WASHINGTON — Does parenting really matter?
When Judith Rich Harris published a book late last year arguing that it did not, she mostly drew cries of outrage and disbelief.
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Debate Rises on Parents' Influence Over Children
Much-criticized thesis that their effect is nil gained ground after Littleton, Colo., massacre. New studies focus on peer pressure.
Caring for Our Children
Caring for Our Children: This is one in a summer-long series examining the issues and challenges of parenting and looking after children. The stories will appear on this page each Sunday.
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Then came the Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colo. The massacre carried out by two adolescents from families with no apparent signs of dysfunction startled child-development experts. Harris' contention that peers, not parents, shape children's personalities suddenly got a new look, in the process reigniting the age-old argument over nature versus nurture.
Cliques, Adolescent Rejection Studied
New studies are pouring out.
The U.S. surgeon general, in a report on school violence that President Clinton ordered after Littleton, is expected to focus on the roles of classroom cliques, adolescent rejection and school size.
The National Research Council--a consortium of scientists that advises the federal government on academic research--recently hosted two professional groups that rarely meet together--criminologists and experts on early childhood development--to talk about peer group influence. The Carnegie Corp. is midway through a six-year study mapping the causes and consequences of conflict among teens.
Although the reasons the two Littleton teens went on a rampage are far from clear, many parents are reassessing the balance of power between them and their children's friends and tormentors.
Harris' thesis in "The Nurture Assumption" is that after an all-too-brief period of babyhood, the tribal--and sometimes secret--world of a child's friends and schoolmates exerts a potent and even decisive influence.
Mary Moore of Torrance, a teacher and a mother of 10- and 14-year-old boys, said in a telephone interview that the Littleton massacre "brought this idea a little closer to home"--that children's friends often overwhelm the best efforts of their parents.
"I don't think it would ever happen to mine," she added with trepidation. "But it's real tough to call."
For mothers like Moore and academics as well, there is cold comfort in the theory that a child's "real" world exists separately and hews to different rules than that of his parents. But how else to explain the murderous rampage of two teenagers who appeared to have experienced what one psychologist called "parenting within the normal range"?
