Do They Really F@#$ You Up?

The English poet Philip Larkin in a famous poem said, "They fuck you up, your mum and dad/They may not mean to, but they do." I always thought he was being very harsh. Parents generally do their best in bringing up their children but all this generally amounts not much to what the child actually grows up to be. Then I read Steven Pinker's book The Blank Slate and was confirmed in my beliefs. In his book he discussed and pointed out debates in the developmental psychology academic community regarding the effect of parents vis-a-vis other factors, specially peer-group interaction, on the overall psychological build-up and growth of children. Most of the scientific evidence so far points to the theory that parents have little or even absolutely no effect in directly influencing the psychological make up of the child. Other than passing off their genes, which of course determines child's inherent nature, they can't do much.

I have always found the over-enthusiastic parenting style extremely misguided, even pitiful. I am a firm believer in the hands-off approach. The job of a parent should be primarily protecting the children from harm, both physical or emotional, and to act as a support figure rather than treating the minds of their children as Blank Slates and worse, as their own fiefdom or property and attempting to scribble on to it whatever their idea of the person they want their child to grow up into. It also helps when parents torture themselves with life-long guilt when their children don't grow up into what they had wanted them to be, as perhaps happens in most of the cases. Parents will save so much of their heart-burn owing to the anxiety and guilt if they really believed in this theory!

All of this because I wanted to point to this review of a new book called No Two Alike by Judith Rich Harris on the subject of human personality and its origins. I remembered her name from Pinker's chapter on parenting in The Blank Slate. She had published the book called, The Nurture Assumption in the nineties which became very controversial because she championed the aforementioned ideas much against the prevailing academic orthodoxies, and despite the fact that she didn't have any university degree. You can check out her home page here. It contains lots of articles and reviews of her earlier famous book. And of course the best is this book by Pinker himself.