Sublime

Judith Harris has convincingly argued that peer influence and community influence are more important than family influence in determining how children turn out.

Harris argued that the top-down influence of parents is overwhelmed by the grassroots effect of peer pressure, the blunt force applied each day by friends and schoolmates.

One book that feeds into New Right thought is The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris. Unlike the left-wing premise that we are all malleable by society, Harris points out that much of the development of the individual is genetic, innate, and internal.

La Donna Harris and Jacqueline Wasilewski (2004) suggest:

One was the fact that our father’s neocortex genes seem to be suppressed during development so that the neocortex we have is determined by our mother’s genes;

And we believe that families are the primary places where children learn how to be adults.