Adrian Buck’s Reviews > Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do > Status Update

"I am proud of both my daughters, but I don't believe that my parenting skills, or lack thereof, had anything with the way they turned out." - really? When I became a parent myself, my first reference point was my own parents, what I wanted to repeat, and what I wanted to reject. I expect that will be true for my children too.

"Psycholinguists have been baffled by the variability in acquisition of a send language, especially by the fact that some people never lose their accent, even when they were very young when they immigrated" - again, not the ones I've studied: there is whole raft of studies of individual difference, and style shifting that apply here. Maybe she should read a brief history of seven killings

"They pointed out, first of all, that parents' judgments of their children are of doubtful validity; as I have mentioned elsewhere in this book, such judgments agree poorly with those of people outside the family. " - She has also pointed out that children's behaviour varies inside and outside the home, so why the the opinion of people outside of the home is to be privledged escapes me: it's biased differently.

The gold standard study study [in medicine] is large (at least a thousand patients), randomized, and double-blinded, and the researchers have no financial connection to the suppliers of the treatment or the drug. Such studies, alas, are never found in psychology" - I shouldn't think the results are determined by asking the patients if they feel better either.

"When you think about childhood you think about your parents. Blame it on the relationship department of your mind, which has usurped more than its rightful share of your thoughts and memories" - which is why we should not be relying on questionnaires to produce psychological 'evidence'.

"Group socialization theory makes this prediction: that children would develop into the same sort of adults if we left their lives outside the home unchanged - left them in their schools and their neighbourhoods - but switched all the parents around." - which is commenably clearsighted, but also ridiculously unlikely.

"I see socialization as a sort of hourglass' - probably the biggest problem with her approach, it requires longitudinal study, and a much more fine grained analysis of the notion of peer group.

"I have been unable...to give you answers to you answers to these questions, because the research has not yet been done" - perhaps not in child development, but in classroom management these questions have been addressed, though probably no more effectively.

"Parents are meant to enjoy parenting" - we are? How did she come to this conclusion?