by Todd Rose
Just as important, when parents resort to beatings over long periods of time, it diminishes their influence, leading to what psychologists call “avoidance behavior.” Humans, in other words, just like all other animals, naturally seek to avoid pain, and by extension, other people and situations that cause it. Thus, unfortunately, my dad’s parenting strategies pushed me away just when I needed him the most.
Beatings do more than damage relationships. Repeated corporal punishment can do lasting harm to a child’s developing brain, flooding the system with stress hormones that cause changes to critical brain structures involved in such important processes as social cognition, self-perception, and working memory. Sustained beatings can also make kids more aggressive and impair their capacity for self-control—a particularly poignant negative feedback loop, given that so many kids are initially punished for just those failures.
All this comes on top of the fact that physical punishment simply isn’t effective when the intent is to curb impulsive and absentminded behaviors that the child can’t control, such as my throwing the rock at the car, or forgetting to bring home my homework assignment. I’m not suggesting kids be allowed to get away with bad behavior—simply that the research clearly demonstrates that physical punishment is so often self-defeating. Honestly, at that point in my life, you could have chained me to a wall and whipped me and it wouldn’t have prevented most of the dumb things I was doing.
Pulling Me Closer
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As modern researchers might have predicted, therefore, by the time I started middle school I feared my father, avoided him as best I could, and had become all but incapable of listening to anything he had to say. To the best of my ability, I sided with my mother, the “good cop.” I don’t want to give the impression that Lyda never lost her temper—I’m fairly sure that kids like I was back then could bring out the child abuser in Mother Teresa. There were times, as I recall, when my mother would chase me through the house with a flyswatter. But these were exceptions, not the rule.
As I entered my teens, Lyda could see I’d fallen into a hole. My self-confidence was failing, after years of friends abandoning me for reasons I couldn’t figure out, and teachers telling me to try harder when I was already trying as hard as I thought I could. Once she realized this, my mother decided that she was going to show me as much love and appreciation and support as she possibly could, counterintuitive as it might have seemed.
Now, let me be clear—Lyda was not a pushover, not even close, and she had no intention of coddling me. She was smarter than that, and I’m convinced that, all else being equal, she would have been every bit as demanding of me as my father. She expected respect, discipline, and responsibility from her kids, just as he did, but she recognized in my case, and at that time, there were other ways to accomplish the goal.
She managed to see through my bluster to understand that what I needed the most—at that moment in my life—was a relationship in which I could feel genuinely safe and valued. So no matter how badly I behaved, she was determined to keep me close. Again, it did not mean “anything goes,” and I was punished when she felt I deserved it. But at the same time, she worked hard to control her anger, as best she could, and to find things in me to praise, from the questions I asked to my abilities on the basketball court.
Everything I’ve learned since then has confirmed Lyda’s wisdom. Today, I tell parents that the number-one thing to keep in mind, challenging as it may be sometimes, is to preserve a good relationship with your child. Set limits, sure. Teach responsibility—of course! But remember that parenting is more like chess than checkers. There are always multiple ways to achieve your goals, and you have to be adaptive, always thinking three steps ahead. Sometimes being as strict as a cop is the right thing to do, yet there will be times where giving your child unconditional love is the better strategy—rules be damned.
BIG IDEAS
Beware of well-wishers: Just because they care doesn’t mean they always know best—especially when it comes to nutritional milk shakes.
Sometimes the most resilient of square-peg kids will choose to be seen as rebels, rather than out of control or helpless.
Conventional school environments are a particularly bad match for kids with short attention spans and low thresholds for boredom.
The quality of a child’s working memory is a powerful predictor of his or her academic success.
The research is clear on physical punishment. Beatings and spankings don’t work well in changing children’s behavior, and can also risk lasting harm to a child’s relationship with his parents and his developing brain.
ACTION ITEMS
Stop hugging your kid, already. It’s starting to creep him out! Take a chapter off.
Repeat the mantra: smart parenting is like chess, not checkers.
Evaluate the demands in your child’s life (at home and at school)—and find at least one “cognitive unicycle” that may be sabotaging him or her. Then, if you can, get rid of it.
Investigate potential support organizations in your area (or nationally), and consider joining one if it seems appropriate for your goals and needs. My personal favorite is a San Francisco–based grassroots group called Parents Education Network (PEN). For other parts of the country, try Googling the words “support,” your hometown, and your child’s diagnosis, if there is one.
You can help a child with poor working memory learn coping strategies for school, and also guide his or her teacher to adopt some easy guidelines to prevent that deficit from becoming a handicap. For instance, encourage your child to write down his or her thoughts, rather than blurting them out. Suggest that the teacher use the blackboard for reminders about schedules and assignments, and also communicate with students by e-mail, or even Facebook.
3
Why Context Matters
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
—Albert Einstein
An Endless Variety of Brains
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More than two decades before scientists used magnetic resonance imaging to get a high-tech glimpse of the inside of a human brain, the novelist C. S. Lewis wrote that “what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what sort of person you are.”
Modern neuroscience has since confirmed this wisdom, establishing that there’s simply no such thing as an “average” brain. Each, instead, provides a unique way of perceiving and reacting to the world.
It may be hard, and even somewhat unsettling, to accept how much of your day-to-day experience of a given environment differs from that of others. The vast majority of those differences, of course, aren’t all that meaningful in terms of the impact they have on your life. I think of these differences as boring variability. For example, I can roll my tongue—a highly heritable trait. It would be useful for speaking Spanish, if I spoke Spanish. But it’s hardly a game-changer in my daily life. Also, and maybe this is a bit less boring, because it’s so weird, I actually enjoy the smell of skunk. Go ahead, make fun of me, but the scent takes me back to those mosquito-filled summer evenings as a kid in Hooper, and when experienced in my mind’s rearview mirror, at least a little of the chronic misery I felt all through those years dissipates.
The point is that each of us is variable in a startling number of ways, only some of which truly matter in our daily lives. These I call interesting variability. Some interesting variability is strongly biological, like my tendencies to be restless and impulsive. Other differences are acquired, such as how our hearing changes as we age. And by this I mean not merely the way older people need you to speak louder, but the way that, past a certain age, we can’t hear some sounds altogether, no matter at what volume. This is because most of us, starting in our twenties and thirties (or earlier if you attend too many rock concerts), lose tiny hairs in the inner ear that detect high-frequency noises. Most people who are more than for
ty years old can’t hear anything above 15 kilohertz. (In recent years, some enterprising firms have exploited this difference, selling gadgets that play high-frequency, piercing noise in malls, to shoo away loitering teens. I guess the idea is that if you can hear high frequencies, you probably can’t afford to shop.)
Beyond these more obvious differences are others, less visible and more elusive, that matter mightily when it comes to how we learn. Each of us differs, for instance, in the way that we perceive, process, and retain information, in how we organize and express our thoughts, and in the kinds of things that lead us to engage with information or new ideas. Some of these differences have become familiar to us as “disabilities.” Unfortunately, this way of thinking has led to a far too narrow, and purely negative, view of variability—a view that ignores the important role of context. Few modern parents, for instance, would be cheered by the news that their child had been diagnosed with dyslexia, a condition affecting perception, which interferes with reading and writing. But what if the story weren’t so simple? For instance, what if I told you that, at least in some contexts, neurological differences that are linked to dyslexia can also turn out to be a coveted professional advantage in science?
The Stargazers’ Trade-offs
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In 2008, I joined a research team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics studying a group of talented astrophysicists from all over the world. Based on a theory that we had published about potential visual strengths among people diagnosed with dyslexia, and armed with a grant from the National Science Foundation, we studied a group of astrophysicists, half of them with and half without dyslexia, on a range of tasks that included not only visual and reading measures, but also visual tasks that were central to being an astrophysicist—among them, the detection of black holes. Although preliminary at the time of this writing, the results of the study were interesting, to say the least. Just as we’d hypothesized, the scientists with reading impairments were, as a group, better at detecting black holes than their unimpaired peers.
Our hypothesis about why at least some scientists with dyslexia (this isn’t, as I’ll explain later, a universal advantage) would have this edge had to do with very subtle brain differences, which among other things produce better peripheral vision—not a lot, mind you, but enough to make it interesting. Here’s why: As peripheral vision gets better, it can interfere with reading and attention, since it usually makes you more sensitive to distracting stimuli in the environment. And in fact, that’s exactly what we saw with our group of scientists. Even as they were seriously impaired in terms of their focused attention and their ability to read, they performed strongly on tasks in which peripheral vision was valuable.
Our study is one of a growing number of scientific attempts to investigate a flip side of a learning “disability.” But here’s one caveat before we move on: For the purposes of testing our theory, this research involved some extraordinary individuals. Neither my colleagues nor I would go so far as to say that everyone with dyslexia has superior peripheral vision—they don’t, because reading is a complex skill, and there will be many ways that someone can be impaired. Nor would we call dyslexia or similar conditions a “gift.” That’s just as misleading as calling it a “disability,” since it ignores the role of context.
To paraphrase Shakespeare, nothing biological is either good or bad, but context makes it so. It’s much better, therefore, to think about variability in terms of trade-offs. For most types of variability, in fact, I can imagine at least one context in which it’s problematic and one in which it’s beneficial. For instance, for most scientists in our study, the differences that made them exceptional in their field were a major source of misery all through school. As I interviewed them, I was repeatedly shocked by the seemingly fresh sorrow of their memories of being punished by teachers who implied they were lazy, and of being bullied and teased by peers. Once their context changed, however, what had seemed a disability became an asset. Our study, therefore, might serve as a reminder of all the potentially underutilized resources we waste when we unilaterally deem differences disabilities. Context matters!
Good News About Novelty-Seeking
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A similar “two sides of the same coin” rule applies to another interesting variability, which for me is much closer to home: the chronic, itchy restlessness that goes by the clinical name of “novelty-seeking.” The trait is commonly observed in children diagnosed with ADHD and has a strong genetic basis, involving a gene variation (called an allele) that scientists refer to as DRD4-7R. Novelty-seeking goes hand in hand with that low threshold for boredom I told you about in chapter 2. Just as I struggle to stay interested when life turns routine, I’m also way more likely than others I know to be drawn to new experiences. So what does this particular interesting variability mean? Just as in the case of those dyslexic astrophysicists, the answer is: it depends.
Now, psychologists who have made it their business to worry about kids like I used to be have spent considerable time and energy demonstrating the alarming risks of this variability. And it’s not as if they lack reasons to fret. Researchers have consistently linked novelty-seeking with risky behaviors including gambling and abuse of drugs and alcohol, to name only a few. Consequently, any well-informed modern parent might reasonably feel some distress to hear that little Johnny or Julie is a “novelty-seeker.”
But wouldn’t that be a pity? Because the research also clearly shows that novelty-seeking is an important source of curiosity, a trait most parents should want to encourage in their children. Leaving aside what it did to the cat, curiosity has been shown to be a critical component of intelligence, academic and professional success, and healthy relationships, among other virtues and desirable outcomes. One scientific paper called curiosity “the wick in the candle of learning” because of the way it activates the brain’s reward system, prompting a burst of dopamine (that neurotransmitter I told you about in chapter 1) to spur the formation of memories. A curious nature represents the same interesting variability, in other words, that could drive a kid to be a heroin addict, a skydiver, or a successful scientist.
So, as we think about novelty-seeking from our complex-systems viewpoint, we realize that of course we should keep a close eye on Johnny’s and Julie’s choices of after-school activities, especially if he or she is a born risk-taker. Yet we also don’t want to ignore or cut off the enormous potential upside of that novelty-seeking trait, which we risk doing when we see it only as a problem. That’s how we end up with a mind-set of playing not to lose, rather than playing to win.
I say this as someone who was quite often punished for my curiosity as a child, although never, thank goodness, by my parents, who knew better. As best as I can recall, the first time this happened to me was when I was just ten years old. My Sunday school teacher had just finished explaining to us how God wants us to love everyone, regardless of how “bad” they might be. Even as a kid, this struck me as odd, and since we’d also been told that the Devil was once an angel who had “gone bad,” I came up with what I felt was the logical next question: Does that mean we should also love the Devil?
I honestly hadn’t intended to provoke my teacher, but he was provoked all the same. He slapped my face, right in front of the rest of the class, saying, “I guess it’s no surprise that we can add blasphemy to your list of sins, Todd.” For my teacher, my curiosity was nothing less than evil.
That slap may have deterred my curiosity for a while, but about three years later I piped up again, this time inciting the wrath of my eighth-grade algebra teacher. For months in that class I’d been my usual rebellious, low-motivated self, a reliable pain in the neck. But then came an assignment that caught my imagination, as I became fascinated by the idea of a variable—the notion that problems could have more than one answer. At home that night, I put aside the formula my teacher had given us to solve our homework problem set and devised my own algorithm, which happened to solve all the problems o
n our worksheet. I was so thrilled about my discovery that I showed it to my dad, who was talented in math. He agreed that it seemed to work, even though it wasn’t a typical approach, and he suggested I show my teacher.
Alas, my teacher didn’t share my dad’s enthusiasm when I showed him my discovery the following morning.
“It’s not right. It doesn’t work,” he said, shoving the paper aside without a glance in my direction.
I argued that, in fact, it was right—after all, half the answers were provided in the textbook, and the algorithm had worked on them all.
“Todd, go sit down now. It’s wrong,” he said.
Acting on impulse—again—I refused to walk away. Conscious that my heartbeat was accelerating, I told him, in what I’m sure was a less-than-respectful tone, that he obviously didn’t understand math. What had started as a quiet conversation escalated into a shouting match and ended with me sitting in detention. Five minutes after the class ended, my teacher marched into the detention room, approached my desk, and slammed down my worksheet, on which he’d written a new problem, for which my algorithm did not work.
“Don’t ever question me in front of my class again,” he said, and turned and walked away.
Of course my teacher was right, and I was wrong … about the algorithm. But I’d daresay he was terribly wrong about the broader question of how to bring out the best in his students.
Luckily for me, not all my teachers were threatened, or even annoyed by my inquisitiveness. In fact, my best classroom memory from high school is of the encouragement I got in an Advanced Placement history class I managed to enroll in during my sophomore year in high school. (I had begged into the class, not because I loved history, at first, but because I heard the teacher didn’t give tests.) My teacher, an expert in the pre-glasnost Soviet Union, routinely reminded us that studying history wasn’t about memorizing dates, but rather about probing critically into the complex relationships at play during the time in question to learn why things happened as they did. She loved it when I played the contrarian, asking questions devoid of the knee-jerk Soviet-bashing view so popular at that time. Of course, some of the details are fuzzy, but I clearly remember her smiling response after I followed her lead and connected some dots between a particular food supply problem and a military conflict. She walked over to me and literally shook my hand, saying, “Now that’s what it means to think historically!” From that point on, I was hooked, and tried my best—at least in her classroom.