Bringing up children is hard work, and you are often to blame for any bad behavior of your children. If so, Judith Rich Hams has

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问题     Bringing up children is hard work, and you are often to blame for any bad behavior of your children. If so, Judith Rich Hams has good news for you. Parents, she argues, have no important long-term effects on the development of the personality of their children. Far more important are their playground friends and neighborhood companions. Ms. Harris takes to bits the assumption which has dominated developmental psychology for almost half a century.
    Ms Harris’s attack on the developmentalists’ "nurture" argument looks likely to reinforce doubts that the profession was already having. If parents matter, why is it that two adopted children, reared in the same home, are no more similar in personality than two adopted children reared in separate homes? Or that a pair of identical twins, reared in the same home, are no more alike than a pair of identical twins reared in different homes?
    Difficult as it is to track the precise effects of parental upbringing, it may be harder to measure the exact influence of the peer group in childhood and adolescence. Ms Harris points to how children from immigrant homes soon learn not to speak at school in the way their parents speak. But acquiring a language is surely a skill, rather than a characteristic of the sort developmental psychologists hunt for. Certainly it is different from growing up tensely or relaxedly, or from learning to be honest or hard-working or generous. Easy though it may be to prove that parents have little impact on those qualities, it will-be hard to prove that peers have vastly more.
    Moreover, mum and dad surely cannot be ditched completely. Young adults may, as Ms. Harris argues, be keen to appear like their contemporaries. But even in those early years, parents have the power to open doors: they may initially choose the peers with whom their young associate, and pick that influential neighborhood. Moreover, most people suspect that they come to resemble their parents more in middle age, and people’s child-rearing habits may be formed partly by what their parents did. So the balance of influences is probably complicated, as most parents already suspected without being able to demonstrate it scientifically. Even if it turns out that the genes they pass on and the friends their children play with matter as much as affection, discipline and good example, parents are not completely off the hook.

选项 A、Children tend to assume their parents’ personality.
B、Children reared in the same home are similar in personality.
C、Children are more influenced by their peers than by their parents.
D、Identical twins under the same parents develop separate personalities.

答案B

解析 文章第一段指出,Ms Harris认为“父母对孩子的性格并没有长期影响”。第二段第一句的attack on表明Ms Harris与developmentalists的观点是相反的,因此可以推断developmentalists的观点是“父母对孩子的性格形成影响很大”。文章第二段第二句提到Ms Harris对两个一起长大的孩子和两个被分开抚养的孩子的性格相似度进行了对比。她认为即便在同一个家庭里一起长大的两个孩子,性格上也不是很相似;那么,developmentalists应认为two children reared in the same home应该性格相同,故B正确。
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