NurtureShock

by Po Bronson; Ashley Merryman

  At first glance, the scholars’ hypotheses were confirmed—but something unexpected was also revealed in the data. The more educational media the children watched, the more relationally aggressive they were. They were increasingly bossy, controlling, and manipulative. This wasn’t a small effect. It was stronger than the connection between violent media and physical aggression.

  Curious why this could be, Ostrov’s team sat down and watched several programs on PBS, Nickelodeon, and the Disney Channel. Ostrov saw that, in some shows, relational aggression is modeled at a fairly high rate. Ostrov theorized that many educational shows spend most of the half-hour establishing a conflict between characters and only a few minutes resolving that conflict.

  “Preschoolers have a difficult time being able to connect information at the end of the show to what happened earlier,” Ostrov wrote in his paper. “It is likely that young children do not attend to the overall ‘lesson’ in the manner an older child or adult can, but instead learn from each of the behaviors shown.”

  The results took the entire team by surprise. Ostrov doesn’t yet have children, but his colleagues who did immediately started changing their kids’ viewing patterns.

  Ostrov decided to replicate the study at four diverse preschools in Buffalo, New York. (Ostrov is now a professor at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.) “Given the fact that [the result] was so novel and so surprising, we really wanted to find out that the findings would generalize—that we weren’t just finding something with this one set of kids,” said Ostrov.

  After the first year in Buffalo, Ostrov ran the numbers. The children in Buffalo watched a ratio of about two parts educational media to one part violent media, on average. More exposure to violent media did increase the rate of physical aggression shown at school—however, it did so only modestly. In fact, watching educational television also increased the rate of physical aggression, almost as much as watching violent TV. And just like in the Minnesota study, educational television had a dramatic effect on relational aggression. The more the kids watched, the crueler they’d be to their classmates. This correlation was 2.5 times higher than the correlation between violent media and physical aggression.

  Essentially, Ostrov had just found that Arthur is more dangerous for children than Power Rangers.

  Data from a team at Ithaca College confirms Ostrov’s assessment: there is a stunning amount of relational and verbal aggression in kids’ television.

  Under the supervision of professor Dr. Cynthia Scheibe, Ithaca undergrads patiently studied 470 half-hour television programs commonly watched by children, recording every time a character insulted someone, called someone a mean name, or put someone down.

  Scheibe’s analysis subsequently revealed that 96% of all children’s programming includes verbal insults and put-downs, averaging 7.7 put-downs per half-hour episode. Programs specifically considered “prosocial” weren’t much better—66.7% of them still contained insults. Had the insult lines been said in real life, they would have been breathtaking in their cruelty. (“How do you sleep at night knowing you’re a complete failure?” from SpongeBob SquarePants.) We can imagine educational television might use an initial insult to then teach a lesson about how insults are hurtful, but that never was the case, Schiebe found. Of the 2,628 put-downs the team identified, in only 50 instances was the insulter reprimanded or corrected—and not once in an educational show. Fully 84% of the time, there was either only laughter or no response at all.

  The work of Ostrov and Schiebe are but two, of many recent studies, that question old assumptions about the causes and nature of children’s aggression.

  The wild kingdom of childhood can be mystifying at times. Modern involved parenting should seem to result in a sea of well-mannered, nonaggressive kids. As soon as an infant shows some indication of cognitive understanding, his parents start teaching him about sharing, kindness, and compassion. In theory, fighting and taunting and cruelty should all have gone the way of kids playing with plastic bags and licking lead paint, mere memories of an unenlightened time. Yet we read reports that bullying is rampant, and every parent hears stories about the agonies of the schoolyard. Lord of the Flies rings as true today as when William Golding first penned it.

  Why is modern parenting failing in its mission to create a more civilized progeny? Earlier in this book, we discussed how the praised child becomes willing to cheat, and how children’s experiments with lying can go unchecked, and how racial bias can resurface even in progressively-minded integrated schools. Now we turn the spotlight on children’s aggressiveness—a catchall term used by the social scientists that includes everything from pushing in the sandbox to physical intimidation in middle school to social outcasting in high school.

  The easy explanation has always been to blame aggression on a bad home environment. There’s an odd comfort in this paradigm—as long as your home is a “good” home, aggression won’t be a problem. Yet aggression is simply too prevalent for this explanation to suffice. It would imply a unique twist on the Lake Wobegon Effect—that almost every parent is below average.

  Aggressive behavior has traditionally been considered an indicator of psychological maladaptation. It was seen as inherently aberrant, deviant, and (in children) a warning sign of future problems. Commonly cited causes of aggression were conflict in the home, corporal punishment, violent television, and peer rejection at school. While no scholar is about to take those assertions back, the leading edge of research suggests it’s not as simple as we thought, and many of our “solutions” are actually backfiring.

  Everyone’s heard that it damages children to be witness to their parents’ fighting, especially the kind of venomous screaming matches that escalate into worse. But what about plain old everyday conflict? Over the last decade, that question has been the specialty of the University of Notre Dame’s Dr. E. Mark Cummings.

  Cummings realized every child sees parents and caregivers carping at each other over such banalities as who forgot to pick up the dry cleaning, pay the bills, or whose turn it is to drive the carpool. In studies where Cummings has parents make a note of every argument, no matter how small or large, the typical married couple was having about eight disputes each day, according to the moms. (According to the dads, it was slightly less.) Spouses express anger to each other two or three times as often as they show a moment of affection to each other. And while parents might aspire to shielding their kids from their arguing, the truth is that children are witness to it 45% of the time.

  Children appear to be highly attuned to the quality of their parents’ relationship—Cummings has described children as “emotional Geiger-counters.” In one study, Cummings found that children’s emotional well-being and security are more affected by the relationship between the parents than by the direct relationship between the parent and child.

  So are parents distressing their children with every bicker? Not necessarily.

  In Cummings’ elaborate experiments, he stages arguments for children to witness and monitors how they react, sometimes taking saliva samples to measure their stress hormone, cortisol. In some cases, two actors go at it. In others, the mother too is a confederate. While waiting with the child, the mother gets a phone call, ostensibly from the “father,” and she begins arguing with him over the phone. (Her lines are mostly scripted.) In other variations of this experiment, the child just watches a videotape of two adults arguing, and she is asked to imagine the on-screen characters are her parents.

  In one study, a third of the children reacted aggressively after witnessing the staged conflict—they shouted, got angry, or punched a pillow. But in that same study, something else happened, which eliminated the aggressive reaction in all but 4% of the children. What was this magical thing? Letting the child witness not just the argument, but the resolution of the argument. When the videotape was stopped mid-argument, it had a very negative effect. But if the child was allowed to see the contention get worked out, it calmed him. “We
varied the intensity of the arguments, and that didn’t matter,” recalled Cummings. “The arguments can become pretty intense, and yet if it’s resolved, kids are okay with it.” Most kids were just as happy at the conclusion of the session as they were when witnessing a friendly interaction between parents.

  What this means is that parents who pause mid-argument to take it upstairs—to spare the children—might be making the situation far worse, especially if they forget to tell their kids, “Hey, we worked it out.” Cummings has also found that when couples have arguments entirely away from the kids, the kids might not have seen any of it but are still well aware of it, despite not knowing any specifics.

  Cummings recently has shown that being exposed to constructive marital conflict can actually be good for children—if it doesn’t escalate, insults are avoided, and the dispute is resolved with affection. This improves their sense of security, over time, and increases their prosocial behavior at school as rated by teachers. Cummings noted, “Resolution has to be sincere, not manipulated for their benefit—or they’ll see through it.” Kids learn a lesson in conflict resolution: the argument gives them an example of how to compromise and reconcile—a lesson lost for the child spared witnessing an argument.

  This is obviously a very fine line to walk, but it’s not as thin as the line being walked by Dr. Kenneth Dodge, a professor at Duke University. Another giant in the field, Dodge has long been interested in how corporal punishment incites children to become aggressive.

  At least 90% of American parents use physical punishment on their children at least once in their parenting history. For years, the work of Dodge and others had shown a correlation between the frequency of corporal punishment and the aggressiveness of children. Surely, out-of-control kids get spanked more, but the studies control for baseline behavior. The more a child is spanked, the more aggressive she becomes.

  However, those findings were based on studies of predominately Caucasian families. In order to condemn corporal punishment as strongly as the research community wanted to, someone needed to replicate these results in other ethnic populations—particularly African Americans. So Dodge conducted a long-term study of corporal punishment’s affect on 453 kids, both black and white, tracking them from kindergarten through eleventh grade.

  When Dodge’s team presented its findings at a conference, the data did not make people happy. This wasn’t because blacks used corporal punishment more than whites. (They did, but not by much.) Rather, Dodge’s team had found a reverse correlation in black families—the more a child was spanked, the less aggressive the child over time. The spanked black kid was all around less likely to be in trouble.

  Scholars publicly castigated Dodge’s team, saying its findings were racist and dangerous to report. Journalists rushed to interview Dodge and the study’s lead author, Dr. Jennifer Lansford. A national news reporter asked Dodge if his research meant the key to effective punishment was to hit children more frequently. The reporter may have been facetious in his query, but Dodge and Lansford—both of whom remain adamantly against the use of physical discipline—were so horrified by such questions that they enlisted a team of fourteen scholars to study the use of corporal punishment around the world.

  Why would spanking trigger such problems in white children, but cause no problems for black children, even when used a little more frequently? With the help of the subsequent international studies, Dodge has pieced together an explanation for his team’s results.

  To understand, one has to consider how the parent is acting when giving the spanking, and how those actions label the child. In a culture where spanking is accepted practice, it becomes “the normal thing that goes on in this culture when a kid does something he shouldn’t.” Even if the parent might spank her child only two or three times in his life, it’s treated as ordinary consequences. In the black community Dodge studied, a spank was seen as something that every kid went through.

  Conversely, in the white community Dodge studied, physical discipline was a mostly-unspoken taboo. It was saved only for the worst offenses. The parent was usually very angry at the child and had lost his or her temper. The implicit message was: “What you have done is so deviant that you deserve a special punishment, which is spanking.” It marked the child as someone who has lost his place within traditional society.

  It’s not just a white-black thing either. A University of Texas study of Conservative Protestants found that one-third of them spanked their kids three or more times a week, largely encouraged by Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. The study found no negative effects from this corporal punishment—precisely because it was conveyed as normal.

  Each in its own way, the work of Cummings and Dodge demonstrate the same dynamic: an oversimplified view of aggression leads parents to sometimes make it worse for kids when they’re trying to do the right thing. Children key off their parents’ reaction more than the argument or physical discipline itself.

  If we can accept that children will be exposed to some parental conflict—and it may even be productive—can we say the same thing for interactions with their peers? Is there some level of conflict with peers that kids should learn to handle, on their own, without a parent’s help?

  Dr. Joseph Allen, a professor and clinician at the University of Virginia, says that many modern parents are trapped in what he calls “The Nurture Paradox.”

  “To protect kids is a natural parental instinct,” Allen explained. “But we end up not teaching them to deal with life’s ups and downs. It’s a healthy instinct, and fifty years ago parents had the same instinct, just that they had no time and energy to intervene. Today, for various reasons, those constraints aren’t stopping us, and we go wild.”

  At the Berkeley Parents Network, an online community, this struggle is vividly apparent. Parents anguish over whether jumping into the sandbox is appropriate to defend their children from a toy-grabber. Other parents confess that their once-cute child has become socially aggressive, which they find abhorrent and are at a loss to stop. The message board is full of stories of children being teased and ostracized; the responses range from coaching children to be less of a target to advocating martial arts training to reminding children they won’t be invited to every birthday party in life. Nobody has the perfect answer, and it’s clear just how torn the parents are.

  The Nurture Paradox has moved many parents to demand “zero tolerance” policies in schools, not just for bullying, but for any sort of aggression or harassment. There is no evidence that bullying is actually on the increase, but the concern about its effects has skyrocketed.

  In March 2007, the British House of Commons Education and Skills Committee convened a special inquiry on school bullying. For three days its members called a variety of witnesses, from school principals to academic scholars to support organizations. The testimony ran a full 288 pages when printed. No laws were written, and no systemwide policies were forced on all the schools, but that wasn’t really the goal of the inquiry. Rather, the entire exercise was conducted to make one important categorical declaration, meant to guide the national culture: “The idea that bullying is in some way character building and simply part of childhood is wrong and should be challenged.” Any sort of name-calling, mocking, gossiping, or exclusion needed to be condemned.

  Most scholars have agreed that bullying can have serious effects, and that it absolutely needs to be stopped. However, they’ve balked on the “zero tolerance” approach.

  A task force of the American Psychological Association warned that many incidents involve poor judgment, and lapses in judgment are developmentally normative—the result of neurological immaturity. All of which was a fancy way of saying that kids make mistakes because they’re still young. They noted that inflicting automatic, severe punishments was causing an erosion of trust in authority figures. As the chair of the task force later explained, “The kids become fearful—not of other kids, but of the rules—because they think they’ll break them by accident.” Du
ring the new era of zero tolerance, levels of anxiety in students at school had gone up, not down. In Indiana, 95% of the suspensions weren’t for bullying, per se—they were for “school disruption” and “other.” The APA task force warned especially against over-applying zero tolerance to any sort of harassment.

  Yet zero tolerance is becoming ever more common. According to one poll by Public Agenda, 68% of American parents support zero tolerance. From Florida to New York, schools are expanding their lists of what gets zero tolerance treatment to include teasing, cruelty, name-calling, social exclusion, and anything that causes psychological distress. One small Canadian town even passed a new law making these behaviors expressly illegal, punishable by fine.

  According to the science of peer relations, there’s one big problem with lumping all childhood aggression under the rubric of bullying. It’s that most of the meanness, cruelty, and torment that goes on at schools isn’t inflicted by those we commonly think of as bullies, or “bad” kids. Instead, most of it is meted out by children who are popular, well-liked, and admired.

  The connection between popularity, social dominance, meanness and cruelty is hardly a surprise to any teacher—the dynamic is plainly visible at most schools. It’s long been an archetype in literature and movies, from Emma to Heathers and Mean Girls. In some languages, there’s a separate word to distinguish the kind of popular teen who diminishes others—in Dutch, for instance, the idiomatic expression popie-jopie refers to teens who are bitchy, slutty, cocky, loud, and arrogant.

  However, social scientists didn’t really get around to studying the connection between popularity and aggression until this decade. That’s largely due to the fact that the focus on the archetypal negative results of aggression helped papers get published and research dollars flow: grants were readily available to study the plight of aggressive kids, in the hope the findings might help society prevent aggressive kids from becoming our future prison population. The 1999 Columbine High School massacre opened more floodgates for grant dollars, as the government made it a priority to ensure students would never again open fire on their peers.