CHALLENGE TO A CHERISHED NOTION

Abstract

What is startling about Jerome Kagan's book, The Nature of the Child, is its strong challenge to a number of beliefs about children that are so widely accepted—by parents, therapists and even some of Mr. Kagan's colleagues—that they are taken as givens. These include some treasured notions—the notions that a certain set of essential experiences in children's home life allows them to grow into healthy and happy adults, that the temperament of the infant foretells the character of the child, that the child's personality foreshadows the adult's and that the child's psychological traits are shaped by what happens between parent and child. It is not, Mr. Kagan argues, that the parent-child bond does not matter—just that the specifics of parenting are not so crucial to the child's future as parents would like to think. While some lay readers may be taken aback by Mr. Kagan's questioning of such golden tenets of modern parenthood, many therapists no doubt will be upset by his assault on some basic premises of their calling. Foremost among these is his attack on the notion that, as he puts it, "a mother's love for her infant is necessary for the child's future mental health," or, more technically, that a bond of secure attachment to a parent during the first three years of life leaves the child less vulnerable to later psychological disorders.