The Playground Matters More
March 25, 2004 AM/Home
I ran across this absolutely great article today via the commentary section of Philip Greenspun's blog. Thank you Alex Chernavsky, whoever you are!
"Do Parents Matter? Judith Rich Harris and child development", by Malcolm Gladwell. The New Yorker, August 17, 1998.
I can't resist, I have to include this little quote. Harris' thesis is that contrary to psychological thought going back to Freud, its really children's interaction with other children that shapes them. Parents, you're off the hook.
"I want to tell parents that it's all right," Harris told me. "A lot of people who should be contributing children to our society, who could be contributing very useful and fine children, are reluctant to do it, or are waiting very long to have children, because they feel that it requires such a huge commitment. If they knew that it was O.K. to have a child and let it be reared by a nanny or put it in a day-care center, or even to send it to a boarding school, maybe they'd believe that it would be O.K. to have a kid. You can have a kid without having to devote your entire life--your entire emotional expenditure--to this child for the next twenty years."
Harris does not see children as delicate vessels and does not believe they are easily damaged by the missteps of their mothers and fathers. We have been told, Harris writes, to tell children not that they've been bad but that what they did was bad, or, even more appropriately, that what they did made us feel bad. In her view, we have come to insist on these niceties only because we have forgotten what the world of children is really like. "Kids are not that fragile," she writes. "They are tougher than you think. They have to be, because the world out there does not handle them with kid gloves. At home, they might hear 'What you did made me feel bad,' but out on the playground it's 'You shithead!'"