Rating: 
Summary: Opium for the me-generation
Review: Unlike most scientists, who take the data and then draw conclusions, Ms. Harris has a conclusion and then picks and chooses data to support it. This book ought to make her money in a culture where people would rather blame someone else or take a quick pill than take the hard road of responsibility, dedication, and perseverance. The truth is, our children are a complex mixture of genes, parental input, socio-economic factors, and social/peer input. If you take the aggregate of child behavioral studies you will reach this conclusion. As parents, we are our children's teachers, and we should not hide from our role or the responsibility it demands. Raising children requires sacrifice, hard-work, dedication, and responsibility. But every smile makes that work easy. Don't hide behind a pop-psychology book: go spend some time with your kids.
Rating:
Summary: a tempest in a teapot
Review: First, Harris is not credentialed and has no expertise in child psychology or any related field. Secondly, how can we believe our children are more affected by the kid down the street than by the people under whose roof they live? Harris seems to have written this book to prove she is not responsible for the problems of her adopted daughter, whose growing up years were much more difficult than those of Harris' natural born daughter. Has Harris done any reading on adopted children? It seems quite likely that much of her adopted child's problems stemmed from feelings born of being an adopted child. I believe many factors determine how a child behaves, including friends and acquaintances, heredity, etc. But I have seen all around me how individual parents affect their children by the way they treat them, the time they spend with them, the values and mores they impart, what the parents emphasize as important or unimportant, etc. Parents do matter!
Rating: 
Summary: Represents a major paradigm shift in focus for society.
Review: Harris claims that it is not heredity or the home environment that shapes a child's personality, but the culture of groups of peers. Harris provides convincing support for her "group socialization theory." Much attention these days is being given to discoveries in brain research. Educators and parents are rushing to implement these findings in the hopes of producing successful children. Harris is telling us that when it comes to understanding (and hopefully helping) children group socialization theory is the horse, and brain research is the cart. Parents and professionals (who impact the lives of children and parents) should read this book. Four stars, not five, is given for the repetitive nature of her writing style. Perhaps she knows this is what it takes to get her idea into minds that have been focused in quite possibily the wrong direction for many decades.
Rating:
Summary: Whew! What a relief!
Review: I'm sure this book will be greatly lauded by many "experts" and parents alike. If I wrote a book stating that what you eat really has no effect upon your health, I know it would receive the same response. This work, standing on a mountain of specious facts (her evidence is derived mainly from questionaires, in lieu of actual studies), basically states that there is no difference between good parents or bad parents. That you have very little effect upon who your child becomes. This is great news to all the guilt-ridden parents of the world! Don't worry! Since you have such a limited influence over your child, you don't even have to set a good example! As a parent, I think this book is more than just erroneous and self-serving. Its dangerous.
Rating: 
Summary: A Major Breakthrough and Iconoclastic essay
Review: Judith Rich Harris is the like the child who pointed out that the Emperor had no clothes. Much of academic psychology publications are misleading or wrong. Her book is a major breakthrough in psychology. Her main message -- the importance of social contexts in the development of the individual -- needs to be heard. She argument is well-reasoned, and entertainingly iconoclastic. There are minor flaws in the work, which maybe used by detractors to dismiss her main points. And maybe some people will use her point that parents don't have as much of a role, as we had thought, as an excuse for bad parenting. But hopefully this will become a landmark book, that swepts away some of the academic garbage that has accumulated in the last hundred years.
Rating:
Summary: The graduate school halls are in turmoil!!!
Review: Kudos to Harris! Within the confines of 400 plus pages she has successfully "thumped" at the minds of parents, university professors and psychologists alike. How ironic is seems that such a "novel" conceptualization has actually existed outside the scope and conscious of individuals without prior recognition (at least in my experience at the university level). Harris' pleasant read "shockingly" suggests where influence is best judged to end and the responsive majority within my university can only comment on the inferiority of her credentials. I value a publication according to the amount of squirm it incites within the professional/academic community. Judith Harris, you've got 'em squirming!!!
Rating:
Summary: Ms. Harris is courageous and right!
Review: Someone has finally looked at the facts as they are, and not as how they think they ought to be. I agree with almost everything Ms. Harris says and additionally applaud her for her courage to speak the very unpopular truth. I KNOW however, that genetics account for over 95% of an individals personality and peers the remaining 5%. If I ever wrote this in a book, I might be shot . . so I'll just tell you here, cause you're still reading.
Rating:
Summary: Were there only a 0 star rating.
Review: Judith Rich Harris is pleased as punch with herself, and her arrogance informs every line of her book. What a shame to waste trees or time on this one. Apparently the author believes moms and dads have no gut instincts, that they parent according to whatever textbook they read, that they haven't figured out for themselves that genes influence child's behavior or that peers play a "nurturing" role. From the cloister of her home and with the tools of her local library, Harris has had a grand old time fashioning controversy. Unfortunately, in her attempt to breeze towards her conclusions, she has slandered entire classes of people. One example will suffice: "Autistic babies don't look their parents in the eye, don't smile at them, don't seem glad to see them," the Harvard drop-out writes. "It is difficult to feel enthusiastic about a baby who isn't enthusiastic about you." Obviously, Ms. Harris' local library hasn't been endowed any recent textbooks on autism. As a professional in this field, I know many, many children with autism who are demonstrably glad to see their parents and quite capable of looking others in the eye. Similarly, I know of many parents of children with autism whose love is huge and whose enthusiasm for making a difference in these childrens' eyes cannot even be described. It's unclear why Ms. Harris felt the need to be so dramatically inaccurate in so many places. It's also disturbing that the only advice she can muster is to buy a nice house in a nice neighborhood and to get your ugly kids plastic surgery. Only the rich pretty kids have good friends, Ms. Harris implies. A parent's job is to buy them acceptance. One shudders at the thought of Americans buying into this lastest piece of the author's own personal get-rich scheme. Hopefully, this too shall pass.
Rating: 
Summary: Yes, but....
Review: A proper review of this book could not actually be contained within the confines of this space, so I shall be brief. As a teacher, I have had several years of experience observing and interacting with children of all ages. While I am not a parent (yet...), I do feel that I have been around enough children to be qualified enough to answer the author's assertations. In some respects, I most definitely agree with the author's main thesis, in that the majority of influence on a child's life (that is, one with a "normal" social life)occurs outside of the home. As a teacher, I can say without egotism that I have an enormous amount of influence on my students' lives, both from an educational and personal aspect. I notice while on the playground that the "leaders" of the groups will most often determine what games will be played and such. Thus, the author's thesis is quite valid. However, I can see a "bad moon rising," as it were, when I think of all the parents who will use this book as an excuse for poor parenting. After all, if nothing a parent does matters in the long run, then what does it matter if a parent does anything? Also, I fail to see how the author cannot take into account the effect abuse has on a child. Maybe the influence of an abusive home life has more of an effect on a child's life than one that is of the "Leave It To Beaver" era, but neither of these situations should be discounted completely. I recall a study done on rhesus monkeys whereby young primates were removed from the influence of their parents for extended periods of time. Their lives, in short, were greatly affected, and they lapsed into periods of great depression. A child does need parenting, even if it does not have that great of an influence. If we, as human animals, are like our primate progenitors, perhaps a parent's influence does end at some point. I recommend that the author's thesis be greatly scrutinized before it becomes the next great social idea.
Rating:
Summary: But we adults set the environment that teen peers use...
Review: One implication of this thought provoking book's thesis,if accurate,makes it very important. It implies that community level, neighborhood level and block level interventions are improtant for health and development of adolescents/children.The context(community) in which the peer groups form and act, can then become each individual parent's and each community's tools for helping teen-peers be different in ways that are adaptive. Human peer groups evolve in a habitat; in that habitat some variation in behavior is useful to account for variation in the habitat across time. Teens know that things could be different (habitat change) so they try new behaviors-- that is adaptive in a global sense-- it can lead to progress and innovation. However, the larger habitat generally is slow to change, and does severely constrain the options of even the most variant peer group. Exteremely variant behaviors are maladaptive and can destroy the individual teen or even family. We adults have a responsbility to help teens by letting them differ from us in basically healthy ways. We can make our neighborhoods (habitat)full of opportunities for teens to be different than thier parents by having a diverse set of role models, and experiences in the community. We can also conserve several key values and institutions. We can do as we have done lately{which as we all know has worked so well, i.e. de-funding art in the schools and midnight basketball, etc. let kids have easy acccess to guns, alcohol, tobacco, irresponsible sexual messages etc}. Or, we can think anew. Remeber, most adolescents have deep feelings of wanting to improve the world. We do not need to put it all on each individual (pure genetics) or family (pure environment) but instead ask each family and teen to contribute to the larger habitat/community. Look at the work of Peter Benson and the Search Institute on asset building for practical research in this area. Steven R. Marks,MS (Harvard School of Public Health '96, former teacher,but most importantly,parent and adoptive parent to be. )
|
