"To parents besieged by expert advice, a new scientific idea offers relief: it’s no big deal how you raise your children. Originally proposed by Judith Rich Har

"To parents besieged by expert advice, a new scientific idea offers relief: it’s no big deal how you raise your children. Originally proposed by Judith Rich Harris in The Nurture Assumption..." Well wait, have read a book by Judith Rich Harris (her followup to The Nurture Assumption, called "No Two Alike"). The basic thesis is that children have their own personality, and it's not the result of how their parents molded them to be this, that, or the other. She never says that it's ok to do a bad job as a parent, or denies that pathological cases of parenting can do damage. There's an idea, going back centuries (perhaps millenia) that if you control the child's environment, you can control what kind of person they grow up to be. More recently, there's the idea that if you make any mistakes in parenting, your child will be scarred for life. Judith Rich Harris was saying that there is such a thing as "good enough parenting", and it does not require perfection, and moreover children are not blobs of clay that you can mold into whatever you want. If it were so, then generations of parents would not have been trying desperately to force their homosexual children to be straight, and nonetheless fail, and you would not have so many cases where one sibling is the black sheep of the family while the others overachieve. Children have their own nature, and no two are alike, is what JRH said, and it was in contradiction to what Skinner and other behaviorists had said. The evidence is overwhelming that she is correct.