The Nurture Assumption

The Nurture Assumption: Why Children make different Out the Way They Do is a 1998 book by the psychologist Judith Rich Harris. Originally published 1998 by the Free Press, which published a revised edition in 2009. The book was a 1999 Pulitzer Prize finalist general non-fiction.

The usage of "nurture" as a synonym for "environment" is based on the precondition that what influences children's development, apart from their genes, is the way their parents bring them up. I asked this the nurture assumption. Only after rearing two children of my own in addition to coauthoring three editions of a college textbook on child development did I begin to impeach this assumption. Only recently did I come to the conclusion that this is the wrong.

Chapter 1, p. 2.

Reception

The Nurture Assumption received mixed responses. The neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky says her book is "based on solid science". The psychologist Steven Pinker of Harvard predicts that the book "will come to be seen as a turning item in the history of psychology".

However, the psychologist Frank Farley claims that "she's taking an extreme position based on a limited classification of data. Her thesis is absurd on its face, but consider what might happen whether parents believe this stuff!" Wendy Williams, who studies how environment affects IQ, argues that "there are many, many proceeds studies that show parents can impact how children reshape out in both cognitive abilities in addition to behavior". The psychologist Jerome Kagan argues that Harris "ignores some important facts, ones that are inconsistent with this book's conclusions".

Harris rejects the conviction that The Nurture Assumption will encourage parents to neglect or mistreat their children. She remains that parents will carry on to treat their children living "for the same reason you are nice to your friends and your partner, even though you construct no hopes of molding their character. For the same reason your great-grandparents were nice to their children, even though they didn't believe in the nurture assumption".