by Todd Rose
This modern model—that learning and behavioral differences result from an interaction between genetic predispositions and environments—offers parents of children like I was a real hope that we will be able to redirect our kids from paths that create disability and disorder. Because so many genes are involved, each with only a tiny individual impact, it is clear that genetic engineering can’t be the solution. So, while neuroscience and genetics will continue to inform our understanding of differences, most of the work we need to do must be in influencing environments, such as the ways that parents raise their kids, and teachers teach them.
There are many examples of the power of this perspective, but for now I’ll give you just one. In 2004, Terrie Moffitt, a professor at King’s College in London and a colleague of Robert Plomin, reported on a study of more than 2,200 five-year-old twins, half of whom had low birth weight, a common precursor to a diagnosis of ADHD. Moffitt and her colleagues found that the low-birth-weight babies who had more warm and loving relationships with their mothers were less likely to be described as having ADHD symptoms by parents and teachers years later. In other words, a warm, accepting, positive environment helped “buffer” these vulnerable children from the kinds of ADHD-like characteristics to which they were predisposed by genetic and intra-uterine influences.
Moffitt’s report, published in the Journal of Counseling and Clinical Psychology, provoked a surprisingly angry reaction from more biology-centered researchers, including a scathing public letter by the ADHD expert psychiatrist Russell Barkley, who questioned Moffitt’s methods and complained that her study “blames the mother.”
Moffitt and her colleagues defended the research at the time yet eventually decided the risks of more controversy outweighed the benefits of pursuing it. I find that a pity. Setting aside my discomfort, as a scientist, at seeing research effectively censored, I believe parents urgently need more of just this kind of help in alerting them to ways they can modify their children’s environments when called for by biological predispositions.
Restorative Niches
* * *
I was blessed that my mother avoided tilting to either extreme during the nature-nurture pendulum swings of her time. She neither punished me unmercifully, yet nor did she ever surrender her power. Instead she hung in with me through a series of embarrassments and frustrations, trying to guide me as best she could, while not taking my screw-ups personally.
In recent years, I’ve often asked my mom how she came by her self-confidence. Her answer always includes a reference to her faith. “I read the Bible in the afternoons while my kids took naps,” she says. “This helped me feel peace, which I needed once they woke up!” She says her faith gave her a perspective that allowed her to trust her own instincts and that the combination of the two fortified her in the face of all the criticism that came her way.
Beyond faith, my mom also relied on traditional comforts to help pull her through. For example, when my siblings and I were small, my mother unfailingly showed up for a thrice-weekly, 5:30 a.m. aerobics class, while the rest of the family slept. There she not only got exercise but also routinely socialized with a group of her like-minded friends—a practice social scientists recommend as a boost for well-being. She also talked on the phone several times a week to her least judgmental sister, whom I’ll call Jane. Such habits constitute what my colleague Brian Little, who studies human flourishing, has described as “restorative niches,” and I’m sure they helped keep my mother sane through the many trials I obliged her to endure over the next decade and more.
BIG IDEAS
Learning differences, temperament, and other human characteristics are the product of neither nature nor nurture alone, but of a complex dynamic of the two.
As the Rosenthal effect demonstrates, performance can be dramatically influenced by the expectations of others (including parents and teachers). Keep this in mind and never let a label diminish what you think your child is capable of accomplishing.
ADHD, like other learning and behavioral “disorders,” remains a vexingly vague diagnosis, and it is most helpful when viewed as a starting point (not a solution) for understanding your child’s unique strengths and weaknesses, and finding appropriate support.
Mothers do not “cause” schizophrenia, homosexuality, autism, or ADHD. But neither are these or any other human conditions purely caused by genes. A child’s environment, including his or her parenting, will always strongly influence his or her future.
ACTION ITEMS
Keep hugging your kid.
Don’t ever leave curious, hyperactive, impulsive toddlers unsupervised near younger sisters, open windows, and/or bottles of barbiturates.
Forget what you’ve heard about biological determinism. Of course, biology matters, but parents and teachers can influence a child’s development in many subtle, positive, and important ways.
Make sure to find your own “restorative niches”—if possible including regular doses of exercise and friendship. They’re useful for everyone, but downright essential for parents of struggling square-peg kids.
2
Smart Criminal
“We are all special cases.”
—Albert Camus
Out of Control
* * *
“What were you thinking?” I heard my dad yell from the other side of our front lawn, on what until just a minute earlier had been a peaceful, muggy summer night.
I can still hear the anger and surprise in his voice, and still feel the hot shame creeping up my neck. I was nine years old, and this felt like the moment my identity was sealed: I was, and always would be, a hopeless square peg.
My mom and dad had been barbecuing dinner for a dozen or so aunts and uncles and cousins. We kids were hanging around on the sidewalk, swatting mosquitoes, when for some reason, which may have boiled down to simple boredom, I picked up a rock and threw it at a passing car.
Just as when I threw those stink bombs four years later, there was no good reason for what I did, and plenty of good reasons not to have done it. I’d never before met the driver of the rust-colored car—a dark-haired man about my dad’s age. Nor was I angry about anything in particular at the time, at least that I can recall. Throwing that rock just seemed like the thing I had to do.
Maybe I thought it would be funny. Back then, I thought a lot of things were funny that most other people found simply annoying. According to some researchers, I suppose I was desperately seeking stimulation—that, and I was also the kind of kid who, even after I realized something wasn’t that great an idea after all, had a lot of trouble putting on the brakes.
In some contexts, this generally hastier MO can be an advantage. Athletes, for instance, hone their reaction times on purpose. Artists can also benefit. Consider an improv actor on a stage, on the spot to come up with material. He’ll never hit the high notes if his mental brakes are too efficient, making him censor his wildest ideas.
In the context of Hooper, however, my impulsivity offered no boon. More and more, in fact, and even within my extended family, I was being shunned because of it. I wasn’t athletic or creative back then: I was simply annoying.
I used to make a practice, for example, of eating every single Popsicle my mom brought home before anyone else could get to them. I also used to twist my brothers’ nipples when they tried to slip past me in the hallways. Sometimes when I caught them, I’d pin them on their backs as I let a stream of spit slowly dribble from my lips, so that if they moved the least bit, they’d get slimed.
My four siblings and I are the best of friends today, yet there are few family reunions that don’t include an hour or so of them sitting around telling stories about all the awful things I used to do to them. Among my most notorious deeds is the time I dragged my brother Doug out of the shower one winter night and locked him, naked, in the snow outside our front door. I remember that well, except for the part about why I did it. There was also a summer day at the neighborhood park when it struck me how hilarious
it would be to pull down my pants and pee down the slide. So that’s what I did, after which neither I nor any of the Rose kids was ever allowed back.
My point here is that long before I reached my teens, I’d morphed from a bright but hyperactive child into an increasingly unpopular pest. What was once seen as my harmless childhood quirkiness had come to be viewed as permanently bad character.
Who needed more proof that I was a bad seed than my throwing the rock at that stranger’s car?
Tsk-tsking away, my aunts and uncles gathered around the scene of the crime like gnats, as the driver, who’d swerved to the curb, jumped out to inspect the small new dent on the passenger side of his car.
Before I could answer my father—and what would I have said, given that the point is that I wasn’t thinking?—I heard my mom’s sister, Betty, pipe up, with her way of addressing everyone and no one in particular: “At least my kids can control themselves.”
Aunt Betty has several children of her own, and she was right about one thing: as far back as I can remember, they have always been much better behaved than I. Still, it wasn’t until that moment that I fully grasped the point that she had already made on several previous occasions, which was that I really couldn’t control myself. I didn’t want to be in trouble all the time, but somehow I kept doing things that got me there.
Making matters worse was my increasing tendency to dig in my heels whenever I got caught. I did that again on the night of the barbecue. Rather than apologize for throwing that rock, I turned to my dad, and for some crazy reason coolly replied, “Actually, I was trying to hit his window—but I missed.”
Hearing this, Aunt Betty raised her eyebrows at my mother, while the car owner walked up huffily to my father.
“Sir, your child is a delinquent,” he sputtered, after which he turned around, got back in his car, and sped off.
Now, anyone listening to all of this might have fairly assumed that I was not only a bad kid, and maybe not that bright, after all, but also intent on self-destruction. What in the world would make a boy invite the world’s bad opinion like that?
A Rebel by Choice
* * *
It has taken me many years to understand my bad attitude then, but here’s what I eventually realized: I was terrified—less by any threat of punishment than by the frightening possibility of some truth in Aunt Betty’s take on me: that I really couldn’t control my own hands. If that were true, I’d be a spastic, a retard, and all the other terrible things kids were already calling me at school.
Okay, it’s not like I hadn’t given them some cause. I may never, for instance, live down the time, in a tenth-grade basketball game, that I scored the winning point—for the other team. That infamous occasion was only the most dramatic example of the kinds of weird screw-ups in which I was constantly involved. Every day, and sometimes many times a day, I’d do something I’d later regret. In the classroom, for instance, I could always be counted on to blurt out often-irrelevant comments and wisecracks alike, a habit both my teacher and classmates found obnoxious.
Only much later did I understand that I did this not only because I’m impulsive, but also because I have exceedingly poor short-term, or “working” memory.
As it turns out, working memory—the ability to hold information temporarily in your mind while you’re doing something else—is hugely important in all dimensions of your life. Research has shown that it is one of the most important predictors of academic achievement, which starts to make sense when you consider how you need to retain information even for the simplest mathematical problems (that’s 21; so put down the 1, carry the 2 …). Bad news for me, since as tests would later show, I rank somewhere near the bottom second percentile for all Americans in working memory.
My limited working memory capacity got me on the wrong track from my earliest years in school, and kept me there; yet today I’m convinced that it needn’t really be such a huge academic liability. By not understanding how much people vary in their working memory, teachers today force kids constantly to jump through needless hoops, much as if they were obliging their students to ride unicycles between classes. Were that the case, a kid who was a budding genius at math but hopelessly uncoordinated might never be able to get to his class and show what he could do.
While, of course, few teachers would seriously consider such a system, many require the cognitive equivalent, with unnecessary rules that often create learning problems where none had existed. It’s more the pity, since schools could easily make many simple changes to get rid of those cognitive unicycles and stop squandering kids’ precious memory capacity.
One such easy step would be to routinely make sure that both class schedules and the goal of any exercise being worked on at the time are always available to students on the blackboard, thereby reducing the information they need to hold in their minds. Another (albeit more expensive) step would be to provide two sets of textbooks, so kids can keep one set at home and not have to remember to bring them back and forth. Teachers can also learn to avoid issuing unnecessary multiple-step instructions (“Take out your books; turn to page forty-three, and underline the paragraph that starts with …”).
Poor working memory does more than threaten academic success; it’s also terrible for social relationships. I was so unskillful at the basic art of following conversations—trying to listen to what was being said, while keeping in mind what I wanted to say—that I’d often strike others as if I didn’t care what they had on their minds. I’d blurt things out, interrupting schoolmates and teachers during class, out of uncontrollable anxiety that if I didn’t, I’d forget it.
My working memory difficulties made me unreliable, spoiling people’s trust in me again and again. I’d make a new friend, but then forget some crucial detail about that person and seem like I didn’t care. I’d spend hours doing homework, but then forget to bring it to school. I constantly lost homework assignments, field trip forms, sweaters, gym clothes, and lunch boxes. In return, my parents, who had so little extra cash to replace all these items, lost their patience.
Whenever I wasn’t caught red-handed at some impulsive prank or act of unintentional forgetfulness, I’d do my best to cover my tracks, no matter how much I had to lie. But at some point, quite possibly on the night I threw that rock, I made a decision. I’d “own” my screw-ups and crimes, for the simple reason that other people’s annoyance and even contempt was much better than their pity and rejection. Playing the outlaw at least made me feel I had some control.
Anything but Helpless
* * *
Only much later, after I went to school and studied psychology, did I come to appreciate the perverse wisdom of my choice, given what seemed like my limited options. By the age of nine, I’d had enough experience out in the world to feel like a chronic failure, and so little experience of being in control of my behavior that I was dangerously close to falling into a mental trap psychologists call “learned helplessness.” This condition is a poignant example of the kind of negative feedback loop I told you about at the start of this book, and about which I will have a lot more to say in future chapters, in which a negative outcome leads to a negative response, and so on, in an excruciatingly vicious cycle that can lead to a cascade of problems.
The now-formidable body of research on learned helplessness began in the 1960s when the psychologist Martin Seligman, then at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted a series of experiments with dogs. In one of the trials, he and his colleagues compared the reactions of two groups of dogs that were given painful electric shocks. One group was able to end the shocks by pressing a lever, but the other dogs’ levers didn’t have any effect. As it turned out, the dogs that were able to control their experience escaped any lasting psychological harm, but the dogs that were helpless in the face of those arbitrary punishments turned passive. They lay down on the floor of the electrified cage and took the shocks, even when moving two feet would end them.
Seligman would later propose tha
t depressed people might be helped by being carefully guided through experiences in which they learned to exert increasing control over their environments, reversing their past experience. And as other researchers confirmed his findings in different studies, he expanded his message to advise parents that providing children with early experiences teaching them that they have the power to influence their world can help inoculate them against depression in later life.
My own early experiences, combined with what I’ve learned from this line of research, have convinced me that many a child’s choice of “bad” behavior over surrendering to powerlessness might well be a healthy survival tactic—and that if we as adults can understand it as such, we can judge less and help a lot more. Now, I don’t mean that we should ignore bad behavior—of course we shouldn’t—but short-term punishment of the behavior will never be more effective than tactics based on an understanding of the reason for that behavior. As it is, sadly, misguided efforts by kids to fight against their rising sense of helplessness are most often misunderstood and simply punished.
For several weeks after my starring role at the barbecue, Aunt Betty lobbied my mother to take me to a psychiatrist. “I don’t mean to tell you what to do,” she lectured. “But I would seriously think about it. It may not be Todd’s fault that he is that way.”
While this wasn’t actually a bad idea, my mom struggled to put it out of her mind as long as she could. For one thing, it was clear that her sister’s comment wasn’t meant to be helpful, but more like her way of pouring salt on a wound. That aside, at the time my mother didn’t see how she could possibly afford therapy. Once I started middle school a few years later, however, and my mom could see how I was failing to cope with the increasing homework load and social pressures, she started to save up money and ask around for referrals. At very least, she would see if I qualified for a diagnosis.