Truck and Barter

That’s psychologist Karl Rosengren talking about the role of imagination in a child’s cognitive development. ( Radio Nationals All in the Mind programme, The Imaginative Child – it was podcast sometime back but they only keep a couple of the most recent podcasts). It also talks about how children think about things like death and the role of parents.

But does parents matter. If you ask Judith Harris;

"….Harris argues that we have been in the grip of what she calls the "nurture assumption," a parent-centered bias that has blinded us to what really matters in human development. Consider, she says, the seemingly common-sense statements "Children who are hugged are more likely to be nice" and "Children who are beaten are more likely to be unpleasant." Sure enough, if you study nice, well-adjusted children, it turns out that they generally have well-adjusted and nice parents. But what does this really mean? Since genes account for about half of personality variations among people, it's quite possible that nice children are nice simply because they received nice genes from their parents--and nice parents are going to be nice to their children. Hugging may have made the children happy, and it may have taught them a good way of expressing their affection, but it may not have been what made them nice. Or take the example of smoking. The children of smokers are more than twice as likely to smoke as the children of nonsmokers, so it's natural to conclude that parents who smoke around their children set an example that their kids follow. In fact, a lot of parents who smoke feel guilty about it for that very reason. But if parents really cause smoking there ought to be elevated rates of smoking among the adopted children of smokers, and there aren't. It turns out that nicotine addiction is heavily influenced by genes, and the reason that so many children of smokers smoke is that they have inherited a genetic susceptibility to tobacco from their parents. David C. Rowe, a professor of family studies at the University of Arizona (whose academic work on the limits of family influence Harris says was critical to her own thinking), has analyzed research into this genetic contribution, and he concludes that it accounts entirely for the elevated levels of cigarette use among the children of smokers. With smoking, as with niceness, what parents do seems to be nearly irrelevant.”

The point she was trying to make was that peer influence are more important than family influence in determining how children turn out. David Friedman, son of Milton Friedman, has been giving Judith’s book The Nurture Assumption to friends as Christmas presents;

"The origin of Harris's book makes an interesting story. It started as an article published in The Psychological Review. The article provoked a lot of mail–partly about the controversial argument, partly asking who the author was, since nobody in the field had ever heard of her.

Judith Harris had gotten a masters in psychology from Harvard and been discouraged from going further by a professor who assured her that she did not have the makings of a successful scholar. She left academia, married, and helped support her family by coauthoring child development textbooks. Eventually she concluded that a good deal of what those textbooks said was not supported by the evidence. The result was the article–which received the journal's prize for the year's best.

The prize is named after the Harvard professor who told her that she had no future as an academic. God, Judith Harris concluded, has a sense of humor."

Now she has written a new book; No Two Alike.

Other related links:

-Ten questions for Judith Harris
- Nature via Nurture, Matt Ridley
- Chimpanzee Politics by Frans de Waal
-The Work of Imagination by Paul Harris
- What does all this mean for economists. Listen to ‘role of biology in economics’