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In August of 1998 a college textbook writer, Judith Rich Harris, received an award from the American Psychological Association (APA) for work that questioned a central tenet of current popular psychology and of much clinical theory written since World War II. Harris aimed her Molotov cocktail at the idea that parents are the primary shapers of human character, and, therefore, are responsible for enormous suffering. She offered instead a new theory of personality development: group socialization theory, asserting that peers shape human character and that this is essential for continuation of the species. Children need skills to live in their own generation, not that of their parents. The award Harris received bears the name of George Miller, a much-honored scholar and the very man who advised her to leave the Harvard doctoral program 37 years ago because, he said, she lacked originality.
The paradoxes here are of biblical proportions, worthy of Jesus' own use of parables. One Graduate Theological Union doctoral student, herself the mother of two teenaged boys, first heard of Judith Harris's challenge to psychology while standing in a grocery line. A couple in their seventies, just ahead of her, read aloud an inflammatory Newsweek headline: "Do Parents Matter? A New Heated Debate About How Kids Develop."
"There it is," the older woman remarked cheerfully. "It's not our fault after all."
"It isn't?" the doctoral student exclaimed. "Then why am I bothering?"
Client after client carried the same edition of Newsweek into my office from my waiting room, in case there was a pause in our session, I suppose, or to ask me what I thought of Harris's radical proposal. And The Nurture Assumption, the book expanding the argument laid out in her prize-winning article, quickly landed on the bestseller list. Harris certainly hit a nerve.
That parents are responsible for their children's lives, character, and misery is an article of faith that has dominated popular culture as well as much of the psychology world for 30 or 40 years. It has served us well. According to this logic, there was a time when we were wonderful and innocent, with practically unlimited potential, but our parents and society ruined our lives. Moreover, this dogma guarantees that, if parents do their job right, it is possible to raise perfect children who become perfectly happy and productive adults (a notion that many Christian parents have found seductive—and never mind original sin). If a child is in trouble, we know who is to blame.
No mystery here; everything is predictable. But it is precisely this outlook that Jesus challenged regularly. His parables were frequently designed to disrupt the pretensions of human-controlled holiness, which traps both the accuser and the accused. Perhaps there is something of the Spirit in Judith Rich Harris's persuasive argument. She knows too much to be brushed aside easily. In this she offers us painfully needed grace.
Academics have been quick to point out that she has no credentials: she holds no Ph.D., and she is not a tenure-track professor at any university, let alone a prestigious one. She is, however, not that easy to dismiss. As a former doctoral student and a writer of college texts, she understands research well, and since she is not embroiled in any particular area of research that would demand her exclusive focus, she has read widely in clinical, social, and educational psychology, behaviorism, cultural anthropology, and primate studies. Harris envisions and describes a child far more active, observant, intelligent, resilient, and flexible than the more passive, acted-upon infant we are accustomed to meeting in the psychology of popular culture. And Harris is also a mother, thus representative of many voices rarely heard in the academic literature.
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