To the guilty parent who frets over the latest advice about quality time, instilling values or toilet training, Judith Rich Harris offers this relief: Mom and Dad, you don't matter that much.

Hmmm, is that good news or bad? It's certainly controversial, and Harris, a northern New Jersey grandmother, is already feeling the heat from psychologists and child-development experts outraged by her views.

"I seem to have hit a nerve," concedes Harris, a textbook writer kicked out of Harvard's psychology department four decades ago because the chairman thought her graduate work lacked originality and independence.

Her book, "The Nurture Assumption," certainly challenges conventional wisdom and, even the author concedes, is counter-intuitive. But her goal is to do nothing less than fundamentally change the direction of child psychology, and she expected a little ego bruising.

Although it landed in bookstores just two weeks ago, the book has already sold more than 50,000 copies and should soon make it to the best seller list. A cover story in Newsweek, a major article in the New Yorker, a scheduled appearance on the NBC's Today show, and possibly one even on Oprah, could send it vaulting even higher.

Meanwhile, the child psychology establishment is in serious backlash mode. "My first reaction is amazement that this book should be taken seriously," says Urie Bronfenbrenner, professor emeritus at Cornell University and a leading figure in developmental science. "We've got a blooper."

"I don't see a constructive fallout from this," said Johanna K. Tabin, a suburban Chicago psychologist, "other than a helpful fallout for Harris."

What Harris proposes is nothing short of breathtaking: Other than providing genes and the basic essentials such as food and shelter (and unless they are abusive or negligent), parents are not the most important influence on their children's lives.

That runs opposite to almost everything the advice-givers have been telling parents for much of this century -- not to mention countering the Freudians, who see personality traits as veritable parental hand-me-downs.

Instead, Harris points to the impact of peer groups, which she believes psychologists have long underestimated. Is the average second grader likely to prefer the sneakers a parent favors, or the kind the fellow second graders wear?

With no academic affiliation or Ph.D. beside her name, her ideas might easily be dismissed, but Harris has done some serious reading of research in psychology, sociology and anthropology, backing her theory with dozens of articles and studies. (Her reference list takes up 31 of the book's 460 pages.) She also has the wit to write about them in a breezy and often entertaining manner.

"My position is that teen-agers belong to the same species as the rest of us," Harris writes of adolescents in one chapter. "But one cannot help but wonder. If they are equipped with the same sort of brain as the rest of us, why do they so often give the impression of having forgotten how to use it?"

Harris must be pardoned if she still has a little frustration with teen-agers. Her own daughters behaved so differently from each other when they were growing up, it made her question her own influence on them.

Her oldest, Nomi, was an achiever. The younger, Elaine, who was adopted, dropped out of high school. Meanwhile, Harris spent much of their teen years stuck in bed, disabled by an autoimmune disease that has systematically attacked her internal organs, leaving her weakened and often homebound.

But Harris, 60, is adamant that her own experience, while instructive, was not the basis for her theory, and she resents how some writers have already exaggerated her ideas and dissected her own life.

"What I acquired from my experiences as a mother was an interest in child development," she says in an interview by telephone from her home. "Secondarily, parenting taught me that things are a lot more complicated than others made them look."

Consider, for instance, the children of immigrants who readily acquire English and adopt American cultural preferences even if their parents still speak their native tongue. Or how about studies of twins that show growing up in the same home didn't make them more alike than twins separated at birth.

Harris also picks apart researchers who are too quick to make a correlation between child behavior and parental influence -- hence, the title of her book, "The Nurture Assumption." An example: Theoreticians once thought autism was caused by cold, aloof parents, not realizing that parents may have been reacting to autistic children who didn't want to be touched or held.

The implications of this idea could be profound. One example is in divorce and the observation that children of divorced parents generally have more problems in life. But is that due to the emotional tumult of divorce or the psychic wounds caused by an enforced separation from one parent?

Harris suspects none of the above. First, there's the higher likelihood that children of divorced parents may have inherited their parents' own genetic behavior problems. Then, there's the loss of financial security and the likelihood the child had to move -- and develop a whole new peer group.

There's that peer-group business again. Any parent of a teen-ager can tell you about a peer group's pervasive power over a 15-year-old, but what about the impact on a toddler or pre-schooler?

Harris says just look at their behavior. Children always seek out other children in a social setting, even as toddlers. Their interactions in school can be profoundly different from their behavior at home. How often do parents hear a teacher's report on their child and wonder aloud, "Are we talking about the same kid?"

In a playful analogy of childhood to prison, Harris compares children to prisoners and parents to guards. "A child's goal is not to become a successful adult, any more than a prisoner's goal is to become a successful guard," she writes. "A child's goal is to become a successful child."

Despite the controversy, Harris' ideas have gotten some impressive endorsements, most notably from Steven Pinker, a well-regarded Massachusetts Institute of Technology psychology professor who writes effusively in the book's forward, "I predict it will come to be seen as a turning point in the history of psychology."

The book's release coincided with the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association last month in San Francisco, where Harris was honored for a recent paper. It included an irony she savors: Her award was named after the Harvard professor who kicked her out so long ago.

But even Harris concedes that in her parents-vs.-peers argument, she has overstated her case at times with some "extreme statements." She calls them partly a "literary device" to draw in lay readers.

Dr. Mark A. Riddle, director of child and adolescent psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center, says her all-or-nothing stance on parental influence is reminiscent of nature-vs.-nurture arguments over IQ. Almost everyone in the child-development field believes the truth lies between the extremes.

"Yes, some theoreticians have placed too much emphasis on parenting," Dr. Riddle said. "It's also true she's placed too much emphasis on peer groups."

Riddle and others fear that some parents may see the book as an excuse to take their roles less seriously or, possibly worse, cause government to invest less money in developmental programs.

"A lot of her arguments are very reasonable, and then she makes some outrageous statements in her book," says Dr. Linda S. Grossman, associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Maryland Medical Center. "She's glib with language, but she's very unsophisticated with psychology sometimes."

Harris brushes aside most of the criticism of the academic establishment -- if only because most of them have not read her book. Even if she fails to convince the experts, she sees another purpose to her work: allowing parents to feel a little less pressured about how they raise their children.

"I really agree with Dr. Spock on this. You know more about parenting than you think you do," she says. "Parents are provided by nature with instinctive behavior on how to raise children. We did it for hundreds of thousands of generations without guidance from experts, and they turned out OK."

An excerpt

There is no question that the adult caregivers play an important role in the baby's life. It is from these older people that babies learn their first language, have their first experiences in forming and maintaining relationships, and get their first lessons in following rules. But the socialization researchers go on to draw other conclusions: that what children learn in the early years about relationships and rules sets the pattern for later relationships and later rule-following, and hence determines the entire course of their lives.

I used to think so too. I still believe that children need to learn about relationships and rules in their early years; it is also important that they acquire a language. But I no longer believe that this early learning, which in our society generally takes place within the home, sets the pattern for what is to follow. Although the learning itself serves a purpose, the content of what children learn may be irrelevant to the world outside their home. They may cast it off when they step outside as easily as the dorky sweater their mother made them wear.

-- "The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do," by Judith Rich Harris (the Free Press, 1998)

Pub Date: 9/08/98