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    The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris Summary

    The Nurture Assumption
    Judith Rich Harris
    4.14 (1951 Reviews)
    PsychologyEducationSociety
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    Overview of The Nurture Assumption

    Judith Harris's Pulitzer finalist challenges everything we believe about parenting. "The Nurture Assumption" argues peers - not parents - shape children's personalities, igniting fierce debate among psychologists. Steven Pinker called it "a turning point in psychology," liberating anxious parents everywhere.

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    Why do siblings raised in the same home turn out so differently? Why do immigrant children quickly adopt their peers' accents rather than their parents'? Judith Rich Harris's groundbreaking book "The Nurture Assumption" challenges our most fundamental beliefs about child development with a revolutionary thesis: parents have far less influence on their children's development than we've been led to believe. When published in 1998, this idea was so provocative that Steven Pinker called it "a turning point in the history of psychology," while others were outraged that a grandmother from New Jersey with no university affiliation would dare challenge decades of established thinking. Yet the evidence Harris presents is compelling and forces us to reconsider everything we thought we knew about how children develop.

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