Rating: 
Summary: Boring
Review: I read this book because I am a child and youth care worker, and I think it is important to read materials that are influencing current thinking. As a practioner, I am glad I read this book, even though I fundamentally disagree with the author on pretty much every point. I think it is important to consider the impact that peer relations have on child development. But Harris misses the mark. Harris is undoubtedly right that peers do have a strong influence over how children develop. However, her thesis is so extreme that it is simplistic. Children are socialized by any number of agents -- parents, peers, teachers, the media, etc -- and the effect is reciprocal. She completely ignores the work of great thinkers like Urie Bronfenbrenner (sp??) who uses systems theory to explain socialization. As well, as another reviewer suggested, the fact that some of the studies she attacks have flaws (and the author is quite right in asserting that) does not mean that their hypotheses are necessarily wrong. She doesn't go far enough to prove that. The only way she could prove that, in fact, would be to attempt to replicate the research, attempting to rectify any design flaws. Some of the studies she quotes to lay out her thesis are equally flawed. The quality of the actual writing is poor. The author's attempts at humor tend to fall flat. She repeats herself far too much. It takes far too long to get to her thesis, and once she finally does, it takes forever to get to the end of the book. The author needed a good editor. This book is not one I would reccommend to parents. I would reccommend that practitioners give the book a glance simply because Harris's ideas do seem to be having an impact on the current culture. Just don't look for any real answers in this book; it is too simplistic and extreme for that.
Rating:
Summary: good ideas repeated too many times
Review: The book's main point is that peers, rather than parents, have more significant role in defining a child's behavior during his development. The point is not too surprising to me, it conforms with some of the observations of my own. But the book laid out the idea nicely, at least at the beginning of the book, with a lot of interesting facts. The book has three major weaknesses: 1) it gets repetetive. If the book were 100 pages long instead of 400 pages, I'd like it a lot more. 2) there are too many speculations. The first few chapter have some facts and experimental results that the author used to support her argument. But in the later chapters such supporting evidence were simply missing. 3) How many times does the author have to tell us that she was kicked out by Harvard but nonetheless became successful? I'm sure Harvard had good reasons to kick her out at the time, and I'm sure one failure in the past does not prevent future success. I surely wished that the author could be more mature about it.
Rating: 
Summary: Somewhat true but not completely
Review: IN my opinion this book lets parents off the hook too easily."I abused my child? NO big deal because my child's peers will make up for it!" "I ignored my child? That's okay because my child's friends will give him the attention he needs!" Garbage! I can tell you from watching my sister raise her children, that she and her husband have more influence over who they become then their friends do.Sure, friends can influence children by exposing them to things, but not all of those are good.The values that parents instill in their children from birth are what will help guide their children to decide what is right and what is wrong.Maybe the peer influence is a little too strong in our society.That's why there is so much drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and behavorial problems! Because parents are too lax and not taking their responsibilities serious enough.The peers are influencing them to do things because their parents are not there to tell them otherwise.We have enough problems in today's socitey BECAUSE of peer influence that we don't need to be told that we no longer matter! Because we do.That's why we have these problems. I am not saying peers can not have a positive influence because I think they can.But by taking what this author says to heart, I am afraid parents are going to start blaming everything their children become, good or bad, on other children.And, if they take this book to heart, they will be right! Parents are the ones who need to help children become decent human beings fit for society and not leave it up to other children to turn our children into something we may not be proud of.If peers were the only influence that our children need, then why did god create parents?
Rating: 
Summary: Shattering the Myth of the All-Powerful Family
Review: At last, someone has challenged the folk wisdom that situates parents squarely at the center of each child's universe. At last someone with intelligence, rigor, and a clear writing style has debunked the phony, softcore social science that backs up this ideological claim. At last someone has acknowledged the influence of peers on child development. Thank you, Ms. Harris, for freeing us from years of Freudian simplification. As a college teacher I've always noticed the ways in which adolescents ape each other. One thing that has always been abundantly clear to me is how really uninterested in me my students are; they turn to one another for social validation and a shared sense of what is normative. It's not that I'm unimportant; it's that I, as an adult, am in a different social category, a category that matters less. Yet, in the psuedo-religious literature of the social sciences, parents shape children; Lockean epistemology said that each child was a tabula rasa -- a blank slate to be carved by society. We've taken this extreme claim a step farther. Our "experts" tell us that the blank slate is carved by only two people: mom and dad. Therapy reinforces this crude belief by suggesting that all other relationships are mere forms of disguise: patients reach back into their putative memories to find the "origins" of their adult relationships in some largely imagined past. This is not a scientific method; it takes for granted that which it sets out to prove, and so reinforces the nurture assumption. Another thing that has always seemed obvious to me is that the formative period of a human being's life is in late adolescence, not early childhood, as the soothsayers claim. In the late teenage years mental illness emerges, personality traits codify. After late adolescence people lose the ability to learn languages. And of course this is a period of intense social activity away from parents. In reading previous reviews I'm amused that a simple claim like "nurture is not environment" -- which Harris makes early on -- can elicit such hostile responses. By pointing out that we should not conflate these two terms and reduce a human being's entire experience to his or her parents, Harris exposes a valuable bias built into popular beliefs about developmental psychology. We should be thanking her, not excoriating her! Her effort is all the more laudable because she is a mother -- who is willing to put aside parental vanity and admit that peers influenced her children more than she did. This is a brave step and one that few are willing to take in a culture such as ours, that sentimentalizes motherhood. Harris has complicated our notions of how people become who they are. Her work has implications for other disciplines: history, women's studies, and literary studies. One quibble: Harris ends her book by admonishing troubled people not to blaim their parents for their problems in adult life. I think she should have also admonished narcissistic parents not to take undue credit for their successful children's accomplishments. Our achievements are, after all, our own, as he book ably shows.
Rating:
Summary: Correction of earlier review
Review: In my earlier review I accused Mrs. Harris of not making references. She brought to my attention that references are made at the end of the book. Although this is an annoying format that authors should not let their publishers force upon them, it is possible, with some browsing back and forth to find where a text comes from. And although the references do not appear in the main text in some widely accepted standard format (footnote or name-year-page reference) I have done the author some injustice, which is hereby corrected, and for which I offer my sincere apologies - I should have checked matters better before writing my review. My main criticism, however, that the book adds little to the original article in 'Psychological Review' still stands. Mrs. Harris brought to my attention that the book makes more references (the world seems to be turning around references all of a sudden) than the article, but here I see only a quantitative difference. More references do not necessarily add anything to a core idea, and the core idea expressed in the book is clearly the same as the core idea expressed in the article. Jaap Hoogenboezem
Rating:
Summary: unnecessary
Review: The book is based on an article of the author in 'Psychological Review' (1995) The main thrust of this book is that some properties of children (called everything from 'personality' to 'the way children turn out to be' by the author but never defined exactly) are more affected by peers than by parents. Apparently the notion of nurture in developmental psychology was, prior to the article, limited to parents, and Judith Rich Harris introduces peers as another, and according to her more important, aspect of the environment of the child. To a reader with a sociological training this is hardly surprising, since the multi-facetted environment in which people play a variety of roles is the object of sociological research. One could wonder what all the fuss is about. The book adds no value to the article which can be downloaded for free at Mrs Harris' website or copied in most university libraries. The argument is made in the article and the book adds little besides anecdote and the ever present humour of Mrs. Harris. This reader was not amused, and became less amused with every half or not funny remark until he threw the book away. A worse error is that the book makes no references, although it quotes widely from the work of others. It is impossible to check a quote, because page/title references are not made. Now I'm sure that Mrs. Harris has copied all the quotes correctly, and I'm perfectly willing to take her word for it but that is only onbe of the reasons references are made. The other important reasons is that it enables the reader to see where exactly a quote shows up in the work of the original author, and in which work exactly. Apparently we are not supposed to check context. The article has much value, the book is just the beginning of a Judith Rich Harris industry (take a look at her website!) that has little to contribute to, and even diminishes, her excellent and interesting article in 'Psychological Review'.
Rating:
Summary: Essential Psych Reading.
Review: Judith Rich Harris proposes a psychological theory that parents are not a major influence on the personality development of children. Instead, peers are. This is backed up by hundreds of research articles cited by Harris. Harris sprinkles her book with LOTS of background and related psychological knowledge, including a lot of information about group processes. Although it might sound bland, to me, this is very interesting. I especially liked her speculation (the only part of the book not strongly backed by research) on how these peer group processes shaped human evolution. It made a lot of sense to me. It's important to note that Harris' theory is NOT "fact" or proposes itself to be "fact." Harris is very scientific-minded and proposes a theory to be critiqued and tested: something which, to my knowledge, has not been accomplished very well yet. Note that the "revelation" in this book is not that parents have little impact in children's personality, but that peers have a major role. Read "Stranger in the Nest" by David B. Cohen for another, less controversial, view about the lack of influence parents have on personality. Do NOT change your parenting habits because of this book. This book is for students and those interested in psychology, not for people who are raising our future generations. Note to another reviewer who wrote the following, in several parts: "Harris' theory cannot explain why my daughter sounds like my husband or me when she talks." - Look what she does when you're not there. It will be different. If not, she learned the same accent from her peers, or she had no peers when learning the language. This phenomenon is widely known throughout linguistics, and is not in question in the context of Harris' book. "Why, because we run a non-violent household, she acts compassionately towards her classmates." - It's very widely accepted that ~50% of any given behavior is genetic. Making up cause-and-effect relationships is very unscientific! Lots of "school shooters" had non-violent households, as far as we know. "Why, at home, I can teach her to deal with bullies, and she successfully uses these strategies in school." - Harris doesn't question knowledge acquisition; she questions the formation of personality. If I teach my daughter how to play the flute, that doesn't mean that she won't be able to play the flute in school. "Why teenagers are less likely to start smoking if their parents themselves do not smoke." - There are so many factors here. One major one is genetics (people often consider the genetics of alcoholism, but rarely the genetics of smoking). Another major factor is that teenagers with parents who don't smoke will have peers who don't smoke. "Why children who were abused by their parents tend to grow up into abusers themselves." - They tend to, but most of them don't. Genetics can easily explain a lot of this phenomenon. Many other factors come into play, such as that these children will likely have peers that accept abuse. This book is easy reading, but if you have no psychology background you might get slightly confused. Most everything is explained very well. I recommend this book highly to people interested in psychology, especially social and developmental psychology. I do NOT recommend this to parents, or others, without any knowledge of how science works, like a lot of reviewers who gave this book a "1"!
Rating: 
Summary: Well worth reading, but has problems.
Review: The main assertion of the book is that parents have little influence over resulting adult personalities of their children. Yet if there is any evidence to support this claim in this book, I cannot find it. There are many references to statistical studies which the author claims do so, but I haven't bothered to chase any of them down. This assertion is so important to the book, though, that the author should have produced any evidence to support it. What the author does demonstrate is that genetic effects and peer group effects have a lot to do with how people turn out. This should come as no great surprise. She also shows that it is difficult to predict the effects of parental influence. For example, evidently (according to the author) identical twins raised in the same household turn out no more similar (or dissimilar) than identical twins raised in separate households. The author is very good at reasoning about and explaining the limitations and flaws of the statistical methods used by the researchers she cites. What she does not demonstrate, however, is any research that shows conclusively that parents do not influence their children. As the old saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And presence of other strong influences (such as genetics and peer group effects) does not prove the non-existence of parental influence either. In fact, the author is careful to point out many ways in which parents can influence children, but somehow in her zeal to show that other effects are more important she repeatedly seems to be trying to say that parents have little long term effect. Although it might have been personally important to the author to minimize the importance of parental influence, I do not believe she accomplished this. However, I still think the book is valuable. By putting the disparate threads of behavioral genetics, evolutionary psychology, socialization research, and her own "group socialization theory" into one context, I think she is on the right track toward a more holistic, integrated picture of developmental psychology. Her discussion of the mechanisms of peer groups was intriguing, especially her discussion of the relatively recent historical development of a separate age group for teenagers and what effects this might be having. One last thing: the overly chatty, and informal writing style, including some not very funny humor, detracts a great deal from the content, and only serves to raise suspicions about the validity of the rest of the book. Don't let it distract you - the book is still worth reading. Despite my reservations I found that it did expand my understanding of the subject matter.
Rating:
Summary: A brilliant scientific analysis of child raising
Review: I'm a medical doctor used to critically evaluating scientific literature. My wife is an engineer, now studying psychology. We tried reading the "parenting advice" books by popular authors and when they didn't work I started looking at the sources of information referred to in the books. Almost none of it stood up to scientific scrutiny, being at best academic opinion and personal prejudice frequently far removed from the realities of child raising - particularly if you have children with difficult personalities. For instance, almost all of the "scientific evidence" against spanking children was simply deliberate deceit. Judith Rich Harris addresses it all and unveils the almost fraudulent assumptions behind a multi billion dollar industry of psychotherapy and "advice giving", most of which is simply impressive sounding fluff. At last somebody sensible has got some critical analysis into print. I also recommend Dr. Robert Plomin's introduction to behavioural genetics, "Toddler Taming" by Dr. Christopher Green, "The difficult child" by Dr. Stanley Turecki, "The 7 worst things that parents do" by the Friels and "The myth of the first three years" . Parents everywhere should read this book and realise the guilt that other authors have ladelled onto them was unfounded, and children should read it to understand that being told to hate their "abusive" parents is unjust. Policy makers everywhere should read some of these books before allotting ever increasing resources into the wrong areas of child rearing and implementing laws based on propaganda rather than sound scientific evidence.
Rating:
Summary: a little irritating
Review: I found this book quite boring and irritating. I found it repetetive and her conclusions became too predictable. It is largely concerned with debunking research, this is ok if you have paid a lot of attention to the research in question. If you haven't you may wonder what is the point of reading all her criticisms. I agree with her advice to get kids out of a "bad" peer group by moving house or schools.
| 
