Nurture (Mis) Assumption

Recently I completed reading hearing the book “Nurture Assumption”, thanks to the free book you get when you subscribe to Audible.

This post is with a a few things I remember a week after hearing to that — which I did during my commute to office.

Given that I did not have an opportunity to “note down / mark” things as I heard it, not much of ‘second round mastication’ could happen on the material. So it may continue to remain food and not really cud or bolus. (Oops! Taking a metaphor too far eh!)

The book basically is to make you feel miserable as a parent — that you have no control over your child’s development. HaHa. The author says that the “Nurture Assumption” (meaning: how children are brought up by parents matters in the child’s character/personality development) is incorrect and there are a lot more things more important than this “nurture” done by parents.

So let us break it down: We all know (assume) that a person’s personality/character is a product of two things: Nature & Nurture. While science (as in genetics) deals with how nature influences, social science does not clearly prove how nurture helps. The author is someone who seems to have done several books/textbooks on the other side (saying nurture is important) before turning the tables and writing this book! So we at least have someone here who has seen both sides of the argument.

The author spends a lot of time explaining why so many of the social experiments claiming nurture to be important are simply flawed — where they mix up causation & correlation. And then provides experiments/anecdotes on how nurture may be the least important — however, I was not able to see any clear causation here too — All these are also correlation anyways. Nonetheless, the book gives a perspective that nurture is not everything.

In terms of any aspect of a person’s character, after giving 50% to hereditary factors (again quoting several experiments), the author says there could be 4 ways to which the other 50% could be ascribed to:

1. Nurture by parents
2. By children imitating parents
3. By children imitating other adults in the tribe
4. By children imitating other (older) children in the tribe

Of these 4, the author quickly eliminates the first 3 (IMHO, in a not-so-greatly-convincing way) and proceeds to explain the fourth item in detail. I am not going into those details now because I do not remember much.

In effect, if there is ANYTHING you could do to help your children get better, it is only about helping/nudging them in choosing their friends, the author says. So you can only decide on which locality to live in, which school your child goes to etc. Rest of it will be done by her friends.

This book, coupled with some articles at (or linked from) Star Slate Codex on this topic and another book I sampled (Language Instinct — which argues that children do not learn even language from the parents but is innate in them, and from.. you guessed it, friends) ensure that one’s feeling of accomplishment/contentment at having played a role in one’s child’s life is all but gone.

Sigh!