I suppose I should know when it's time to lay a thread to rest, and the
increasingly agitated tone of some of the recent posts suggests that the
time is now. But I'm not one for taking my own good advice.
Tasha Howe said:
> My final comment on this thread is that those posting their
>agreements with Judith Harris have obviously not read the
>developmental science on parenting/contextual influence, which goes
>far beyond correlation and unfounded assumptions, research done by
>top scholars in the field (I referred to much of it in my long email
>earlier in the week, including behavior genetics studies).
In the earlier post to which she referred, she said:
> For example, Parke and Ladd (1992) wrote a tome about how complex
> the impacts of parents on their children's peer relationships actually
> are.
Here's an example of the powerful evidence adduced in the tome edited by
Parke and Ladd in support of the complex impacts of parents. I quote from
their book:
"_Mothers'_ total expressiveness, mothers' positive expressiveness,
and mothers' negative expressiveness were all positively correlated
with _girls'_ peer acceptance, but not with _boys'_ peer acceptance.
Conversely, _fathers'_ total expressiveness and fathers' negative
expressiveness were positively correlated with _boys'_ acceptance, but
not with girls' acceptance. Fathers' positive expressiveness was not
related to boys' acceptance, but was related to girls' acceptance."
"Parents' emotional expressiveness was also significantly
correlated with peer and teacher behavior measures. Greater maternal
total expressiveness was associated, for boys, with greater prosocial
behavior and less disruptiveness. A congruent pattern of results
emerged in relation to maternal positive and negative expressiveness.
A different pattern emerged in relation to paternal emotional
expressiveness. Greater paternal total expressiveness was associated,
for boys, with less aggression, less shyness, and more prosocial
behavior. For girls, greater paternal total expressiveness was
associated with less aggression, more prosocial behavior, and less
disruptiveness. A congruent pattern of results emerged in relation to
paternal positive and negative expressiveness, with one exception: a
positive correlation between fathers' negative expressiveness and
girls' shyness."
"These findings reveal connections between parental emotional
expressiveness within the family context and children's social
competence."
And here's what Judy Harris said about studies which use the same
technique as described above to generate similarly powerful evidence of
the complex impact of parents:
(from The Nurture Assumption, pp. 19-20:)
"If we collect, say, five different measurements of each home and five
different measurements of the child's intelligence, we can pair them up
in twenty-five ways, yielding twenty-five possible correlations. Just by
chance alone, it is likely that one or two of them will be statistically
significant. What, none of them are? Never fear, all is not lost: we can
split up the data and look again [...]. Looking separately at girls and
boys immediately doubles the number of correlations, giving us fifty
possibilities for success instead of just twenty-five. Looking separately
at fathers and mothers is also worth a try. "Divide and conquer" is my
name for this method.[...] "
Powerful evidence in Parke and Ladd? Or powerful delusion?
Stephen
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Stephen L. Black, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology
Bishop's University e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
2600 College St.
Sherbrooke QC J1M 0C8
Canada
Dept web page at http://www.ubishops.ca/ccc/div/soc/psy
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