THE POINTING FINGER

The long-running dispute concerning which influence has a stronger impact on our individual development, genes or the parents, has taken a new course. The American amateur psychologist Judith Rich Harris takes the discussion even further and claims that parents have no influence whatsoever on a child's behavior before the age of 10. She believes after that age, the peers of the child are mostly responsible for its behavior. Her books have become increasingly popular and have even been translated into Swedish.

Reviews of these kinds of books are eagerly being published. Theories that take one page to explain are doing well in the market. Books of writers whose ideas are against the wishes of the parents are not popular. Even though they present a much more accurate truth. The idealizing of parents in cases of misbehavior against children is a survival mechanism of common practice in our society. It can be for example about the 'False Memory Syndrome', research that approves the beating of a child or now the 'new' theories of Harris; every time again there are people who feel compelled to diminish the damage in the childhood.

Parents, who are pushing off responsibility for their children, are not something new in history. In the high-days of religion society used the will of God to make sure the child was being formed after its desired image. After the vanishing influence of religion as a pedagogical tool, science took over. Genetics claimed that behavior was already set before birth, as some kind of blueprint. You couldn't change anything about it. But eventually one couldn't deny that there were clear relations between early childhood experiences and neurotic and criminal behavior later in life. Countless psychologists and pedagogues started on a large series of theories. Raising children became a science. Whichever theory you preferred, there was always someone in psychology trying to prove it. The result was a lot of confusion, for the parents but especially for the children. Genetics and empiricism merged and today a popular statement is that about 50 percent of our behavior is already 'programmed' immediately after the conception and the environment shapes the other 50 percent.

Harris, who literally never leaves her house, claims that parents do not influence their child at all, but the environment outside the family. After the egg is impregnated and the DNA has established itself, further influence has stopped. Practically nothing said to the child has influence. Punish or not to punish, slap or not to slap, authority or indulgence, encouragement or contempt, according to Harris it doesn't matter in the mental development, behavior, self-esteem, intelligence or personality of the child. And what the genes don't do, the peers in school will.

During a lecture in New York on October 22, 1998, Dr. Alice Miller tried to address the opposite and talked about the history of the 'Childhood Trauma' and the parental influence: 'In 1860 the widely-read tracts by Dr. Daniel Gottlieb Schreber - some of his books ran to as many as forty editions - had become the standard upbringing techniques. His core idea was teaching parents in the systematical upbringing of their babies from their very first day of their lives. Many people thought - with him and other writers - that it was the best way to raise your child. Today we would call it a systematic instruction in child persecution and maltreatment. One of Schreber's convictions was that when babies cry they should be made to desist by the use of spanking, assuring his readers that "such a procedure is only necessary once, or at the most twice, and then one is master of the child for all time. From then on, one look, one single gesture will suffice". Above all, these books counseled that the newborn child should be forced from the very first day to obey and to refrain from crying. We all know - or, today, we should all know - that physical punishment only produces obedient children but cannot prevent them from becoming violent or sick adults precisely because of this treatment. This knowledge is now scientifically proven and was finally officially accepted by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 1998. Contrary to common opinion prevalent as recently as fifteen years ago, the human brain at birth is far from being fully developed. It is use-dependent, needing loving stimulation for the child from her first day on. The abilities a person's brain can develop depend on experiences in the first three years of life.'

Harris makes things very easy for herself by staying completely silent about the pre- and perinatal period of life (the period before and during birth). It is known for example that there's a negative influence of smoking during a pregnancy on the child's later behavior. According to her, about 50 percent of behavior is genetic. And therefore, she writes, the need to belong to a group is genetically determined. So, someone who joins a fascist group was born as an evil person. Why so many people with bad genes were born around the turn of the century in Germany, later willingly becoming Hitler's executioners, is something not a single geneticist can explain.

Ludwig Janus writes in his book 'Wie die Seele entsteht' about the subtle influence parents have on their children: 'by our helplessness in the beginning of our life we seek a reflection of the primary pre-natal security in the group of the family. On one side attention, worship, and feelings of something sacred and wonderful often determine the image of the parents. On the other side are fear, panic and terror the gloomy aspects of the parental image. In the early relationship with the baby parents try their best to restore the happiness of the pre-natal security by rocking, warming, looking after and speaking to the baby. This relationship lives on the archaic strength of these wishes. At the same time the feelings of helplessness and being at the mercy of the higher power of the parents are being hammered into the child's mind by the cruelty of many pedagogic measures, depending of the cultural environment. Letting it cry, letting it stay hungry, not paying attention to the child's needs and later slapping, lays the foundation of creating a submissive, aggressive adult, who has learned that there's no security in this world, only subjection and subservience.'

According to Harris the choice of group is genetically determined but that doesn't mean you cannot try to influence the choice. She writes in her books that parents can contribute to that choice: 'Dress your children according to the current fashion so they won't be excluded.' 'If you can afford it, or if your health-insurance wants to pay it, let your children undergo plastic surgery.'

Of course a group in which the child spends time has influence. We influence each other all the time. Being bullied in the schoolyard is at first sight due to the behavior of the bullies. But it is most important that a bullied child can come home to express its hurt and is being supported and understood by its parents. If that doesn't happen, the alternative is to conform to the bullies; the forming of peer-groups.

Harris doesn't even try to look for a parental influence in the choice of a child's peer group. Aren't children trying to make up for the deficiencies of their parents by seeking support in a group? Or aren't they trying to follow their parents' way of life, if they are hardly critical or just satisfied? Or trying to rebel against the parents if they are critical and/or unhappy? In short: aren't children choosing for a certain group exactly because of the influences that the parents had the first 10 years? And would it be of absolute no influence how confident you have made your child during the first years of its life? But even Harris cannot deny the parental influence in cases of severe abuse and neglect. But where she draws the line is unknown. According to her one slap doesn't matter. Neither do five. Maybe ten?

These are questions, which Harris doesn't have the answer for. Her theories seem to be mainly based on her own situation with her two daughters. Her oldest daughter was much like her parents: calm, self-sufficient, and highly intelligent in academic circles. She was the vision of what her parents wished for in their children. Her four-year younger adopted daughter was more of a loose cannon, less academically gifted and was a delinquent teen. Harris suffered from a series of maladies, beginning when this child was six, which left her bedridden and homebound. She doesn't see that this child had suffered when its mother was in chronic pain and unable to perform the most basic tasks for months on end. By Harris' own admission she monitored the elders' school homework but not the younger's. The older daughter played with a safe and scholarly crowd and the younger hung with a bad lot. Hence Harris's conclusion that childhood peers rear one another from the start. Harris then began working her way backward, fitting available information into the appropriate slots to prove her theory. ('Media on Mothers' - Welcome Home, December 1998)

Probably Harris tries to push away her own surfacing feelings of guilt for good. It's no coincidence that she regularly emphasizes that one should forgive parents and certainly must not look for mistakes in them. And together with her, millions of parents who are busy with their careers will certainly feel much more relieved of care and responsibility.

© 1999 Dennis Rodie
The original Dutch article appeared in Kleintje Muurkrant, september 1999