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one come to be “shy”? What is the difference between being a
“shy person” and being “situationally shy”?
8. You might want to discuss Judith Rich Harris’s book, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children
Turn Out the Way They Do; Parents Matter Less than You Think and Peers Matter More, in which
she argues that peers, not parents, play the most important role in shaping a child’s
personality. As the text explains, there is abundant research that consistently indicates that
parents play a large, if not critical, role in shaping a child’s personality. As the text
suggests, if parents had little or no impact, then there would be no observable birth order
effects. Additionally, Harris ignores the fact that since children tend to grow up in
neighborhoods where many families have similar values and behavior standards, they are
surrounded by other children with fairly similar values to their own. Children may also
self-select friends based on how similar their attitudes and interests are to their own. While
peers clearly have some effect, especially during the middle school and high school years,
there is no evidence that the effects of peer influence override parental influences in the
long run to the degree argued by Harris. How do students feel about this?