My textbooks endorsed the conventional view of child development — that what makes children turn out the way they do is ‘nature’ (their genes) and ‘nurture’ (the way their parents bring them up). But after a while it dawned on me that there just wasn’t enough solid evidence to support that view, and there was a growing pile of evidence against it. The problem was not with the ‘nature’ part — genes were having their expected effect. But ‘nurture’ wasn’t working the way it was supposed to. In studies that provided some way of controlling for or eliminating the effects of heredity, the environment provided by parents had little or no effect on how the children turned out.
And yet, genes accounted for only about 50 per cent of the variation in personality and social behaviour. The environment must be playing some role. But it wasn’t the home environment. So I proposed that the environment that has lasting effects on personality and social behaviour is the one the child encounters outside the home. This makes sense if you think about the purpose of childhood. What do children have to accomplish while they’re growing up? They have to learn how to behave in a way that is acceptable to the other members of their society. How do they do this? Not by imitating their parents! Parents are adults, and every society prescribes different behaviours for children and adults. A child who behaved like his or her parents (in any context other than a game) would be seen as impertinent, unruly or weird.
Before going on to become The Nurture Assumption, her work started out as a 1995 Psychological Review piece, which won the George A. Miller award for an outstanding article in general psychology — and there was a certain irony to that:
In 1960 I was a graduate student in the Department of Psychology at Harvard. One day I got a letter saying that the Department had decided to kick me out of their PhD programme. They doubted I would ever make a worthwhile contribution to psychology, the letter said, due to my lack of ‘originality and independence’. The letter was signed by the acting chairman of the Department, George A. Miller!
Sometimes, when life hands you a lemon, you should just bite in. Getting kicked out of Harvard was a devastating blow at the time, but in retrospect, it was the best thing that Harvard ever did for me. It freed me from the influence of ‘experts’. It kept me from being indoctrinated. Many years later, it enabled me to write The Nurture Assumption.