Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Family Values 449at random. The biggest influence that parents have on their children is atthe moment of conception.(I hasten to add that parents are unimportant only when it comes todifferences among them and differences among their grown children.Anything that all normal parents do that affects all children is not measuredin these studies. Young children surely need the love, protection,and tutelage of a sane parent. As the psychologist Judith Harris has putit, the studies imply only that children would turn into the same kinds ofadults if you left them in their homes and social milieus but switched allthe parents around.)No one knows where the other forty-five percent of the variationcomes from. Perhaps personality is shaped by unique events impinging onthe growing brain: how the fetus lay in the womb, how much maternalblood it diverted, how it was squeezed during birth, whether it wasdropped on its head or caught certain viruses in the early years. Perhapspersonality is shaped by unique experiences, like being chased by a dog orreceiving an act of kindness from a teacher. Perhaps the traits of parentsand the traits of children interact in complicated ways, so that two childrengrowing up with the same parents really have different environments.One kind of parent may reward a rambunctious child and punish aplacid one; another kind of parent may do the opposite. There is no goodevidence for these scenarios, and I think two others are more plausible,both of which see personality as an adaptation rooted in the divergence ofinterests between parents and offspring. One is the child's battle plan forcompeting with its siblings, which I will discuss in the following section.The other is the child's battle plan for competing in its peer group.Judith Harris has amassed evidence that children everywhere aresocialized by their peer group, not by their parents. At all ages childrenjoin various play groups, circles, gangs, packs, cliques, and salons, andthey jockey for status within them. Each is a culture that absorbs somecustoms from the outside and generates many of its own. Children's culturalheritage—the rules of Ringolevio, the melody and lyrics of thenyah-nyah song, the belief that if you kill someone you legally have to payfor his gravestone—is passed from child to child, sometimes for thousandsof years. As children grow up they graduate from group to groupand eventually join adult groups. Prestige at one level gives one a leg up atthe next; most significantly, the leaders of young adolescent cliques arethe first to date. At all ages children are driven to figure out what it takesto succeed among their peers and to give these strategies precedence over