by Todd Rose
She wasn’t entirely wrong about that. I’ve already mentioned my little problem with impulsivity, and back then, especially, parties reliably revved me up. I was famous for doing things like blowing out candles on other kids’ birthday cakes, or blurting out the contents of a present before it was opened, and pounding other kids on their backs in what always seemed to me like a hearty greeting, but which some kids claimed actually hurt them. Many times, after I left a playmate’s house, coveted toys would be missing. Eventually, people of all ages took to cringing when they saw me show up at social events. At twelve, as I ran through the front door of the church social hall, to attend the bishop’s wife’s fancy “etiquette dinner” to teach us kids some table manners, the hostess literally grabbed me by the collar as if she were a mafia thug and pushed me up against the wall, hissing, “You are not going to ruin this for me, do you understand, Todd?”
As best I can recall, she succeeded in scaring me straight—for that night. But within days I was back in trouble again. I had so few friends that I would do just about anything to get attention, which of course nearly always backfired. At the annual performance by my middle school choir, I scrambled onstage just before the curtain went up to join four preselected soloists. I hadn’t been preselected, because I couldn’t sing, a deficit all of my choir-mates had witnessed. “What are you doing?” the kid next to me whispered as the curtain went up. “Mr. Harkness tapped me to go!” I lied. We continued to argue until the song began. I mouthed my way through it, and basked briefly in the undeserved applause. In later years, my bids for attention escalated to so reckless a degree that when Hooper’s old church building burned to the ground one night, my dad braced for the worst, until he heard that someone else’s kids had done it. Then he grinned, exclaiming, “Let’s get those brats!”
Adolescence is hard for most kids, but for naturally impulsive, socially awkward square pegs it can be a nonstop nightmare. It’s the time when the world’s expectations increase and you reliably disappoint. The consequence for all too many children is that former relationships fall apart just when they need them the most.
Sam Goldstein, the psychologist who evaluated me at sixteen, once said something I’ve always remembered: “A good day for challenging kids is when bad things don’t happen.” By the time I was ten, my mother could see that I’d lost every single one of my former friends and cost her several of her own. But there was much more she didn’t know, at least for many years thereafter, mainly because I was too mortified to tell her.
Worse than Ostracized
* * *
Chief among these private mortifications was how I spent my lunch hours all through middle school. Halfway through seventh grade, that particularly eventful, awful year, I’d stopped trying to sit with other kids, after some of them threw food at me to make me go away. I was so embarrassed about having to sit all by myself that I repeatedly broke one of the strictest school rules by sneaking off campus to spend my lunch hours playing video games in the nearby community recreation center. The vice principal caught me about as often as he didn’t, and I wound up with a string of detentions. But this was no deterrent, since the alternative of facing that teasing all alone was so much worse. What’s more, in detention I’d always have company for lunch.
My mom also stayed in the dark about Casey, the ninth grader who used to beat me up almost every day after school. I never understood his reasons for this. I can’t recall that I’d ever crossed him personally, so ultimately I figured it could only have been because I’d been marked as a loser, low down in the schoolyard pecking order, incredibly annoying and all but defenseless, so that it was easy for other kids who were unsure about their own status to score some points at my expense.
Every afternoon, Casey rode the bus with me home from school, and time after time, would get off at my stop instead of his and chase me down the street. My house was only about three hundred yards from the stop, yet even though I always made sure to sit up in front of the bus, so I’d have that much more of a head start, I never once managed to outrun him. At some point he would always catch up, tackle me, and then, as I lay on the ground, slug and kick me a few times, after which he’d spit on me and walk away. The routine never varied; it was almost like he saw it as his job.
Those beatings hurt a lot, but what was far worse was the way no one ever came to my defense. On the contrary: Kids would lean out the bus windows to get a good view. The bus driver also watched, yet not once did she intervene—even after I summoned the nerve one day to complain to her. She was probably glad to see me get my comeuppance; in truth I’d been annoying her for months, shouting, throwing paper airplanes, and opening windows she’d ordered us to keep closed.
Had my mom known that any of this was going on, she would surely have gone after Casey and the bus driver to boot. But I couldn’t stand the thought of her finding out. It made me feel queasy to think of her seeing how far I’d fallen. I could almost pretend it wasn’t happening if I kept it secret from her. She was always telling me how good-looking she thought I was, and how much potential I had to do great things, so perhaps I also thought that if she knew the full extent of how much people didn’t like me, she might be swayed to revise her opinion.
And so, after every beating, I’d either run into the back of our garage and clean myself off with my father’s grease rags or, if that weren’t possible, invent some excuse for why my shirt was torn or my lip was split. I remember stumbling into our house, crying, and saying I’d fallen down while playing. More than two decades later, after I finally told her the truth, my mom was furious with me for keeping it a secret for so long.
My mom feels guilty that she didn’t stop the bullying, yet I have never blamed her for not knowing what was going on. I reserve that blame for my school. Kids are kids, and it wouldn’t be realistic to think that schools could completely eliminate occasional teasing and bullying. But no school employee—including bus drivers—should ignore signs that a child is being systematically victimized.
Given all we’ve learned about bullying in the intervening years—including how prevalent, and often secretive, it is, and its uniquely devastating impact, both on the brain and on behavior—I am heartened that schools are finally starting to focus harder on this problem, although I believe they should also be doing much more. In recent surveys, one-third of U.S. schoolchildren—an estimated 13 million students—have reported being teased and bullied at school, with more than one in ten of these suffering physical abuse, such as being shoved, spit on, and tripped. Addressing the problem head-on would be more than simply compassionate. From someone with direct experience of the costs, I can assure you that bullying wastes time and money throughout our education system, and there is no question that it sabotages learning.
Bullying Dumbs You Down
* * *
Education experts have been sounding alarms about bullying for several years now, and, to be sure, many conscientious school directors have worked hard in various ways to curtail it. Only quite recently, however, has there been serious momentum for change.
In March 2011, a few weeks after a highly publicized wave of half a dozen suicides of adolescent boys who’d been persecuted at school or over the Internet, President Barack Obama presided over the first White House conference dedicated to combating bullying. Obama, who revealed that he himself had been bullied and teased as a child, said his goal was to “dispel the myth that bullying is just a harmless rite of passage or an inevitable part of growing up.”
Indeed, a great deal of recent research has detailed the lasting harm that bullying causes its victims—and the most effective measures that schools can take to prevent it. (I’ll talk more about this in chapter 6.) Sadly, the research also makes clear that my seventh-grade torment was typical, at least in some ways, to what happens every day to millions of American students.
For one thing, I got bullied in middle school, where bullying is most common: More than 40 percent of the reported cases involve kids
in grades six through eight, compared to less than half that in elementary and high school. As a boy, I was also more likely to be bullied than if I’d been a girl—and as a boy with learning struggles and poor self-esteem, even more so.
It wasn’t the least bit exceptional, moreover, that my mistreatment was chronic. About one in five victims say they get teased or bullied once or twice a month, while one in ten get bullied several times a week or even daily. Nor was it unusual that I kept quiet. One-third of the victims in surveys said they’ve never reported the bullying at school. Instead they often tune out and shut down.
Rather than admit they’re being bullied, many children will simply pretend to be sick or find other excuses to avoid school. As many as 160,000 students miss school each day in the United States for fear of being bullied, according to the National Association of School Psychologists. Dash Seerley Gowland, a middle schooler who was diagnosed with ADHD and teased almost every day in and out of class, described the experience in a letter he wrote to his mother. “I wake up and my stomach lurches like a mad ‘eel’ because I hate school,” he wrote. “I dread school so much … that I try to make myself barf so much that I won’t have to go to school. But my mother sees right through me. Even though she feels my pain, like having a knife stabbed into her, she makes me go anyhow.”
Just as Gowland’s imagery suggests, the pain of social rejection is in many ways on par with physical suffering, both for lonely kids and their empathetic mothers. Neuroscientists have shown that both types of pain activate the same brain regions, specifically the secondary somatosensory cortex and the dorsal posterior insula. While of course being teased is not the same as being stabbed with a knife, it’s surprising how similarly the brain treats the two. And it makes me wonder: if a child came home from school with what we now know are the neural equivalents of knife wounds, would we really want to tell him to suck it up and get back to business?
My life improved after my nemesis, Casey, turned sixteen, got his driver’s license, and stopped taking my bus. Yet throughout the next two years, I had a nightmare that evoked the same feeling I had when he was chasing me down the street. It went like this: I’d be sitting alone in a rowboat on Bear Lake, a vacation spot near Idaho where my family vacationed each year, when all of a sudden the winds would whip up waves as tall as skyscrapers. I knew I’d done something wrong to land me in that boat but didn’t know what it was, or how to save myself. I could see a lighthouse in the distance, but each time I turned my eyes toward it, my rowboat would shrink. Night after night, my boat became steadily smaller until I felt the waves pulling me under, and I’d wake up, dripping in sweat.
As I understand today, my problem, likely shared with Dash Gowland and many others, was that my fear had worked its way into my very bloodstream, in the form of (among other things) a chemical called cortisol. Cortisol surges in the body and brain when we perceive a threat. Its purpose is an all-hands-on-deck mustering of energy to get a mammal moving quickly, to flee or to fight. It’s a kind of triage system that takes place at the expense of the normal maintenance functions that happen when a body is at rest—like calling away plumbers and cleaners at a hospital to help carry stretchers.
For most mammals, the system works quite well. “For 99 percent of the beasts on this planet, stress is about three minutes of screaming terror,” says the Stanford stress scientist Robert Sapolsky, “after which it’s either over with or you’re over with.” Yet the problem for the remaining one percent, in other words, modern humans, is that we have the unique ability to worry about the future, like what fresh hell will Casey dish out tomorrow? Under repeated stress, pretty soon, the cortisol is flowing several times a day, day after day, and month after month, until, as Sapolsky’s research has shown, the body’s normal maintenance operations break down. In a particularly terrible irony for kids who already have learning problems, part of the damage is that cells in a brain structure called the hippocampus, critical to memory, shrivel up and die.
This is what I mean when I say bullying dumbs you down. The effects are not only pernicious over time, but they are obvious in the moment. When reacting to a threat, a person who might normally test about average for working memory can shoot down as far as the second percentile (where I’ve staked my claim). It’s that big an impact. Learning is simply not a priority during those moments of “screaming terror,” so every part of the brain that might help it along essentially shuts down. Curiosity takes a backseat, as do judgment and self-control. What makes this story all the more heartbreaking is that a kid who is already a target for bullying and punishment because of his behavior will likely end up behaving even worse when he’s under constant threat, which in turn makes him even more of a target. Similar to what happens when children get physically punished by their parents, this is a classic example of how negative feedback loops can create a downward spiral that reliably ends in some crisis, such as drug addiction, a suicide attempt, or the victim turning into a victimizer.
While a large proportion of victims—and, notably, also bullies—suffer from anxiety and depression, many develop characteristics that attract much less sympathy. They can get defensive, irritable, and argumentative, overreacting to the slightest or even an imaginary provocation. In many cases, this might lead to a diagnosis of oppositional defiant disorder, or ODD. As many as 60 percent of kids diagnosed with ADHD also qualify for this particularly controversial diagnosis, research suggests. Among its “symptoms,” as listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the atlas of psychiatry, are “frequent temper tantrums,” “excessive arguing with adults,” “questioning rules,” and “blaming others for his or her mistakes or behavior.”
As I’ve mentioned before, while I remain deeply skeptical about the value of labels from a scientific standpoint, I also recognize that, practically speaking, some diagnostic labels may be helpful, at least at the start of a parent’s or teacher’s journey to help a child. But let me be blunt: The fact that we are pinning a label of ODD on so many kids makes me, well, pretty irritable and argumentative. It suggests that 100 percent of the blame for a child’s behavior belongs to that child, when it’s also likely that child is essentially reacting reasonably to years of hostile treatment. In particular, I see “questioning rules” less as a symptom of pathology than a trait I’d like to encourage in my students.
What’s missing when the ODD label is slapped over a label of ADHD, or dyslexia, or whatever, is any insight into the reasons why such kids are behaving the way that they are—in particular, it’s ignorant of the interactions between biology and context that led up to, and the feedback loops that sustain, the bad behavior. It presents the child as a patient with a biological glitch that needs “fixing,” as if he or she had been born with a contentious nature, rather than, as is usually more likely, building up the opposition over time. And it ignores all that we now know about how living under threat, and being routinely swamped by cortisol, can damage the brain.
Faking It
* * *
By the time I got to middle school, my mom understood that I was not exactly a social magnet. Even so, I took pains to hide the extent of my suffering from her and anyone else who showed interest, even when that meant I had to lie, and mostly, I succeeded. The psychologist Sam Goldstein’s notes from my office visit during my junior year in high school say, “Todd seeks out and is sought out by peers for friendship,” a statement that, sadly, was pure fiction. Short of trailing me around school himself, however, Goldstein was obliged to rely on my own reports and my parents’ limited observations. Knowing this, I put a big smiley face on my miserable life, even inventing a “best friend”—citing the name of a kid who would have been shocked to hear himself described that way.
Even as I remember those fables I told, I’m surprised today by the level of detail in Goldstein’s report, which dwells attentively on my earliest years, even as it makes no mention of how much trouble I was getting into at school. True, Goldstein cited comp
laints by three of my teachers about my restlessness and distractibility, yet from reading his report, one wouldn’t get any idea of all the time I spent in detention, nor of the overall, abject misery of my daily life.
Rather than being “sought out” for friendship, I remember burning up with jealousy of a kid my age named Stephan, who for reasons I can’t remember today was confined to a wheelchair. Because of his obvious disability, the same, popular kids who enjoyed tormenting me made a point of showing what good people they were by including him in their group, and even taking turns pushing his chair around the campus. I used to dream about trading places with him.
Was there anything, really, that Goldstein or my mother could have done to make me open up and share that gloomy vision? Honestly, I doubt it. And so, the only advice I might now offer my mother, were I able to travel back in time and whisper in her ear, would be to assume that what she already knew of my struggles at school was merely the tip of a cold, lonely iceberg. She didn’t have much power to change things for me at that point. We couldn’t afford a private school, and even my feisty, energetic mom couldn’t have forced kids at my public school to be kind to me.
All she could do was to try to understand me, a job I know I made ever more difficult for her as my misery increased. To this day, I feel crummy, for instance, about how nasty I was to my family through those years. I wish I could change that, since they are such a wonderful part of my life now. All I can say in my defense is that back then I had experienced so little empathy from other people that I wasn’t yet capable of showing it. Moreover, in a world in which I felt I spent much of my time preparing for and weathering attacks, empathy wasn’t a useful trait. It seemed then that my choice boiled down to being bullied or bullying. I chose, as I saw it, to avoid being a victim.