By: Vijai P. Sharma, Ph.D
A fierce controversy is raging these days over how much influence parents really have over their children. Judy Rich Harris, author of “The Nurture Assumption,” draws an unsettling conclusion from her analysis that parents have no lasting effect on the personality, intelligence or mental health of their offspring. That’s quite a statement, huh? According to the U.S.A. Today, Harris’ book has “launched the hottest debate over nature and nurture in years.” Newsweek recently did a cover story on her work.
According to Harris, children are most influenced by their peers. They adopt many behaviors of their peers in social settings in order to be accepted by their peers. She goes on to say that children’s interaction with their peers permanently modifies their inborn psychological characteristics. Thus, what they learn outside the home remains steadfast with them thorough adulthood. So, if there is a psychological characteristic or behavior that you don’t like about yourself, don’t blame your parents because you might have acquired it from your peers.
From the days of Freud, the foundation of psychological work has been based on the theory that parents are a major influence on children and that they significantly contribute to the psychological characteristics that children acquire as adults. Folk wisdom also supports the experts on this one.
All of us, sometime or the other make such statements as, “As the father is, so is the son or, as the mother is, so is the daughter.” Thus, we have psychological theory and folk wisdom on one hand that emphasize the importance of nurturing, and Harris, on the other, who totally minimizes the importance of child raising methods and the family genes. This is confusing. Who do we believe?
We live in the world of sound bytes. “Blame your peers and not your parents,” grabs everybody’s attention. It induces people to make impassioned pleas for or against this position. But, the truth often lies in the middle and often happens to be somewhat bland. In this article, I will try to separate the hype from the facts. Facts, I should warn, as they appear to me.
We human beings are obviously social beings. Babies are connected with their social world even before they are born. Later, parents, relatives, teachers, and peers all influence a child’s behavior until he or she has a “mind of his (or her) own.” When a person becomes independent minded he or she is capable of selecting and rejecting external influences. Most people gain such independence and autonomy fairly early. The fact is that we decide who we would let influence, inspire, or corrupt us.
It is true that children adopt or mimic certain behaviors in social settings in order to win acceptance of their peers. How desperate children get for peer acceptance and approval depends on the sense of individuality (or lack of it) their families cultivate in them. Children whose parents encourage them to think independently learn to question rather than to blindly follow. Such children might be less influenced by their peers.
It can be argued that parents exercise significant influence on children’s choice of peers. Children who are taught to be responsible are more likely to choose responsible peers. In the negative instance, children join gangs because they don’t have a close knit family. In a family in which siblings are close to each other, they may be more influenced by their siblings than by peers.
Parents influence at-home behavior and peers influence behavior outside the home, that is, the behavior in the social setting. We learn how to make friends and influence others by first experimenting with our peers and then we transfer these skills to the adult world of coworkers and friends. But, how we behave as partners and parents is more likely to be shaped by what we observe in our families as children.
Parents and other significant adults in our childhood may serve as negative or positive models in our adulthood. For example, people spank their children because their parents spanked them and that “helped to straighten me out.” An equal number of people say that they would not spank their children because they hated to be spanked during their childhood. A similar family experience, but some people use it for positive modeling and some for negative modeling.
So, the truth that is bland and lies in the middle may be a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Peers influence our behavior but parents play a part in which peers we choose to associate with. Our behavior in public and at work is largely determined by our childhood peers but our family behavior is determined by the early lessons we received at home.
Someone said, “Whatever I need to know, I learned in kindergarten.” When it comes to our role learning as parents and partners, we learn it even before we go to kindergarten. As adults, we either decide to follow it exactly as we experienced it or modify it according to our preferences.
When getting into comparing consciousness and unconsciousness the primary difference the two stages is in consciousness the organism is able to interpret thoughts, feelings, emotion of itself and its surroundings. Whereas in unconsciousness the organism’s mental state has been altered due to little or no data coming in about self and surroundings.
Consciousness defies definition. It may involve thoughts, sensations, perceptions, moods, emotions, dreams, and an awareness of self, although not necessarily any particular one or combination of these. Consciousness is a point of view, an I, or what Thomas Nagel called the existence of “something that it is like” to be something. Julian Jaynes has emphasized that “Consciousness is not the same as cognition and should be sharply distinguished from it. … The most common error … is to confuse consciousness with perception.” He says, “Mind-space I regard as the primary feature of consciousness. It is the space which you preoptively are ‘introspecting on’ or ’seeing’ at this very moment”.
Ned Block divides consciousness into phenomenal consciousness (similar definition to subjective consciousness), which is subjective experience itself (being something), and access consciousness, which refers to the availability of information to processing systems in the brain (being conscious of something).
The issue of what consciousness is, and to what extent and in what sense it exists, is the subject of much research in philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Issues of practical concern include how the presence of consciousness can be assessed in severely ill individuals to what extent non-humans are self conscious; at what point in fetal development consciousness begins; and whether computers can achieve conscious states.
In common parlance, consciousness denotes being awake and responsive to the environment, in contrast to being asleep or in a coma.Unconsciousness, more appropriately referred to as loss of consciousness or lack of consciousness, is a dramatic alteration of mental state that involves complete or near-complete lack of responsiveness to people and other environmental stimuli. Being in a comatose state or coma is an illustration of unconsciousness. Fainting due to a drop in blood pressure and a decrease of the oxygen supply to the brain is an illustration of a temporary loss of consciousness. Loss of consciousness must not be confused with altered states of consciousness, such as delirium (when the person is confused and only partially responsive to the environment), normal sleep, hypnosis, and other altered states in which the person responds to stimuli.
Loss of consciousness should not be confused with the notion of the psychoanalytic unconscious or cognitive processes (e.g., implicit cognition) that take place outside of awareness.Loss of consciousness may occur as the result of traumatic brain injury, brain hypoxia (e.g., due to a brain infarction or cardiac arrest), severe poisoning with drugs that depress the activity of the central nervous system (e.g., alcohol and other hypnotic or sedative drugs), severe fatigue, and other causes.
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