There was also a tendency, according to Dr. Allen, for social scientists to assume bad behaviors are uniformly associated with bad outcomes; aggression was considered bad behavior, so scientists were really only looking for the negative consequences of it.
Few research grants were available to study the popular kids systematically—chiefly because it was assumed popular kids are doing fine. Then, a few scholars who had been conducting long-term studies of adolescents reported on a connection between popularity and alcohol use. Lo and behold (not really any surprise), popular kids drink more and do more drugs.
For the first time, scientists were concerned about the kids who were doing well socially—they were at risk of becoming addicts, too! Suddenly, federal grant dollars began to flow into the science of popularity. Soon, the social forces of popularity were linked to aggression as well (especially relational aggression), and, finally, the social scientists caught up to the schoolteachers and screenwriters.
Today, the field of peer relations is in the process of doing an extraordinary backflip-with-twist, as scholars adapt to the new paradigm.
Ostrov’s mentor, Dr. Nikki Crick of the University of Minnesota, has contradicted decades of earlier research that claimed girls weren’t aggressive. She proved that girls can be just as aggressive as boys—only they’re more likely to use relational aggression.
Similarly, Dr. Debra Pepler has shown that at the elementary school age, the “nonaggressive” kids are far from saintly—they still threaten to withdraw their friendship and threaten and push, just not as frequently as the more aggressive kids. So rather than the nonaggressive being the “good” kids, it might just be that they lack the savvy and confidence to assert themselves as often.
As University of Connecticut professor Dr. Antonius Cillessen explains, it’s now recognized that aggressiveness is most often used as a means of asserting dominance to gain control or protect status. Aggression is not simply a breakdown or lapse of social skills. Rather, many acts of aggression require highly attuned social skills to pull off, and even physical aggression is often the mark of a child who is “socially savvy,” not socially deviant. Aggressive kids aren’t just being insensitive. On the contrary, says Cillessen, the relationally aggressive kid needs to be extremely sensitive. He needs to attack in a subtle and strategic way. He has to be socially intelligent, mastering his social network, so that he knows just the right buttons to push to drive his opponent crazy. Aggression comes as “early adolescents are discovering themselves. They’re learning about coolness—how to be attractive to other people.”
This completely changes the game for parents. When parents attempt to teach their seven-year-old daughter that it’s wrong to exclude, spread rumors, or hit, they are literally attempting to take away from the child several useful tools of social dominance. “This behavior is rewarded in peer groups,” observed Cillessen, “and you can say as a parent, ‘Don’t do this,’ but the immediate rewards are very powerful.” As long as the child is compulsively drawn to having class status, the appeal of those tools will undermine the parent’s message. Children already know that parents think these behaviors are wrong—they’ve heard it since they were tots. But they return to these behaviors because of how their peers react—rewarding the aggressor with awe, respect, and influence.
The mystery has been why. Why don’t kids shun aggressive peers? Why are so many aggressive kids socially central, and held in high regard?
Two reasons. First, aggressive behavior, like many kinds of rule breaking, is interpreted by other kids as a willingness to defy grownups, which makes the aggressive child seem independent and older—highly coveted traits. The child who always conforms to adults’ expectations and follows their rules runs the risk of being seen as a wimp.
The other reason aggressive kids can remain socially powerful is that—just as the less-aggressive kids aren’t angels—aggressive kids aren’t all devils, either.
“A vast majority of behavioral scientists think of prosocial and antisocial behavior as being at opposite ends of a single dimension,” explains University of Kansas professor Patricia Hawley. “To me, that oversimplifies the complexity of human behavior.”
In the canon of child development, it’s long been taken as gospel that a truly socially-competent child is nonaggressive. Hawley questions that orientation.
Hawley studies kids from preschool up through high school. She looks specifically at how one kid makes another do his bidding—whether it’s through kind, prosocial behavior, or antisocial acts—threats, violence, teasing. Contrary to those who expected kids high in prosocial behavior to be low in antisocial acts, and vice versa, she finds that the same kids are responsible for both—the good and the bad. They are simply in the middle of everything, or, in the words of another researcher, “They’re just socially busy.”
Hawley calls the children who successfully use both prosocial and antisocial tactics to get their way “bistrategic controllers.” These kids see that, when used correctly, kindness and cruelty are equally effective tools of power: the trick is achieving just the right balance, and the right timing. Those who master alternating between the two strategies become attractive to other children, rather than repellant, because they bring so much to the party. Not only are they popular, they’re well-liked by kids, and by teachers, too (who rate them as being agreeable and well-adjusted).
Hawley’s data suggests that at least one in ten children fits the bistrategic description. But inspired by her approach, several other scholars have done similar analyses. Their subsequent findings suggest that the proportion is even higher—around one in six.
Jamie Ostrov has been finding kids with a similarly mixed pattern of prosocial and aggressive behavior in his preschool research. In his television-use study, the children who watched a lot of educational television were far more relationally aggressive, but they were vastly more prosocial to classmates as well.
“The lesson from these children is that it might not make sense to look at aggression alone,” Hawley stated. “Bistrategics can use unsettling levels of aggression without suffering the same consequences of those using only aggression.” It’s an exhibition of their nascent ambition.
For her part, Hawley’s only problem is that her bistrategics are so successful, in school and in life, that she still can’t get a grant to follow them long-term.
We began this chapter by asking why modern parenting has failed to result in a generation of kinder, gentler kids. It turns out that many of our enlightened innovations have had unintended consequences.
When we changed the channel from violent television to tamer fare, kids just ended up learning the advanced skills of clique formation, friendship withdrawal, and the art of the insult.
In taking our marital arguments upstairs to avoid exposing the children to strife, we accidentally deprived them of chances to witness how two people who care about each other can work out their differences in a calm and reasoned way.
We thought that aggressiveness was the reaction to peer rejection, so we have painstakingly attempted to eliminate peer rejection from the childhood experience. In its place is elaborately orchestrated peer interaction. We’ve created the play date phenomenon, while ladening older kids’ schedules with after-school activities. We’ve segregated children by age—building separate playgrounds for the youngest children, and stratifying classes and teams. Unwittingly, we’ve put children into an echo chamber. Today’s average middle schooler has a phenomenal 299 peer interactions a day. The average teen spends sixty hours a week surrounded by a peer group (and only sixteen hours a week surrounded by adults). This has created the perfect atmosphere for a different strain of aggression-virus to breed—one fed not by peer rejection, but fed by the need for peer status and social ranking. The more time peers spend together, the stronger this compulsion is to rank high, resulting in the hostility of one-upmanship. All those lessons about sharing and consideration can hardly compete. We wonder why it takes twenty y
ears to teach a child how to conduct himself in polite society—overlooking the fact that we’ve essentially left our children to socialize themselves.
One more factor that contributes to children’s aggression needs to be mentioned.
Dr. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan did a study of parenting styles, and how they relate to aggressiveness and acting out at school. The fathers in her study fell into three camps—the Progressive Dads, the Traditional Dads, and the Disengaged Dads.
We might expect that the Progressive Dads would smoke their competition. No longer inhibited by gender roles, and very involved in child rearing from the moment of birth, Progressive Dads are regularly shown in the research to be an almost universally good phenomenon. Children of these coparenting fathers have better sibling relationships, feel good about themselves, and do better academically.
And at first, in Schoppe-Sullivan’s study, the Progressive Dads far outshone the other two groups. In the lab, they were more engaged with both spouses and kids. At home, they shared responsibility for the children. While the Traditional Dads were involved parents, their involvement was usually at their wives’ direction. The Progressive Dads, on the other hand, were adept parents on their own. These dads figured out what the kid should be wearing for school and the rest of the morning routine and then put the child to bed. They played more with the kids, and they were more supportive when they did so. They were just as likely as the moms to stay home from work if the kid was sick.
However, Schoppe-Sullivan was surprised to discover that the Progressive Dads had poorer marital quality and rated their family functioning lower than the fathers in couples who took on traditional roles. Their greater involvement may have lead to increased conflict over parenting practices—which in turn would affect their kids.
At the same time, the Progressive Dad was inconsistent in what forms of discipline he ultimately used: he wasn’t as strong at establishing rules or enforcing them. Extrapolating from earlier research showing that fathers often doubt their ability to effectively discipline a child, Sullivan has hypothesized that the Progressive Dad may know how not to discipline a child (i.e., hit the kid, scream), but he doesn’t know what to do instead. Indeed, the whole idea that he would actually need to discipline a child—that the kid hasn’t simply modeled the father’s warm, compassionate ways—may throw him for a loop. Moreover, he finds punishing his kid acutely embarrassing. Therefore, one day it’d be no dessert; the next day the silent treatment; the third it would be a threat of no allowance if the infraction happened again; the fourth it’d be psychological criticism meant to induce guilt. He’s always trying something new, and caving at the wrong time.
This inconsistency and permissiveness led to a surprising result in Sullivan’s study: the children of Progressive Dads were aggressive and acted out in school nearly as much as the kids with fathers who were distant and disengaged.
There’s an old word in the Oxford English Dictionary that means “one skilled in the rearing of children.” The word is pedotrophist. We sometimes assume that today’s progressive coparents who can set up a portable crib in sixty seconds and can change a diaper one-handed are the contemporary pedotrophists.
But at least in one dimension, the progressive parent appears to come with a natural weakness.
TEN
Why Hannah Talks and Alyssa Doesn’t
Despite scientists’ admonitions, parents still spend billions every year on gimmicks and videos, hoping to jump-start infants’ language skills. What’s the right way to accomplish this goal?
In November 2007, a media firestorm erupted.
The preeminent journal Pediatrics published a report out of the University of Washington: infants who watched so-called “baby videos” had a quantifiably smaller vocabulary than those who had not watched the videos. With sales of baby videos estimated to be as high as $4.8 billion annually, the industry went on red alert.
Robert A. Iger, Chief Executive Officer of Disney—which owns the Baby Einstein brand—took the unusual step of publicly disparaging the scholars’ work, describing their findings as “doubtful” and the study methodology as “poorly done.” He complained the university statement in support of the study was “reckless” and “totally irresponsible.”
Parents, many of whom had these DVDs on their shelves, were similarly disbelieving. One of the big reasons for their skepticism was an inexplicably wacky result within the study. According to the data, almost all other kinds of television and movies infants were exposed to—from Disney’s own The Little Mermaid to American Idol—were fine for kids. It was baby DVDs—and only baby DVDs—to watch out for. Iger described the findings as nothing less than “absurd.”
How could these DVDs, beloved by infants around the world, possibly be bad for them?
The report was actually a follow-up to an earlier study the researchers had done to examine if parents used the television as an electronic babysitter. Most academics had assumed that was true—parents were parking the kids in front of a video while they went to make a phone call or cook dinner—but no one had tried to find out if there was a basis to the hypothesis.
In that study, parents did confirm that some babysitting was going on, but the main reason infants were watching television—especially videos such as those in the Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby series—was because parents believed the programs would give their children a cognitive advantage.
“We had parents with kids in front of the TV for as many as twenty hours a week ‘for their brain development,’ ” recalled Dr. Andrew Meltzoff, one of the authors of both studies. “Parents told us that they couldn’t provide much for their children, and that troubled them, so they had saved up and bought the videos hoping that would make up for everything else. Then they had faithfully strapped their kids into place to watch for four to six hours a week. They said they thought that was the best thing they could do for their babies.”
Moved by parents’ dramatic efforts to shore up their children’s intellectual development, the scholars conducted the second study—in order to quantify the actual impact of such television exposure.
The research team called hundreds of families in Washington and Minnesota, asking parents to report the amount of television their children were watching, by each type of program. Then, they had the parents complete what’s known as the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory. Quite simply, the CDI is a list of 89 common words infants may know, and, if they are old enough, say themselves. The words represent a range of vocabulary sophistication, from “cup” and “push” to “fast” and “radio.” The CDI is an internationally accepted measure of early language—translated versions of it are used around the world.
Analyzing the data, the scholars found a dose-response relationship, meaning the more the children watched, the worse their vocabulary. If infants watched the shows one hour per day, they knew 6 to 8 fewer of the 89 CDI words than infants who did not watch any baby DVDs. That might not sound like a big deficit, but consider that the average eleven-month-old boy recognizes only 16 of the CDI words in the first place. Understanding 6 fewer of the CDI words would drop him from the 50th percentile to the 35th.
The results couldn’t have been further from the statements made in the very first press release from Baby Einstein, in March 1997:
Studies show that if these neurons are not used, they may die. Through exposure to phonemes in seven languages, Baby Einstein contributes to increased brain capacity.
Baby Einstein creator Julie Aigner-Clark specifically credited one professor, Dr. Patricia Kuhl, as the inspiration for much of the video’s content. In an interview, Aigner-Clark explained, “After reading some of the research by Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington, I decided to make the auditory portion of the video multilingual, with mothers from seven different countries reciting nursery rhymes and counting in their native languages.”
Kuhl and other scholars had determined that, at birth, babies are sensitive to any language’s phonem
es—unique sound combinations that make up a word. (Each language has about 40 phonemes, such as “kuh” or “ch.”) Once babies are around six to nine months old, they gradually lose that generalist sensitivity. Their brains become specialized, trained to recognize the phonemes of the language (or languages) they hear most. Kuhl describes this process as becoming “neurally committed” to a language. Commonly-used neural pathways in the brain strengthen, while unused pathways weaken.
Aigner-Clark’s hope was that her audio track would train children’s brains to recognize phonemes in a wide assortment of languages—essentially, preventing neural specialization. Hearing these languages early in life would allow them to learn multiple foreign languages later.
Back in 1997, Aigner-Clark’s product seemed to piggyback on Kuhl’s research. But that’s quite ironic, because in the years since, Patricia Kuhl’s ongoing findings have helped explain why baby DVDs don’t work.
First, in a longitudinal study, Kuhl showed that neural commitment to a primary language isn’t a bad thing. The more “committed” a baby’s brain is, at nine months old, the more advanced his language will be at three years old. With a weaker connection, children don’t progress as quickly, and this seems to have lasting impact.
Second, Kuhl went on to discover that babies’ brains do not learn to recognize foreign-language phonemes off a videotape or audiotape—at all. They absolutely do learn from a live, human teacher. In fact, babies’ brains are so sensitive to live human speech that Kuhl was able to train American babies to recognize Mandarin phonemes (which they’d never heard before) from just twelve sessions with her Chinese graduate students, who sat in front of the kids for twenty minutes each session, playing with them while speaking in Mandarin. By the end of the month, three sessions per week, those babies’ brains were virtually as good at recognizing Mandarin phonemes as the brains of native-born Chinese infants who’d been hearing Mandarin their entire young lives.
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