from school to playground. I hear others speak similarly of their childhood, people growing up in countries far flung from India, countries like Spain, Italy and even the US.

My father likes to say that he is quite modern in his outlook. In some ways, he’s probably ahead of his time. Unlike my peers, I spent most of my childhood alone, reading or playing by myself. We lived inside textile mill compounds, sometimes the only family. Even if there were other families living in the company quarters, other kids would not play as easily with me either because my father was the head honcho or because they were not my age. My time with my friends was controled by my parents to once a month outings at their place or ours usually for a few hours only. Similarly, my activities outside of school with peers were completely governed by my parents.

Left to my own devices, I hardly indulged in any form of physical activity, prefering instead to slouch in a corner with my books. Over time, I became quite fat, acquiring that brahmin belly. A friend’s mother would often joke that my belly entered their house well before I did. Even at school, I prefered to cook up some excuse to get out of the P.T (physical training) class.

My childhood fits perfectly with how most kids are raised these days in the US. They are chaperoned from activity to activity, are rarely allowed any time without adult supervision and lead cloistered lives. A friend once commented that in this country, parents are more chaffeurs than parents, spending entire weekends driving kids from activity or birthday party to another. Shanthala often says how much she hates orchestrating time for kids to play with each other, those play dates. It is unusual to see kids playing out in the streets by themselves.

This article in Boston Globe, published in January 2008, is one of many articles that I found on the net when I searched for any data on how little kids played outside these days. Here is an excerpt from the article:

‘Roger Hart knows this wistful territory better than anyone. In 1972, as a graduate student at Clark University, the young researcher set out to understand the geography of childhood. He journeyed to a not-so-exotic locale — a village in Vermont — and spent two years tracking the movements of a species that, remarkably, had never been closely studied in its natural environment: the human child. (At the time, says Hart, “we knew more about the ecology of baboons than the ecology of children.”) Running, playing, and digging in the dirt with packs of kids from 5 to 12 years old, he discovered that virtually all of them had outdoor places they considered their own, where they went to hide, reflect, or commune with nature.

When Hart returned to the same town two years ago, to repeat his research and learn how childhood has changed in 36 years, he discovered a universe transformed in a single generation. The children had moved indoors, and the intricate, outdoor play-world they had once invented and inhabited on their own was gone. In the wake of the shift he found nagging questions about its effects on children’s creativity and independence. Now 60 and a professor of environmental psychology at the City University of New York, Hart is working on a film and a book about his research, tentatively titled “Childhood Revisited.”‘

The article goes on to say how his study indicates that kids these days have a hard time spending time on their own, inventing activities to keep themselves occupied. I remembered how a friend’s child, raised in the US, had a hard time finding something to do on his own in the absence of a computer or TV. He kept saying how bored he was. An article in LA Times about this subject (from May 2008) states a University of Michigan finding that between 1981 and 1997, “3- to 5-year-olds lost an average of 501 minutes of unstructured playtime each week; 6- to 8-year-olds lost an average of 228 minutes. (On the other hand, kids now do more organized activities and have more homework, the lucky devils!) And forget about walking to school alone. Today’s kids don’t walk much at all (adding to the childhood obesity problem).”

There is no dearth of articles that bemoan this new geography of childhood, of time with computers and TV and almost complete lack of unstructured, adult-free time. For example, this article talks about a national movement called “No Child Left Inside”, inspired by a book called “Last Child In The Woods” by a Richard Louv. An excerpt from the article:

‘Louv tagged the term “nature deficit disorder,” the physical, psychological and emotional conditions that result from society’s increasing alienation from nature. Obesity, stress and attention disorders are just some of its manifestations. Louv’s book has triggered a national conversation about the issue, even sparked federal legislation to help fund local programs and the development of school curriculums. It is the springboard for groups all over the country who are working to get youth outside more.’

The article speaks of how the latest edition of Oxford Junior Dictionary cut out terms such as: beaver, dandelion, heron, magpie, clover, otter and others, and substituted Blackberry, blog, MP3 player, voicemail and broadband. It is quite well-known that kids today can identify brands far better than they can identify flora and fauna.

Other articles speak of how kids in day care spend less time outdoors compared to kids not in day care. The causes vary from the personality of the day care supervisors (if they don’t enjoy being outside, they tend to not take kids outside) to the nature of groups (if one kid comes ill-prepared to be outside, such as not having the appropriate clothing, the entire class doesn’t go).

Why this massive shift in a single generation ? The factors are many. Fear is a large factor. Most parents are terrified that their kids will be abducted and/or killed by homicidal maniacs or pedophiles if left to play by themselves. Litigation is another factor according to this article published in 2006. The structure of our lives is another factor. We live in suburbs, in communities where neighbors hardly know each other and so parents prefer to drive their kids to their friends’ houses or to common meeting points. Another issue is the increased urge to enroll kids into every possible activity, to not deprive the kids of possible benefits and to provide a competitive edge. It is also far easier to plonk kids in front of the TV or the computer compared to taking them out to a park.

Many articles speak of the effects of this retreat from the outside and the lack of unsupervised time. They speak of increased risk of obesity (physical activity is one factor, not the only factor of course), diabetes and heart diseases. Some articles also highlight that play and unsupervised time itself is critical. A representative for the American Academy of Pediatrics’, Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg testified to Congress in 2006, “Play allows children to create and explore a world they can master, conquering their fears while practicing adult roles. … Play helps children develop new competencies … and the resiliency they will need to face future challenges.” But here’s the catch: Those benefits aren’t realized when some helpful adult is hovering over kids the whole time.” Then there is the possibility that all this alienation from nature will make kids immune to issues such as loss of biodiversity and open spaces.

People who look at me today may ask, “Well, it doesn’t seem that your physical inactivity during your childhood has prevented you from becoming physically fit and healthy in your later ages. So why all this hoopla ? Let’s give the parents a break”. What they don’t see is the struggle I grow through every time I have to lace up for a run. I have to fight with myself from giving all those excuses to not run each time. And as some of the articles state, the issue is more than just health. And I don’t think I’m just blaming parents or the modern life. In our drive to acquire the trappings of a successful life, I fear that we’re forgetting how to live, we’re withdrawing or opting out of making decisions that may lead to greater benefits systemically, for us and our future generations.

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Are Parents Irrelevant ?

Posted on June 2, 2009
by Dinesh Dutt

“Do parents have any important long-term effects on the development of their child’s personality ? This article examines the evidence and concludes that the answer is no”.

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.

The pendulum on personality is swinging on the momentum of nature today. Newspapers and blogs proclaim on a regular basis how a gene has been found that is considered responsible for some behavior such as alcoholism and even novelty-seeking behavior. People who emphasize genetics more than environment are called psychological nativists. Steven Pinker is a prominent nativist.

Parenting has largely been the domain of women with men acting as interested bystanders and more concerned with “bread winning”. The swinging pendulum of parenting advice struck mothers squarely in the face, barely registering a glancing blow on the fathers. The experts speaking from the “scientific” podium only heightened the guilt the women felt, making parenting seem an onerous burden. With the rise of feminism, the women began to fight back. In the process, they sometimes threw the baby out with the bath water, rejecting attachment theory, aspects of evolutionary parenting traits, the benefits of breast milk etc. as proclamations of a male dominated world designed to enshackle women in permanent slavery.

Judith Rich Harris stepped into this climate to relieve parents of their burden by pointing out that many of these so-called sciences, had really no basis in science, were more about correlations than causes, using statistical mumbo-jumbo to reach inconclusive conclusions, ignoring many critical factors such as genes and interaction with peers. However, in the true style of an American, she went entirely in the opposite direction and proclaimed that parents hardly matter in the final psychological development of a child and that peers were “everything”, a theory which she admits doesn’t have much evidence either. Ann Hulbert writes that Harris’ theory conformed to the Western faith in personal responsibility and in an unbroken continuity between past and present.

Recently, the simple nature vs nurture debate has been taking a beating. For a fascinating insight into this debate, two wonderfully erudite and readable guides are Matt Ridley’s “Nature Via Nurture : Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human” and Robert Sapolsky’s “Monkeyluv: And other essays on our lives as animals”. In one particularly brilliant chapter, “The Madness of Causes”, about the search for the causes of mental disorders such as schizophrenia and manic-depression, he seesaws back and forth between genetic and environmental causes, showing how impossible it is to separate the effects of genes and environment. The first section of Sapolsky’s book is similarly illuminating, and with much more humor. Sapolsky says that we must use the term “gene/environment” to refer to their combined effect. He writes: “Genes don’t cause behaviors. Sometimes, they influence them. … What that means is that the effects of a gene on an organism will usually vary with changes in the environment, and the effects of the environment will vary with changes in the genetic makeup of the organism.“

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

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