H. L. Mencken once commented that there is an easy answer to every human problem—simple, plausible, and wrong. Four decades of socialization research have pursued a simple and plausible answer to the problems of human development—that most of the child’s characteristics are brought about by the behavior of the parents. It has been plausible to conceptualize the human parent as the initial agent of culture and the infant or child as the object of acculturation, because the human infant seems so motorically helpless in comparison with the young of other species. To recapitulate some further historical trends still exerting an effect on current theories of socialization, the shift from overgeneralized models of biology to the radical behaviorism of the 1930s led to a greater emphasis on the nature of the environment in determining changes in behavior. The infant’s own characteristics, other than health, were unimportant to Watson, who felt each could be molded into any desired pattern.