I’m listening to a lecture on Social Neurobiology by UCLA pyschiatrist Daniel Siegel: “One way of describing shy kids is that they have more reactive right hemispheres. Jerome Kagan (of Harvard) found that depending on what the parents did, shaped the outcome for this child. If the parents tuned in to the child and supported their development enough so that they had a secure base but then encouraged them to push the envelope, by the time these kids became teenagers, you couldn’t see any signs of anxiety. We have a shy child at home and I used Jerry’s technique and he’s now president of his class.”
In contrast, her third assertion — parents don’t matter — is plausible only within her narrow, arbitrary boundaries. To fully explain human behavior, everything matters. Anything conceivable (whether genes, peers, parents, cousins, teachers, TV, incest abuse, martial arts, breastfeeding, prenatal environment, etc.) influences something (whether personality, IQ, sexual orientation, culture, morals, job skills, etc.) in somebody.
To show that peers outweigh parents, she repeatedly cites Darwinian linguist Pinker’s work on how young immigrant kids automatically develop the accents of their playmates, not their parents. True, but there’s more to life than language. Not until p. 191 does she admit — in a footnote — that immigrant parents do pass down home-based aspects of their culture like cuisine, since kids don’t learn to cook from their friends. (How about attitudes toward housekeeping, charity, courtesy, wife-beating, and child-rearing itself?) Not until p. 330 does she recall something else where peers don’t much matter: religion! Worse, she never notices what Thomas Sowell has voluminously documented in his accounts of ethnic economic specialization. It’s parents and relatives who pass on both specific occupations (e.g., Italians and marble-cutting or Cambodians and donut-making) and general attitudes toward hard work, thrift, and entrepreneurship.
Nor can peers account for social change among young children, such as the current switch from football to soccer, since preteen peer groups are intensely conservative. (Some playground games have been passed down since Roman times). Even more so, the trend toward having little girls play soccer and other cootie-infested boys sports did not, rest assured, originate among peer groups of little girls. That was primarily their dads’ idea, especially sports-crazed dads without sons.
While millions of parents sweat and save to get their kids into neighborhoods and schools offering better peer groups, Mrs. Harris redefines this merely as an “indirect” parental influence. She claims modern studies can’t find predictable relationships between “direct” influences (i.e., different child-rearing styles) and how children turn out. But that may be merely an inherent shortcoming of these non-experimental analyses. For example, she asserts (not necessarily reliably) that studies prove it doesn’t matter whether mothers work or not. But the same methodology would report that it doesn’t matter whether you buy a minivan or a Miata, since purchasers of different classes of vehicles report roughly similar satisfaction. In reality, women don’t randomly choose home or work; they agonize over balancing career and family. They tailor their family size to fit their career ambitions and vice-versa. Mothers then readjust as necessary to best meet their particular families’ conflicting needs for money and mothering. For instance, a working mother might quit when her second baby proves unexpectedly colicky, then return when the children enter school, then shift to part time after her husband gets a big raise. That’s bad for these studies, but good for their kids.
Finally, why do mothers care so much? Disappointingly for a Darwinian, Mrs. Harris blames it on The Media. She hopes her book will encourage parents to fret less, but it will likely have little impact on mothers, since natural selection has crafted them so that “‘Worry’ is a mother’s middle name.” In contrast, men will find her view more appealing, with painful consequences not just for their kids, but for themselves and all of society. The more violent and poverty-stricken will a culture become, the less it persuades men that “fathering” requires decades rather than minutes.
