by Todd Rose
Thinking Makes It So
* * *
Many years later, as a researcher studying the mechanics of learning, I realized what a powerful advantage I’d had that day at the school door. The tide of my teachers’ expectations was poised to carry me to greatness, if only I didn’t swim against it.
In recent decades, scientists have offered plenty of evidence to suggest that Hamlet’s famous insight—that “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”—can apply to the potentially transformative power of other people’s expectations about you. The psychologist Robert Rosenthal, in particular, has produced such convincing evidence of this phenomenon that today it is sometimes referred to as “the Rosenthal effect.” He began, as scientists so often do, with rats.
In a study published in 1963, Rosenthal, then a professor at Harvard, assigned several lab rats to a group of his students, telling the students, falsely, that the rats, who were selected at random, had been specially bred for high intelligence. He next assigned another group of rats to another group of students, saying, also falsely, that those animals had been bred for dullness.
The students trained their rats to perform various routine tasks, such as making their way through mazes, and, eventually, just as Rosenthal had expected, the students who had been assigned the supposedly smarter rats reported significantly faster learning times.
Rosenthal next conducted a similar but far more daring experiment, this time involving elementary-school children. With the permission of school administrators in an unnamed, predominantly low-income community in the San Francisco Bay area, he and his colleagues gave students a test, which they later told teachers had revealed that 20 percent of the students were showing “unusual potential for intellectual growth” and could be expected to “bloom” academically by the end of the year. As with the rats, this statement was untrue. Yet, eight years later, when the researchers checked back, the children who had been labeled as ready to bloom had indeed shown a markedly greater increase in performance than those who were not singled out. Rosenthal called this dynamic “the Pygmalion effect,” named after the sculptor who, in Greek myth, fell in love with one of his statues. Like Pygmalion, the teachers idealized their charges, and their high hopes became self-fulfilling prophecies.
From my very first week of kindergarten, I was all set to fulfill my teachers’ and my parents’ hopes, and may well have done just that had it not been for two factors that ultimately proved even more powerful than expectations: my extraordinarily restless disposition and an environment with which I was destined to clash.
A Context of Conformity
* * *
Hooper, the small, rural town where I grew up, has long held a place on the far end of the spectrum of traditional Mormon values. Lying just a few miles east of the Great Salt Lake, with a view of the jagged tips of the Wasatch Mountains, it was known as Muskrat Springs for several decades after Brigham Young and his followers first arrived in the state from Illinois, to raise cattle and crops, in the mid-nineteenth century. Today the overwhelming majority of its few thousand residents are proud members of both the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Republican Party. (When Ronald Reagan came to Utah in 1982, he drew a crowd of twenty-five thousand to our local park, where he spoke on a podium decorated with a wagon wheel. I was eight years old then and remember running along the edge of the crowd, wearing my free T-shirt that said, “I Had Lunch with Ronnie.”) All through my childhood, people put on their best clothes for church on Sunday and stayed dressed up most of the day.
My parents moved to Hooper from the comparatively booming metropolis of nearby Ogden in 1979. My father paid for our small, two-story house with a Farmers Home Administration loan, and my mom grew cucumbers, beans, and corn in the backyard.
Fourteen years later, when my dad could finally afford a bigger house in a livelier neighborhood, my mother made one of her memorable comments. “I want a place with more diversity,” she said. “And I don’t want to be the diversity.” What I’m sure she meant was that, from the first, my family had felt like visitors rather than residents in Hooper, a situation that only grew more obvious and awkward over time. Hooper was populated by several families who had lived there as far back as anyone could remember, and to my mother, it seemed as if every kid on the block was someone’s cousin, making it extra hard for her children to fit in. My mother, as I’ve mentioned, was also several degrees more outspoken than most other women in town. Still, what eventually made us pariahs was my own increasingly notorious record as the neighborhood miscreant.
While there was judgment aplenty, however, there were also quite a few upsides to growing up in Hooper for a kid prone to trouble. For starters, it was an extraordinarily safe place—serious crime was all but unheard-of, and most people felt so secure that they routinely left their doors unlocked. Granted, I took some advantage of this particular show of faith, during a phase in which I engaged in some petty breaking-and-entering. But on the whole, I was also protected from several varieties of fear and temptation. I could trust, for instance, that no matter how badly I behaved, my parents would likely stay together. They were both followers of the Mormon faith, which considers marriages binding both on earth and in heaven. And no matter how terribly I treated my siblings, I knew we would stand by each other when it mattered. Perhaps most importantly, throughout my childhood, neither alcohol nor drugs were easily available, nor commonly discussed, reducing risks that might easily have proved too much for me. In fact, when an outsider bought the local store, which was across the street from the elementary school, and had the cluelessness to apply for a liquor license, neighborhood leaders promptly organized a ballot initiative to prevent it.
What made Hooper work so well for most of its residents, in other words, was that very homogeneity that made my white-bread family seem “diverse,” in addition to its inhabitants’ uncompromising obedience to social norms and religious authority. This combination provided Hooper’s residents with structure, predictability, and safety. It also made my failure there inevitable.
Labeled
* * *
In my thirteenth year—that infamous year that encompassed both my defeat in the Snickers bar poetry contest and my stink bombs in the art class—our family’s pediatrician gave my nonconformity a name: attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. ADHD is not only one of the most prevalent of childhood mental disorders, but also a leading cause of kids being labeled “troublemakers.” Yet despite many decades of well-focused research, it’s surprising how often kids who have this label are misunderstood.
The primary characteristics of ADHD include restlessness, forgetfulness, impulsivity, and inattention—traits that most people, and particularly young males, exhibit from time to time, yet which, when severe, can prevent a child from learning, or at least from learning anything in a traditional schoolroom. Scientists have found that many ADHD traits may emerge from a difference with the way a person’s brain processes dopamine, an important neurotransmitter or “chemical messenger” that helps alert people to danger and rewards. In other words, dopamine is a motivator, helping us to decide which of the many stimuli that we can attend to at any given time most deserve our attention. Too little of it can lead to difficulty in sustaining attention to matters a person finds uninteresting or irrelevant. And indeed, most people who meet the criteria for ADHD usually have an extremely low tolerance for boredom. Alas, this neurological variability is usually perceived as a character deficit.
It’s not as if we restless types enjoy being bored, after all: boredom is in fact a downright painful mental state that is closely related to anxiety. Brain research has demonstrated that, contrary to popular assumption, boredom isn’t an inactive mind. In fact, a bored brain is quite busy, seeking stimulation wherever it can find it, sometimes in highly creative and positive ways (to the extent those avenues are available), and also sometimes through risky or provocative behavior such as drug abuse, or, as in my case, provo
king my siblings and teachers.
Now, lest you get the impression that I’m entirely against the use of diagnostic “labels,” I’m not—so long as they are kept in proper perspective, which includes understanding what they do and do not tell you about your child. At their best, diagnoses can serve useful purposes, such as getting families to think more seriously about their children’s highly variable brains, and, ideally, how to make the most of their strengths while minimizing their weaknesses (although when I say “ideally,” I mean, that, alas, this all too rarely actually happens). Diagnoses—labels—also help connect people with resources that may often be useful. My caveats are reserved for those all-too-common situations in which parents, teachers, and medical professionals are quick to label someone as “disordered” (whatever that means) when the real problem is a mismatch between a child and a given environment. When the student might in fact function perfectly well in a better school, how fair is it to characterize him or her as defective?
The strategic mistake here boils down to something scientists refer to as a “single-factor fallacy”—the mistaken idea that a problem (such as a delinquent child) can be explained by just one answer. The American physicist Richard Feynman, one of my heroes, once said “I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.” Accordingly, obtaining a diagnosis for a child isn’t the same as understanding that child’s predicament. Not even close. You may recall from the Prologue that the whole point of complex systems is that they are, indeed, complex, with many variables interacting to produce dramatically different outcomes. This explains both why children diagnosed with behavioral and learning disorders can, just like other kids, have startlingly different futures, and why it’s misguided to assume that you simply need to “fix” the child, and everything will be fine.
The answers to understanding and engaging a square-peg student will never be that simple, partly for this important reason: a diagnosis of ADHD won’t tell you anything about a child’s potential, including how intelligent he or she might be. For example, there’s abundant research to show that ADHD symptoms, such as a distractibility and impulsivity, are found in people of all levels of intelligence. In fact, a rather high percentage of so-called gifted children—as many as one in six—also meet the criteria for one or more diagnosable learning challenges.
Snakes and Snails
* * *
My grade school environment was a bad match not only for my biological tendencies, but also for my gender, as an increasing amount of research has shown. Of course, school is not an ideal place for girls—not by a long shot—and there are many long-standing gender-specific issues that still need to be addressed for girls to reach their full potential. At the same time, school-age boys, as it turns out, are far more likely to be medicated for attention and learning differences, and to be held back or disciplined for inappropriate behavior. Since the 1980s, boys have trailed girls in reading, writing, grades, test scores, and overall motivation, with increasingly serious effects on their future earning capacity. A recent report went so far as to predict that men will receive less than 40 percent of U.S. college diplomas in 2019, down from 61 percent in 1966.
So, to sum up, there were two major-league strikes against me in school by the time I landed in seventh grade: I was diagnosed with ADHD, and I was a boy. Making matters even worse by that seventh-grade year was that I was an adolescent boy. Adolescent boys have filled the ranks of troublemakers throughout history. As Leo Tolstoy wrote, “I have read somewhere that children from 12 to 14 years of age … are singularly inclined to arson and even murder. As I look back upon my boyhood, I can quite appreciate the possibility of the most frightful crime being committed without object or intent to injure but just because—out of curiosity, or to satisfy an unconscious craving for action.”
Becoming Cain
* * *
Call me precocious, but Tolstoy’s description of the adolescent male would have applied to me roughly by the age of three. I’m thinking in particular about the time when I pushed my little sister, Kim, out of our second-story window, purportedly to see if she could fly.
The backstory was that I was already sick and tired of hearing how my calm, compliant little sister, who always slept through the night and never got into trouble, was Mommy’s precious “angel”—sent from heaven, as I remember her crooning, to make her life easier. I’d learned about “real” angels at church, which I guess helps explain the irresistible impulse that took hold of me one afternoon when my mother was busy cooking dinner and I spotted Kim leaning on the window screen.
A minute later, I ran to the kitchen, shouting to my mother: “Guess what? Kim doesn’t have wings!”
This would be one of the first of what turned out to be a frankly hair-raising number of narrow escapes by the time I reached young adulthood. By only just a few inches, Kim missed hitting the concrete pavement below. Instead she landed in the shrubbery, scratched but intact. What might have been a horrifying event that would have changed all of our lives forever miraculously played out instead as a funny story that we still tell each other at family reunions.
Another of our family’s best-loved tales also involves me and Kim. We were both still in preschool, and, in a highly unusual instance, were left unsupervised one afternoon long enough for me to fetch the spray paint I’d seen in our garage and spray stick-figure drawings all over our house’s concrete foundation in the backyard. I’d assumed it would all wash away with the garden hose, but when it didn’t, I thought fast, remembering how Kim always drew little circles for kneecaps on her figures. I filled them in on mine just in time before my mother appeared and Kim took the fall. Several years would pass before I confessed to the crime to my parents, who had of course figured it all out anyway by then.
These antics were rapidly earning me a reputation in my extended family and our tight-knit neighborhood in Hooper, where everyone was closely involved in everyone else’s business. My many aunts and uncles were soon referring to me as “Cain.” Long before I started grade school, in other words, I was acquiring a reputation that would dog me for nearly two decades, as I left in my wake a broad swath of misunderstandings, hurt feelings, school failures, and bodily harm.
As I’ve gradually come to realize, however, it could have been much worse. Worn-out, exasperated, and inexperienced as my mother was, as a twenty-three-year-old high-school dropout consumed by caring for several small children, she also brought her own unique disposition to the mix: a blend of independence, imagination, and passion that ultimately led to her boldly out-of-the-box way of parenting me. Almost as if she were drawing from the study of complex systems, she in time came to appreciate that even as I was so often branded a troublemaker, and even as I was most certainly contributing to that reputation, the causes of the trouble I got into routinely extended beyond my control. Through the years, she had to learn and grow and be much more discerning than the average parent about just how much power she could wield over my behavior, and when she needed to look elsewhere in my environment. Nor, at least after the first few years, did she take my bad behavior as a personal indictment, which in particular, distinguished her as well ahead of her time.
Nature, Nurture, and Blaming the Moms
* * *
This takes some explaining. In the 1970s, when my mother was starting her family, moms of kids with any number of differences and challenges were under terrible fire. Psychologists preached, and most people believed, that parents—meaning moms—were the major cause of homosexuality, autism, schizophrenia, and the kinds of behavioral problems that might, for example, predispose a toddler to push his little sister out a window.
“If your child was gay, that meant you were overbearing; if he was always misbehaving, it meant that you weren’t disciplining him enough,” my mother has since recalled. “And it was all, all, aimed at the moms. Nothing stuck to the dads: they were Teflon-coated.”
The judgment was often as heartless as it wa
s unscientific: in the 1950s, the famous psychologist and author Bruno Bettelheim championed the notion that cold and withdrawn “refrigerator mothers” were responsible for their children’s autism. Bettelheim went so far as to compare these mostly exhausted and overwhelmed parents to Nazi concentration camp guards.
No wonder, nearly two decades later, that so many mothers were vastly relieved when the pendulum swung sharply in the other direction. After years of breakthrough findings about genetic influences on behavior, a new creed of biological determinism all but absolved parents of responsibility for shaping their children’s future and held out the hope that scientists would one day find a single gene for each learning difference, from dyslexia to ADHD.
The truth, of course, falls somewhere in between these two extremes.
The work of behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin, regarded as one of the hundred most eminent psychologists of our era, in my view best conveys that complicated middle road, based on his studies of data involving some fifteen thousand sets of twins. Plomin has shown that when it comes to learning and behavioral differences (including what we now call “disorders”), there’s no one gene that causes any of them. Rather, a vast assortment of genes that may predispose a child toward such a difference get turned on or off as they interact with a unique (Plomin coined the term “nonshared”) family and social environment. Each sibling, he posits, grows up in an essentially different family, which explains why each grows up to be such a different adult. Rather than talk about “nature or nurture,” Plomin insists on the phrase “nature and nurture.”