Overview
The Nature of Nurture challenges prevailing views of how children’s early-life experience shape their future development, as these treat so-called normal development (e.g., secure, autonomous, cooperative, friendly, stable intimate relations, supportive parenting) as how nature intended humans to develop and deviations from such “optimal” development as reflective of dysfunction, dysregulation and disorder.
What remains underappreciated is that early-life adversity has not been uncommon in our species’ history and, as a result, evolution has shaped how children respond in ways that increase, or at least once did, their chances of passing on their genes to future generations, the ultimate goal of all living things: to make more life.
The Nature of Nurture thus shares developmental insights that emerge when one puts on evolutionary lenses to look at effects of nurture in childhood, ones that have not been considered by traditional discussions of nature and nurture.
In the first part of the book, author Belsky reveals why and how adversity accelerates development, perhaps most notably resulting in earlier sexual development than would otherwise have occurred.
But in the second half of the book, he makes clear that such effects do not emerge in all children, because evolution has also shaped families to bear offspring who vary in their developmental plasticity, with some being more and others less susceptible to environmental influences, including parenting.
In the final chapter, implications and applications of evolutionary-developmental understanding are highlighted, making clear that in some cases they have much in common with more traditional thinking, but in other ways offer new insights.
Endorsements
“The Nature of Nurture brilliantly unravels the mysteries of why and how early adversity matters—not just psychologically, but biologically. In doing so, Jay Belsky deftly dismantles the age-old nature-nurture dichotomy. This provocative book reshapes our understanding of what it means to be resilient or at-risk, making it indispensable reading for policymakers, educators, and parents alike.”
“The Nature of Nurture is the modern synthesis that developmental science has sorely needed for decades. I guarantee that Jay Belsky’s highly readable book will radically transform the way you think about how genetic and environmental factors interact to shape the course of human development.”
“In these pages, a world expert on child development sets out to trace his own development as he gradually integrates evolutionary perspectives into a lifelong quest to understand ‘how, why, and for whom’ childhood circumstances shape later life. The Nature of Nurture is as important for its insider’s view of paradigm shifts currently underway across the social sciences as it is for Jay Belsky’s revelatory insights into human psychology and reproductive strategies.”
“In a lucid and comprehensive rendition of a complex field, Jay Belsky provides an elegant summary of how individual susceptibilities and variations in early environmental conditions conjointly bend human development toward its broad diversity of outcomes. The Nature of Nurture offers both scientists and lay readers nothing short of the erudition and clarity of thought we have come to expect from a first-rate scholar of evolutionary principles in developmental psychology.”
“A very well-written and timely book by a world-renowned developmental scientist. Jay Belsky does an admirable job of taking on the knotty issue of how early experiences influence the unfolding of evolved developmental patterns.”