[Maybe less than we assume. -e]
Judith Harris’s big idea–that peers matter much more than parents–runs counter to nearly everything that a century of psychology and psychotherapy has told us about human development. Freud put parents at the center of the child’s universe, and there they have remained ever since. “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do,” the poet Philip Larkin memorably wrote, and that perspective is fundamental to the way we have been taught to understand ourselves. When we go to a therapist, we talk about our parents, in the hope that coming to grips with the events of childhood can help us decipher the mysteries of adulthood. When we say things like “That’s the way I was raised,” we mean that children instinctively and preferentially learn from their parents, that parents can be good or bad role models for children, that character and personality are passed down from one generation to the next. Child development has been, in many ways, concerned with understanding children through their parents.
In recent years, however, this idea has run into a problem. In a series of careful and comprehensive studies (among them the famous Minnesota studies of twins separated at birth) behavioral geneticists have concluded that about fifty per cent of the personality differences among people–traits such as friendliness, extroversion, nervousness, openness, and so on–are attributable to our genes, which means that the other half must be attributable to the environment. Yet when researchers have set out to look for this environmental influence they haven’t been able to find it. If the example of parents were important in a child’s development, you’d expect to see a consistent difference between the children of anxious and inexperienced parents and the children of authoritative and competent parents, even after taking into account the influence of heredity. Children who spend two hours a day with their parents should be different from children who spend eight hours a day with their parents. A home with lots of books should result in a different kind of child from a home with very few books. In other words, researchers should have been able to find some causal link between the specific social environment parents create for their children and the way those children turn out. They haven’t.