The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn out the Way They Do

The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn out the Way They Do

by JudithRichHarris (Author)

Synopsis

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOKHow much credit do parents deserve when their children turn out welt? How much blame when they turn out badly? Judith Rich Harris has a message that will change parents' lives: The nurture assumption -- the belief that what makes children turn out the way they do, aside from their genes, is the way their parents bring them up -- is nothing more than a cultural myth. This electrifying book explodes some of our unquestioned beliefs about children and parents and gives us a radically new view of childhood.Harris looks with a fresh eye at the real lives of real children to show that it is what they experience outside the home, in the company of their peers, that matters most, Parents don't socialize children; children socialize children. With eloquence and humor, Judith Harris explains why parents have little power to determine the sort of people their children will become. The Nurture Assumption is an important and entertaining work that brings together insights from psychology, sociology, anthropology, primatology, and evolutionary biology to offer a startling new view of who we are and how we got that way.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 480
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 26 Oct 1999

ISBN 10: 0684857073
ISBN 13: 9780684857077

Media Reviews
from the Foreword by Steven Pinkerauthor of The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works The Nurture Assumption is truly rare. Though its thesis is at first counterintuitive, one gets a sense of real children and parents walking through these pages....Being among the first to read this electrifying book has been one of the high points of my career as a psychologist. One seldom sees a work that is at once scholarly, revolutionary, insightful, and wonderfully clear and witty....I predict it will come to be seen as a turning point in the history of psychology.