by Todd Rose
Gravitating to a group of other misfits, I took out my anger on strangers. We smashed mailboxes with baseball bats, and once or twice threw lit firecrackers at passing cars. Once, under cover of darkness, we dropped a makeshift scarecrow—a pumpkin head, and shirts and pants, all stuffed with tomatoes—in front of a car passing under a tree that overhung the road. (There were no streetlights, and the sudden impact so frightened the poor driver that he jumped out of his car screaming, worried that he’d injured or even killed someone.) I stole cash from a neighbor’s house when no one was home, and for a short time even sold fake IDs I helped produce with a friend who had a color printer and plastic casings I swiped from the DMV. (Because I had no formal income at the time, I ended up using the substantial proceeds—the IDs sold for a hundred dollars apiece—to take my friends out to breakfast.)
These were all obviously more than your average high school high jinks. It was no more than luck, many times, that kept me out of juvenile hall, and the memories of the risks I took with other people’s safety and my own still distress me, two decades later. I can’t offer any excuse for that behavior, only an explanation: At some point I got trapped in one of those negative feedback loops, or more like an out-of-control downward spiral.
My dad, as I see now, was trapped right along with me in that spiral. He’d punish me, and I would hurt others, or mouth off to teachers or my mom, after which he’d punish me more, and so on. Now let me be clear, I’m not saying he was the cause of my behavior (he wasn’t), and I sympathize with how he must have felt at that time. Angry and scared that I was headed for jail or worse, he tried desperately to stop it the only way he knew how—with ever-stricter punishments, which drove me ever further away from him.
Our brawling also created a rift between my parents. My dad accused my mom of not being tough enough, of coddling me and being too quick with excuses for me. In fact, however, my mom was often even angrier over my behavior than my dad was. Still, at this critical time in my life, when it looked like the world was caving in on me, she recognized that someone had to detach and deescalate instead of engaging and amplifying the negative feedback loops.
We usually assume that parenting is one-directional. Parents influence their children, not vice versa. But Lyda’s personality was transformed through the crucible of my adolescence, when, as the hands-on parent while my dad was usually at work or school, she had to evolve to survive. Educating herself about the way my brain worked, and thereby understanding better how her own brain worked, made her more self-aware, improving her control over her own reactions. My father, to his credit, would make the same progress in time, but at a distance, and not forged by that same fire.
The depth of the way Lyda was changing became clear on the night she swore at her friend Peggy. As she’d tell me years later, she’d come to believe that, despite my tough-guy act, I desperately needed at least one person uncompromisingly on my side, and that if she didn’t step in at that point, no one would. She let me know that, if it came to it, she’d choose me over any of her friends if they persisted in characterizing me as hopelessly bad.
And she went on, from that day, taking stands for me—not ever to excuse my terrible behavior (the worst of which, thank goodness, never reached her ears at that time), but letting the world know that she, at least, was in my corner. One tactic I’ve come to appreciate in particular is that she’d often suspend a punishment she’d planned for me (and which I usually deserved) if she saw that I had already gotten my comeuppance elsewhere. At the time, she figured that I could only take so much negative input before I’d start to shut down, a philosophy that starts to look like genius when you consider all we’ve learned about the pernicious effects that sustained high cortisol levels have on the brain.
“I didn’t want to be blind to the fact that you were obnoxious and irritating to people,” my mom told me many years later, with her usual dearth of diplomacy. “So I had to learn how to pick my battles. It was okay that someone didn’t love or even like you. Sometimes it was difficult for me, too. But attack you—watch out!”
Islands of Competence—and the Magic of Spandex
* * *
In time, it became one of my greatest (albeit mostly secret) joys to watch Lyda go on the warpath on my behalf. My high school teachers and the lay church leaders all learned not to cross her. She’d reliably call and chew them out after any incidents like the time my fashion-impaired Sunday school teacher made fun of me for wearing a black linen jacket with the sleeves pushed up (à la Crockett, the super-cool Miami Vice TV detective) to church. I was by then taking clothes so seriously that I’d save up for months to buy a pair of designer jeans, trusting that other kids would be in awe at least of my fashion sense. In this case, however, it was my mom who’d saved up to buy the linen jacket for me, which made her all the more incensed at that Sunday school teacher.
At the same time, Lyda kept her eyes out for opportunities where I’d have a chance to genuinely feel competent, and maybe even shine a little. She seemed at least as delighted as I was when I made the high school basketball team in tenth grade, and she was there at every game that I ever played in—even better, she’d routinely stay out with me late at night, many nights, rebounding missed shots from the hoop in our driveway. When my grades got so bad that school administrators tried to take me off the team, she came to my defense, even summoning my pediatrician as a witness, arguing that my meager emotional investment in school was sure to disappear if I lost this key incentive.
Today, I picture my mother’s efforts as having helped me to build what psychologist Bob Brooks calls “islands of competence”—little strongholds where I could feel safe and somewhat in control, and where I could anchor my self-esteem. It didn’t matter whether she shared the same interests with me—in fact, she always reminded me that it was my life, and I should find things that I enjoyed. She figured the type of pursuits I chose—as long as they were legal—were less important than the fact that I had chosen them and that they gave me an opportunity to feel competent. I have often since talked to parents who’ve nudged their square-peg children away from activities that seemed to them (the parents) like a waste of time. My feeling is that whether your child takes pride in being a good chess player, a collector of rocks, or even in being the best Call of Duty player on his block, the value-add is going to be the same. It’s about feeling pride for something that you’ve done, and done well. And, most likely, it’s a rare and precious feeling for that child.
Something else that my mother clearly understood is that these little islands of competence, such as my basketball prowess, should never be used as bargaining chips. This can be difficult, I know, since parents naturally want to exploit any incentive available to get a child to improve his behavior. And the tactic may work with most kids. Still, it’s almost certain to backfire when a child needs any authentic positive attention he can get to build up his flagging self-esteem. These islands are refuges amid stormy waters, and they also represent ideal places for lonely kids to make friends with other kids who share the same interests. If you take away their one reason to think well of themselves, why shouldn’t they just stop trying?
When others, including my dad, charged Lyda with spoiling me, her wise reaction was to seek out allies who shared her out-of-the-box approaches. Parents of challenging kids need strong emotional support, and often, fortunately, it’s there for the asking, although not nearly as much as it should be. Lyda gathered a small team of stalwarts who sided with her for siding with me. They included one of her sisters, a friend who was a practicing psychologist, and, most important, her mother, Grandma Burton.
Studies on why certain children are resilient while others crumble at bad turns of fate have repeatedly found one constant: a relationship with at least one adult other than a parent who gives the child unconditional love. All through my entire childhood, my grandma fulfilled that role, showing an almost mystical knack for knowing when I needed her most. Some of my best childhood memori
es are of the times when I slept over at her house. Most of these nights, as I now understand, were times when my parents desperately needed a break.
Our routine rarely varied: We’d go to Sizzler for a cheap steak, and then stay up late playing games such as Yahtzee and Aggravation for hours at a time. Unlike almost every other adult in my life, my grandma showed no interest whatsoever in trying to fix me, or change me, or even talk to me about how I was doing in school. Instead she’d praise my fledgling sense of humor, even as she taught me about comic timing, and the thin line between wit and sarcasm. I was so keen to make other people laugh, and in particular to win my grandmother’s approval, that under her patient tutelage, this became one of the few areas of my life where I started to practice self-restraint.
My grandmother’s own sense of timing was exquisite, and not just with humor. She unfailingly seized opportunities to show me I was loved. There was the time, for instance, when I was about eleven years old, and, running past a table, accidentally knocked over a vintage Avon cologne bottle that was in the shape of a car and that she had repeatedly asked me not to touch. It was important to my grandmother—precious, actually—because she had taken it from her father’s house when he passed away. It was one of the very few mementos that she had left. I figured she’d be furious. It seemed like I was always breaking other people’s things, I was so clumsy. I barely dared to look at her as she was sweeping up the pieces, but when she finally caught my eye, all she said was “People are more important than things.”
It was only years later that she admitted to me how upset she was about that broken bottle. At the time, however, my grandma was thinking strategically. She recognized that the loss was also an opportunity for her to prove that I was important to her, and she took full advantage of it.
Grandma Burton, alas, would have many other chances to restrain herself from overreacting to all the trouble I caused, but the one for which I’m most thankful came after my seventh-grade stink bomb debacle. My poor mom was so thrown by this behavior, which was so much worse than my usual impulsivity, that she stopped talking to me altogether for the entire day. My dad also gave me the silent treatment. I remember sitting alone in my room, feeling sure that I’d finally pushed them both too far, wondering if they were ready to abandon me, like my great-grandparents did to my grandpa, and if I’d have to go live in a junkyard.
I heard a knock on my door, and before I could answer, my grandma walked in, with a white box wrapped in ribbon. She wasn’t smiling, but she did look straight in my eyes as she sat on my bed and handed me the gift, which turned out to be a pair of Spandex shorts, an ultrafashionable (for Hooper, Utah, circa 1987) style that I’d coveted for months, but which I knew my parents couldn’t afford. (Nor could my grandmother, a fact that wasn’t lost on me.)
“It is not because I’m proud of what you did. It’s because I love you,” was all she said.
As I’ve said before in these pages, I can’t really credit any one moment or person for helping me change, although of course I owe the largest debt to my mom. Still, I know my grandma’s gift could not have been more timely or important. I am quite sure it would be hard to find a psychologist or child-rearing “expert” who would prescribe such a gift at such a time. I suspect most experts would even disparage her decision, claiming she was unintentionally rewarding me for my aggressive behavior. Luckily for me, she didn’t consult specialists. Instead she trusted her instincts, which told her to go ahead and show me I was still worthy of love.
BIG IDEAS
An estimated 13 million U.S. children get bullied and teased every year, with 1.3 million suffering physical abuse.
Bullying is most common in middle school, involves boys more often than girls, and often goes on for a long time without being reported.
The stress hormone cortisol floods the brain and body when someone feels threatened, and over the long term having too much of it in your system for too long can damage parts of the brain essential for memory and attention.
The diagnosis of oppositional defiant disorder, applicable to as many as 60 percent of children diagnosed with ADHD, is likely less a medical condition than a result of a damaging, out-of-control feedback loop, in which a child is lashing out against his environment after possibly years of negative reactions. It is not a satisfying explanation for any child’s emotional struggles.
Getting sent to detention in the morning means you’ll at least have company for lunch.
ACTION ITEMS
Look for authentic opportunities to “take a stand” for your child—when he or she has been poorly treated, it matters less what you say than what you do to show your support.
When your child or student seems socially isolated, irritable, and reluctant to go to school, spend at least as much time investigating the quality of his or her environment as you do in seeking a diagnosis.
Don’t just correct the negative. Add positive influences to your child’s environment. Help build “islands of competence” and do your best to protect them. If all your son and daughter have to look forward to is a basketball game or school play, don’t take that away as a punishment.
Every square-peg child should have at least one adult outside the immediate family who provides appreciation and support. Do what you can to make sure your child has such an adult in his or her life, including letting people know the role that they might play to help—you’d be surprised how many aunts or uncles will be happy to be the “good cop.”
5
Fitting In—and Dropping Out
“Play the part and you shall become.”
—Unknown
What Would Jimmy Do?
* * *
By my sophomore year in high school, my grades were rock-bottom and my social status even lower. I still didn’t have a single close friend, and girls outright ignored me when they weren’t making fun of me. I’d attended just one of the school dances, and only had a date that night because the girl’s mother had pressured her to do the right thing. (She’d hoped to go with another boy, but I’d asked her first.) I was miserable, and made sure the rest of my family was, too, by constantly picking fights with my mom and my siblings.
Still, a few weeks before my seventeenth birthday, a constellation of events that had little to do with me, specifically, ended up changing my context, which, in turn, changed me.
While I’d been slogging through grades six through ten, my dad had been busy with his own ambitious agenda. For several years, he’d been working at a truck repair shop by day and taking college engineering classes at night. Out of the blue one morning, or so it seemed to me, he informed us that he’d gotten a new job at an airbag-manufacturing company called Autoliv. Our family would be leaving rural Hooper for Layton, just fourteen miles away, and a comparatively booming metropolis, with its population of fifty-eight thousand. My dad’s new salary would pay for a much nicer house for us, and I’d be going to a new school.
While many kids my age might have protested being uprooted from their social circles, I was unambiguously overjoyed. I recognized that this was my chance to try to reinvent myself with a whole new group of peers. And by this, I didn’t mean academically. Improving my grades was not my priority, as my report cards from Layton would soon show. The first item on my agenda was no longer to be teased, slugged, and spit on by schoolmates. Next, I wanted some new friends. If it seems at all hard to understand that I’d put friends before scholastic success that might guarantee me a brighter future, I’ll merely point out that the only kinds of people I’ve ever heard claim that academics are more important than friends are people who already have friends. If you’re as isolated as I was then, nothing else matters.
I can’t say that I plotted my course at my new high school with strategic brilliance, since all I really knew at that point was what didn’t work. As it turned out, however, that was enough. Today, I compare my situation to the classic episode of Seinfeld in which Seinfeld tells his feckless friend George, “if every instinct
you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.” George agrees, and promptly starts doing the opposite of everything he has done in the past, from ordering something completely different for lunch to being frank with a beautiful woman he meets, revealing that he’s unemployed and lives with his parents. To his joyful surprise, the “Opposite George” tactic gets him dates.
In a similar spirit, I resolved to be “Opposite Todd.” I had a general sense of the kinds of things I’d been doing to put people off. I stood too close, bragged too much, interrupted a lot, and always seemed to say the wrong thing. I didn’t understand how to fix any one of these problems. Yet I sensed I could make progress by patterning myself after someone completely unlike me who was obviously doing everything right. My model turned out to be a kid named Jimmy, who was the quarterback of the football team at the high school I was leaving. Jimmy was such a nice guy that he had occasionally even let me follow him around. From my first day at Layton High, in every social encounter, I’d simply ask myself, “What would Jimmy do?”
Mimicking Jimmy educated me. It showed me, for one thing, how I was unconsciously contributing to many of the negative feedback loops that had made life miserable for me—pushing people away even in the way I greeted them. “What’s up, dick?” had been my customary salutation. I thought it was funny, and, besides, from my perspective, this was how people always talked to me. But Jimmy never talked like that to anyone, no matter how high or low they ranked socially. Instead he’d say things like “What’s up, stud?” and always be greeted with a smile. From the first time I tried this at Layton High, I got the same result, which brought a revelation: People like to be complimented! And so the insights emerged, until soon I seemed even to myself to be turning into a different person. A person other kids actually liked.