Parents vs.Peers

Dave Weissbard

UU Rockford

May 09,1999

[eating crow]

This is not the sermon I expected it to be. Not when I first promised it; not when I wrote about it for the newsletter last Tuesday. Perhaps as important as the sermon itself, if not more important, is that gap between the intended sermon and the sermon about to be delivered.

In my sermon six weeks ago on "Numbness," I said:

The height of [the teaching of our powerlessness], I fear, is represented by the recent book affirming that parents actually have no responsibility at all for how their kids turn out. All the power, we are told, is in the peer group and the values and actions of the parents are meaningless. I confess I have yet to read the book, so I am shooting from the hip here, but I have heard few more cockamamie theories. I will get that book and get back to you on that, but it strikes me as the ultimate act of surrender and meaninglessness.

And then, in our newsletter this week, I said I would keep the promise I had made "to return to the recent book which suggests that parents have little impact on their kids. I do not agree."

I am here this morning to eat a large portion of crow. I cannot believe, in retrospect, that I was prepared to "shoot from the hip" like that and comment on a book I had not read, purely on the basis of how other people had characterized it. Nobody should be so foolish - certainly never a Unitarian Universalist minister.

[exploring the "counter-intuitive]

I consider Judith Rich Harris' book The Nurture Assumption, which is subtitled "Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do," to be one of the most important books I have read in years, and, if I had the power, I would make it required reading for this congregation. It raises challenges to some important assumptions we make that need to be challenged. It confronts the difficulty of being open to ideas that run counter to things we think we know, and Mothers' Day seems the appropriate time to address the particular issues it raises.

There is a word that has come into vogue of late that was not included in my slightly aging unabridged dictionary. That word is "counterintuitive." My "on-line" dictionary reports that it was first used in 1955 and means "contrary to what one would intuitively expect." Now, what we attribute to "intuition" is somewhat malleable. There are ideas that we have come to take for granted that have not always been so accepted.

[nature vs. nurture]

My earlier comment on Harris' book is a demonstration of that. " We all know" that parents have a major influence on how our kids turn out - right? People have not always thought that, and they do not think that even today in every culture. There are people who used to think that inheritance was really the determining factor - we all learned in psych 101 about the "nature-nurture" controversy and it was finally resolved in favor of nurture - while genetics have an impact, "we all know" that how kids are brought up is what makes the major difference: the love, the attention, the affection, the guidance, the values, the stimuli with which parents provide them are what really make the difference. Right? It would be preposterous to suggest otherwise.

Remember the offer of the behaviorist psychologist, JB Watson?

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select - doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, and race of his ancestors.

Now, no one ever took him up on his offer, but there has been a sense in which we have accepted that it could be done.

[the nature of "nurture"]

Judith Harris has attracted a lot of attention and has sold thousands of books because of her assertion that we have got it all wrong. It is her contention that half of who we are is a product of genetics - many dimensions of our personalities are inherited, as proven by the studies of twins who were separated at birth and who turn up wearing the same clothes, driving the same cars, voting the same politics, attending the same churches, having the same hangups, even though they were raised in very different families in different communities. Twins raised in the same home are no more similar than twins raised apart.

OK, we will buy that - we never wholly threw out "nature" as a contributor to the outcome. But the real flack comes when she insists that, in fact, the nurture provided by parents is largely irrelevant to the final outcome. She insists that the other half of the equation, after nature, is socialization by the peer group, by other kids, not the vain attempts of parents to help their children "be all that they can be." Wait just a minute! She can't be saying that all that self-sacrifice, all those hours, all that suffering do not mean diddley-squat. Yep! Wasted effort flushed down the toilet of life.

Harris does concede that how parents raise children does have an impact on how the children behave in the presence of the parents, but, she insists, it has virtually no carryover to how they behave outside the home in their "real lives."

Do you remember the parent-teacher conferences, or the conversations with the parents of your kids' friends when you thought they must have your kid mixed up with someone else's? What they were describing had little resemblance to the kid you knew? I still remember teachers and classmates describing my daughter Shelley, to whom we referred affectionately as "motor mouth," as being quiet. Shelley? Our Shelley?

[the "otherness" of parents]

Harris' book is filled with wonderful lines, one of which is, "A child's goal is not to become a successful adult, any more than a prisoner's goal is to become a successful guard. A child's goal is to be a successful child."

She suggests that parents are more than a little like prison guards. A prisoner learns to play by the rules, to indulge the quirks of the guards because the guards have control over them, as parents have control over kids. But parents, like guards, represent "the other," the "ones not like us." The real rules that guide life in the prison are the prisoners rules. So too, according to Harris, kids real lives are based on meeting the expectations of the peer group, not the parents. They are, in fact, working to distinguish themselves from their parents, and it is the peer expectations that will dominate their adult lives.

[peer power]

One of the disgusting mechanisms that some kids use to differentiate themselves these days from parents is smoking. It doesn't matter much if parents don't smoke. The determining factor is whether their peer group smokes. Harris cites Dave Barry's piece about smoking:

Arguments against smoking: It's a repulsive addiction that slowly but surely turns you into a gasping, gray-skinned, tumor-ridden invalid, hacking up brownish gobs of toxic waste from your one remaining lung.

Arguments for Smoking: Other teenagers are doing it.

Case closed! Let's light up!

[language]

The clearest example Harris gives of peer group influence is language. When immigrant kids go to school, they quickly acquire the language of the group and, if they are young enough when they arrive, within a couple of years they can be accent-free. They may still speak the parent's language in the home, but their real language is taught by the peer group. Commonly, kids who have learned English do not continue to grow in their ability to speak their native one, so they are not able to express complex ideas in the old language - they don't have the words.

I still remember how quickly my kids acquired British accents when I went to England in 1972 for a sabbatical, and they attended British schools. And I also remember how quickly they lost those accents when we came home. In both cases it was only a matter of days! The pressure of peer groups worked miracles. And there is Hilary's acquisition of the Rockfordism, "Go with," which I can assure you she has never heard at home.

Harris clearly does not support bilingual programs in schools because they invite kids to continue to identify with a group that speaks their native language, rather than getting on with fitting into the majority English speaking group. She contends that bilingual programs have been "a dismal failure" because of their failure to provide peer group support for learning English. Is it easier for the kid to adjust in a lilingual program? Yes. Does it work better in the long run? She says, "No."

[so much like their parents]

Now, part of what makes this counterintuitive is the fact that we know, from observation, that kids often turn out a lot like their parents. Harris explains this by the fact that the kids' peer group is influenced by the parents' peer group. When, for instance, you put your kids in a nursery school, the kids they encounter are likely to be a lot like them, to be largely from families that have values similar to your family's. So, in such a case, the peer group will not necessarily work against the parents' values. The values the kids are reflecting are just as much the values of their friends' parents as their own parents.

[a cop out?]

One of the things that made me nervous about Harris' book is the fact that she is actively engaged in letting parents off the hook. I worry when we hear what we would really like to hear - perhaps it means we are being pandered to. Maybe it's persuasive precisely because we want to hear it. Having now read the book, I do not believe that is what it is about.

[divorce]

She attacks head-on the studies which have purported to show that divorce is bad for kids, and if parents really cared they would stay together. She shows the flaws in the methodology of those studies and cites, on the contrary, what she considers much more reputable ones which show that divorce has little or no impact. Actually, she concedes that there is some impact because divorce usually means that the kids have to move to a new peer group and establish new relationships and that they lose economic status - but she insists that the change in the parental relationships is just not a significant factor. In fact, the well known fact that the experience of growing up in a family with divorce means that you are more likely to have one yourself is, according to Harris, absolutely disproven. Yes, people whose parents divorced are more likely to have one themselves, but she suggests this is because the kids have inherited genetically some of the same personality factors that brought about the parental divorces.

[cause and effect]

One of the things I found interesting to contemplate is that we tend to blame parents for not treating all their kids the same. Harris suggests that we have the cause and effect reversed. Perhaps it isn't that different treatment makes the kids turn out differently, but that it is because the kids are different that we treat them differently. There are kids who are disagreeable to live with, and parents feel guilty for feeling that way, but these are often kids whose peer groups also find them difficult to be with. Harris says:

Of all the mistakes made by the style-of-parenting researchers, the most serious is to assume that a parenting style is a characteristic of a parent. It is a characteristic of the relationship between a parent and a child. Both parties contribute to it.

She cites a New Zealand study of a thousand kids which found certain personality factors to be predictors of risky behaviors.

Eighteen year olds who are impulsive and quick to anger, who aren't afraid of danger, and who seek excitement, are more likely to drink too much, drive too fast, and engage in risky sex. These same young people also tend to have difficulty establishing and maintaining close personal relationships.

That may not be surprising, but what may be is that this was a long term study and when those same kids were three years old, trained observers had judged those very same kids as: more impulsive, quicker to anger, and having more trouble staying focused on a task. It wasn't what the parents did in raising them that made them that way; it was who they were!.

[blaming parents]

As a culture, we have been quick to blame parents for whatever is wrong with people. All the talk these days about dysfunctional families places a lot of blame in the previous generation, and makes us worry about how we may be screwing our kids up. It is Harris' contention that this is all based on a false assumption that parents deserve either the blame or the credit for what their kids do.

We have some discomfort dealing with parents whose kids do blow it. Take my niece -- please! I have a niece who was in honor classes in high school, but who hung around with kids whose brains had not entertained a thought in years. For some reason, she was drawn to losers. She is eighteen and has a three year old daughter. She dropped out of high school. She continues to hang out with the useless father of her daughter who, at 22, has demonstrated no inclination whatever to do any kind of work, and has, on occasion been so abusive that the police were called. She did earn her GED and worked for several months as a bank teller and was seemingly doing well, but the values of her chosen peer group predominated and she quit and has been thinking about working for several months now. My sister has taken on an additional job to help support her.

The values my niece demonstrates are not those of her parents but those of the group to which she was drawn. Did her parents do everything perfectly - of course not. Can we see things they might have done differently? Of course. But who is to say that anything they might have done would have made a difference in the outcome?

Part of why this seems relevant at this time, of course, is the shootings in Littleton. There are a lot of people who want to string up the parents of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. "They should have done something!" What exactly? Both kids were under court supervision by professionals who reported officially how well they were doing and what bright futures they had. The parents sought professional help. The influence of their peer group, the "Trench Coat Mafia," and their rejection by the other groups in the school appears to have been the dominant influence in their lives.

Our newest member, Ken Rogers, who raped and murdered three women 35 years ago, came from an dysfunctional family, but he is clear that it is he who is responsible for what he did - not his parents.

I vividly remember a conversation at the home of a Libertarian member of my previous congregation, with a Virginia State Representative who was telling me what a rotten kid he had been and how it wasn't his parents' fault. I thought, "How sad it is that he has internalized all this and is blaming himself when it must be something they did." Harris rips that to shreds. He was more insightful than I knew.

[race]

There is so much richness in her book that I do not have time to go into. One of the ideas worth thinking a lot about has to do with the peer groups of black kids who accuse other black kids who are succeeding in school of "acting white." To succeed means to alienate yourself from your peers. What a powerful force this represents against the interests of our society.

Harris is clear that she believes that teachers are in a position to address factors like this, but to do so means that we must first stop blaming the black families who are so often scapegoated by teachers and administrators, and begin to look at what we can do to change the peer groups as exceptional schools ion the ghettos have.

[attacking the messenger]

Harris has, of course, been attacked for her book. She has no PhD. "How dare she play psychologist?" She actually was in the PhD program at Harvard many years ago, but they booted her out because they saw no future for her in psychology. Most of the critics acknowledge that she is thorough in her citing of research, although those who disagree most, assert just the opposite. She maintains that it is her lack of professional credentials that gives her the freedom to be as critical of the field as she is. She has been accused of saying that it is ok for parents to do anything to their kids that they want. Harris actually says:

I ask you to promise not to go around telling people that I said it doesn't matter how you treat your kids. I do not say that; nor do I imply it; nor do I believe it. It is not all right to be cruel or neglectful of your children. It is not all right for a variety of reasons, but most of all because children are thinking, feeling, sensitive human beings who are completely dependent upon the older people in their lives. We may not hold their tomorrows in our hands, but we surely hold their todays, and we have the power to make their todays very miserable . Let us not forget though, that parents are also thinking, feeling, sensitive human beings, and that children also have power. Children can make parents pretty miserable too.

[can parents win?]

One of my favorite books is called "The Job of Sex." It is a parody of the old "Joy of Sex" series and has illustrations of a similar style, except that the guy in them is wearing a hard hat. It is a humor book that ridicules the performance orientation that has been imposed on sexuality. Parenting, in our society, has become such a burden that it is easy to understand why some rational people want to avoid it like the plague. The dangers of failure are so manifest and the likelihood of success seems so small.

[establishing balance]

I suspect that Harris has over-reacted to an ugly picture that needed to be attacked. Some parents have poured too much of themselves into parenting. One of the ethical principles worth remembering is to respect people as ends, not merely as means. Some people have seen their real role in life solely as propagators of the next generation, rather than as ends in themselves.

Harris' wonderful writing and significant insights do not, I believe, preclude the possibility that she, like most crusaders, has overstated her valid point. I believe, on the basis of experience and observation, that parents have more influence on their children than Harris suggests, but that she is right in urging us to realize the limitations of our influence. We cannot ultimately take responsibility for either their successes or failures.

As a superb review article by Ann Hulbert in the New Republic concluded, quoting a New Republic article from the 1920's:

. . . if we attain the perspective of one grandmother who said to her daughter: "Always remember that mothers aren't important. They don't amount to much. They give their children life, keep them clothed and nourished, teach them manners and the fundamental moral things we have to have to get along at all. But the big things that count we do not give. What we give they keep forever, but they are unconscious of it, it is not a live force. The inspirations that will grip and shake them must come new and fresh. The ideas for which they will give their lives will not be ours. They will get them from teachers, books, friends, from those they fall in love with, not from us." Humility, unlike clarity, does begin at home.

In The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran said it this way:

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children, as living arrows, are sent forth.

The Archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and bends you with might that the arrows may go swift and far.

Let your bending in the Archer's hand be for gladness.