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The Nurture Assumption is a fascinating, polemical book that has already generated a great deal of controversy and will probably continue to do so. Harris's main points are as follows. Parents are not as important as the child development experts claim with their “nurture assumption.” Harris claims that the importance of parents' providing a nurturing environment has been vastly overrated. Other than in extreme cases of parental neglect or abuse, other factors influence how children develop. She attributes 50% of how children turn out to genetic endowment. Here she includes such elements as the child's temperament, intelligence, and even his looks. According the Harris, the child's peer group shapes his socialization and aspects of his personality depending on his relative standing in the group. For example, she cites a child's relative size, his ability to play ball, or whichever attributes are valued by the peer group as decisive factors. She states that learning is context dependent and that children learn very different behaviors at home and from their peers. For instance, she describes the way in which the lessons learned at home, such as moral values, or a given mother tongue, or the child's role vis-à-vis his siblings, do not carry over to his peer group. She calls the group the natural environment of the child and the conveyor of culture.
To the extent that all of us have had some painful experience with rejection or ostracism at some point during our formative years, Harris's description of the importance of peer acceptance may threaten to revive unpleasant memories. Some of the furor surrounding the publication of The Nurture Assumption may be attributable to our collective tendency to minimize the importance of group phenomena. We feel this wish especially as parents, when we need to acknowledge how little we are able to protect and