Nineteen years ago, I gave birth to twins. They were born exactly eight minutes apart, in a natural birth. Of course this event dramatically changed my life, the life of their father, the life of the person who up to that moment had been our only and adored child, and of course the lives of the twins.
Needless to say, not only were the twins not Siamese twins (a complication I feared during the pregnancy), but they were born perfect and beautiful, just as their parents wanted. But also very, very dissimilar. To the point where even in their infancy they looked like a multiracial Benetton ad. And once, when I took them for a walk in their huge twin carriage on the streets of Jerusalem, my neighbor glanced at them and said, "Oh, how nice, here are Neri (their mother) and Ariel (their father) in the same carriage." They were born different not only in appearance but in their natures as well, because from the moment of their birth, their behavior was completely different, and the differences between them only increased in the years that followed.
A day after the magnificent production, when my twins were one day old, a relative with mystical tendencies came to visit me. "Apparently you are on the twins horizon," said the potential soothsayer, "otherwise you wouldn't have given birth to twins so easily." She immediately suggested preparing astrological maps for the two of them. I told her that at the age of one day, the twins already looked like two totally different creatures in terms of their behavior and their nature, whereas according to their birth times they belonged to exactly the same astrological map - a fact that should have eliminated any vestiges of belief in astrology, even among fervent believers like her. "What will determine the lives of these children will be only genetics and high-quality education," I firmly summed up my parental manifesto.
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Nineteen years have passed since then, genetics and free will have done their job, to the joy of the excellent parents, one of whom definitely found that she was patting herself on the back with self satisfaction. But last Friday, I got my hand on the recently published Hebrew version of the book "The Nurture Assumption" by Judith Rich Harris. And after starting to read it, I couldn't put it down until I had finished, completely shocked at the thought that the children in my sons' kindergarten, the students in their high school, the students in the High School for Arts and the students in the Open School in Jerusalem - all played a role no less important than mine in the great success called my children.
Challenging Freud
The subtitle of the book, "Why children turn out the way they do," doesn't even begin to hint at the tremendous discovery it announces. Rich Harris challenges the basic assumption of all of psychology - that the first years of a person's life in general, and his initial relationship with his mother in particular, play a decisive role in shaping his personality and character. This assumption of Sigmund Freud's - which lies at the basis of psychoanalysis and psychology, as a philosophy and as a method of treatment and therapy - is so deeply and fundamentally rooted in our worldview that it is almost impossible to imagine modern human creativity and thought without it.
We assume that what does not come from the genes, of necessity comes from the parents, and that the infant's connection to his or her mother will later determine the pattern of his relationship with the world at large, as a child and as an adult, and that in effect it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the parents in shaping their child's entire world. On the one hand, this assumption serves as the solid basis for the feeling of "pleasure from the children" experienced by parents whenever their children achieve something. On the other hand, it is the source of the maternal guilt that is fundamentally the result of a kind of megalomania (which psychology has only intensified, of course), that makes us think that whatever happens to our children, even when it comes to things that ostensibly are unrelated to their relationships with us, is an outcome of our mothering. In other words, it's all our fault.
We used to speak about "heredity" and "environment." "Heredity" is the genetic inheritance that the child receives from his parents, and "environment" is the way his parents raise him. These expressions were later replaced by the phrase "nature and nurture," which in effect says the same thing. Rich Harris acknowledges the importance of genes, but says that it is not the parents, but the friends in the child's age group, who determine his character, and therefore, there is no point at all in "nurturing" by the parents.
Rich Harris studied psychology, but due to an illness that forced her to remain confined to her home, she left the academic world and continued her research independently, with friends from the academic world helping her to find research material. She published the ideas in "The Nurture Assumption" for the first time in 1995, in an article in the journal Psychological Review, and was ignored. In 1998 it came out as a book, was met by raised eyebrows on the part of psychologists, who wondered about the writer's academic background, and became an international bestseller.
We are to blame
I think that quite a few mothers will agree with the assumption that different children are born with different characters, and that it makes no difference how much child-rearing books and nurses at well-baby clinics try to convince us that everything depends on the way in which we educate them from age zero. In other words - we are to blame for everything.
It is more difficult to accept the assumption that what really forms the child's personality is his peer group. Rich Harris tries to prove her argument by giving many examples of the influence of the environment, such as evidence of the fact that children of immigrants assimilate quickly into a new society and become part of its culture, while their parents suffer from absorption difficulties and remain the product of the culture from which they came.
She claims that the human race is a product of evolution. Man is a species that lives in groups, whose entire development depends on learning the rules of the group, and this group cannot be his parents' group, but rather his own. Children internalize the behavior patterns of their peers because they identify with them. They cannot identify with their parents, because their parents differ from them - they are adults. Children bring to their peer group things they learned at home, but if the culture of the members of their age group differs from that of their parents, their friends' culture will win out. Anyone who grew up in a kibbutz where the children slept together in children's houses will easily understand Rich Harris' message.
What does it mean? It means that according to Rich Harris, parents are justifiably concerned by their children's choice of the social groups they want to join, but on the other hand, parents do not actually have any possibility of influencing this choice. That means that parents whose child gets into trouble are also right in claiming that they should not be blamed, but rather the child's friends, who were a bad influence on him.
That means that a good school is no less important than a good home, that parents may be unable to do much damage (unless they are cruel or hardhearted or negligent, but Rich Harris emphasizes that she is talking about good, loving parents), but on the other hand, neither can they contribute much or do much about the child's social success, which, in the final analysis, will determine his future as an adult. The role of the parents is at most to provide the child with genes, physical needs, education, comfortable growing conditions and love. The environment will do the rest in any case.
Popular psychology blames Mom and Dad, says Rich Harris, whereas she, as an alternative, offers parents release from guilt. This release is a great gift when it comes to children who have become problematic adults, but it takes away from the real enjoyment of raising children, the pride that we feel when we believe that, thanks to us, they have turned into such wonderful creatures.
The feeling that if we love them, learn to meet their needs, develop their talents, know how to place limits and give them freedom, and do our best to be good parents, we will in the end guarantee our children a better life - that is the force that motivates our desire to improve as parents. Our definition of ourselves as good parents has a much broader role than a description of the way we take care of our children's needs. We see parenthood as a central and definitive part of our own identity. But Rich Harris in effect empties the concept "good parents" of content. Aside from passing on genes that are of as high a quality as possible, the role of the parents is limited to not interfering with their children's proper growth. When it comes to our children, we are, in the final analysis, carriers of the seed, or human incubators, and nothing more.
Rich Harris does not believe in nurturing. Sometimes it seems that she sees raising children as a kind of hobby, a satisfying substitute for people who are deprived of house pets. Children, she writes, with more than a grain of sarcasm, do not belong to you, the parents, but to the future!
"I wonder what kind of a mother raised her, to make her write that way," my late mother, a graduate of the course in introductory child psychology at the Levinsky Teachers College, would have asked at this point.
The advice of Rich Harris that I find most difficult to follow is that which appears in the last line of the book, and whose main point is not to blame your parents for your own defects. Even if we could free ourselves of the guilt that we feel as parents, giving up the need to blame our parents is intolerable. Because after all, after everything they sacrificed for us and did for us, only to see us happy and successful, this blame is the least they deserve from us
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