Judith Rich Harris

The whole time I was reading this book, I also had...

Judith Rich Harris's book, in my mind, so just for the listener, it's a really important book called The Nurture Assumption.

And her main thesis is that parents have extremely little influence over the outcomes of their kids.

Of course, bad parents, abusive parents can mess their kids up permanently.

Thank you.

Further to the question of parenting and environment, and for a little nuance on the nature versus nurture dichotomy, I'd like to invoke a book that may have first put this question on the map, Judith Harris's The Nurture Assumption, back in the 90s, I'm sure you're all familiar with, in which she argued that, yes, genes are one of two enormous influences on a child's development.

but that while parents top-down have very little influence, the other big factor is the child's peer group, and parents can have an indirect influence there, and in a bottom-up way, perhaps have influence.

My question is, to what extent do you subscribe to Harris's once controversial thesis, and which side of the debate does it favor?

And I think it's difficult when we're thinking about this interrelated web of people to pick out one person and say, well, it's the child's genotype, or it's the peers, or it's the parents that scaffolded and structured this entire environment.

That being said, if we're thinking about responsibility, the parents are the grown-ups in that situation, right? So if I'm gonna say, well, why is my seven-year-old acting up? Well, I'm gonna blame the other seven-year-olds that he's happened to meet in school, or I can think about, well, who is in charge of this classroom? Who is in charge of putting my kid in this social environment? So all of that to say, I think it's come back to Andrew Solomon's point of can we really disentangle this interconnected web of people.

The second point I wanted to make is that in the wake of Judith Harris's book, there was a number of twin studies, Robert did an enormous amount of work, I've done some of this work too, where we try to say, okay, well, can we account for some of this non-shared environment, twin differences in something by measuring something about the peer environment.

And that has largely been a really frustrating research endeavor, which has led, I think, to Robert's conclusion that this is randomness, this is unsystematic.

As you think about parents, and especially fathers of daughters, what advice would you give to other dads who want to build a lasting and meaningful relationship with their daughters?

I guess this is going to sound counterintuitive or whatever, but there's a giant book by a woman named Judith Harris called The Nurture Assumption, which maybe you've heard of.

And it talks about we can give our kids a lot of love, but we can't make them into something.

We can't make a physicist.