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

  • Book
  • 1998
  • #Psychology
Judith Rich Harris
@JudithRichHarris
(Author)
www.amazon.com
Paperback
4.5/5 144 ratings
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4.11/5 1.2k ratings
2 Recommenders
2 Mentions
How much credit do parents deserve when their children turn out well? How much blame when they turn out badly? Judith Rich Harris has a message that will change parents' lives: The... Show More

How much credit do parents deserve when their children turn out well? 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 raise them--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 examines with a fresh eye the 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 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.

(From Goodreads)

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Number of Pages: 462

ISBN: 0684857073

ISBN-13: 9780684857077

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Charlie Munger @CharlieMunger
  • Post
  • From www.amazon.com
When I learned from her impressive book that this ironic result had occurred, I wrote to Harvard, my alma mater, urging it to award Ms. Harris, whom I did not know, an honorary Ph. D., or, betteryet, a real Ph. D. I cited the example of Oxford.
Richard Hanania @RichardHanania · Nov 8, 2021
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  • From richardhanania.substack.com
For those who are unfamiliar with the behavioral genetics literature, Judith Rich Harris’ The Nurture Assumption is still a great resource, although it was written before the era of cheap DNA sequencing.
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